Sorting

Sorting is pretty fun. None of the labs thus far have been very challenging, and they're pretty straightforward, what with them just being sorting items. However, I still don't like sorting all that much because there's so many different ways to do it, and most of them just feel really useless. I know its not really the case, but it still feels like you'd find the best sort and then just stick with that, or with one or two sorts. Still, doing useless redundant stuff is what I do best, so I suppose that me and sorting are practically made for each other.

Quiz

I am really surprised that I got a 10 out of 10 on this quiz. I wasn't here for nearly a class and a half while we were learning inheritance and such, and as such I just didn't get what was going on for a lot of pong. I was still able to be helpful, but a lot of the concepts were kind of fuzzy. Then I kind of spaced out during the abstract classes thing a little bit, and though I got that one better than inheritance, it wasn't completely clear. But then I took the quiz, and maybe its just because I had the presentations to see, but I got everything, which was pretty weird. I'm not complaining, mind, but its just a little odd.

More Pong

Other than on Thursday, we've really just kept working on Pong. I have to admit, I like Pong better with all of the bizarre, inexplicable bugs. My personal favorite from mine and Darian's was when the block would occasionally get behind the paddle by passing through it, and then bounce back and forth in the space of about three pixels, making it look like its vibrating for a second before shooting out in a random direction. Or there was the one were it would randomly speed up, slow down, or change direction whenever it was at the same y coordinate as the right paddle, making it look like it was dodging the paddle as we tried to check if they could actually collide properly. In the end, though, we managed to iron out all of the bugs (we think) and  now its just boring regular pong again.

Pong

Pong is a fairly frustrating lab. First of all, because I wasn't here on the day that the concepts that pong revolves around were introduced, so I'm effectively learning it through the lab. Second of all, because there are so many files involved, you have to test every aspect of it one by one, which can get really tedious. Finally, because its Pong. I mean, yeah yeah, cornerstone of gaming history, whatever, it doesn't change the fact that Pong sucks and I hate it and it deserves to die. We should have had a lab making a much better game, like Contra.

This Week

I don't have anything actually Compsci related to write about. Tuesday we were just doing the same thing we were doing last week, which I really can't write another blog post about, because that would be stupid. Then, I was out on a field trip Thursday, so I don't have anything to say about what we did then. Instead, I'm going to write about that field trip. The two APES classes got to go out to the Lost Pines for the entire school day and plant baby pine trees in areas that had been severely burned during the fire there a while back. Overall, it was fun, but the hundreds of fire ant nests (seriously, every single tree stump had some fire ants next to it) were very annoying, and carrying around the 18 pound hunk of metal we were using to dig the holes to put the seedlings in got tiring. Overall, we planted 1572 baby pine trees, which means we planted the most out of any previous group, despite also being the smallest group.

OOP

OOP is really confusing me. Maybe its just because I wasn't paying quite as much attention as I should have been during the presentation, or maybe its just a dense topic but I don't really get it. I'm looking at the labs, and I get the point of what its asking, but I'm just not really understanding the implementation of the things in the slides in the labs. That's probably just me though, and most likely because of the aforementioned lapse in attention during the relevant presentation. As to NACLO, I'm thinking that I'll take it, but then again I thought I'd take it last year, and in the end something came up which prevented me from actually participating. So, I'll  probably sign up, but its still iffy as to whether or not I'll be able to take it.

Contest

That little contest that we had in class was fun. None of the problems were hard, and they were all pretty fun to figure out and complete with only minor errors and setbacks. More amusing, however, was the really strange mistakes that I saw people making. I'm not gonna name any names, but it was really odd watching people do a problem you did with one for loop and an if statement or two, and see them use several for loops and what looked like five or six while loops. I suppose that just illustrates the extremes differences in thought processes between people. I thought all of the problems were fairly straightforward, but I guess not everyone agreed with me.