Where Did I Go?
It's been over a week since my last journal entry, so everyone, myself included, has been certainly wondering... where did I go? School started as of last Wednesday, and I've been sort of busy. Lots of minor but interesting events up until now. I'm currently sitting around in a computer lab until my 6PM class starts.
Well, first off, I like my classes. Discrete Mathematics are the basic mathematical principles behind computing, and have numerous applications outside the field as well.
Computer Organization deals with the actual physical hardware, as well as some more discrete mathematical principles, and the lowest human-level programming interface, assembler languages.
Unix Programming in C is exactly that, a class that'll give me some insight into Unix, which is most widely used OS, and its applications, as well as knowledge of how to program in the C language.
It's basically computing history/pre-computing theory. A very low-level series of courses that promise to be pretty time-consuming, but it'll form a good foundation for me to work with more math and computer science topics.
Other events of the past week include hanging out with my friends Larry and Dana at a coffee shop. We talked for a bit. It's good to see them both, they attend school out of town and we are rarely able to make time. Larry's approaching his English degree already and is probably going to be in law school in another year and a half.
I look at my friends and I see people who know what they want to do. I had an hour talk with my Unix professor today about general computing issues, views on software piracy and the like, and he asked me a question I found myself unable to answer.
"What do you want to do in computer science?"
The answer to that changes every day, but the basics stay the same. Large systems, networks in which big processes are begun and then observed. Goldberg-esque stuff, but practical. You insert the data, watch the system crunch it in some way that you quantify, and see what comes out. This is why neural network architecture and AI interest me. I think we'll be seeing the first AI within this decade.
Either way, I don't have any worries. That I do not know what I want to do in the future is irrelevent. I am doing what I want to do now, and if I allow time to pass, now will become the future and my path will be true.
My room is basically complete. I like the setup, although I'm getting stiff necks right now while I test out ways of sitting in front of my display. I think that I'll end up sitting in lotus position. It seems to support my neck and shoulders better than others.
On some night last week, I was hanging out with some friends of mine, and after a fairly event-free night(we drove around, ended up drinking coffee at a donut shop and complaining that we were becoming like old men), we got some excitement when we got pulled over for a manufactured reason.
The cops got us out of the car and went over it with a fine-toothed comb, searching us as well. They brought in about five other vehicles, so at the end we had like fourteen of Pittsburgh's finest breathing down our necks. One of them found what looked to him like a bit of weed in the carpet on the floor, but he didn't find any more and we were free to go after about a half hour of interrogation and searches.
The cop who started it had a hot partner. She was probably in her early-to-mid twenties, definitely a rookie insofar as she conversed with me while the other cops were playing Gestapo with my friends. I should have asked for her number, and I regret not doing so.
Maybe if she's there for another random drug search, I'll ask her. Either way I'm disturbed at how little civil rights seem to matter in this day and age. The search was entirely baseless, even though their concerns about contraband in the vehicle might not have been entirely unwarranted. Ultimately they didn't find any, so it was all cool. Definitely an interesting end to a night.
I've been busy, been reading and learning about computers, from Turing in Bletchley Park during WW2 to Colossus to the inception of UNICS at Bell Labs, which we call Verizon nowadays. Lots of fun, lots of information to absorb.
An interesting sidenote before closing, I was to be late to my first Vector Calculus(not mentioned because it's not really of a lot of interest, it's more Physics, and right now I'm not interested in the Physics side of Math too much) when my martial arts instructor drove by my bus stop. He stopped, I got in, and we talked a bit while he drove me to class, as he was heading there to teach. Strange coincidences and odd luck. Interesting, huh?
So that's where I went. On a trip fraught with peril, lucky breaks, and knowledge. Plus a nice girl in my Discrete Math class that I might try to get to know better, but that's a story for a different time.
I hope everyone chooses to feel good about more things than they choose to feel bad. I also hope that the temperature here rises above freezing for more than a few hours. It's been below/around freezing for approaching a month. Everything is dead, but since the snow's old, it's gray.
Well, first off, I like my classes. Discrete Mathematics are the basic mathematical principles behind computing, and have numerous applications outside the field as well.
Computer Organization deals with the actual physical hardware, as well as some more discrete mathematical principles, and the lowest human-level programming interface, assembler languages.
Unix Programming in C is exactly that, a class that'll give me some insight into Unix, which is most widely used OS, and its applications, as well as knowledge of how to program in the C language.
It's basically computing history/pre-computing theory. A very low-level series of courses that promise to be pretty time-consuming, but it'll form a good foundation for me to work with more math and computer science topics.
Other events of the past week include hanging out with my friends Larry and Dana at a coffee shop. We talked for a bit. It's good to see them both, they attend school out of town and we are rarely able to make time. Larry's approaching his English degree already and is probably going to be in law school in another year and a half.
I look at my friends and I see people who know what they want to do. I had an hour talk with my Unix professor today about general computing issues, views on software piracy and the like, and he asked me a question I found myself unable to answer.
"What do you want to do in computer science?"
The answer to that changes every day, but the basics stay the same. Large systems, networks in which big processes are begun and then observed. Goldberg-esque stuff, but practical. You insert the data, watch the system crunch it in some way that you quantify, and see what comes out. This is why neural network architecture and AI interest me. I think we'll be seeing the first AI within this decade.
Either way, I don't have any worries. That I do not know what I want to do in the future is irrelevent. I am doing what I want to do now, and if I allow time to pass, now will become the future and my path will be true.
My room is basically complete. I like the setup, although I'm getting stiff necks right now while I test out ways of sitting in front of my display. I think that I'll end up sitting in lotus position. It seems to support my neck and shoulders better than others.
On some night last week, I was hanging out with some friends of mine, and after a fairly event-free night(we drove around, ended up drinking coffee at a donut shop and complaining that we were becoming like old men), we got some excitement when we got pulled over for a manufactured reason.
The cops got us out of the car and went over it with a fine-toothed comb, searching us as well. They brought in about five other vehicles, so at the end we had like fourteen of Pittsburgh's finest breathing down our necks. One of them found what looked to him like a bit of weed in the carpet on the floor, but he didn't find any more and we were free to go after about a half hour of interrogation and searches.
The cop who started it had a hot partner. She was probably in her early-to-mid twenties, definitely a rookie insofar as she conversed with me while the other cops were playing Gestapo with my friends. I should have asked for her number, and I regret not doing so.
Maybe if she's there for another random drug search, I'll ask her. Either way I'm disturbed at how little civil rights seem to matter in this day and age. The search was entirely baseless, even though their concerns about contraband in the vehicle might not have been entirely unwarranted. Ultimately they didn't find any, so it was all cool. Definitely an interesting end to a night.
I've been busy, been reading and learning about computers, from Turing in Bletchley Park during WW2 to Colossus to the inception of UNICS at Bell Labs, which we call Verizon nowadays. Lots of fun, lots of information to absorb.
An interesting sidenote before closing, I was to be late to my first Vector Calculus(not mentioned because it's not really of a lot of interest, it's more Physics, and right now I'm not interested in the Physics side of Math too much) when my martial arts instructor drove by my bus stop. He stopped, I got in, and we talked a bit while he drove me to class, as he was heading there to teach. Strange coincidences and odd luck. Interesting, huh?
So that's where I went. On a trip fraught with peril, lucky breaks, and knowledge. Plus a nice girl in my Discrete Math class that I might try to get to know better, but that's a story for a different time.
I hope everyone chooses to feel good about more things than they choose to feel bad. I also hope that the temperature here rises above freezing for more than a few hours. It's been below/around freezing for approaching a month. Everything is dead, but since the snow's old, it's gray.