Reading back through my blogs over the semester I am amazed at all we have covered and all that I have learned.  I remember sitting in class during the first week of class and wondering how is the instructor going to cover all the topics listed in the course content page in the time allotted and will I be able to learn it all and understand it.  I must admit that I do understand, at least on the surface level, all of the topics that we went over.

The things that I learned this semester that I thought were totally cool was Moore’s Law, how binary works, creating a web page using html, programming in Scratch, and the great robot race/self driving cars.  The other things that we learned were interesting but I didn’t find them as interesting as the things I mentioned.  Out of the things I mentioned I think Moore’s Law was the most fascinating.  It amazes me that what was observed back in 1965 still holds true today.

I believe I mentioned in one of my earlier blogs that before I took this class I thought I knew quite a bit about computers.  I have realized during the class that I actually know very little about computers but I am learning.  I have really enjoyed the class this year and I feel that I have learned a great deal and I look forward to my future computer science classes.

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I have always enjoyed playing video games when I play them but I don’t really like playing video games.  That probably doesn’t make much sense but let me try to explain.  My parents bought an Atari 2600 back when they first came out and I enjoyed playing the games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Pac Man but I have a tendency to get bored with the games pretty easy.  So after playing for a little while, I would get bored and decide to do something else and I would play the games less and less.

My kids, ever since they have been old enough, have had some type of game system or other.  They have had Nintendo’s, Game Boys, DS, Game Cubes, Xbox 360 and even a couple of years ago, my wife and I bought the family a WII.  The kids loved it and I thought it was pretty cool that my kids could create a character (I think they are called a MII) and they could make the character look anyway they wanted to and they could name their characters then when they played different games, their characters were actually playing.

I must admit that my favorite game is Call of Duty on the Xbox 360. About once a month or every other month I go over to a friend of mine house and we play that game for 3 – 4 hours and I have a lot of fun.  After that, I usually have no interest in playing again for awhile.

In class this week, I must admit that I have never heard of most of the games that the class was talking about.  I had heard of World of Warcraft because I had seen commercials about it but I had no idea what it was.  It amazes me that there are so many adults that love playing video games and they play them all the time.  As for me, I enjoy playing them every now and then but not all the time.

My 10 year old daughter just read my blog and she said, “You know dad, if you were a kid and told someone that you didn’t really like video games, they would think that you were weird!”

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This week we discussed artificial intelligence.  I find it interesting that people are working on this issue.  I wonder what their motive is?  I wonder if they are working on this just to see if it can be done since no one has done it yet.  I’m sure most of the people that are working on this are doing this with good intentions but it’s hard to overcome the negative possible outcomes as seen from Hollywood such as Terminator.   I just don’t see the point or why we need artificial intelligence.

On another note, I really like what my group in lab did with our robot.  We decided to use the light sensor and of course the servos.  What we did was write a program that when a direct beam light source like a flashlight, shines into the light sensor, the robot will be attracted to the light and move straight toward the light at full power.  When the light source is removed then the robot will decrease to 25% power and turn to the left and continue circling to the left until the light source shines into the sensor again.  When that happens, the robot will begin moving straight toward the light at full power.   I think it is totally cool!

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This week has been rather interesting.  It was fun playing with/working with/programming the robots.  It was a lot like programming in Scratch except when we tried out the program, we got to watch a physical object instead of something on the computer.  It was kinda like watching your program come to life.  I wonder if that is why people are working on building robots.

The thing that I most enjoyed about this weeks class was watching the great robot race.  Over the years I have watched movies about futuristic stuff like cars driving themselves and I would think that would be so cool if I had one of those for long trips.   I never thought that anyone could create one and then I watch the great robot race and videos about the Google car and now I believe it is possible.  Now I wonder when car company’s are going to start making and selling these cars.

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This topic is probably the most interesting topic in computer science for me.   When I first started using computers, I didn’t know anything about computer security and I also didn’t know it was needed.  Over the years, I started hearing about firewalls, viruses, mal-ware, and spy-ware.  At first I wondered what is all this stuff?  Then people started telling me that I needed to have this type of virus protection or that type of virus protection and to be honest with you, I really had no idea what they were talking about.  Recently, I have started learning more and more about computer security.  I have made sure that all my family’s computers have a firewall enabled and they all have the Norton Security Suite enabled which is free from Comcast.  I’m not sure if this is the best product or even a good product but I believe it is doing a decent job and I plan to continue to use it until I find out that I need something else/better.

As far as hacking goes, I really didn’t know what that was all about either except what I saw in the movies or on TV.  I really didn’t understand that hacking was primarily guessing what your password was.  I also didn’t realize that phishing was a form of hacking, I just thought that people who were phishing were trying to steal your identity but I guess they are one in the same.   I wish we were able to go more in depth with this topic in this class but since this is an introductory class, I guess that is not possible.  I hope that one of my computer science classes that I take in the future will go more in depth on this subject.

