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<p>I went into this class not being to sure of what I was going to experience in there. I will have to admit that after the very first week I was already growing quite fond of this class. Granted, it was just an overview of the class and a brief history of computers up through what has not happened with them yet, but could be possible in the future. Seeing some of the later topics that we would be discussing was also a promising factor in the beginning. Robotics instantly seemed to be a topic of interest for me, as well as the weeks talking about World of Warcraft and Video Games/Virtual Worlds also caught my eye. Even the concept of binary numbers was pretty simple for me to grasp onto, so with the first 2 weeks in the bag, I was feeling pretty confident that this was a class that I would thoroughly enjoy. The main thing that I took from this week was that I am glad that we do not have to type 0′s and 1′s over and over again anymore. I would turn and run from this major in a heartbeat if that was still the case. The ALS was the first bump in the road for me. I must admit that there was not really anything about the ALS that I enjoyed. It was not a fun week for me but at least I was warned ahead of time that it was not the most popular topic that would be covered in this class. I can honestly say that I have not even really went back to that topic and looked at it again after the test was over.

<p>The weeks on HTML was alot of fun for me. I had taken a few classes in high school that was dealing with web page design so I was already very familiar with this topic, even if I was a bit rusty. After that week was over, I actually continued working on a website from my home that I am still currently working on. Im kind of trying to get involved with some web page designing from my home because I have a few different family members and friends that own businesses that would like some future help with designing web pages for their businesses. That week was a huge help to me because I always found web page design interesting.  The databases lecture week was one of my not so favorite weeks as well, but it had to be done, and im glad that week ended with me actually grasping the majority of what was talked about. Working with Scratch wasa neat experience but it was still something that I had a hard time diving really deeply in to due to personal reasons outside of school. I worked with it the best that I could for the time that I had free, and since then I have still played around with Scratch now that I have had some extra time lately. It is a program that I actually had alot of fun with but was just unable to explore it as best as I could at the time of the assignment. The final part of the class was alot of fun, especially the weeks devoted to the Robotics project. It shed a whole new light on how difficult it is to work with robots and make them do even the simplest of things. It seemed to be such a pain for us to even get our robot to stick with following the black line on the paper. Overall, the videos were even more interesting to watch, and I devoted quite a bit of time looking at random videos on youtube about Robotics.

<p>I have taken alot more form this class than I originally thought that I would. As a whole, I enjoyed more about this class than I did not enjoy, and I learned alot more from this class than I anticipated that I would. The 3 major topics that really caught my attention was Robotics, Video Gaming/Virtual World, and especially the Web Designing week. Like I stated above, I have had quite a bit of exposure to web designing in the past, but it was nice to get back into it this semester because it is something that I can at least list as a pretty solid hobby that can turn out to be very helpful in the future for me. Who knows, things might progress into somehting more than just a hobby in the future, because I can honestly say that it is something that I enjoy doing. At first I just figured that this would be a typical class dealing with computers, but throughout the semester I realized that it worked out to benefit alot more than I thought that it would. This semester has shown me many different aspects dealing with the career field of CSIT. It did not really focus so much on cramming information into my head, but in fact it showed glimpses on many different aspects that could potentially blossom into a career and allow me to make the choice at what I want to do with my future. Thank you so much for the great semester. It was a great experience and it really turned out to be much better than I expected. I have not had to many classes that I could honestly say in the end that I enjoyed, but this one was an exception. Thanks again!

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The only game that I have ever seriously been involved in online was World of Warcraft, with a huge emphasis on was. I am no longer a member of the World of Warcraft community so therefore I do not have any form of an avatar to post anymore due to me selling my account a long while back. The experience with World of Warcraft can only be summed up in one word, “addictive”. I wish that I could give a ballpark range on how much time was put into my World of Warcraft account but I cannot say for sure. All I can say is that it was way more than should have been. It was always an experience to take in. There was never an end to the game. With all of the hours, or better yet days put into World of Warcraft, I can honestly say that I never did completely explore the entire aspect of this game, probably did not even come close. It was so addictive to build up a character from scratch and explore through everything that there was to offer. Countless hours at night were put into a character, questing around with friends and completing new challenges every night. It was so much fun, but I can honestly say that I never want to experience it again. That game can consume people, and Ive heard many stories of this happening. There are way greater things out there to experience other than the World of Warcraft, and I can honestly say that I was one of those people that got consumed. Selling the account was one of the smarter decisions I have made in my life, and once it was gone, I breathed a sigh of relief that I was finally free from the chains of Azeroth. After the account was sold, I decided to never be engulfed by a game like that ever again. I specifically bought an xbox 360 to avoid ever coming back into contact with an mmorpg, and so far it has worked well. I have friends that have discussed playing around on World of Warcraft that have never experienced the game, and the only guidance that I can give them is to run away from it. I tell them to get that idea completely out of their head, to just not even try it. I do not want any of my friends to experience what I did for the longest time, and I feel that is the best advice that I can give them. In the end, I can honestly say that sometimes I miss the game. As soon as that thought comes into my head, I smack myself to try and knock that idea out of my head. So far, so good.

