Photoshop

A few weeks ago, I figured out how to make skins for weapons in one of my favorite games (CoD4). I found this extremely fun, and soon began using GIMP 2 to create my own weapon skins. I guess the reason I found this so entertaining was because I could make something, and then put it into a game, and it would be my own personalized thing that I created (bragging to my friends about it was also fun). Even though they didn't show up for other people that picked up my gun over the online server, it was still cool to be playing and then remember that thing that I created and put into someone elses work, almost contributed to. This also opened my eyes to more things I could do on the computer, like making just images on Photoshop. Not everything had to build on a game. So I went to http://www.youtube.com/jxtutorials and watched some tutorials on how to make cool images in GIMP. I started making some images just for myself, to experiment with what I could do with this program. I made backgrounds for myself, I tried messing around with new brushes (by the way, I get my brush packs from deviantart.com or brusheezy.com), and found some cool things that I couldn't do before, just by looking up some things on the internet. Then I thought about how it was winter time, and Christmas was slowly creeping up on me, and I really didn't have anything to give to my family, and I also didn't wanna spend any money. So I said, "Hey, what if I combined this skill that I just acquired with that?" and I decided that I would find out all of my families' screen resolutions on their computer, so I could make wallpapers for them for Christmas (and certainly more than one, and not just 2). Because most of my family has mobile computers (except for me and my grandpa), I thought it would be cool to make the wallpapers a week in advance or something, and then when we go on our ski trip starting on the twentieth, then on Christmas, they would boot up their computers and find a cool background for Christmas, and thanks to Windows 7 themes, I can make a slideshow of pictures that I make. I also thought about it from even a career standpoint. There are people in the world that live under great living conditions, and all they do is graphic design for a living. Most of them also do some normal photo editing for people, maybe even some photography, but I thought that would be a really cool way to make money. Or, there is a website called threadless.com where you can submit designs for t-shirts you make, and if they pass criticism from all of the people who vote on them, and if they make it in a certain margin of top votes, then you get around $5000, and your shirt gets printed and sold regularly. Plus, every time they bring it back to re-print it, they give you $500 dollars, which would be a cool idea for a job, even though it would be a bit chancy.

Call of Duty 4 Skinning

A few weeks ago, I figured out how to make skins for weapons in one of my favorite games (CoD4). I found this extremely fun, and soon began using GIMP 2 to create my own weapon skins. I guess the reason I found this so entertaining was because I could make something, and then put it into a game, and it would be my own personalized thing that I created (bragging to my friends about it was also fun). Even though they didn't show up for other people that picked up my gun over the online server, it was still cool to be playing and then remember that thing that I created and put into someone elses work, almost contributed to.

Weekly Reflection

Jeroo is done, because we took the final quiz. I liked it, it's more fun than Alice (in case you can't tell at this point, I didn't like Alice, I know it taught fundamentals of Java like methods and loops, but the syntax was most of the time confusing and was hard to find stuff), and I liked it. This week, Mr. Stephens noticed that me and my friends tend to play a lot of games once done with the labs, and so he gave us an interesting (and mandatory) challenge for next semester. He told us that if we wanted to play a game in his class after the Christmas break, we would have to make it ourselves, which got me thinking about how would I incorporate multiplayer into a Java game besides sharing a computer...? Like for instance if I wanted to play Pong with Gus, but didn't wanna have to share a keyboard? Hmm. Anyways, this week was fun as usual.

Grooveshark

When I am on my computer and I hear a thing of music, but I don't want to bike all the way to Waterloo Records to buy a CD, I go to Grooveshark, a website dedicated giving you free music to stream. The way it works is that Grooveshark hosts their servers, and you can upload your own music libraries to Grooveshark. You and other people can then search for music, and listen to each others copyrighted material, but don't worry, it's 100% legal. It doesn't include downloads, just streaming. Check it out! http://listen.grooveshark.com/#

Weekly Reflection

This week in Computer Science, we finished up Jeroo. Jeroo actually got hard for me when I tried to make compound conditionals work, and it failed horribly. Ifs was very easy for me, and I kind of went through those labs really fast. I had a fun time with Jeroo overall, and using it kind of got me warmed up to Java which we will be using next semester. Trying to use the methods in Jeroo was a bit unorganized, because they were all kept in this one little method (tab). But I like Jeroo, and am ready to move on to Java.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Release

This week on the 10th, a new addition to the Call of Duty first person shooter series was released. Dubbed "Black Ops", it combines many of the game series' previous titles with aspects from other game series. Being a huge addition to the series seeing that the previous game was a glitchy mess, in which every single gun in the game was over powered, being an owner of Black Ops myself, I can say for sure that I like Black Ops much better than Modern Warfare 2. I also play the game with friends such as Calvin and Michael, and others from Kealing.

