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Here it is at last, the end of the semester. I enjoyed taking this class with Dr. Brown very much. The class itself was very engaging, with quite a bit of participation from  my classmates. It was easy to tell that most of us were very interested in the subject.

I particularly enjoyed way we covered the material, from the history of computing to the present and beyond, it certainly gives the student an amazing amount of insight into how limitless the potential is for growth in the technological field and how much the singularity will change things for everyone from almost every other field, including medical, agricultural, robotics, to our day to day lives and tasks, menial or not,

I found the hands on experiences to be quite helpful and fun as well, such as the Scratch programming and the Lego Mindstorms sets. Both actually seemed to help me visualize what i have been working on in java, so if even for the purpose of helping to begin to learn programming I would recommend this class. All in all I would say this class was a very positive experience.

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This past week we learned about virtual reality. Virtual or alternate realities seems to be a common staple in poplular culture, particularly films such as The Matrix, Inception, War Games, and many others. The Matrix, in particular seemed to open up many people’s minds, which really hammered in the concept that reality is simply comprised of our sensory input. Virtual reality obviously has many real-world applications, in particular training and discovering and modeling how the world around us works. Definately an interesting week, I realy enjoyed watching the matrix documentary.

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This last week we talked about artificial intelligence.  What I’ve learned from programming  has really helped me grasp the difficulty of programming an AI, and I would like to learn more about neural networks, although  so far I have not had a chance to check out some of the java versions available. I also liked learning about the different ways AI is used, it will be interesting to see what things like Asimo and Neural Networks are like in the years to come. A lot of it really reminded me of the ghost in the shell series, where people’s consciousnesses are copied into machines. Dr. Brown keeps mentioning Neuromancer, which I will have to read.

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This past week we have been working on robotics! I have really enjoyed working with the Lego Mindstorms kits. I have actually really been reminded of working with scratch as there are multiple elements that you need to coordinate, in scratch’s case the visual space and sprites with the programming, while with the Mindstorms kits you work with the sensors, parts, and physical space along with the programming. While I enjoy working with the kits, however, they certainly come with their own frustrations. As always when I work with some sort of hardware, there are complications in getting everything to work correctly and at times it is difficult to troubleshoot our problems, and we end up having to narrow down issues to hardware and software, which can definately be time consuming. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to work on issues with Asimo.

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This past week we worked on security. I had to miss Friday, sadly, however I enjoyed Monday and Wednesday quite a bit. What I liked learning about the most was the bits of  history we learned, I already felt fairly familiar with the tools, descriptions, and protection. I am studying to take my Security+ test before people begin having to redo their tests every year so I have been able to learn quite a bit about much of the topics we went over however everything I have learned so far has been pretty dry, so I was very interested to see it discussed in class.

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This week we have been programming in scratch. So far it’s a lot more interesting than java. It’s been interesting to learn how it correlates with Java, though, and helped me learn more about object oriented programming in general. Each individual segment in a scratch program could be compared to a method it seems. Perhaps each sprite would be a class? I am not sure but the hardest part with scratch for me is organizing everything, and I find myself wanting to use comments. I am excited to learn how I can do everything in scratch with different languages.

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I’ve had a nasty flue for a few days. Its been pretty crappy so I’ve spent a lot of time sleeping and listening to music, so here’s what I’ve been playing.

Becoming X by Sneaker Pimps has always been one of my favorite trip-hop albums. If you like Portishead, Lamb, or Massive Attack I am sure Sneaker Pimps is something you will enjoy. Sadly, the other albums blew as after this album they decided to go in another direction, without their singer. Here’s their most popular single, Six Underground.

Broken Bells, the self-titled album headed by Danger Mouse (0f Gnarls Barkley and DANGERDOOM,) and James Mercer ( front-man of The Shins,) is an album I only recently have been listening to. So far I have really enjoyed it, I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it before. Really great indie album. Here is my favorite track so far, The Ghost Inside. I can’t wait to see what comes next from these guys.

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So far the HTML assignment has been pretty easy. not much of it is really new to me but one thing I have been doing differently this time is using indentation in my tags like I do in java. It makes everything much easier to read from a coding standpoint. The biggest problem so far has just been deciding what I want to put in it. I suppose it will be sort of similar to my blog in that standpoint!

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Alright, so it’s been about a month or so in class. Everything has been going well, and I have actually stayed on top of my assignments, so kudos to me.

One of my favorite albums since high school is Death from Above 1979′s “You’re a Woman, I’m a Man”. They broke up in 2008 or something, after only one LP release, but it was brilliant. According to Last.FM it is classified as dance punk, which is sort of a wierd description, but it certainly fits once you have listened to some of their tracks. Sort of a grunge-with-a-bounce-to-it feel. The album art is also awesome, which never hurts. Here is one of their better known singles, “Blood On Our Hands”

I have always been a HUGE fan of Portishead. They were my introduction to trip hop and downtempo, and this is one of the most relaxing albums I have ever listened to in my life; definitely great to relax to after a day at school or work. Not much else I can say but this is certainly an album to listen to if you are not familiar with trip hop. A good sample track would be “Wandering Star”.

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This week we worked on the assembly language simulator. I had a fuzzy idea of how the ALS worked, but it really helped me to get a more visual look. Visual representations of things tend to help me to learn quite a bit, and so using this helped me to get a much more firm grasp on it. The only real trouble I ran into was with getting it to work, and that was only because I hate reading instructions. After getting my ducks in a row and finally paying attention to notice where the programs were everything went smoothly.

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