the brotaku

I think I realized why my activity on this blog is so stagnant.

Anytime I find something amusing or interesting that I want to share, it’s usually a lot quicker and more convenient to just post to Facebook or Twitter.

Anyway. Classes have started again. I’m taking a course on Artificial Intelligence which I’m really looking forward to. It’s a topic that i’m really interested in and the professor is great for it. All in all, I sort of feel a little excited for all my classes. Even the ones which have reputations as being “hard” - I feel the topics should be interesting and beneficial to me. One of the reasons I failed my Combinatorics class last semester is because my heart just wasn’t in it, as it was a math class and wasn’t required - I was only in it because of a mixup at registration.

But I still need to prepare for and take the final exam for the CS Logic class. I’m not taking the course now, but I’ve been granted permission to test out of it for the sake of graduating this year. As important as it is, I’m finding it next to impossible to pick up the book and do the necessary work. I dont’ know what it is. All of my official classes this semester are great and I feel very energetic and optomistic about them. This test is for a class which I’m not even taking and I feel like it’s just a dark cloud hovering over me trying to ruin these first few weeks of the semester. On top of that, I am also going to have to retake the Operating System final because even though I did really well in the class, evidently I slacked on the final and wound up with a D. I question the possibility of this even happening but I can only argue so much with the teacher. She’s been a big help with graduation requirements and is allowing me to retake the test rather than forcing me to retake the whole class.

I discovered while working on a project for my Software Engineering class this past semester that I’m faily interested in socket programming. I also have a crush on C code. I wish to become better at it, as I feel having a firm grasp on C will be way more valuable than C++ later on, even if I do stick with just game programming. But back to the socket stuff. The project was to design a chat room application. Long story short, we didn’t finish it 100% (neither did the other group). But early on, I tasked myself with writing the code to handle communication via a server and the clients. I had never done this sort of stuff before so it was a learning experience. I never completed what was needed, and we ended up ditching the socket model for something way more… ghetto… for time restraints mainly but it whet my pallet. It was really cool to have two different computers talking to each other (about as complex as I managed to make it) with code that I wrote myself. Perhaps I can later expand on these concepts to integrate some sort of online multiplayer in a game.

Speaking of games. I have been bored out of my mind and i’m sick of browsing reddit or waiting for my homies to hop on MW2 and what I really want to do is to start a programming project but I have no idea what to make. Part of it is i’m torn between wanting to do something original or just picking something common to practice with.

In the mean time, the only coding I’ve been doing is with Ruby on Rails for work. It’s pretty cool stuff, but coding websites isn’t really my main interest. Hopefully as soon as I finish my internship, I can join the rest of the SD team in working with Unity on real products. That will be great.