Week Eight

Well, I did not do very well on the exam.

I felt as though I studied the material thoroughly placing equal weight on all of the material. As it turns out, I should have paid a little closer attention to three or four functions out of the tens that we covered. I kept thinking through out the exam that I was being punished heavily for not knowing exactly how one specific function worked due to the fact that three or so questions were devoted to asking about the same one. Because I forgot some of the intricacies of those functions, whole groups of questions I could assume I got wrong.

I am eager to work on the next phase of the World Crises project, especially since my group was working up until the deadline for the previous phase and I feel as though we didn't quite get it in time. Hopefully we can start earlier and get it all done.

Until next time. Rock'n Roll

Week Seven

Alright, Spring Break is over and it's time to get back to reality. I t was nice to be able to put this class in the back of my mind for a few days while volunteering for SXSW, although my group did meet up once over the break to work on the project.

This project is bringing back some interesting memories. The last time that I hard-coded HTML files was in Mr. Yeatts' Data Tech class in seventh grade. Needless to say, those sites were a jumbled mess of weird hexadecimal colors and simple tables. I think the coolest thing we did was embed flash video objects that we created ourselves.

This project stands head and shoulders above anything we did in that class. I find myself having to created and dive head deep into CSS stylesheets and, while I know there is no requirement on looks, I find it all to be very fun and interesting. To create something that has the potential to be seen by anyone is very invigorating and compels me to put forth my best effort. Anyways, it is getting late.

Until next week - Rock'n Roll

Week Six

I always intend to start on projects earlier, but it is very difficult to not procrastinate without a partner to force you to work at specific times. Because of my very developed procrastination skills (read as level 100) I did not begin the assignment until tuesday evening. Surprisingly, however, I finished the project on time with a RMSE below 1.0. That should only affirm future choices to procrastinate.

The Netflix project was very interesting. At first, I was very intimidated by the task in front of me with no clue of how to accomplish it, but after sitting down for an hour in order to plan, it was clear what I had to do. My solution wasn't anything special. Basically, through a little trial and error, I found an equation of variables that produced an RMSE of below 1.0. This was after I learned that the solution suggested in class only provided an RMSE of 1.0033.

I'm beginning to like python more than java.

Until next week. Rock'n roll