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Artificial Intelligence is a much more tricky topic than I originally suspected that it was. I guess Hollywood has alot to do with that based on some of the movies that have been released that is based around AI. I guess I had a thought in my head that eventually something like IRobot was inevitable, but the discussions during class this week have kind of steared me away from that thought. All the small things that just come to human beings based on instinct or common sense seems to be some of the more major problems with creating AI. I actually was explaining the problems with AI to my girlfriend just earlier today by showing her a Coca  Cola can and asking her to tell me what she saw. Naturally she responded with the answer “a can”. Then I flipped it over revealing the silver bottom of the can facing towards her and asked her what it looked like at that point, and naturally she responded differently. At that point I explained to her that this was a major issue in Artificial Intelligence because every issue like that has to be addressed to even give the appearance of AI. Even using the toy robots in class showed how hard it can be to program even the simplest tasks. We were having issues just having the eye on the robot following the black line continuously so therefore everything else would not work the way it was supposed to. Humans can do stuff like that blind folded if need be, but it was taking alot of work to get the robot to perform that same task. After all of the discussions during class this past week, my perspective has changed entirely as to how I feel about the possibility of Artificial Intelligence being in the near future. Now I feel that it will be much farther into the future before all of these issues can be addressed with computer/AI that humans find to be so simple and common sense based.

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Robotics has been a topic that has fascinated me for a long time. Terminator was always one of my favorite movies growing up (for whatever reason), because the concept of something like the Terminator was always really cool to me. After diving more into the topic of robots, I started browsing the web for some videos about recent advances in robots and other stuff that was similar to it, it sparked my interest even more. I know that it is probably going to be a long time in the future before the field of robotics really takes off outside of just the imagination phase, but it is shaping up to be getting closer and closer to reality. However, I can’t seem to get past the fact of watching IRobot the other day and wondering if something like that movie could actually be possible if such advancements are made that allow robots to have free thought at some point in the distant future. Hopefully Will Smith will still be around to prevent that from happening…

Using the toy robots in class was a pretty solid experience. Ive played with remote control cars alot growing up, but I never got the opportunity to use a program to actually make the car do stuff on its own. Even though I barely dove into the program that is used to input the controls into the car, I am very excited about this week in class getting to dive deeper into the program to learn more about it. Like I said previously, I have always been interested in robots and finally getting to actually use one and program it has been an awesome experience and I hope to progress farther into it and learn more about it.

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From a personal standpoint I am against hackers pretty much as a whole, at least the Black Hat hackers I am completely against. At 2 different points in my life I have had either my computer hacked or an account hacked for a video game. Back when I was either 17 or 18 years old, my computer started acting kind of funny one day after downloading the ever famous Napster on my computer. It did not really make any sense to me at the time because I was not very accustomed to anything dealing with a computer so I just disregarded it and just went about my business day after day, just enjoying the fact that I was getting all kinds of music that I had been wanting for a while. Not long after I noticed my computer acting different, it all of a sudden began popping up notifications from the anitvirus program that the computer had been compromised, but it was to late for me to be able to do anything about it. A virus had come in through a pop-up from Napster apparently and infected my computer to the point to where I could not fix it, and I did not know anyone that knew how to work on computers very well. Looking back on that situation now, I guess I kind of deserved that since I was downloading music through Napster illegally, but at the time I was pretty upset because that was my main access for video games and music. Going for over a month before the computer was fixed was pretty awful for me, so I guess I still sort of hold a grudge for that.

