The FBI and Apple

I definitely think that Apple has made the right choice in choosing to fight the FBI and judge's orders in the San Bernardino case, especially after some more news that the situation could have possible been avoided.  Once again, while I'm not the most informed citizen, I think it would create a terrible precedent if Apple were to comply and create the tool that the FBI is asking for.  Personally, I would not trust that even the tool itself would only be used in this one case, or that various parts of the government would not try to continue to use their power in a similar fashion, regardless of the legality.  I generally think that people are good and try to do good, but I also don't have blind faith in the government, and wholly believe that there are plenty of less-than-legal things going in the United States' government.

Reflections on Snooping

So I honestly thought we were going to find out more about our classmates.  I was pretty surprised at how little we found, and was surprised at how difficult it was to find some things.  Of course difficult is relative, and I'm sure if you dedicated multiple hours to looking into a person you could have more luck with it, as well as more luck finding out ways to find out information on people.

I did think there was a couple of very clever things that people brought up. For instance, finding someone's hometown then specifically going to that town's website to look up public records was smart.  A friend of mine also pointed out that his personal Facebook URL gave away his online handle that he used for many things, which could've been used to find a lot of other online activity.  I had also realized that a few years ago if you had reverse image-searched one of my old Facebook profile pictures, you could have found a forum that I used to be a part of, which would have given away my online handle.  Although now the website no longer exists, it made me think about some more complicated and clever ways you could gain access to someone's information.

Reflections on the Last Lecture

Well, that made me feel like more of a worthless sack of shit than I already was.

I am of the belief that for a lot of issues, you cannot help other people, they have to choose to help themselves.  That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be nice, supportive, compassionate or what have you, but that ultimately it is up to the individual to choose to take any of that to heart and make the choice every day to help themselves.

I am not in a place right now where I want to help myself very much.  I kind of want to just want to give up, go home, and forget.  So I wasn't very receptive to what Dr. Pausch was preaching, to say the least.

Career Development Presentation

So I had just seen Erika's presentation last semester in Junior Semester, and as such a lot of it was familiar.  However, this time I did take note and pay more attention to the information about the mock interviews that App offers.  I have no in-person experience with job interviews and my interpersonal skills would be described as lacking at best.  So I definitely think that doing mock interviews would be extremely beneficial, especially since I am looking for an internship for this summer.

And while I know that I should use all these services provided to me, that I should take advantage of these amazing, free opportunities to help myself, I know that I'm going to have an extremely hard time actually pushing myself to utilize any of them.  Because I dislike awkwardly interacting with people I don't know, and I really dislike revealing things that I'm not happy about to people I don't know.  Such as how I do nothing related to computer science outside of class, that I can barely remember half the classes I've taken in the major, and that my good grades are pretty much all I have going for me.  And all that is likely to come out in a mock interview, and probably in a real one as well.

But hey, since I'm required to do one at some point (probably for the better) we'll see how it goes.

Best Computing Experiences

"Make an introductory blog post describing your best "in class" computing experience as a computer science student and you best "outside the class" computing experience during your time as a computer science student."

My Best In-Class Computing Experience:

Probably my most enjoyable in-class experience was the second or third-to-last lab for Systems 2, building the Y86 simulator.  For some reason in that lab almost everything my partner and I wrote worked perfectly on the first try.  Any debugging we had to do was simple and easy.  We ended up writing two or three short files that worked seamlessly with all of our other code in about an hour and a half, hardly encountering any problems.  It was a pretty awesome feeling to have everything go so smoothly, and the next week we realized we had completed that week's lab as well.  It was a fun, smooth, experience where we accidentally did more work than we needed to in half the time.

My Best Out-of-Class Computing Experience:

Honestly I haven't done much programming outside of class during my time as a CS student.  Probably the most fun I can remember having was creating a series of scripts for a game, where one script bound certain keys to run the other two.  This allowed me to switch key-bindings on the fly in game.
Thrilling stuff, I know.