Intro. to Pem's Courses and Graphics Interest
12/2/2002:
Growing Up:
Just for general background info., I grew up in a suburb of Cincinnati, OH.
I visit my family and closest friends from high school home during some breaks.
My exposure to programming at all was very limited until my upper class years in
high school (these early times included things like Logo, Basic programming
(junior high), and Pascal programming (freshman high school). Junior and
Senior year, I got both more into using computers in general (mainly because of
games) and more into programming through the school. This was done in a
small independent study of C++ with Visual C++ and during times when I was a
teacher's aid for a new actual programming class that started my senior year.
I made some neat little programs in my upper class years of high school (in between random liberal arts and AP courses) like a Tic-Tac-Toe AI program. The game always won or tied; there is a very finite amount of games possible for Tic-Tac-Toe - although my "AI" was a bit more than just listing responses to all possible game states. I also did some other little programs, like a 1st person 2D maze viewed from very simple very ugly 2D graphics. This looked a lot like the game Wizardry 5. Another worth mentioning was writing (in a group) a GPA storage program meant for the school's guidance office.
Today:
Anyways, that's all in the past. Today I'm a 3rd year SE taking 19 credits this quarter,
yet none of my courses are SE - instead I'm focusing on my games/graphics
programming Application Domains. This includes both this course and CS
Computer Graphics 1. I've taken pretty much all of my SE required Math,
Science, Liberal Arts, and Computer Science courses as of the end of this quarter (except CS
CG-2 and maybe some other CS course). After this quarter I have 4 quarters
of classes left and 4 quarters of co-op to graduate, and these last 4 quarters
will be filled with SE courses - probably 2 SE courses, 1 philosophy course, and
1 other engineering course for each of them.
This is my first IT course. But from what I know of typical IT courses, it seems more like this course (which is geared towards ITs, CSs, and SEs) just happens to be in the IT department.
Brief Philosophy Aside:
Kind of on the side I'm getting a liberal arts minor in Philosophy. On
a relevant (to this previous statement) note, I'm very value-driven and "hardcore" rational.
You won't catch me apathetically conforming to things like sexism/racism,
genocide/slavery, drug
prohibition, irrational sexual norms, etc... they are wrong regardless of who
happens to be in power at the time. And it is right for people to defend
themselves against such evil, regardless of when or where it happens. Nor
would I be found foolishly desiring the unearned (such as getting a job over
irrelevant qualifications, or cheating in a course). Life is a temporary
state, and I am often baffled at the great number of people who value simple
comforts over intellectually-based self-respect. Humans are (or at least
some of them are) much more than smart animals. And as any
sane person knows, "It is better to be a
human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be
Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied"
(J. S. Mill).
Yet this quote might confuse the point which is: that which satisfies a pig is a shallow and meaningless satisfaction compared to that which can deeply satisfy the more intellectual more and hardworking of humans. Anyways, this minor has included some interesting and fun courses (like Logic, Philosophy of Law, and Special Topics: Intelligent Design Controversy). And gives me the opportunity to consider/evaluate ideas on various philosophical topics. These are good for improving my future life/plans, but don't really have much to do with graphics programming... :-)
CS / SE Courses:
Anyways, I've taken lots of math courses (all kinds), science courses
(mostly physics), some engineering (CE), and liberal arts (mostly philosophy).
But in the end the CS/SE courses are the most important, especially for Games
Programming. I've taken CS I-IV, Prof. Comm., SE-1, SE Sub-Systems, SE
Verification & Validation, and Programming Language Concepts. And
currently I'm also taking Scientific Programming and Computer Graphics.
So, I'm an SE, but I'm ahead on my CS courses and behind on my SE courses.
This means I could still switch easily if I wanted to (especially if I took SE
courses for my CS concentration), but I plan to stick with SE.
On Graphics
Graphics amaze and excite me! I'm planning on getting a Geforce4
ti4600 after the Geforce FX's come out (By then the Geforce4 ti4600s will be
almost cheap - the Radeon Pro 9700s are a bit much for my system). This is
largely from playing video games, which are a typical place to show off what
current graphics technologies can do. At this point I'm pretty sure I'm going
to go on to take both the sequel ("3D") to this course and CG-2. As I mentioned,
by taking both of these graphics courses at the same time, I'm thus delaying an
SE course or two a quarter into the future. This is partly because I would
so love to get a co-op doing something graphics programming related (though I'm
nearing the time period in which I need to just get some software development
co-op soon). Anyways, I'm pretty hyped about learning and doing graphics
programming, and hopefully my interest will continue!