The Effects of Thinking and Having a Strong Will in School

In my past two years of school I have discovered several things in high school, some of which include the will to think, the act of thinking, and the positive effects of both. I've noticed among some of my friends (I refuse to name any names because I know these people have the ability to do a whole lot better) that many people go to school, sit through a lecture, neglect their homework and barely pass. Hopefully you have heard the expression, “in one ear, out the other” because I'm going to talk about that a little bit. When you sit through a lecture, and you don't take notes, is it very easy at all to remember what you heard? I know that everyone is different, but this is how I see it and the best method I've found to work for myself. In one of my classes, we sit through a lecture then we do the homework. When I don't take notes, I don't remember anything the professor talked about, what I remember is all the random crap that ran through my mind while I was sitting through that lecture such as what kind of food I wanted to eat after class or what I was going to do that weekend. On the days I take notes, I don't ever look at those notes again but I still remember a lot more about what was talked about in class. The reason is, writing notes is considered a 'hands-on activity' and hands-on activities activate the brain so you have to think about what the professor is talking about. When you think and activate your brain, you are more likely to remember what you thought about.

I feel like in school, you are not there to learn about and remember the dates of history, the rules of grammar and English, and the equations of math, but you are there to learn how to learn, and to learn how to logically think. When's the last time you took a history test and remembered any of the dates you had memorized for that test a week later? Now you at least know what you are looking for if you ever wanted to recall those dates and you would know where to look! A person who graduated from high school with A's and B's could know just as much about something as a 2nd grader, but the graduated high school student would be able to learn a lot more about something than the 2nd grader. I'm not writing a research paper here so I don't have a way to prove any of these things but these are my theories and I want to know what other people think about this.

My adventures in switching from Windows to Ubuntu Part 1

So this weekend I decided I'd finally switch over to Ubuntu for most daily computing tasks and I'll tell you how that's been :)

Thursday night I stuck the CD in and installed Ubuntu 8.04 because it was LTS. Well bad choice because that edition is now over a year old and my monitor and graphics card are... less than a year old, so I was running 800x600 resolution the entire time. Friday afternoon I just went in and installed 9.04 instead since that's the newest currently available. Instantly, 9.04 already had my graphics card and monitor recognized so I could run 1600x900 immediately, and I installed my graphics card drivers in a breeze.

Some things to note, Ubuntu isn't like Windows at all (obvious) but in some ways is better. I really like Windows a lot because I know where everything is at and I have my own little shortcuts set up for optimum speed in my daily computing. There are some minor cracks in my little system though, I run into out-of-date software constantly, and every once in a while there's that darn security issue. I noticed instantly that updating software with Ubuntu is very easy. I didn't even have to open Firefox to download my graphics card drivers! Well I had to open firefox to find out HOW to do it without opening firefox but now I'll be able to update those drivers with a click of a button, as with all the other software I installed.

Next weekend, hopefully I'll be able to get my sound working. I know I should probably (definitely) get a legit sound card but with Ubuntu, you make work what you have with as little money as possible :D

About Me

About me.. hmm.. Well I guess you could say I'm a semi-hard-core gamer but I get work done too. I probably average about 15-20 hours of games per week during the school year and over the summer I think I was getting around 50+ hours per week. I don't do consoles, I'm solely a PC gamer, I'm currently running a Compaq I bought with my 'summer savings' running an AMD Athlon Dual-Core 7550 at 2.5GHz+, with 3GB RAM, a 320GB hard drive and my favorite part: NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT!

I'm a hard-core Windows boy, I've always used Windows but recently I've considered switching over to Ubuntu. I started out on an old Compaq (need I remind you, my laptop is ALSO a Compaq.. Not that they are my favorite, just what I can afford) running Windows 3.1, playing whatever games I could find at the time, and learning QBasic. To keep on track with the current subject, Windows, I later did some things with Windows 95 and then later, Windows 2000, and soon enough I was on Windows XP which is when my history really picks up. I had somehow got an old junk machine with Windows 98 and I got this baby to run Windows XP (with 128MB RAM and a <1GHz pentium 3 processor) but I never used that as much. My first GOOD computer was my Compaq laptop which I got in 2008, and it came with Windows Vista. I installed Windows 7 on it in January right after the public beta was released. From there I've always used Windows 7, the Beta, the RC, and now I'm running an RTM version I got from my school :D That concludes my Windows history.

I've been interested in programming for almost as long as I've been into computers, but I've never really kicked off the ground with it unfortunately. I started going through a QBasic book my dad gave me a long time ago and I found something online called DarkBASIC which is made specifically for creating games. This interested me a lot but I was always hindered by the computer's onboard Intel graphics chipsets... Then I got addicted to a game for 3 years . . . Then I got back into programming and started learning C++. By this time I had worked at WaterWorld for a whole summer and bought a nice laptop with the money I made. I had gone about half way through a C++ book before I lost interest to something else: XNA Game Studio. This is Microsoft's game studio for creating PC, Xbox 360 and Zune games. I pretty quickly picked up on C# by going through the book, Head First C# and got to making a project in XNA. Then the summer came and I worked at WaterWorld and also got interested in World of Warcraft. . . And then the school year came and I'm back :)

This semester (Fall 2009) I'm taking two extra classes at Red Rocks Community College, college algebra and computer science I: C++. Both are pretty much review of stuff I already knew unfortunately, but I am definitely gaining knowlege of the college environment and making friends. By this point I've started practicing C++ again obviously, and along with the class at Red Rocks, I'm casually going through the book, C++ Primer.

My typical week consists of 2 days of Hope, 2 days of Red Rocks and then Friday and Saturday to work on homework half the time and just do whatever the other half of the time. In this case, whatever being: Playing WoW, or maybe Unreal Tournament 3, working on teaching myself some C++, playing with random things on my computer (8 hours of fiddling with random things and reading random articles could save you 8 hours of waiting for the damn slow computer in the next 2 years...) . . . (Although most of the time it's the last two hours that benefit you... the first 2 hours you screw your system up and then the next 4 hours you fix it.. then the last 2 hours you make it even better) Then Sunday is my day to either sit back and relax, maybe enjoy a movie or something... or my day to frantically work on all the homework I've neglected the rest of the week!