Reflection, week after Spring Break

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So yea, Spring Break. While I told myself I'd be productive, I ended up doing no such thing. I mainly just sat around an relaxed, hung out with friends I haven't seen in a long time, and occasionally looked at some Discrete Math IT was a good break, and although I feel like I should have gotten more work done than i did, I had a good time. I'm happy to be back at school, even if the weather is completely ridiculous (Snow? Really?).

Now on the topic of my Unix class. All seems to be going well in the class, and I'm enjoying the material we are covering. I'm glad that we are covering GitHub, as it is a useful resource that I feel we should know how to use. It is excellent for collaboration between partners. We are also of course doing C programming in Unix, which is interesting and I feel we maybe should have been introduced to it earlier in the curriculum. We have a test coming up, which I feel should be quite easy, and I believe we have a project coming up as well. Speaking of tests, I have a test in circuits this Wednesday, which should be tons of fun. Kind of wish it wasn't so soon, since we just got back from break.

This week, man, this week

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So this week has been absolutely crazy with work and exams and such. I had three exams yesterday, back to back, and that was the opposite of a good time. I spent all week up till that point, plus the weekend, studying my butt off. Luckily the studying paid off and I'm pretty sure I wrecked all three tests (woo). (By the way, if you are looking for a great place to study at Tech with friends, 1st floor of Newman Library there is a room with whiteboard walls and multiple TV's that you can use, I highly recommend it) Unfortunately, I'm still a bit tired from it all and have a Microcontrollers project due next week as well as another exam in History. But hey, such is life, at least I got the bulk of my work done.

Speaking of the Micro project I'm working on, it's pretty darn fun, to me at least. I just finished my first revision of fully working code, and I have to say, it was a blast to program. Sure I ran into many... stupid errors, but hey that's how you learn so it's fine. I'm still trying to optimize my code as I feel it is far from fully optimized, and that could take longer than it took me to write everything! Either way I feel like I'm learning a lot and it's been fun from start to finish*.

* Some parts in the middle did suck, and I may or may not have wanted to break my Digilent board in half multiple times

This, that, and other things

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So yea, it's been another week. I've finally been able to go rockclimbing again since the weather has gotten a bit better and that's pretty awesome. I try to get myself to go once or twice a week, but with the recent snow I've been unable to drive myself to go (Curse my small car). Either way now that I'm able to go I have to balance my schedule even more. It seems that I'm always doing homework or studying or something to do with school, and even then I forget things. Like just this week I forgot to do a reading for one class because I was doing a reading for another class and studying for a test in another. Hell, it's no joke when they say engineers have no time for social lives, but it works out in the end. You have to put the hard work in now to get the future you want later. Also, as far as classes go I'm relatively enjoying all of them, no bad classes yet. The only one I forsee issues with is Discrete Math, and possibly Circuits because I just can't understand the teacher for the life of me. However, because I enjoy the classes it will be a bit easier to stay on track.

In other news, my laptop decided to corrupt itself earlier this week and I've just recently revived it. I decided to go with a Linux Mint installation along-side a Windows 7 installation so that I could use it for all my classes. Linux because its quick and I'm able to use it within my Unix class of course, and Windows because a couple of my classes such as Microcontrollers and Circuits require me to run software that only runs under a Windows machine. I'm just finishing up the Windows installation as I type this and all seems to be going well. It should be up and running for classes next week so that I can finally go back to digital note taking. Anyways, it's been a long day and I still need to get up at ~7:00 tomorrow to get on campus, so until next time, this is my blog, posting, thing.

First Post of 2014

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So here it is, my first post of 2014. Haven't posted on here since senior year of High School but hopefully that will change soon. SO I've been reading This book The Art of Unix Programming and so far it's been pretty good. It starts off talking about the Unix culture and how it has an "n associated design philosophy transmitted across generations of engineers". This is interesting to read as I believe that the culture behind a topic is almost as important as the topic itself. It is important for something to have a strong following and helpful base if it is to survive throughout the years. It is also important to have a strong culture in order to draw new people into it, to again keep it alive. I hope to discuss this aspect of Unix a bit more in my class, and if not then I hope to read about it in the future. The first chapter of the mentioned book also gives a brief overview of what Open Source is and how Unix is flexible and provides an environment to learn "good design principles and development methods" as stated in the text. Unix has paved the way for some features we see in our operating systems today, which is also stated in the text. It is a great environment to learn these skills in and I would recommend it to any C (or even other language) programmer.