Seven months between posts isn’t bad, is it? A lot has happened, and I’m going to briefly recap. In a nutshell, I built a computer, nearly finished my Bachelor’s degree, and am considering a Master’s degree (but I don’t know in what concentration).
I built a new desktop from used Craigslist parts (and some new parts) including an EVGA E-762 board, EVGA 1200 watt PSU, Intel i7 920 CPU, Corsair plug-and-play CPU water cooling system, 3 Nvidia GTX-470s in 3-way SLI, 12 GB of RAM, 120 GB SSD, 1 TB HDD, and a crazy-big Rosewill Blackhawk-Ultra tower. It’s a shame I don’t game on it; I feel a bit wasteful. I spent quite a bit of time optimizing my Windows partition and my Ubuntu partition for my SSD with the full intention of posting my tweaks and shell scripts — that’s still on the to-do list.
As for school, I’m nearly finished with my Bachelor’s degree; I finally finished my core programming courses with a coupon code web application that I designed and wrote using an Oracle database and Java. The application was supposed to be a group proof-of-concept project in which we had a time frame of 9 weeks, but I ended up doing 100% of the design work and 95% of the coding. As a result, it’s only about 60% complete. On the plus side, it’s a securely unfinished prototype complete with proper input sanitation and user password hashing. I even threw in a little AJAX to be fancy (although I did run into a problem today calling javascript functions from the AJAX-populated HTML that I still haven’t figured out — the javascript file is linked in the calling page, so why can’t the AJAX-populated HTML buttons call those functions once they are added to the document?).
I’ve decided that since I have come this far with the whole college thing, I might as well get a Master’s degree. I almost think a Graduate degree is pointless in the computer science world since technology moves so fast, but hey, what’s a little more debt and a couple more years? I was considering Bellevue’s MS in Cyber Security since I’m already enrolled there, but UNO has an MS in Artificial Intelligence that I want to inquire about first. The Cyber Security degree looks like a fair amount of re-work; the Artificial Intelligence seems more challenging and fun. Plus, since I’ve been tinkering with micro-controllers lately, understanding AI has become slightly more intriguing. I’m thinking a snow blower that operates itself with perhaps a little help from me sitting at my desk would be nice (albeit difficult since everything would be white, effectively making image processing a pain).
Anyway, that’s good enough for now. Cheerio.