VJ - Comp Sci 108

I first started using a computer in the mid- to late- 1990s. Of course, all I remember was Solitaire and the cool sound the modem made when it dialed up. Going through normal academia, I was exposed to PCs and Apple systems. Since then, I use a (portable) desktop replacement running Mandrake on Win XP Pro (and only because I haven't gotten Slackware to install on the virtual machine). These days, it's my lifeline to the real world, and it's foremost a communications, entertainment, and development system. On days too cold, it acts instead of my weights for resistance training. Versatile it is, and that is evidence for the facisnation I have held with computers from an early age. But more than that, I'm interested in the diverse applications for technology, and that's why I'm here. For a description of what I expect life to be as a computer scientist, please see the Dilbert link above.

My best experience was probably making a tic tac toe program in a few thousand lines of code. No one could beat it, and I made a little money off the bets they placed =P. The worse experience comes in the form of documenting any project at all. I mean, I didn't write that program; most of us can attest it was really the caffeine.

I was actually a studying a Computer Systems (read electrical) Engineering course in Massey University, located in Palmerston North, New Zealand. Until I was ejected (read: my parents literally shipped me here). Massey University gave us instruction in mainly Object Oriented Pascal and Java. I transferred to Duke University in the Fall 2004 Semester, and had (until now) been suffering from withdrawl symptoms from not coding anything. I'll later study an MBA, preparing me for IT Consulting and/or venture capital for IT startups.

I am now an officially declared Computer Science major, with a Markets & Management Studies Certificate, and (barring any semblance of a useful summer courses) will graduate mid-2007. My other courses are Math 104 (a linear algebra thingy), Comp Sci 182S (an Astrachan thingy). And of course, Music 153, where we compose wonderful and harmonic works using sine waves - or square waves if you get them wrong. However, should you repeat that mistake consistently (read: creatively), it then becomes part of the piece, and who can criticize you then?

Systems Design - Friday, 14th Januaray 2005. Listening to 666 - Amokk (Vinyl Version)

This task was quite clear. Assumptions limited us to designing for a single elevator and floor system, though these were easily extrapolated into multiple elevator/floor systems. Our group was assigned to design an elevator system. We first outlined a flowchart, identifying how the four components (CPU, elevator, floors, and the motor/pulley) interacted with each other. From here, it was a fairly easy task to write the responsibilities of each component and the necessary communication it had with other componenets, making it a productive and satisfying group activity. We had a guy who took quite the initiative of being the scribe; he also lead the discussion at time. In the end howerver, we had all contributed, and each of us wrote up a component on a (CRC?) card after talking about it with a group.

When we got together with a group that had design a shipyard system, one of the first things we noticed was the common element of a CPU (though renamed). As we progressed, the similarities increased, till we finally relabelled the 'people' in our elevators to the 'cargo' for the shipyard and came up with an almost identical flowchart. Lucky we didn't get assigned the restraurant - what items do they push around? Food? Waiters? Tips?

I'm not too sure how the product could've been improved. The only thing I can think of would be to actual give a flowchart of the CPU's algorithm, though sanity prevented us from doing that.