Birthday PC

My friend Frank Feder recently burned out his laptop screen by leaving it on during a LAN party, and the screen burned out. For his birthday, a bunch of his friends contributed spare computer parts they had, or just bought new ones, and for around 200 bucks we build him a decent gaming PC. The graphics were something to be desired (ATI Radeon HD 5450) and paired with his 30" INCH MONITOR, the icons on his desktop were about as big as his fist. But, other than that, at least he had a PC.

Weekly Reflection

This week in computer science we learned about strings and math in general. We learned how to take remainders of numbers, how to make things return numbers in some cases. Like you would make a scanner record input from the user, and then the program would calculate something. We learned about the different types of variables, and more about ASCII.

Back to the Basics

A few months back, I went to Fry's Electronics with my dad for him to pick up something or other, like thermal paste. We got there, and I kind of automatically gravitated towards the games section, and saw an old game I used to play called Call of Duty 4. I used to have an iMac before I built my kickass gaming rig I have now. I used to have to run this game on lowest settings or else I would get a ton of frame rate lag! So I decided to buy it again, and then I went home and installed it, and it ran easily on maximum graphics. It wasn't so much the game, just the fact that I was remembering how much fun it was, even if I had to run it on lowest graphics. The campaign was the greatest I'd ever played, besides Portal. The multiplayer was fantastic, and the leveling process was a huge reminder of how much fun I had with this game.

Weekly Reflection

The second week of computer science consisted of messing around with getting things to calculate simple formulas for you, like gathering side lengths of a triangle or rectangle from the user and then combining them to get the area, or perimeter or something along those lines. I thought this was fairly simple, because it was just adding all the things we had already learned to an equation for a shape.

Borderlands

My latest interest in a game is a game called Borderlands. It takes place in a post apocalyptic desert type environment, where you play as one of four characters, all with different abilities and specialties. The game is a fusion of Role Playing and First Person Shooter. You level up, and gain levels to be able to use certain guns, which have varying stats. You embark on missions to gain experience points and get more weapons. The more levels you gain, the more damage you begin to deal, but the enemies also get tougher. It's a battle of strategy, teamwork (4 person coop), and skill with a gun. With a team of 4 of your friends and a game like this, you really can't go wrong.

Weekly Reflection

The first week of computer science of the spring semester, we pretty much jumped headfirst straight into Java. We learned about creating scanners, and how to save input into the computer. I didn't think that this part was all that hard, just a bit repetitive. We practiced recording different types of variables, like doubles, integers, and other such things. This was pretty easy.