Nearing the End of the Semester: A look back

A semester has already past, that sure was fast, but then again no one really notices. A semester in Computer Programming, looking back on it, how did I ever survive? First of all, I'm not that good at problem solving by myself, which is why I'm more like a rock who does great in group work. Working in HTML was sort of fun because we made a basic web page with links, those were the days. Then we moved onto Scratch, another irksome program cause someone here had a problem with it. However, that was when we were introduced to "and" and "or" which made things a little easier to comprehend when we eventually moved onto Jeroo and eventually onto Python. However, I say "a little easier" because I still had difficulty with the program. My luck with computers has still not gotten any better. Yet I'm trying and getting the hang of it. I pray one day when I'll be able to do things without an error. Ah, who am I kidding? I'm going to get a bunch of errors in one line. But I can still dream. Talking of dreaming, working in Jeroo has made me dream of flowers, water and nets. Although, to be honest, the nets look like brick walls in my opinion. How they ever came to be known as nets is a mystery to me. Jeroo is my worst enemy at times and at other times, it's that jerk of a friend who occasionally helps me and then leaves me on my own, but helps me out again. I shall tame you Jeroo, one day. By the way, I still do not know what a Jeroo looks like, I've been imagining it as a kangaroo except it has an arrow for a head instead. That is also very creepy now that I realize it. Back on the topic, the final exam on Jeroo is coming up, and my nerves have not gotten any better. I'm just hoping it isn't too hard of a problem, cause if it is, I'm just going to cry or yell, although I probably won't. Events sure pass by in computer programming don't it? The most vivid thing that I can remember is David saying "ghost mouse," I swear if he says that one more time, I am going to revenge, that or keep calling him a jerk. Hmmm, I wonder if Python is going to be just as hard as Jeroo? It uses the same language, so I guess it will be similar, although I doubt that there is going to be an arrowhead, flowers, nets and water. After Python, I really want to start working on Java, mainly because it seems to be the most well known mainstream language. I guess that's it for this week, and of my reflection of the fall semester.

This week is stressful

My goodness, I almost forgot to do this week's blog post, good thing I remembered. Jeroo is becoming a major pain in my side, sometimes it's easy and other times it is harder. Sometimes, now in my dreams, I see flowers and nets in front of me. What's worse is that I keep running in a circle! I can not seem to get this ineptitude out of my head. At least I am almost done with lab 5. Frankly, I do not know I even got this far. It's probably thanks to David, and Sam. However, I managed to do some labs without them which makes me proud of myself. I just wish I could do that more often like at the time of the Final. Dear lord, I hope it isn't too hard. Lab 5C is difficult by itself, I think I'll have to think my way around this. The only thing that's really hard is that I have to have those preconditions which is really screwing me over. I got so close, but then the Jeroo turns around. I wanted to scream and then kill my Jeroo by making it drown. The funny thing was that it took me 5 minutes to do that. Jeroo is obviously not my strong suit, but I'll try to get it done, and hopefully it won't turn out so bad. Let's just keep believing in that.... Alright that's it for this week.

Short Week

Man, my body feels like it has been dragged by a car. My joints are hurting from Field Day, granted I didn't do much to help my team, but then again I rarely do anything physical in the first place. Field Day went from good to bad when my forum started to lose some events. We'll do better next year, granted I'll be a senior and seniors rarely go to Field Day anyway, we'll have a better chance. Now on to CP, this week we didn't do much other than watching TED videos and a spaghetti video. I thought my problem solving skills weren't bad, but my idea to use the spaghetti tower was based on stability not on height. I thought using a triangular pyramid would be enough, but it would seem that I forgot one of the most important rules of walls. You need to have braces to reinforce the walls or else the structure will fall down. The TED videos then made me curious about why every other country uses more advanced Capcha's than 1+1. I feel a little more stupid. Argh, I also didn't finish all of the Jeroo labs either which means I have to do them over the break. All right that's it for this week.

11/18

My god, this week is finally over. I can't wait till Field Day and then Thanksgiving! I need a break. The weekends aren't enough anymore. Okay, onto Computer Programming, we are continuing with Jeroo. I finally finished with lab 3B, pinball island or something, the name escapes me, but there was pinball in there. It was super annoying, because every time I wrote a piece of code, it wouldn't work and I had to scrap it. If this is what Python is, then I'm already a little apprehensive about my ability to work with it. On to the next one, 3C, I am actually making more progress on it than 3B. I already cleared one circle of flowers and one circle of net, although I'm stuck at that part. Sad, isn't it? In any case, I am surprised that some people already past Labs 3 and 4 and on to lab 5. Whatever, I'll be there one day, perhaps after thanksgiving break. Ah, life, you can be so cruel sometimes. Oh yeah, another thing we did was that Jeroo While loops quiz. It was pretty funny, I scored a 50 on the first attempt and then a 90 on the second attempt. But the cool thing was that I forgot about the answers and I actually answered from what I knew. It's really different when you go from memory and by application. One day, I'll be able to do well in those quizzes. Well, I guess that it for this week.

