Can you share more about where you took the class? Continuing education, or a vocational school? Did you take it purely as a hobbyist, or hope to get into the trade?
To solve the wide-screen, narrow text problem, I once threw together a demo with a hacked up Chromium/WebKit to create a flowing, multi column view mode that created a long virtual scroll surface and scrolled it like newspaper columns: https://vimeo.com/59463521.
It wasn't super intuitive, but wish a modern browser had this.
This is essentially how a wingsuit works, although inflation happens in flight through inlets. That is in general how nylon wings (e.g. paragliders) work as well.
You'd be remiss if you don't mention Binary Ninja[1]. A relative newcomer that's already extremely capable, has great scripting support and is under very active development.
If you're healthy and using a normal, dynamic rope, no it won't. It won't even hurt. A factor 2 fall onto webbing or dyneema can totally mess you up though, even from a couple of feet.
Man, talk about the ephemeral internet: One of my first projects[1] in Haskell was a small tool to go through my Google Reader favorites and download posts I tagged on ffffound.
Something that made filling rentals cars easier: there's a triangle on the dash that points to which side the cap is on next to the "fuel" symbol on all the cars I've been in.
I recently started reading "Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air"[1], which is available as a free book, and it's been a wonderful introduction to reasoning about alternative energy. The author also gave a talk a few years ago that is very approachable[2].