Tony Hansen, in Orlando Florida, used about 45,000 lights and $10,000 worth of equipment to rig up one awesome Christmas display. It is very over the top, and I wouldn’t want to be his neighbor, but it is cooooool

You can read about it in the Orlando Sentinel and I’ve posted YouTube videos below.

Enjoy

W00T! I finally finished college!

In my last semester I got:

• COMM 210 A
• CS 421 (Software Engineering) B+
• CS 471 (Operating Systems) B
• PHED 138 A
• PHYS 243 B
• PHYS 244 A

So my final GPA is 3.39 . I had kind of hoped to graduate with a 3.5 but, I’ll take a 3.4 

** goes dancing in the streets **

Several of my friends have been asking me to teach them programming, so I thought that I would start posting some programming tutorials on my blog.

Basically, I would program an application in a programming language, give some background on the language, and then explain what the code is doing line-by-line.

I was thinking this could also act as a comparative programming study. If I did the same program in various different programming languages, it might be easier to see how the languages are similar and where they differ.

Soooooo…. what programming languages do you want to learn and what should I make for the example?

Here are some examples to get you started:

Programming Languages:

• ASP ¹
• C++
• C# ¹
• D
• Fortran
• Haskell
• Java
• Lisp
• Lua
• Perl
• PHP
• Ruby
• Python
• Smalltalk
• TCL
• Visual Basic ¹

Programming Examples:

• Calendar
• Chat program
• Checkers game
• Drawing program
• Journal
• Text editor

Please post which programming languages that you want to learn and a simple programming example that you would like to see! Note that I don’t know all the programming languages that I listed above, but I tried to hit most of the major ones and I can learn the a new one or two

1: This is only if I can get Mono working on Linux. I’ll tend to shy away from these

I just got an idea for a book! After finals, hopefully I will have some time to start writing.

I’ve wanted to write a book for quite a while. However, it has been centered around fiction. I enjoy reading and have often been intrigued with the possibility of writing a novel. I’ve started countless ideas, but they usually end up in some dead end where my characters are rather unbelievable and the plot even more so. So, I put the ideas away until I see something that sparks my imagination which I attempt to work into my plot, but nevertheless it results in yet another paradox which I am unable to resolve.

However, I got an idea for a non-fiction book, which I am really excited about. I watched a video on youtube presented by an atheist and septic. He didn’t present any arguments against Christianity, but rather demonstrated how he, as an atheist, was able to convince people that there was a God by playing on their emotions and manipulating them psychologically. This really opened my eyes and revealed to me the problems in today’s church and our society as a whole.

In this sensationalist and individualist society, feelings are valued very highly and are often taken advantage of. When people in the Church are asked how they know God exists, they often respond by referencing a feeling. In addition, people today widely accept debunct theories such a global warming and evolution which uses shady evidence at best and contrived stories at worst. They accept such things due to feelings of peer pressure and intimidation from scholars. However, people simply do not research and find out facts for themselves. Rather they allow themselves to be manipulated by others.

It is a ironic that in this individualist society we are allowing our minds and emotions to be controlled by others instead of seeking out truth for ourselves.

They book that I plan on writing will be dealing with these issues and strive to motivate Christians and non-Christians alike to roll up their sleeves and find out the facts for themselves, instead of checking their minds in a the door.

NOTE: Obviously there might be some flaws in the logic that I’m using in this entry. Once I write this out formally, it will be given much more thought. 2AM is not condusive to thinking

I’m thinking about titling the book “Trusting Echos”