The Virtual world and I

Alright, This weeks blog entry is as all of you know, our experience with virtual worlds and games.
I for one, have played many videos games in my life. But I will be covering the one game that influences me the most. Which would be World Of Warcraft.
I’m going to say I started playing World Of Warcraft around my first year of high school since my friends were playing the game and recommended that I should try it out. I was pretty much hooked the moment I began playing the game. It wasn’t so much that my friends were playing the game with me as much as it was my first time playing a Role Playing Game. The games I usually stuck with were always first person shooters..mainly halo.

When I finally got to the highest level of the game(which at that point was level 60.) I began joining guilds that were Doing the high end raids in the game. Now at that time I didn’t know how to really play my character that well(a restoration shaman.) So needless to say I did receive a lot of negative feed back about what all I was doing wrong..But as Randy Pausch said in his “last lecture” we watched earlier on in the semester. “if no one is giving you a hard time when you are doing something incorrectly then they have given up on you.” But of course there were some guilds that kicked me from the guild in the process. But the more time I spent playing I began to improve day by day. I started watching videos that people made as guides,I asked other shamans what talents they use for their class,downloaded addons,made macros, etc..
Eventually, all of the effort and time I put into working on my class became more then just a in-game skill. What I mean by all of that is I began to notice that I was able to multitask unbelievably better. Not to mention I started to type much faster.

However, those two skills are just implied to myself.There are a few things that you will experience when you are playing World Of Warcraft that can be compared to what you do in life.
alright, lets go ahead and compare a guild you are in to a job you are working at in real life:

  1. they require people to function
  2. they have schedules
  3. They both have a “boss” and “workers”

Okay, Now let me go over those three comparisons just so there is no confusion. The first one will be a little difficult to understand till I discuss the second comparison. So Let’s move on to that first!

Now for those of you who have not played World Of Warcraft most of the guilds in the game are formed for a certain purpose. They are ethier formed for players to get together to do PvP(player vs player) or PvE(player vs environment) with a specified role a player is to perform. And they will have a set schedule of what days and time frame they will be forming together to “raid”
Alright, now that I have explained the second comparison I can now go over the first one. So now let me ask this, what happens if a player doesn’t show up for the scheduled “raid”? Now in real life it will just leave them short handed. In the game its the same except it will sometimes end up making the group have to call off the “raid” for the night.

Now onto the third comparison. just like in real life there is someone who is in charge. In the game the person who would be considered the “boss” would be the guild leader. that person has literally the same abilities as a boss does in real life.

So Basically, the experience you gain from all of what I discussed is that others have high expectations of you.

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Thanks for reading my blog this week! hope you enjoyed the whole discussion!!

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Artificial intelligence

My blog for this week is going to be about what all I have learned about AI or Artificial intelligence.
Of course I had already understood what Artificial intelligence was to a certain point. However what I didnt know is what all around us use Artificial intelligence. For example, when I was going through the comic this week I saw that google and other search engines use AI-based searching techniques. So I began to question myself if I really did understand what Artificial Intelligence really was.
I surpose what I didn’t really think deep enough about it. I guess I thought AI was only capable of being a “robot” if you will programmed to resemble a human.
What I found to be really Interesting is the “Cellular automata” and the “Conway’s game of life” which was created by John Conway,a professor at Princeton University.

The Lab Work:

Now that I have dicussed what all I have learned about AI this week I can move on to the Lab work we had!
This week my group worked on programming out legobot to follow a path using the “Color sensor”. I was unable to attend one of the days so i did miss alittle of the work. however the following day of class i did get to help, but mostly learn, what all was needed in order for the legobot to follow along side the black ring in the inner part of the tracks circle.

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Robots,Robots,Robots!

So we Covered Robotics this week..To be honest i was kind of a surprise seeing some of the robots that have been created already from the videos we watched in class. I honestly can’t think of much to say about all of it. the Lego building was pretty awesome. I really enjoyed having one drive around and shoot balls while playing a sound that you can program it to say.
I guess when it really comes down to it I just haven’t really thought about it that much till now.

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Hacking,viruses security issues

alright so todays blog entry is going to be my thoughts concerning computer hacking. viruses and other security related issues.
Lets begin with computer hacking. first of all for those of you who only think of the term hacking to be a bad thing you are incorrect.Hacking can be a bad thing, a good thing and anything in between. But i will only be covering the bad things hacking can do in this post.

hacking:
There are seven types of methods a hacker has in their “toolkit.” which are the following:

now with all that aside i am going to give my input on all of it. all of the “tools” a hacker has that i just listed are pretty lethal. however, what decides that they are lethal are in the hands of whoever may be using them.

ALright, Now I that I have discussed my thoughts about hacking. I can now go onto what I think about viruses.

first off let me point out that a computer virus is a type of malware. Malware is a software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owners informed consent.