11-11-11

Woohoo, another week is over and better yet I found out that I am staying in AISD. That means I won't leave LASA and my friends. That sure was a load off my chest. Now on to computer programming, this week we're having more fun with Jeroo. This program is slightly annoying because of the syntax. I can not seem to visualize the movement of the Jeroo sometimes and to fix the problem. My brain sort of hurts after going through each lab. Labs 1 were sort of easy, labs 2 slightly more difficult, and labs 3 so far has been more difficult. Methods, and loops sound the same to me, but loops require "whiles" and "ifs." My main problem is with direction and movement, which is basically the point of Jeroo. More and more each day, Jeroo seems to be more like building/doing a game. It's fun when I solve them but even then I need help which sort of takes away some of my pride. But that does not matter because I will surely find out how to do that stupid "pinball island" lab. Curse you Bob for not being able to move like a snake and just go down row by row collecting those flowers. At least I didn't do anything like David, that was weird. I guess that's it for now because it was a 4 day week. Hooray for 3 day weekends!

Finishing Scratch and Beginning Jeroo

Ahhh, we are finally done with Scratch which in retrospect was not that bad. What is better is that I finished with all of the assignments that we were meant to do. Hooray for me, today was sort of cool after all. The easiest one was probably the Guess that secret number, that one was more intuitive rather than that Random Character program. I had so much trouble with that. Maybe it's because we needed to add Random X + Current X and vice versa with Y as well. RockPaperScissors was also a pain, well mainly because my head was spinning and I was dizzy while I was making it and the numbers got scrambled up. Apparently I did not know that I put 1 as rock, 2 as rock and 3 as scissors. I am an idiot sometimes. Fortunately I feel much better afterwards and could finish it today. Oh yeah, the new thing we are working with is Jeroo, apparently named after an animal living near (please forgive my spelling) the "Sangot" islands? I still can't find a picture of it, I got a picture of a woman instead, and art too. Jeroo is about arrows, islands, flowers, nets and water. The jeroo is in the shape of an arrow and you guide it around the island using syntax like Bob= Jeroo(). Your jeroo's name is Bob and the () signify that it is at the location of (0,0), the island also uses a (y,x) coordinate system which messed me up at first but got better later. I also finished the 3 assignments, yay. But it was mainly hops, turns, plant, and toss. Hope it stays like this....That's it for today.

Worst Week of My Life

Ugh, if ever a moment in my life where I felt like I wanted to die is this week. But that is another issue, not about computer programming. Now I will talk about computer programming, let's see it was mainly about working with Scratch in more complicated areas, primarily working with variables. I have no idea how I even got through all of this. All I know is that variables are blocks that we make and can customize it to other blocks. We have mainly used variables with loops but I am sure that we'll get to more complicated topics later. Another thing is that we took a quiz over Scratch, and I did not do as well as I wanted to. I missed 3 out of 10, so that means I got a 70. 2 of the questions I would have gotten right if I had just noticed that "say" was at the very end, so the output would have only said the last number said. Darn it. Darn it. Argh, I hate you so much right now scratch. I am stuck on the character not moving outside of a 100x100x100x100 box. The only thing that I think can happen is that the sprite is going to hate to move back and forth repeatedly. The only problem is that that is probably not going to go well since I can't even do that. Curse you my ineptitude. I guess that is as much as I got to this week and that is it.

Scratch

This week, we used "Scratch" which was very fun. I actually knew how to use it, because it was not that hard to learn but it was probably to understand the functions of each command. In all truth, I missed out on how to make a keyboard because I was not here on Friday, I was at the Austin Film Festival. It was fun, sort of because I received some bad news while I was there but I cheered up, a little. But on Thursday, I was able to make my sprites "sing" and by sing I mean utter noises and sounds in a rhythmic fashion. Technically I just combined two  or three different tunes and then just said that was a song. Well, it was a song, it had music...and a wolf howling. Whatever. I also made a scene with broadcast. It was sort of making of play and that you write the dialogue. Basically you use the "looks" section and then choose "say _________ for __ seconds" and then your sprite will say something for said amount of minutes. Somehow it ended up being a story about a loan shark and a victim who did not have the money. The loan shark was going to break the kneecaps of the victim, but the story sort of ended there which may be good. In any case, I had fun with Scratch and that's it for this week.