Its kind of interesting that the subject from the past week in class dealt with hacking because the movie “Hackers” has just recently shown up on Netflix and I felt inclined to watch it after it being so many years since the last time I saw it. It is such a great movie and its still hard for me to understand what is going through their heads in this movie. Hacking seems almost like a gift instead of something that you just practice at and get good at. Some of the things that hackers can accomplish goes well beyond what I would interpret as “experience”.

I wish that antivirus programs worked flawlessly, but that is just way to much to hope for at this point in time. Like I said before, I hold a grudge against hacking and I will probably continue to hold grudges against most forms of hacking due to not only my personal experiences dealing with that, but other stories that I have heard from people as well. I do respect the other form of hacking, White Hat hacking. I have a friend that had worked at Dell years ago and actually was able to hack into my personal computer, take over the controls of my computer from an outside source, and fix an issue on my computer that had been bugging me for a long time. That type of hacking I actually enjoy seeing, but it seems that you never really hear the good stories from hackers, just stories about hackers and viruses being put on a computer to mess it up, not fix it.

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Scratch so far has been the most enjoyable thing that I have used in this class. I have found myself just playing around with Scratch late at night sometimes instead of playing Xbox 360 at night. Going through all of the different scenes/games that have been uploaded to Scratch has been pretty enjoyable to check out. Sometimes I have found myself watching the different scenes/games instead of doing my own project because I am trying to get different ideas that help enhance my project. At first it was a little rough to get everything working the specific way that I wanted it to work, but over time and after putting a decent amount of time into working on the project, everything began to come together. Collision detection was something that I was having issues with figuring out for a little while but eventually with enough time put into something it can always be figured out. Luckily that after I put in a decent amount of time trying to figure out collision detection, it was talked about in the very next class period, which was incredible because I had just spent an extended period of time the previous night trying to figure something out that was explained in less than 5 minutes the next day. Overall, this project dealing with Scratch is something that I am looking forward to diving deeper into using Scratch.

The movie about Randy Pausch was one of the more inspiring and moving videos that I have watched in a long time. He was such an energetic and outgoing person that had accomplished more than I could even dream of doing at this point in my life. Listening to his stories about what he has been through and what he has accomplished in his life was just incredibly inspiring. He seemed to be such a great person to work with and work for, and with him being such a goal oriented person just helped him along the way to become what he was. His video is one that I have actually recommended to many people since the class period where it was shown. I feel that it had an impact on me in a way that has hopefully began the building stones for me being a better person and a more goal oriented/active person, and I would like to share such a moving video with other people that are close to me. I feel that it needs to be a video that people see.

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Personally, my view of the internet has not really changed after creating a website from scratch because I have had a decent amount of exposure to html in the past so I sort of already knew what to expect. The fact that I can go to a mainstream website like espn.com and be able to figure out for the most part how they did the alignment and the rows/columns of all of their topics is kind of cool. I am very rusty in Java and even then I am not that good with Java because I never got a massive amount of exposure to it from the past, but overall I can pretty much distinguish the different aspects of their website. The biggest thing that I learned this week about databases and SQL is that information is one of the biggest resources that there is to have control over.  DBMS was something that I have never really heard of because I am not to familiar with databases and SQL, but it was interesting to find out sort of what a DBMS is. The DBMS supports data manipulation and data definition, which I guess that if I wouldve sat down and actually thought about it before now, then that would have made perfect sense to me without it having to be explained. It is kind of mind blowing to me as to how much work goes into storing information. There is so many things that need to be defined in order to have the ability to go back and relocate information that has been stored in the past.

SQL is something that I have never looked at in my life other than just hearing it used in a sentence occasionally. I am still not entirely comfortable with SQL, nothing specific about it but it is something completely new to me. SQL seems to be something that I would learn much quicker by doing hands on excercises with it instead of just seeing writings about it. I do understand that SQL is used to manipulate data by using simple commands, but I do not feel as comfortable yet with SQL as I have with other things because it is so new and I have not had the opportunity to use it as much as I would like.

