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Oddly, the paper from my last post received a perfect score while the class average was only 88%. Now if I could be that lucky in my calculus class…

This is a paper I just finished for my technical communications class. I argue that software development should be considered as a creative art like other forms of writing. It’s not especially well written as it was one of those “write a paper by next week in your spare time between work and other classes” type assignments and I had to throw it together in a few hours, but the main point is still valid. Maybe another argument for coding being creative is the fact I’m better at it than I am writing papers.

I think that the process of creating … Continue Reading

Bill Gates puts his foot in his mouth in this one. We all know Google’s philosophy is “Don’t be evil”, so I guess Microsoft is adopting “be evil”. It’s always fun to take people’s words out of context.

CNet: So that would be the philosophical difference between Microsoft and what Google is up to at this point?
Gates: Well, we don’t know everything they are up to, but we do know their slogan and we disagree with that.

One of the reasons I decided to return to school to finish my CS degree is that I’ve always thought it would be cool to be self employed as a software developer. When I was a kid I thought I could spend my time creating cool stuff and people would pay me for what resulted. Now I’m older and know the world generally doesn’t work that way, but today I read this really cool article about Paul Graham’s new company that gives seed money to college students to help get their startups off the ground. Ok, so he … Continue Reading

I’ve been playing around with Wordpress for a couple weeks now, and I commented when I first installed it that blogging doesn’t really seem like anything new. Just old concepts with new names. I haven’t really changed my mind on that, but Wordpress sure makes things easy. My other sites internetfun.com and realjeep.com are written in php and use mySQL to keep track of things. I spent a few days writing the code behind them and I could have created the exact same sites using Wordpress and spending a couple hours creating custom themes. Sure there are benefits … Continue Reading

It’s confirmed, I still hate math. Last week was the first of fall trimester, so I’ve now experienced a week of two of my classes. The third is only a 6 week class and don’t start for a few more weeks. I have now confirmed that I’m going to be miserable until calculus is over, and technical communications will be 15 weeks of busywork. How’s this for busywork? For next week I have to write 2 papers to email to my professor, write summaries of them to post to the class bulletin board, and then read other students summaries and … Continue Reading

It’s the first week of a new semester and I’ve been looking over the syllabus for my Applied Calculus class. I hate to say it this soon, but this is one of the few classes that will hurt my GPA. Right now I have a 3.79 with 7 classes left to complete my BS in Computer Science, and the 3 classes I failed to earn an A in were the 3 classes I have taken from the math department. My other classes this semester are Technical Communications and Windows Administration, so they shouldn’t be so bad. The communications class will … Continue Reading

I’ve been playing with c# and Windows Forms programming lately, and found a couple articles about making custom non-square windows easily by hiding the frame and making the part of the square you want to get rid of transparent. Super easy to do. Of course, using this technique you still really have a square window, which your users will discover when they are trying to click on a window behind yours to switch focus to another app, and they are really clicking on the invisible part of your window. Still, this would be great for splash screens or windows that … Continue Reading