CS1030 Final
Computers are something I do all day and I honestly can’t imagine myself doing anything else. It’s my career, it’s my hobby, and it’s my addiction. I have to be around computers and if I’m taken away for long periods of time, I get very cranky. To me, it’s more than just being entertained by the present and future powers of computing. It’s the connection to the rest of the world, to new information, and different experiences that keeps me going back time and time again.
Knowing that, I thought CS 1030: Connected Computing was going to be a breeze. In fact, my exact thought process was something along the lines of, “Psh, I know computing and connecting. This class will be superfluous in my journey to obtaining my ultimate goal of a bachelor’s degree in computer science.” A few days into the class, I learned how overconfident and wrong I was.
To the best of my memory, it began with binary and hexadecimal. I had been taught how to read and convert things to binary many times before but I always seem to forget everything I’d just learned. One day, I expect the knowledge and experience to actually stick in my brain from how much repetition I’ve incurred over the years. Lucky for me, this time I seem to have been able to retain some information about binary conversion. Perhaps it was because I learned hexadecimal conversion too. Previous to this class, I knew hexadecimal only because of Adobe Photoshop and its lovely array of colors. I knew nothing about what the letters and numbers meant, however. But now I can fully appreciate both binary and hexadecimal and the way they are structured. I can also fully appreciate these two shirts and possibly buy them without feeling like a poser.
IP addresses were next. Now, I certainly knew an IP address when I was looking at one. What I didn’t know were the classes, private IP addresses, and CIDR notation. The first two concepts were easy to understand but CIDR notation was another story. Eventually I got it but I still like to mix up subnetting and supernetting. Good thing I’m not going into networking, though I probably should still know the difference.
Before we move on, it’s important to know that I absolutely horrible with hardware. I’m able to pick it up quickly once it’s been introduced to me, but I have no desire to pursue its meaning like I do with anything software-related. So, when I saw routers sitting on the classroom tables, I was very distraught. Fortunately, routers weren’t as complicated as I had originally thought and everyone was really nice about helping me and other people out anyway. About a week after we took our router test, my family bought a new router. It was the Cisco E2500. My father told me to set it up, as I am the family’s only technology-aware member, so I did. Everything worked fine but a couple of days later my brother bothered me about fixing his terrible Xbox Live connection. It had always been terrible, even though the Xbox was plugged directly into the router and I had already tried port-forwarding on our previous router. Regardless, I searched the web, entirely determined to help out my brother because my brother’s a pretty cool kid. This time around, I actually knew what I was doing when I was forwarding more ports and changing the quality of service. Now, my brother’s Xbox Live connection is the best it’s ever been and I feel awesome for being able to install a router correctly and understand what most of the features and options mean.
From then on, every day was spent talking through a new concept. Though I knew about most of those concepts, the fact that we were able to walk through them as a class made them a lot easier to understand and become familiar with. For example, near the end of the semester, we went over end-user license agreements. I’ve never read one in my life because I never really planned to exploit loopholes in those agreements. I didn’t realize that I could also be exploited through that same end-user license agreement if I wasn’t careful. My understanding was that if I broke the rules of the end-user license agreement but I didn’t gain anything of monetary value from it, then I was free to do as I pleased. It didn’t occur to me that giant companies would care so much about protecting even the smallest things they own, especially if they were going to lose money from it.
At the end of the semester, I was very sad to leave this class. Coupled with CS1032, I felt that I was given a goldmine of knowledge that I was sure to use later. My understanding of computers, networking, and all the things that can be accomplished between the two has grown and I feel that I am at least three steps closer to obtaining my ultimate goal.