Weekly Reflection

This week was more of Jeroo, which I thought to be a very nifty program now. At first, it seemed a bit repetitive and inefficient, but as we got into methods and loops, the challenges actually became easier and easier for me. Instead of having to type up 20 lines of code to do a very simple task, it took me 5 lines of code to call a method a certain number of times, and using while loops to detect conditions. I am enjoying Jeroo much more than Alice so far, because it gives you more freedom than Alice, and also because you don't have to search around forever for a certain function, you just type it.

Urban Terror

When I am done with all my labs during computer science, I like to play a free First Person Shooter game with my friends. The game is called Urban Terror, and it's a (now) free and very old Quake III mod, which the developers developed into its own individual game. It's loads of fun, as the the slogan suggests (Fun over realism.) and I primarily like it because it's relatively small (900 mb) with low system requirements, and it's free for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh.

Weekly Reflection

This week in Jeroo, we went over methods and I thought I had a way easier time with methods in Jeroo than I did with methods in Alice. Alice methods were all premade and stuff and I had no clue what to do with them because I was used to just making my own methods and then doing stuff that way. It was also alot nicer having a UI like Eclipse where you can just say "Run" and the program will run and you can see what you did wrong, and in Alice it went all fullscreen and annoyed me alot. So so far I am liking Jeroo the most.

Weekly Reflection

Now that we are FINALLY moving into concepts of Java, I see why Mr. Stephens had us do Alice and Scratch, because the concepts and commands that we learned in those can be pretty easily translated to Java code. We haven't started on making methods yet in Java, but I'm actually enjoying the Jeroo, as I thought I wouldn't like it.

LBJ vs McCallum Game

I went to my first football game this Thursday at house park, during which LBJ played McCallum. Football isn't really my favorite sport, but it wasn't really the game that made it so fun, it was the cheering for LBJ. I thought that LBJ had kickass fans, and Mac just sat around banging their little noise sticks together. The school spirit of LBJ was great, even though we lost. I had loads of fun and hope to at future football games.

Weekly Reflection

This week, we learned more about Alice, and commands like using lists an more (Mostly events). Using events I found to be easier than using things like lists, where you had to add a bumch of items to it instead of just compiling a bunch of commands into a method and then calling that method, like you would do for events. Even though lists helped me out lots when I figured them out, they were still harder for me than using events.

LAN Party

This weekend I went to a LAN Party at a friend's house, which is basically where you set up a bunch of computers and play games together, and I didn't get much sleep. Actually none at all. I am now fully getting the consequences of my actions, seeing as I have much homework for each of my classes, and I am sleep deprived.

Weekly Reflection

This week, we learned more about things in Alice, and I realized how much easier it is to get into a subject gradually instead of jumping in all at once. I'm also kind of glad that I didn't take AP Computer Science, just because it would require so much previous knowledge that I don't have or know how to implement correctly.

ACL

As we all know, this weekend was Austin City Limits Festival, at which one of my favorite artists Deadmau5 (pronounced Dead mouse) played, but unfortunately I couldn't find tickets in time to go on Saturday. I heard he was great though... sad face

Weekly Reflection

Even though the concepts in Alice are getting more and more complex, even sometimes surpassing my previous knowledge in Java, I'm doing my best and keeping up in Computer Science, and making the most of it. The labs that Mr. Stephens has us complete are very very useful to me at least, because when we start doing Java, I can have something to look back at and refer to if I have problems. This week was good.

My stuff i found this week

This week, my dad bought starcraft ii, a real time strategy game, and it's been a learning experience for both of us, because i'm new to it and he is too.

Weekly Reflection

This week we finished up Scratch, which I felt very confident about, and moved into Alice, a more advanced vocabulary of programming. It requires you know terms that you will need to know in Java, so it prepares us for the future. I am enjoying Computer Science 1 about as much as I enjoyed Java in 7th grade, in which it was another hands on experience. I'm trying to currently decide if I like Alice as much as Scratch, or both as much as Java, but I still like this class.

My thoughts on Computer Science 1

So far, I think this class isn't bad at all. I especially like that we aren't just jumping into material that I have no clue what it means, despite prior experience in Java. I think that starting with something really simple like Scratch got me warmed up to the commands once again, and didn't kill me with work while I tried to figure out what was going on with binary, decimal, etc. I especially enjoy the mindset of this class, how it is not just "Alright class, today you have to do this and this and this" it's more of "Alright class, today you will have to have this done by the end of class, but you can also go experiment with what you want", which for me helps me learn a lot faster, and makes it much more enjoyable. So, I am obviously liking this class, and hope I will like it for the rest of the year.