{"id":18,"date":"2023-10-02T21:28:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-02T21:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/?p=18"},"modified":"2023-10-02T21:41:17","modified_gmt":"2023-10-02T21:41:17","slug":"blog-1-good-tidings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/2023\/10\/02\/blog-1-good-tidings\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog 1: Good tidings!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Light at the End of the Tunnel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Image by Bradley Dunn from unsplash.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The beginning of this month marks the start of my final quarter in OSU’s Computer Science E-campus program, which had been quite a ride due various including the global pandemic and life changing events. Never have I thought that taking courses online would be feasible, but technology has definitely come a long way to make it possible and here I stand as a testament to its capability. Throughout my education with OSU E-campus, I have come to understand the strengths and weaknesses of engaging with the course materials and my peers remotely. Strengths include having the material readily available and its asynchronous nature, which gave me the flexibility to take the courses as I juggle it with my job and familiar responsibilities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One can truly understand how essential the internet is until the network one has relied on suddenly stops working due to a raging wildfire or deluge of rain causing a flood. If you surmised that I must be based in California, then you are correct. The effects of natural disaster on my connectivity made me cognizant that electric grids are managed through computerized systems. As I progressed through my degree, I have come to realize that our society have come to rely on computer technology on almost every aspect of our daily lives which include traffic lights, banking, and medical needs. I now have greater appreciation of how the computer technology made living more convenient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I start to embark on my final course, Capstone project, with OSU I have come to the understanding that it truly is the final test of my education as I will need to employ everything that I had learned throughout the program including understanding of algorithms, data structures, data bases, and networking to name a few. The capstone course truly is as the namesake implies ‘the crowning achievement’. The resulting project will be the final ticket to exit the proverbial tunnel of education in order to reach the starting point of a career in computer science. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How my interest in computers began?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Everyone has a story or two on where their interest in computer science began, here is my story. I grew up in a military family which often moved between military bases, and my first exposure began through one of the techs that maintained the computer systems for a military base located in the jungle. Being outdoors exploring the forest and the nearby river with kids around my age were some of the ways I passed time, however there were downtimes when I had nothing to do and have found myself hanging out in the airconditioned computer room. Since it is a workplace, I was only allowed in if I were to behave and not disturb the work environment. In the beginning, placing me in front of an available computer to play built in games (Space pinball and Minesweeper!) was a way for them to keep my excitable young self-contained. However, as I grew bored of the games, I started to observe the work that was done by the tech, and they eventually started to explain what they were doing. Some of the memorable parts include maintenance work such as optimizing the computer memory using disk defragment and installation of the operating system after they had assembled the hardware together. I was quite impressed that they used language I can understand as a 7-year-old boy which included analogy using food and everyday items. Heck, I even got to type the commands in DOS, which was double checked by the tech of course. Hence, I had a nice exposure to some of the general basics of computer use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next deep dive into computers occurred when our family got a computer a few years later. What is a boy quelled by computer games to do when given access to a computer and the internet? You guessed it! Getting games installed in the computer. The year was 2000 and the internet was in its infancy and boy was it a wild west! I managed to find myself in sites that have games I can install in my computer which needed some technical capacity to get it up and running. Furthermore, I found a couple of friends who I spent hours with setting up and playing multiplayer games through LAN. We were always troubleshooting when our set up would not work, and sometimes doing a clean reinstall of the operating system because we managed to break it one way or another. Don’t ask me what I broke as I did not understand it myself!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Technologies of interest to me!<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Now that I am more technically competent compared to my 10-year-old self, I find myself being enamored with the emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and quantum computing. These aforementioned technologies are justifiably receiving a lot of attention because of its capabilities to advance technologies. From what I have gathered, they are the amalgamation of different disciplines thus making it difficult to tackle without using an interdisciplinary approach. For example, in machine learning fields such as Bayesian approach from statistics and neural networks from neurobiology are used to make models. The topics in each of the aforementioned technologies run the gamut from basic research to practical use and it is indeed interesting to see the emerging developments. My exposure to technologies I mentioned are minimal to nonexistent (anyone got a quantum computer they’d like to share?), however I do know that there is great potential from exploring the technologies and I would like to dabble with it in one form or another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Light at the End of the Tunnel The beginning of this month marks the start of my final quarter in OSU’s Computer Science E-campus program, which had been quite a ride due various including the global pandemic and life changing events. Never have I thought that taking courses online would be feasible, but technology has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13852,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13852"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions\/23"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/deguzmam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}