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The week of HTML Coding was more of a refresher than anything. During my junior and senior year of high school I had the opportunity to take Web Page design classes, which got my feet wet in html and java. It was actually nice to dive back into html and refresh my memory on it because I really enjoyed using html back in high school. The best thing about html is that it is pretty simple to use and remember once you use it slightly. The unfortunate problem with this is that I did not remember much about how to use html. After I got a little ways into the assignment, everything was just flowing pretty naturally and quickly. It was a very slow going process at first when creating the webpage because I was very rusty when it came to html, so getting everything aligned on the page was a nightmare for me for a while. Also getting words to link to different websites was a problem for me for a while, even though I slightly remembered how to do it. I remembered for the most part what the command was, but it slipped my mind that the closing tag was simply /A instead of closing with /AHREF. Forgetting that closing tag ended up being a nightmare for me for a little while because I was so sure that i knew that the tag was right when it was just slightly off. I had been considering going above and beyond and making it a 2 page website but I could not figure out how to make it happen so I had to scratch that idea. However, after the assignment was over I stumbled across what I needed to make the webpage 2 pages, but unfortunately I did not find that information in time. Overall, even though it was a basic assignment it was still an enjoyable assignment and it was nice to refresh my memory on one of my more interesting classes from high school. I am actually going to possibly dive a little deeper with webpage designs and take it up in my spare time. Knowing how to make a webpage is a nice little bit of information to know for the future, especially for just a little side project/job/hobby.

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Using the Assembly Language Simulator has so far to this point been the only thing about that class that I have not really enjoyed doing. The concepts of the ALS was slightly confusing to me after the monday class period when the assignment was given to us, but in retrospect it was partially because the original one was not working correctly so it was making it difficult for me to grasp just by reading notes. As the week went on I started to become more familiar with the simulator and it was almost like a lightbulb turned on in my head and I began to understand what was going on with the different aspects of the simulator.

At first I was unsure of what to expect out of this class, but from the first week after the history of computers lecture was over with, my interest had been sparked. Watching videos and looking over notes about how computer technology has evolved was one thing, but over the past few weeks when the more in depth discussions started about how computers operate and have evolved over time, it made everything that was talked about in the beginning of the class make more sense. The binary lecture was intimidating in the beginning because I was unsure how 0′s and 1′s could make a computer work the way that it does, but after just that 1st class discussion about Binary it made much more sense and was way less intimidating than it was just a few hours before. Over time it seems that everything has become easier due to the development of language systems, which is comforting because writing strands and strands of 0′s and 1′s would make me shy away from this class in a heartbeat.

As discussions continued about hardware and then software, it began to paint a much better picture as to how things operate at this stage, even though I have not really gotten into the thick of how it works, just scratched the basics. So far, the class has helped me immensely in understanding even just the lowest level of how computers work, but it has proved to be an enjoyable class thus far and if things keep up, I will feel much more confident in expanding upon taking just 1 CSIT class for my college career into taking many more in the near future.

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Over the course of my life, I have known about the fact that computers use 0′s and 1′s but I was never aware of how they were used. During the last class period I learned in much more detail how a computer actually uses 0′s and 1′s to store and interpret information. It is amazing that using just those two numbers in the form of a language can allow human beings to mold a computer into what they are today. As illustrated in the comic book for the week, the scene from the Matrix where everything turns green and 0′s and 1′s were spamming across the screen never really made nearly as much sense to me as it does now. Everything that was happening in the world that they lived in were being interpretted by such a simple language of 0′s and 1′s. Also, I knew what the different types of formats were to an extent when scanning a picture, listening to music, and uploading a video onto a computer, but it is much more clear now how a computer can recognize and interpret each type of format. The last class has also cleared up to an extent how pictures, music, and videos are recorded in common ways. “Just as an image had to be divided logically into pixels to be encoded as numbers, audio is sampled at fixed intervals at which the volume is measured.” This phrase alone cleared up my concept of how different things are recorded.

It now makes me wonder just how far fetched ideas like what revolves around the Matrix and I-Robot really are. Computers have evolved more quickly than anything alive today and there seems to be no stopping it in sight. It is already believed that one day computers may be able to think on their own and based on what was talked about in the last class period, I am becoming more of a believer that it is innevitable. By using simple 0′s and 1′s, computers have become a neccesity in today’s lifestyle, and they appear to not be going away any time in the near future. Almost everything done today has a direct relation with a computer or the internet, and that is becoming more and more scary based on what technology is beginning to scratch the surface on.

The last class period cleared up alot of cloudy areas that I had on how computers operate. It is amazing how everything is stored as just simple numbers. A family picture at the beach can be interpretted as a number is just astounding to me, and I look forward to diving deeper into the world of computer science.

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