I’ve noticed that over the past several months there has been a sharp incline in the amount of work I have been asked to undertake. Not in regard to school or Chick-fil-A but in website design and odd computer related jobs people ask me to do. Right now I have one completed, two that I’m working on, and at least two more possible jobs.
I made a site for my friend Jon over the summer which wasn’t really too much work. It was more of a favor I owed him. It needs a bit of maintenance now though. Currently I’m working on cleaning up the table based piles-o-crap that are ionfolio.tntech.edu and theucsc.com. Upcoming possible projects come from the most random of places too. My roommate Eric mentioned that his father needs a web-based database for his company which I could probably do for him. An friend of mine that has awesome drawing skills wants to start up a web comic and came to me for that as well (I was thinking a copy of SomeryC would do him nicely).
The best part is, some of these jobs will actually be paying which means I’m finally breaking into my aspired line of work, almost by accident. Web design really doesn’t fall under any of the classes I’m taking (or will be taking) here at TTU but I really like the sort of art that a clean XHTML/CSS page can be. I think it would be even cooler to work on this kind of stuff as a team with maybe just two or three people, just one more small web design firm out there.
Who knows what the future holds; I certainly don’t. But, I’m enjoying what I’m getting to do now. That’s a fact.
This is for those of you out there still in high school, or who have influence at a college that hasn’t heard about Zinch yet. Zinch is a sort of social networking site designed to let you, as a high school student, interact with prospective colleges, where they are on your stage. It is an outcry against standardized tests and GPA scores being the primary measures of acceptance for colleges. Since it doesn’t do much for me, already in college and everything, I haven’t bothered to create a profile and see what all can be done, but I think it’s a great idea which I hope will gain widespread adoption. Even though you’ll probably end up getting in to college through your standard application process for now, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to go ahead, sign up, and see what colleges are genuinely interested in you. I’m really curious what it’s like, so get back to me if you do.
Published on
January 17, 2008 in
College.
Classes started for me yesterday, finally. The winter break turned out very well. I worked a bit at Chick-fil-A, had some time to spend with family and friends, a lot of time to spend with Sam, and a couple of new gadgets to play with. I particularly like the new Logitech G5 mouse as a complement to my usual Trackman Wheel usage, but the more notable new toy was a Canon PowerShot SD1000. My Flickr pictures should be flying by in my photostream by now, so keep an eye out.
I’ve only got twelve hours this semester, so except for my Thursday night history class, I’m done by 1:30pm all week long. I have a algorithms class that I’m in at the moment which is already escaping me. I should be doing much better in C/C++ with my previous experience with the professor and two friends in the class with me. My ‘Concepts of CSC’ class will turn out well, and though a bit boring, I’ve liked what I’ve had so far. What I think will be my most difficult is my ‘Design of Algorithms’ class. Our professor is the kind to pace back and forth and ramble in a quiet voice that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the class, and I have no idea what was on the projector slides on the first day. Three of my four classes have at least one programming assignment as part of the grade, so I’ll have my work cut out for me, but David is in all three of those classes with me, so between the two of us I think we’ll be ok.
I looked all over the internet for a nice big PNG for my Pidgin shortcut in RK Launcher and I couldn’t seem to find one so I built one from the SVG source in Ubuntu and here it is for your docking pleasure.
EDIT: Now there’s an alternate too.
I don’t remember how I first came across it, but I found this cool looking upcoming indie game: World of Goo Yeah, looks kind of interesting doesn’t it. I’ll be sure to let you know how it turns out, as I’ll be keeping my eye on it in the future, but that’s not the point of this post.
One of the two developers of the game made this very simple website as an experiment out of curiosity which he explains on his development blog for World of Goo. It’s very basic: You visit the site, humanbraincloud.com, and you are presented with a word or phrase. You simply type the first thing you think of into the box and hit enter. If you don’t like what it gives you, just hit enter without typing anything to skip the word and move on. You could spend hours doing just this, but that’s just half of the game. All that time you were contributing words to a relationship database that remembers what words and phrases people associate with others. If you respond with something the system hasn’t heard of before and it seems like a legit response then it will be added to the dictionary and others will be presented with it to see how it associates with things in their brains. This is actually how the whole word database has been built. It all started with one word: volcano.
The fun part is that he has written a fairly well polished flash interface for viewing this database. When you click to view the cloud it starts out by picking a random entry and showing you all the things that people relate with it and with its closest relation as little wobbly black blobs connected by lines of varying width and opacity depending on how strong the relation is. Over time these relations disappear but a new random one will soon appear. The fun begins when you strart clicking on different nodes, at which point it will display all the entries that have been related to that one. It’s interesting to see where your train of thought can lead you in a more visual way, not to mention just to see where some people’s minds go when presented with a word or phrase.
If you don’t get it, maybe his explanation here will help, or maybe you should spend five minutes playing around with it. You’ll figure it out quickly.
