Hi, my name is James Finchum, and I'm from Kingsport, TN. I'm a senior double majoring in ECE and CS. I'm also going to end up with a minor in religion mainly because I needed a change of pace class every semester.
My first experience with computers came when my parents bought an Apple IIe back when I was in Kindergarten. Apples were the only computers I ever used until 6th grade when we got our first Windows machine, an IBM Aptiva running Windows 95. Since then, I've gone through a Dell laptop that sadly died this past summer, and I'm now running a P4 Dell with WinXP as well as an old comp that dual boots XP and Linux just for fun. My only experience with Unix and Linux before playing around with them some this past summer has been from my computer science and engineering courses here at Duke. As for Macs, they remain a mystery to me.
On a daily basis, I use my computer for AIM, email, music (downloading and listening), news, homework, and sometimes games. I'm not completely sure of what I'm going to be doing when I graduate in May, but I feel certain that whatever field I end up in, computer use will be an essential part of it.
I've always had an interest in computers, but my first experience with computer science came in high school when I took the AP class. I really enjoyed it, and ever since then I've wanted to study it. I was originally going to just get a minor, but after checking what I had to take for the ECE major, I figured I might as well take the couple of extra classes and get the major. The most interesting programs I've done while here at Duke were the Huffman project from 100 and then the semester long Nachos project for 110. Both of these were very interesting because of their practical applications. If I had to choose a least favorite project, I'd probably have to stick with the Nachos project just because of the extreme amount of time my group spent on it.
My group was the assigned the design of a set of elevators for a building. The group was able to immediately list the major components that would be necessary to run and elevator system. After listing the components, we then made a simple chart that depicted all of the interactions that would take place within our sytem. Our design was straightforward, whereas it could have been very complicated had we been concerned with actual algorithms for running the elevator, but we assumed the CPU component of our design had all of this built in. The group worked well together and I would like to think this will be the case throughout the semester. Based on this first simple assignment, it appears communication and group interaction are clearly going to be important in completing more complicated future assignments.