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I must admit that I have been dreading this week since the beginning of the semester.  Back in high school, I took a programming class, I think is was Pascal, and I hated it.  I didn’t understand what I was doing or what they were talking about and the only reason I passed was because a friend of mine wrote the programs and gave them to me for me to turn in.  Ever since then I never wanted to do anything with programming.

Programming in Scratch changed all that.  I am having a blast and I feel like I am learning a lot.  I am even considering getting a double major – Networking & Communications Concentration and Programming Concentration.  I think it is cool coming up with an idea and then taking the steps to make it happen then coming up with an additional idea and taking the steps to make that happen.  When I got stuck trying to figure out a certain process, I had to try a couple of different things until I figured out how to make the process work.  Getting some advice from Dr. Brown didn’t hurt either.

The Last Lecture was interesting and it made me reflect on my life.  Have I lived my childhood dreams or have I just kinda drifted through life?  So what were my childhood dreams?  I wanted to be a police officer, soldier, doctor, and pilot.  Have I done any or all of these things?  Well, when I was 18, I joined the Army Reserve and served through college.  Shortly after graduating college (it took me 6 years) I went on active duty with the Army and joined the Military Police Corps which I did for 4 years.  While serving as a MP, I was trained as a combat lifesaver which is comparable to an EMT.  After the military, I have worked as a Reserve Deputy Sheriff for Knox County Sheriffs Department and I have worked as a Reserve Police Officer for Clinton Police Department.  I have flown in many different types of aircraft but I have not piloted one…yet.

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This weeks assignment was for us to finish our web pages and then upload the finished project to the server.  On Monday, I discussed with Dr Brown that I was having problems adding pictures and needed help.  Dr Brown wrote the tag on the board on how to add the pictures which I wrote down in my notes.  A classmate also suggested that I create a folder and put all my pictures and my HTML in the folder.  He also suggested that I rename the pictures to something simple and make sure all the pictures are the same size.  He suggested that I use Microsoft Picture Manager and then click edit and re-size the pictures.  So when I got home I created the folder and put my HTML and pictures in it.  I also renamed and re-sized my pictures.  I then entered the tags in my HTML for my pictures and then went to my web page and my pictures were there!!  The problem I had now was that my pictures were between my paragraphs instead of my paragraphs being wrapped around the pictures.  I reviewed my notes to make sure that I entered the tag exactly and I had.  So, I had to ask Dr. Brown on Wednesday what I did wrong and he noticed that I had entered a : where I should have had =.  When I changed that, the text wrapped around the pictures like they were supposed to.  So, the major thing I learned was that the computer will only do what you tell it to do and if you want the computer to do a certain thing then make sure you 1) write the instructions correctly in your notes, 2) write said instructions so you can read what you wrote, and 3) if you don’t follow 1 & 2 then ask Dr Brown for help.  Here is my web page: http://pstcc11.pstcc.edu/~c1110c01/

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I am writing this blog late since I totally overlooked that I was supposed to write one last week.  So, I am going to write last weeks blog on what I learned last week then I will write this weeks blog as a separate entry on what I learned this week.

This week Dr. Brown explained to us how to create a web page using HTML.  The first thing we had to do was enter the tags and our narrative in notepad then we needed to open the file into a blank web page to see how it looked.  The first thing I learned is that when you save something in notepad, it is saved as a text file by default and I also learned web pages can’t read text files.  So I had to review my notes to see what I missed which was I needed to change the file name from *.txt to *.html.  After doing that, my narrative showed up on the web page.  The assignment for this week was for us to write a few paragraphs of 3 of our hobbies or interests and we had to add links to other web pages and we had to add pictures to our web page.  Dr. Brown wanted our narrative to wrap around the pictures.  By following the instructions that Dr. Brown gave, I had no trouble creating the title, entering the narrative, and entering the links to other web pages.  Adding the pictures was another story.  No matter what I tried, I could not get the pictures to load.  I tried pictures from web pages and I tried pictures from my computer.  I finally came to the conclusion that I had to have written the tag down wrong and I needed to ask Dr. Brown next week for help.  To be continued next week or actually in just a few minutes.

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This week confirmed something that I thought I knew for a long time, that computers are dumb and they only do what we tell them to do.  If your instructions to the computer are clear and accurate then your results will be good but if your instructions are unclear then your results will be also.

This week we got to program an Assembly Language Simulator with a few simple programs and watched what happened.  For each program that I loaded, I would have to run it a few times to make sure I understood what the program was doing.  Even though the program wasn’t doing much, I was still fascinated with watching and telling myself what the program was going to do on the next step.  It was pretty cool!