The following are the types of malware:

with that being said, spotting a Suspicious link,e-mail, file, etc.. can be pretty simple. all you need to do is dont click on a link from anyone you do ot know or from someone you do not fully trust.However, there are some hackers out there that are very good at slipping a virus into your computer.Once this happens your computer is in extreme danger and the damage that it can be inflected depends on what the virus was designed to execute.

A good example is something that has happened a few years ago to my sister’s computer.I remember her calling me into her room to come see what was going on with her computer. i guess since i spent most my day playing video games on my computer it gave me some type of knowledge on what a computer does. When I walked into her room she pointed at her computer screen and asked me what was going on. when i looked at her screen the first thing that came into my mind was “wow you have fucked up.” All that was happening is her screen was being bombarded with pop-ups. this went on till her computer crashed and when she tried rebooting it all that happened was it was extremely slow and that she could only access it in safe mode. I had no clue how to fix it at that time since this was back when i was just starting high school.

She never told me what all she did when i asked her so i am assuming it was something private so i didn’t pry any deeper. But that is, in my opinion a very strong example of how lethal a computer virus can be.

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Randy Pausch and Scratch!

Let’s see here. where should I begin..I surpose I will start off with what I thought about Randy Pausch’s lecture. Or well I mean his “last lecture.” I have to say that I was really impressed by the how he accomplished the dreams he had when he was younger. The one dream of him wanting to experince zero gravity was by far the most impressing thing In my opinion. the way he came up with getting NASA to let him and his experince the “vomit rocket” blew me away. But of course thats not to say that the rest of the dreams he made come true were not amazing.
The quote “experince is what you get, when you didnt get what you wanted” he talked about really did move me. It made me rethink the way I look at things.
When I sit back and really think about how much he has accomplished and of how many people he has taught that have gone on and worked for high scale businesses. I begin to wonder what all we could have learned from him if he didn’t die.

Alright, now onto my first impression of scratch. Currently I am having some difficulty figuring out what all I should create with it. However I do find it pretty impressive when I look up all the examples of what other people have created with it.
The tools the program comes with are simple enough to make it very easy to put together a decent project. it’s pretty interesting even though its only 2D!

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HTML,SQL and databases

I have to say that when it came to creating a HTML page from scratch on notepad i can see how easily it can be to mess up with some coding and not realizing where the error was or/and how to fix it. i for one had the roughest time creating tables properly. however, the amount of pride you gain upon finishing your page is almost undescribable.

As for SQL i honestly did not feel like i learned much about it.This may have been due to my absence of monday due to me being sick. which makes this blog entry very difficult to go into great detail about all of it. I understood that it is much easier to code then using HTML since you do not have to use commands such as “” and “. But thats pretty much it…I will be going back through this weeks comic/lecture notes on d2l to be prepared for the future exam thats for sure!

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My HTML web page experience

when it comes to creating web pages i have absolutly no experince. which makes this weeks topic pretty interesting to say the least. So far my webpage is coming along nicely. i have been having trouble getting everything to blend in well with the background and font. as for finding images and links that is obviously a no brainer considering what my hobbies/interests all revolve around one “catagory” i guess you could say.

to be honest i really didn’t think creating a webpage would be that fun or even remotely interesting. but i guess you never know if you will like something or not untill you try it out yourself!

one thing is for sure, this is a beneficial skill for many people out there looking into a career in computers in general!

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ALS and the semester so far!!

So lets see here where do I begin..I guess I will start off with how I am doing with all of the material we have been taught so far. I have been able to grasp almost all of the chapters much faster then I thought I would be able to. of course this is still just the start of the semester so who knows what all awaits in the upcoming material? But with the amount of ease I am having so far I feel pretty confident!

with all that being said I can move on to the Assembly Language Simulator(ALS). this particular program was a little confusing at the start..I went through the assigned commands more then just a few times. out of the group of them I spent most of the time trying to understand program 4 the whole “jump” command was the worst of it all.

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what i think about binary

back in my high school years i heard about binary(the language of computers) from my friends and what it was used for. all that went through my mind was that it didnt sound very interesting and that i didnt see the point in knowing how to use it. only intill my senior year of high school did i realize that my outlook of binary was that of how some students in my math classes..you may know what i am talking about but for those of you who do not, i am talking about how the students would say “i will never need to use this in my life.” However, for the most part, they are incorrect. without even realizing it we use math on a daily bases. Even though binary is not a subject in its self. we need to know how to use it for programming. of which knowing math is needed (even though it is the basic part of math.)

surprising enough, i didn’t have any issues learning binary. i guess it is because i learned the basics of it from my friends before i graduated. But if i had to pick one thing that was “confusing” about binary is using the ASCII(American Standard code for information interchange.)

I would have to say that this is my favorite material i have learned college. And the most exciting part about all this is that this is only the second week of this class!

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blog for CSIT1110!

this is the start of the blog for CSIT1110!

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