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.

2012-09-15 - Top

Lately I've been thinking about a way to set up certain posts as semi-permanent, meaning they don't get cycled out. This could be useful for announcements or really important posts (I’ve been thinking about doing this because I want to post one such item), ensuring that they stand out but still appear after other things have been posted. The easiest way would have been to just insert the items into the index directly but that breaks the automation design philosophy I've been going for and it also makes it hard to convert the top posts back into normal posts when they are no longer important. So I decided to just use a different file name (replacing top for post) and then setting up the archive and index pages to also check for files with that name. This makes the process automatic and it also means that a file name change is the only thing required to demark an item. If all goes well this should show up as one such item for a little while.

2012-08-12 - Validation

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading through a series of articles called The “Web Standards Curriculum” which is basically a set of tutorials on web languages. Most of the stuff I already knew but the thing I found exciting about these articles is that they talked about the standard and best practices way of doing things. So I figured I’d take the time and update my site so that it validates using the online standard checkers. You may have noticed the new footer at the bottom of the page with several badges stating that the site is now valid by those standards. It should be noted though that the HTML5 one is not a badge and does not mean that the site is completely valid HTML5. For one thing I haven’t gotten around to fixing up all the issues on every page and for another the HTML5 validator does not give out badges. I made the image myself based on the others just so I could easily validate any page on the site. It was an interesting experience, as I worked to fix things I found better ways of doing those things that solved other problems. For example I changed the way that the left and right columns are styled so that I no longer have to use a special CSS hack to get things to show up right in Firefox. It also seems to look better in older browsers and just generally works better.

Now most of these changes (If I’ve done things right) shouldn’t be apparent. The actual layout should stay the same with only the underlying structure changing. What you may notice is that a bunch of the images have changed. As I mentioned a while ago the images template files were lost when my hard drive broke so I’ve had to recreate them from scratch. I could have just left them but it’s better for consistency if I have a template file to work with. If in the future I need a new button I can just go back to that file and make a new image that fits in with the rest. The big thing though is the penguin. While I was recreating the buttons I also finally got around to redoing the penguin. I know it doesn’t look as good but I’d rather the logo be a penguin of my own creation than a copy of someone else’s. It’s also probably better for legal reasons; don’t want any angry Linux people attacking me.

2012-08-05 - Strangeness

During the winter months it's cold and dark and all you want is some sunlight. When summer comes around you close the blinds and sit in the dark because it's too hot. Life is strange.

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