The software part of the class was interesting and it was neat to think back on my childhood when IBM compatible computers first came out and when the Apple IIe came out (my best friend had one of those).  Back then I didn’t understand computers very much and only used them to write a paper for school and play the occasional game on them.  It amazes me how far computers have come and when you show the videos of what people are working on to further technology, it just blows my mind.  Sometimes I think somebody is going to say at the end of the video, “Ripley’s Believe it or Not”!

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Before taking this class I thought I knew a thing or 2 about computers.  Well, with all the things I am learning in class, I’m discovering that there is some much more to computers than what I knew.  This week we are building computers from scratch or at least we are identifying the parts that are needed to build a computer, identifying a link to where we can buy the parts and how to put the parts together.  At first I thought this would be a simple assignment because I have changed out memory and DVD Drives before but the more I got into it, I quickly became overwhelmed.  I mean, I realized that I had no idea of what was needed in order to build a computer.  I watched both of the videos on how to build computers and became even more confused on what was needed since apparently not all components will work together.  Also, since I didn’t want to forget all the components, I went to About.com searched for a Desktop PC Parts Checklist.   I clicked on some of the links regarding motherboards, processors, and memory to learn more about each part.  After that, I went to a couple of websites like Tiger Direct, Amazon, and Geeks to find the parts I needed.  The type of computer I chose to build was one that was relatively inexpensive (since I have a family and other financial obligations), relatively fast (because my wife and I like watching movies and videos on the computer), with a large hard drive (to save pictures of the family on).

The first thing I need in order to build my computer is the case which is what I will put most all of the parts in.  The parts that are listed below that won’t go into the case are the monitor, keyboard, and mouse.  For the case I chose the following.

Thermaltake V3 Black Edition Mid Tower Case  Thermaltake V3 Black Edition Mid Tower Case – ATX, Micro ATX, 120mm LED Fan, 4x 5.25 Bays, 5x 3.5 Bays Tiger Direct  $49.99

First I would install the power supply in the case.  I chose the following power supply for my computer.

Ultra LSP550 550-Watt Power Supply   Ultra LSP550 550-Watt Power Supply – ATX, SATA-Ready, SLI-Ready, 135mm Fan, Lifetime Warranty w/ Registration Tiger Direct $44.99

Next I would install the motherboard into the case.  I chose the following motherboard.

EVGA P55V SLI Motherboard   EVGA P55V SLI Motherboard – Intel P55, Socket LGA1156, SLI+PhysX, Dual-Channel DDR3 Tiger Direct $94.99

Next I would install the following processor on the motherboard.  This processor has a fan included to help with cooling.

Intel Core I3 550 Processor  Intel Core i3-550 Processor with 4 MB Cache, 3.20 GHz Clock Speed, LGA1156 Socket BX80616I3550 Amazon $129.99

Next I would install the 2 memory cards in their assigned slots on the motherboard.

Kingston 4GB DDR3 HyperX Blu Memory Kit  Kingston KHX1600C9D3B1K2/4GX HyperX Blu Desktop Memory Kit – 4GB PC3-12800 (2 x 2GB), DDR3-1600MHz, 9-9-9-27 CAS Latency Tiger Direct $47.99

Next I would install the following hard drive in its slot in the case and then plug it in to the motherboard.

Seagate Barracua 1TB Low Power Hard Drive  Seagate ST31000520AS Barracuda LP Hard Drive – 1TB, 5900RPM, 32MB, SATA-3G Tiger Direct $59.99

Next I would install the following DVD Drive in its slot in the case and then plug it in to the motherboard.

Sony Optiarc AD-7260S-OB 24x DVDRW Drive  Sony AD-7260S 24x DVD±RW DL SATA Drive (Black) Geeks.com $20.99

Finally before closing up the case, I would plug in the following video card in the motherboard and then secure it in the case with screws.

Video card  EVGA GeForce 9500 GT 1GB DDR2 PCIe w/Dual DVI Tiger Direct $54.99

You probably noticed that I did not list a sound card or network card in this list.  That is because they are already apart of the motherboard.

I probably didn’t have to list the mouse, keyboard, and monitor but I figured that if I didn’t add these items to my list then how would I know for sure if my computer worked or not.  So, the following is what I would buy.

Mouse & Keyboard Logitech Wireless Desktop MK320 with Keyboard and Mouse Amazon $30.99

Monitor with built in speakers  HP 2009M 20-Inch HD LCD Monitor Amazon $130.00

Total price of my computer is $664.91

One thing I didn’t mention that my computer would need in order to work is an operating system.  I would probably use Windows 7 because that is what I am familiar with but since it costs around $200 I might consider using Linux.

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