Energy Capture

Two days ago we had an English professor come to my HCI class and give a presentation on Rhetoric. Shortly put, it was a fantastic presentation. Sadly put: I wish someone had made a case for this kind of writing as a viable pursuit for a degree/career. Positively put: I need to find out how to incorporate the knowledge from this presentation into my focus for any future career in CS.

Longly put:

It was great to have someone in a CS class talking about all of those things I learned in every English class/Film Studies class but in a way that applied to my new degree path. The presentation dealt with using Rhetoric to anticipate what the audience of our software projects want/need. In other words, what will our end-users expect from our software applications, how with they expect them to look and how will the expect them to function.

I think that, of course, this is a concern for any software developer worth any grain of salt (even I thought of that!), but Rhetoric manages to give a name to it all. There are specific guidelines that I can follow, certain questions that I can ask myself about my intended audience that can help me anticipate their needs and wants.

It was hilarious to hear the term Gaze being discussed in a room full of mathematical and logical thinkers. Not to stereotype, but I know that a lot of them have never studied the connotations of that term, or have probably even heard of it.

This is the stuff that gets me excited about the world. The question is, how do I find a career path that lets me do this stuff professionally? I don't have the answer to that right now, but I'll be damn sure to talk to the people who do. I'm still having such a difficult time seeing what careers are out there besides coding at some company which, quite frankly, is never going to be one of my strengths. I can get better as I gain experience, but I just don't see myself being a contender for any top spots at any company simply based solely on my coding strengths. I've got to figure out a way to blend my CS knowledge with my strong analytical skills.

Alright Chums, Let's Do This...

Looking forward to getting back to school. I find that, as someone who is working on being more self propelled, long breaks can be a bit detrimental to my whole, well, process. It allows me to fall back into some classic rythms (staying up until 4 in the morning, playing video games, not going to the gym) which can be difficult to break out of. Now don't get me wrong. I wasn't a completely useless lump of flesh who never left the dimly lit dungeon that is my basement apartment. The lovely weather was well taken advantage of, and many walks were had. But...

I didn't get to do much that was in the way of constructive. But Meraud! It was a vacation you were on!

True.

But I wanted it to be more. More leisure time learning and reading. More fiddling around with coding in my spare time.

So yeah. It'll be good to get back to learning. To banging away at the Android project. To interacting with people much more learned than me. Even to driving the bus! There's only so much Batman: Arkham Asylum one can play before they feel a little bit dead inside.

This sure seems fru-fruey and personal. Maybe that's alright as I'm still attempting to figure out what exactly I want from this blog. So let's analyze this all and set some goals.

- Less games. Will be difficult with Metro 2033 coming out on Tuesday.
- More scholarly reading. Looking forward to it. Needed a break after finishing
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. Had that break. Time to dive back in.
- More exercising. Easy with the work out partners back in town.
- Interact with beings of higher intelligence (or experience). Already have plans
speak with Dr. McNely about digital humanities.

Pressing Launch...

LEEEERRROOOOYY JEEEENNNNKKKKIIINNNNSSS

Meet and Greet

So the team (minus Ron) was finally able to get together with our Community Partners from HP on Tuesday. It was a nerve wracking day for me. I was excited to meet with these guys (there were three) but I was also terrified of what would happen. They were investing a significant amount of their time to drive down from Kokomo to see our project, of which there was little to show. Frankly, I just didn't know what the hell I was supposed to do to make their trip worth while. I compiled some questions about project development and deployment so that we would have some stuff to talk about, but I was pretty worried...

About nothing.

It went really well. We actually ended up speaking very generally about the world of programming, and they answered my questions with enthusiasm and wisdom. God that makes them sound like sages. They're not. One of them really hates Indian people. I think.

One of the more interesting points of the meeting was in hearing about what their concerns were as programmers with real life jobs. Apparently, projects being outsourced to India is a serious problem. They all seemed extremely dissatisfied both with working with the people over there (sub par results) and with losing work to people overseas. One of the guys seemed, maybe a bit too dissatisfied, but whatever.

So yeah, they weren't mad that we didn't have an end result to show them. In fact, they weren't even interested in seeing the code we had produced. I got some excellent feedback on how to inject the WOW factor into our work and on how to market the app more effectively. It was a really great experience.

In the end, they were thanking us, which initially sounded very odd. Then they told us how, since no one new had been hired since 1996 (yay for future prospects!) they were ecstatic about being able to meet with and communicate with a younger generation. We've been invited to go to their labs to see what they do, and we'll probably take them up on the offer. But not until we have something to show them...I really want to show these guys what we've got.