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.

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.