Interesting Documentary

Not a full blog post, but I found this video pretty interesting.  If you have a little over an hour, you should check it out!

Portfolio Website

Pretty late post tonight, but sometimes I just get sucked into work and I don’t even feel like I need sleep!  I have started work on building a personal website that will serve as a portfolio/life update website.  I plan on keeping it pretty minimal, but I didn’t want it to just be a boring white website.  So I am starting to experiment with shapes and vibrant colors to keep it happy.  Without further ado, here is my progress after the first night!

The home page

My about page

My portfolio page, currently empty

Always a good idea to leave yourself open to be contacted!

Well there you have it!  As you can see, there is also a blog link and it links off to this blog.  I hope to add more color, and find a way that everything with work aesthetically.  It will be a whole different issue when I get around to choosing the font type.  Joys!  Any feedback is wanted and appreciated.  I also plan on going to a Starcraft II tournament tomorrow, and I hope to take some cool pictures.  I am excited!

Brett

Web Development Class & A Resource

I have been trying to improve my own web development skills over this break to exceed the skills that our professor has been teaching us.  In about a month and a half we will have to present our web site to the class.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I am a bit competitive and I will be bummed out if my group does not have the best site in the class.

I consider it necessary to have a clean and appropriate look to the website, as well as full functionality and the impassibility that the site would actually go live after the class.  In my groups case, the plan is to make the site a full time site for a Fraternity on campus.  This makes it a lot easier for the color scheme, so it won’t drive me crazy looking for hours for a great theme.  I hope to have the design and HTML/CSS done by the time we start class again next week, that way we can focus on the functionality and the server side programming.

If I get something up and running that is semi presentable I will post it here, and hopefully get some feedback.  But before I go, I want to leave this link to a pretty good resource.  This is especially good if you are just starting out with web development and it helped me work a little more with CSS: 30 Days to Learn HTML & CSS

All 30 days are already posted, so you can work through them at your own pace.  Hopefully someone will find it useful.  Later!

Electric!

With my digital electronics class this semester I have come to realized I really, really enjoy building circuits and using IC’s to build logic.  So I decided I wanted to expand my knowledge to see if a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering/Computer Engineering would be something I would enjoy pursuing.  After doing some searching I think I found a really good online resource to cover my basics before getting into the more advanced topics, and building some cool electronics.  The site is called All About Circuits and it has some online “books” for things such as DC, AC, Semiconductors and Digital.

While I am learning a lot about digital in my class, I also need to learn about DC, AC and Semiconductors so I can build some cool stuff on my own.  I think I may have just found a new. slightly expensive hobby.

Anyone else out there who enjoys building electronics with some tips for a newbie to get started?

Embracing Failure

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
    –Thomas Edison

 

I have been thinking recently about how to improve myself.  What areas can I work on to become a better programmer, Computer Science student, person?  I came to the conclusion that I sometimes shy away from a challenge, or from learning new things because I hate failing.  This lead me to think about why I hate failing so much.  It seems to me that failure and mistakes are just part of life.  Just like waking up, and eating, and feeling emotions.  None of these things are bad, they just exist.

So what makes me hate something that happens in life?  I think it is because of the social stigma we attach to failure.  If I don’t pass a class or if I had be held back in grade school I would have been looked down upon by my peers.  If I were to have a failing grade, I would get something taken away as a punishment.  Essentially in our culture, if I fail the focus is on the bad consequences that occur because of it.

I think that this has paralyzed me, and I just want to stick to what we know we can succeed at.  And when I do fail, instead of looking at my mistakes to learn from them I push them aside and try to forget about them.  This has to be the worst thing I could do!  I need to start making mistakes.  To start learning.  To start embracing my failures.  The Thomas Edison quote above is going to be a new philosophy to live by.  Failure is only bad if I do not learn anything from it.  Mistakes where I learn something valuable from are just as good as success is sometimes, and I cannot help contribute to forming a better future if I am to afraid to get my hands a little dirty when exploring.

So here is to embracing failure!