Website Completed!

All right, I managed to finish my first website. It looks mediocre, but I put a lot of time and effort in this undertaking, especially when you consider that the computer hates me. There were so many problems with the lightbox, a javascript tool, that was so annoying. I swear it worked at first and then something happened that completely screwed up the lightbox. But after I made separate folders and then copied exactly from the website, it became so much easier. HTML is not so bad after I learned about the basics, and CSS isn't either but I still think that I will have trouble in the future. On another note, we had a quiz this week in HTML and CSS. I think I got at least a solid 80 or so. I forgot that the smallest heading would be <h7> since it is larger than <h6>, but I didn't know that could happen because we were only shown <h6> so I assumed that was only as large that it could be. Some of the questions were about things I had not known about. I didn't know that you could change the bullet into a square or any other shape for the matter. I feel stupid now. Argh, I'm just glad the week is over and all I need to do now is finish the rest of my homework. That's it for today.

HTML and CSS

We have started to work on our websites. HTML was sort of easy and fun to do, probably it was just content and not style. But there were some tricks to make my webpage "presentable," I had a background and colored text. Well, almost all of my text was readable. The only text that wasn't readable was the table, but that was due to the background. Dark on dark does not make text readable, not unless you can tell the distinct lines. But I digress. We sort of started on CSS, but Mr. Stephens was not there when we started so I had trouble. I spent 30 min trying to make my new background using CSS. I finally made my colored background when I got rid of my HTML background. Then CSS worked for me, it felt great, but I still believe that technology hates me at times. And when I say "at times" I actually mean all of the time. That's just bad luck, but that's okay because I am around people that are willing to help me...sometimes. Let's see, CSS made my webpage look more readable although it was only a brown color rather than a movie theater background. It does make it easier to see the stuff I put into the file, and CSS doesn't require as much letters and symbols. All I need to do connect my other 2 webpages to my base html file and then I will be done. I'm just glad I have a three day weekend now! That's it for today, and now I nervously wait for next week.

End of the Six Weeks: Hooray!

The First Sixth Weeks has finally ended but that does not make me any more glad. I am sure there is more work in the future, but I digress. Now this week in Computer Programming, we are going over HTML and using it to make a simple webpage. However, HTML is not for programming, it is a markup language which I believe is just annotated text that connects by tags. The tags start and end with <> with characters in the middle. Frankly, this is very interesting, I mean creating simple webpages that are not wikis are sort of cool. I managed to make a webpage of animated films that I like, albeit it could be improved. But I like it, or maybe that is because I made it. I wonder what can I do further with HTML. And I have just noticed that you can also "Edit HTML" in Blogger as well, is that not a big coincidence? In any case, hopefully I will be able to use this information one day.
Well, aside from HTML, we also went over networks and choosing the most efficient way to choose paths. I am still bad at finding algorithms for things, but at least this activity was easier.
That's it for this week.

Algorithms and Problem Solving

Well, after this week, I have learned that every time I do something on the internet, I basically make data that can be used by anyone if accessed. All this has done is scare me into near paranoia because at any moment, someone can try to use my information against me. That is seriously sick and rude. But then again, this is the internet, and no one gives a rats butt on the internet. It is also sort of getting hard to remember to do my data journal, I am trying to fill in the days but it is getting harder because of the more work that keeps piling on. Besides, I have a daily routine and I go to the same websites everyday anyway. Anyways, the only thing that matters is that be careful on the internet and do not trust search sites because they can use your information against you. That is a pessimistic lesson, isn't' it?

My privacy aside, we also did a problem solving activity. In all truth, the only one that I really understood how to do was the first activity. There was 20 people including you, so that means you can only shake 19 people's hands. The second one was a little more difficult but I could do it. There are two fence posts for every one yard. So if there are 12 yards of fencing, there is going to be 13 fence posts. I am just basing that on logic, but when you involve math into it and turn it into algorithms, my head starts to hurt. Probably because I just got out of Statistics and that class always seems to make my head hurt. Then the third problem was another toughie, and I also did not make an algorithm for this one. Instead I used logic and concluded that since there are 10 people including myself, and if everyone can only shake one time with one person but we need to shake hands with everyone in the room. At first my mind pointed to 9 handshakes, but then what about everyone else? So after I shake hands with that one person, I will shake hands with someone else, then another one, and so on until everyone has shaken hands. So I thought that I will shake hands with 9 people, that person will shake hands with 8 people after he has shaken hands with me. So the equation I thought of was 9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1+0=45 handshakes. Then the part with 20 people was the same thing. 19+18+17+16+15+14+13+12+11+10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+2+1+0=190 handshakes. However, I did not get the problem on the board at all, mainly because I could not see it. So I relied on my group who did get the answer, or what we thought they answer was. After Mr. Stephens told us the algorithm was 2^n, I felt stupid. But that is life, and I guess I might as well learn about this. May be useful in the future, and since I lack common sense sometimes, I especially need this.

