home comics writing pictures archive about

2013-02-23 - Learning Plan

I’ve almost finished my C# textbook, just a few more chapters left, which means I need to find something to do as a final project and something else to learn. For the final project I’m thinking about building a budgeting application to replace the income/expense tracking I currently do with excel. That would give me a chance to build a lot of controls and also work with MS SQL. I should say that this isn’t a final project from the textbook or a class; it's just that when I've finished learning about a topic I like to do a project on my own to cement what I’ve learned and get some experience doing things from scratch.

Now to the other question, what to learn next? I’ve been looking at python and I think it could be interesting. While looking into it I found out it was named after Monty Python which is certainly a point in its favour. The other thing I want to learn is Visual Basic. It is one of the things a lot of jobs seem to be asking for and it’s also something I’ve been wanting to learn for a while since it seems to be fairly different syntax wise to the c inspired languages I’ve worked with so far. I’d like to get a textbook for Visual Basic and python, but that will have to wait until after I get a job.

I’d also like to learn ASP.net as well as Perl or Ruby at some point. Unless I get a job using one of those I’ll probably hold off for a while though. ASP.net seems like an interesting web technology and the others seem to be useful but there are only so many hours in a day. There’s also my Win32 textbook I’m still working on. I’m 375 pages in and still barely a quarter of the way through the book.

2013-02-01 - If looks could kill

I was listening to the radio a while ago and “Games without Frontiers” by Peter Gabriel came on. It’s an interesting song but one line in particular caught my attention, “If looks could kill they probably will”. Now I’ve heard the statement “If looks could kill” many times but this got me thinking about what would happen if looks could kill. Now the obvious, and trivial, answer is that the human race would have died out. For some reason I feel the need to be more positive about it though.

If we assume that people wouldn’t all instantly die off if looks could kill I think it might actually be a good thing. The main idea behind killer looks is people annoying other people to such an extent that they give them a dirty look. If these looks could kill people would have to be much more mindful of them and they’d have to try and avoid them. That would mean that people couldn’t just be absolute bastards without natural selection taking over. It would also give people an excuse not to deal with annoying people. A cashier could tell their manager that they need to step away for a second because they’re going to kill their customer and the manager would let them as it could really happen. So if looks could kill people would have to be nicer and more considerate of other people.

Of course that’s never going to happen because people always get annoyed and then we’ll just slowly wipe ourselves out.

Update on previous post: HA! Steady state, that lasted long.

2013-01-02 - New Year Archives

Today is a very special day for the site. As many of you may know it’s the start of a new year which means that when this is posted the archives should automatically add a new section for 2013. I don’t know about you but I’m really excited to see that. My new year’s resolution is, of course, to write more things for the site and I’m sure that will be my resolution for many years to come.

2012 was an interesting year. I graduated, got a shit job, quit that job, got a different job and moved 300 km. It was a bit stressful having to go through two job searches with a terrible employment experience in the middle but I think things are reaching a steady state now. I haven’t written a lot the past few months because I’ve been busy with things but hopefully for the New Year I can get into a routine that includes a nice balance of work, games, writing and my own personal projects. I’ve got lots of plans and things I’d like to do; I just need to find the time and motivation to do them. To that end I’m going to end this post with “To Do” list for the site.

Things to do:

2012-09-25 - Engineering

I never really had any other choice but to become an Engineer. It was the only thing that felt right to me. The University of Alberta was the only school, and Engineering was the only program I applied for. Sure I had other ideas as a kid (for a while I wanted to be an architect) but once the idea of engineering came into my head it was all I wanted to be. I got the idea to become an engineer from my uncles, two of which are professional engineers, while others work in highly technical jobs. One of the things that interested me most about Engineering was the design aspect of it. I’ve been trying to design things most of my life and a profession that was built around it just made sense.

I enjoy designing things, I enjoy thinking about designing things, and I enjoy thinking about the design of things. When I was a kid one of my dreams was to be a writer. The problem was that I never actually got around to writing the books I wanted to write because I never finished designing stuff for them. I had a plan to write a sci-fi saga but that required designing ships and weapons and figuring out how everything worked. Then I had to map out the section of space where it was all going on, think up planets, systems, and the races that inhabited them. It turned out that I was more interested in creating a universe then writing about what happens to it. I also remember having a set of small toy space ships as a kid. They were just generic ships but I enjoyed playing with them because I could make things up about them. They all had little bits and marks on them that I could pretend were various things. It was all about looking at them and thinking about what each ship needed and what each part could possibly be. I did the same thing with Lego and K’Nex. I’d build something with an overall shape and look in mind but I’d also be thinking about the parts, imagining where things were and what each piece did. When I was finished I’d have something that was fully functional in my head. Whenever I’d build something it was important to me that it made sense that, in some way, it seemed real.

Once I had decided on engineering and finished my first year it came time to choose a discipline. I choose computers because it was the only one that really seemed to make sense. The reason is simple; I really like computers. My earliest memories were of computers. I remember playing rampage on an old black and green computer. I remember playing cross-country Canada on the Macs at school. I remember being fascinated by the mirror tool in the paint program that came with our printer. I do not own a computer that I haven’t taken apart at some point in time. I built the computer I primarily use from parts I bought online. I had to rebuild one of my older computers because it acquired a motherboard problem. I find computers fascinating. There are so many languages, technologies and systems to discover. Every day there’s a new version of some software coming out or a new technology being developed. You program a computer with lines of code and its hardware sets about doing what that code says to do. That intersection is very much where I see myself and my education. I’m not a programmer although I enjoy programming but I’m also not a technician- although I enjoy working with hardware, I am a computer engineer because I want to deal with all of it. Every time I learn something new about computers it just makes me want to learn more, and I really enjoy learning new things. I consider it one of my life goals to learn as much as I can. That’s why engineering and computers appeal to me so much.

One final thing; I recently modified the writings section so that it has categories. I’m in the progress of making a programs category, writing about various programs I’ve made (as well as this website) to describe how they work. This is similar to the Programs category in the picture page but more in-depth and focusing on things I’ve written from scratch where as a lot of the pictures are of example programs I’ve made from the couple of textbooks I’ve been going through.

Prev page

24 25 26 27 28

Prev page