Alright, this week seems to have been a return to my passions as a computer science geek and electronics nerd. To begin, my work planning for college has rekindled an old flame of sorts. I've had the urge to design a class scheduling program. This would take a list of the classes I want to take, and then use the class times for that semester to build the perfect schedule.
Of course, that's a very general description. One of the most immediate problems that comes to mind is: what is a perfect schedule? It's a fuzzy, arbitrary goal. I have several ideas to make it more concrete, and if I get that far I'll probably incorporate them all. Another technical issue to be solved is getting the actual class times. I'll have to start by hand-entering the ones I'm interested in, but I wonder if there are better solutions. Perhaps the Computer Science department can hook me up with read-only access to parts of the school's database. Or maybe I can find a way to scrape their website. That method would be inelegant, but it might just be the only way to get the meeting times automatically.
Of course, I made a crude version of this once before. When I was just starting college, I was overwhelmed at trying to put together a schedule. So, I fired up Visual Basic and had some fun. Unfortunately, I lost the entire project at some point. This time, I'm feeling much more ambitious. I want to use Java, using all of the good programming techniques I've learned in the last 5 years. I'm talking object-oriented programming, Collections frameworks, generics, the works. And I'm trying to build a frontend/backend system, so that I can make all of the guts, and then easily make it either a GUI desktop application or an applet embedded in a webpage. If you're still following along, then you're probably a programmer.
In other words, my programming gears are turning again, and it's exciting. I don't know if it's possible to be excited about programming, but I am right now.
There's also more exciting news, but it's a bit of a guilty pleasure. You might recall that I purchased a laptop back in July, just for the deployment. (I guess I didn't make a post about that! How odd!) It's an HP Pavilion dv9700z. It has a beautiful, huge 17 inch screen, and is a respectable gaming PC. But thinking back to school made me think for a minute. Can I really carry around a huge, expensive laptop to school every day? No, I would rather leave it home. I could trade Ashley back for the smaller HP that I was using. It's a 14.1 inch screen HP, and a perfect machine for school.
The other alternative I started looking into is a netbook, an ultra-light, ultra-small, ultra-cheap laptop. They're underpowered, but it's not like taking notes or programming and light compiling need a lot of power. Before I even had time to give it a lot of thought, I was talking casually with Mr. Wizard, and he mentioned he might try and sell his. He wasn't using it after buying a small MacBook, and so was looking to get most of his investment back. I came by for a trial run, Ashley and I talked, and we decided it was a good option.
So I'm writing you now from my Asus Eee PC 1000D. It has a tiny 10 inch screen, and a keyboard that's 92% of the standard size. It's quite cramped to work on, but I think it will be perfect for school. As long as I can get used to typing on the darn thing. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog...
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