Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Hyperconnectivity

My wife says I have a problem. She may be right.

During tonight's project to get all of my electronics charged and software updated, I discovered that I've collected an astounding array of "computers" in the last few years. When I think about it, I use all of these on a somewhat regular basis, because they all have their particular niche.



From left to right: 
  • HP Pavilion dv9700 gaming laptop (dual-boot Win7/Ubuntu)
  • Barnes & Noble nook e-reader (Android)
  • custom-built gaming desktop (Win7)
  • (same screen) VNC session to media server in living room (Ubuntu)
  • G1 smartphone (Android)
  • Apple Macbook 13" mid-2010 model (OSX Snow Leopard)
  • Asus Eee PC netbook (Ubuntu netbook edition)

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Beginning of the End

I'm finally into my last semester at CU. I've been working toward my BS in Computer Science for a total of six and a half years now, and I will finally have my piece of paper in a couple of months. It's a great feeling to be this close, and yet somehow I've avoided catching Senioritis, that contagious feeling of apathy that sometimes hits high school and college students towards the end of their studies. I think the things that are really keeping me grounded are a) our senior project, which has been interesting and challenging, and b) the fact that I have a job waiting for me.

My team's senior project, Volumizer, has seen some fairly major progress in the last two months. We've swapped out our rudimentary, homebrew 2D canvas for an open source solution called PaintWeb, and that gives us a lot more tools and functionality. The downside is that trying to interface with PaintWeb is a little difficult for what we're trying to do with it. It's very tightly integrated, and trying to pull it apart for our needs has been mostly unsuccessful. At the moment, we've just hidden away the parts we don't want. However, we've started alpha testing Volumizer with our classmates, and the results have been mostly positive! (By the way, the latest version of Google Chrome that came out today finally includes WebGL support, so you don't have to use a developer version of a web browser to check out our project!)

My other classes, "Data Mining" and "Object-Oriented Analysis and Design," have started out at a good pace, and are very interesting. I've been looking forward to OOAD for a while, because it teaches not just how to write software, but design good, robust, maintainable, "beautiful" software. Coming up with clever, elegant solutions one of my favorite aspects of writing software. In addition to these, I'm taking a beginning guitar class that just started this week. I've been slowly getting myself back into playing music, but this class should really jumpstart the process. I've been meaning to pick up guitar for a while, but it's very different from anything else I've every played.

I'm still looking forward to my job at Northrop Grumman. It's still contingent on an extensive background check, but I expect that will go smoothly. Now I just need to savor my last few months of school, and prepare for being a full-time bread winner.