CompSci 108 – Fall 2008
Micah N. Jasper
Classwork
About Me
I have lived in Hillsborough, NC for 3 months now with my lovely wife. I just recently got married, on May 17th. You all can check out pictures on Facebook. It was really beautiful. :-)
Hobbies
Dreaming out building my own poker bot. I have been following the articles on a site called Coding the Wheel. The article is called How I Built a Working Poker Bot. And though I don't know the C++ to actually code the stuff he's talking about, I dream of the day that my skills will get good enough to code something like that. Then I want to work on a stock trading bot, also capable of trading currencies and metals, etc. And some sort of elaborate Ebay bot too, as well as a few free rice bots, and... um... yeah, ok I'll go on.
Dreaming about playing video games. I don't have time for such anymore, but I used to play all the time, and over the summer I played a fair amount of Final Fantasy VII. I finished realMyst this summer, even though I have played the original Myst a few times before. And I beat the Virtual Boy Wario Land game on an emulator (called Red Dragon, if anyone was interested ;-).
I am a senior, but I took a semester off and I'll probably be here this year and fall semester of next year.
Courses
I am taking CS 108, CS 150, CS 102, CS 116, and German 2 .
Computer Science Autobiography
I first stared using a computer in elementary school. At about 2nd grade they let us play around on these Apple II computers. My grandfather had bought an Apple II as well, so I would write little stories and play games on that computer. My grandfather was an electrical engineer, and my father a computer programmer. In middle school I programmed some in Visual Basic 4. I tried my best to make a Zelda game (specifically some version of the Game Boy game Link's Awakening), and I was able to make a sprite walk around the screen and not intersect walls and blocks. That was probably 7th grade. The funny thing is that all through middle school my mom was adamantly against the Internet and even some into my high school years. But finally my mother relented and got dial up at about the same time that everyone else was enjoying high speed broadband. My mom still has dial up. I took an AP CompSci course in High School. It was the first year they stopped teaching C++ and taught Java. I then went to college and took CS 100 and CS 104. And this summer I worked two research jobs. “Research” jobs. Really all I was doing was coding to help other people with their research. But one of the jobs was coding in Labview and the other I used Acrobat JavaScript and coded some ASP stuff with VBScript.
Now, I have a Dell Inspiron 6000. I have changed the motherboard once, and upgraded the RAM. But I am afraid I will need a new computer soon. I don't really know what a computer scientist does. I am majoring in computer science, because I want to get out and get a job programming. There are a bunch of things I would like to code and that interest me: Articficial Inteligence, Simulated Reality, Augmented Reality, Video Games, and boting.
My favorite programming project was probably the JavaScript job I had this summer. I was working with somebody on the project in general, but I was in charge of the JavaScript part. It was nice to work with someone, and also to know that what I was doing was useful and important, and that the guy I was working for appreciated what I did. I was also learning a new language, and though JavaScript is very similar to Java, there are some significant differences. And even though I'm sure my code was ugly, it was still fun to learn these languages this summer.
"How do you see yourself using computers in the future?"
Well, I hope that within the next few years, 10 or so, that we won't need to carry around bulky laptops. I hope that we will be able to wear glasses that transpose screens and keyboards and text and things like that over top of what we normally see.
I hope that I can program some games and bots and things like that, that I want to do. But realistically, I'm sure I will have a typical programming/software development job.