Technology changes Privacy

So in this week in class, we were talking about how privacy is affected by the growth of technology and this includes social media sites and other sites that record our data. We also did an activity which made us evaluate a scenario, my group was to present a scenario in which a guy whose wall gets posted by comments of legalizing marijuana. Thus this guy does not get hired by the government.  I guess it was not the guy's fault since he couldn't control his friend, but there was always the option of making his profile private so others can not see. It is strange when we can not see the answer. But other than that, we also talked about how privacy is dropped due to recorded information that we usually are not aware of. Netflix, GPS, and cookies record our information and we do not even know about it. I am now nervous about signing up for any kind of website now. Listen up everyone, the world is changing, and it is not going to be good for people who leave their information all over the place! Get better passwords, and get antivirus security software.

On another note, since I was not in class to watch the videos, I had to watch them at home. The one I liked the best was the RSA Animate video because it was the last video I watched last and the one I can remember better. The video talks about the common ideology that people are usually motivated by a reward, usually monetary compensation. This is pretty much accurate for tasks that even just physical labor. The situation that they often presented in the video was the carrot for the mule. The mule will work for the carrot. However, this ideology did not work when rudimentary cognitive skills were needed. The test subjects performed below par or at least worse, and the test subjects were from MIT, and Carnegie-Mellon. These guys were the top of the bracket yet they did terrible when it came to cognitive ability. The world is strange, isn't' it? The lecturer later said that what really motivated us when it came to work was not money, it was mastery, autonomy, and a sense of purpose. Mastery is getting better at something for the sake of being better. He relates this to musicians, somehow I can see that. They are not getting paid much for singing, so all they have is get better at music. It is their drive, their motivation. I also guess that autonomy is a benefit since you are basically making your own rules to work. I liked how he used the business model with free software in it. I do not use Linux but I may want to in the future. Maybe when I become a servant to the money game, I will ask my employer to give me personal autonomy and purpose. Probably will not happen, but I can always dream. What still shocks me is that money is not the panacea for a workers desire.

Well that's all for today folks.

2nd Post: Whoohoo!

This week in Computer Programming we learned about Web 2.0 tools. This list stretched from bubble.us to Quick Forget, and it was a fairly entertaining activity. We got into teams of three, and we researched Mapwing, glogster, and wikispaces. I had to research the latter, which proved to be somewhat interesting. Initially, I had known wikispaces to be another website like wikipedia where you can create web pages about various subjects. I was somewhat right and also somewhat wrong. Wikispaces was more personal and could limit those who could access it. Apparently teachers get a free premium account, but everyone can get a free basic account which should suit most people. It was ironic that to learn about Wikispaces, I had to read about its wikipedia page first. In some areas, it resembled a blog because all I was doing was making "posts" in the form of web pages. Even the function to add widgets seemed similar to Blogger. Wikispaces aside, I had actually heard cool websites which I should try out over the weekend. One website in particular caught my attention, stumbler. I never knew that you could just click on a button and then you are on your way to doing something exciting. Another good thing is that it has filters to prevent any undesirable results. All in all, it was a fun activity. That's it for today, see you later.

First Week of Doing Stuff in CompSci

In the first time of my life, I had learned how to properly search for something. I should not equate Google search with accurateness because everything that may pop up may not be credible. Apparently sites that use .edu and .gov are more credible than .org and .com. This is a surprise for me because I thought .org sites were okay, but I guess I was wrong. Another important thing that surprised me was that 90% of people do not know the CTRL+F function. That is ridiculous, more people should know how to do that. We are living in an age full of technological advances, I was sure that people knew the simplest of operations.
I did not win the scavenger hunt, I felt so sad because I wanted to feel the rush of victory. I guess it was too much for my group and I. Competitions have never been my cup of tea anyway. So there, at least I attempted, that is all that matters. Or at least, that is what I tell myself at night. So that is it for right now, see ya next week.