The Last Blog

.....get it?....There's a movie called the 'The Last Song' so I called this the Last Blog....
I thought it was catchy :)

Anywho, it's the last day of class for us and also the day of our poster session. I'm pretty excited about it because we put a lot of work into our poster and it actually turned out quite well. The semester is coming to a close, so we're also trying to get our work/final presentation finished before it gets here.

It seems like just yesterday we were just starting our work and trying to figure out what we wanted to do, now our project is almost complete and we can reflect on all we've gotten accomplished (which is actually a good bit). For anyone interested, our final presentations are May 3, 2011 at 12:00 pm in TATE 202. I can't wait to see what kind of progress everyone else made and how they decided to do their final presentation (I"ve seen a few prezis, which is exciting!).

Beyond that, there isn't much to share..just gotta wait until the Final to see how it all comes together ;).
See you there (hopefully)!

Time for some creativity!

Now that the semester is coming to an end, it's getting close to presentations time! It's time to start getting creative...create presentations that are visually pleasing but that also convey the information we want our audience to get. We are doing a poster for the School of Science and Mathematics Poster Session and have also gotten started on a Prezi for our final presentation. I'm mostly in charge of getting these things taken care of, mainly because of my role on the team (Documentation and Outreach), but I'm having to enlist the help of my other teammates. The biggest thing I need help with is getting the images for our Prezi compatible with the zoom in/out ability the prezi has (which is what makes it so cool, so we have to make it work). For the most part, any screenshot I take on my mac is saved as a png and comes up fairly clear when using prezi, but some of the other images, particularly ones I'm going to get from my other teammates, may not be as compatible. Therefore, Ryan is going to take the images that aren't working properly and help me turn them into raster/vector images. I've never been very good with photoshop or anything of that nature, but I guess now's as good of a time to learn as any!

Thanks to our open communication with the Fortune Hunter/Math4 Team, this project is continuing to progress (sometimes not quite how we want it to), but it's progress none the less. We've had to scrap a couple of things because of how much time they were taking in comparison to how much time we thought it would take, but we've accomplished a good bit and plan to accomplish more before the semester's end :)

Until next time folks...

As the semester comes to a close...

Things are going to start really getting serious...Deadlines are arriving and there is much to be done. For our team, the first important deadline is this week (April 15). We have to have an abstract written and submitted for the School of Science and Math Poster Session (April 21, 2011 on the second floor of the New Science Building--all are welcome!). Being that we're not really doing "research", it changes how the abstract should be written. I've done a number of presentations and written a few abstracts, but they were all research related. It should be interesting to see how it turns out. Also, we need to get on actually creating the poster. One problem that we've encountered is that half the group won't be available to actually present on the day of the Poster Session because of class conflicts. That leaves two of us, which isn't bad, but being that we've been kind of working on our own assignments and coming together periodically, it's a little difficult for us to be able to explain what the other is doing. I'm sure we'll come to a final decision by the time of the deadline.

After that, we need to start organizing our final presentation. Once again, being that we all worked on separate things, this will have to be a group effort. We're leaning towards doing a prezi (powerpoint doesn't seem appropriate for a presentation about a video game). We're also going to work on making sure the code is uniform and gets to a stopping point to where we have something to demo for the audience (that is concurrent with what we've actually done).

Individually, we have to get a pdf of our blogs to submit but I'm not exactly sure how that would happen. I've been doing some research into it and Jaime said she may have found something but if anyone knows anything or has figured anything out, some input/help would be greatly appreciated :)

I'm sad to see the semester come to an end so quickly...I was just starting to get into a lot of things and now I'm about to be gone. There's still a lot to get done, though, so it's not the time to mourn or think about that...gotta do work!

Until next time...

Blitzkev = YES!

Hello again,

Not much to update...still working on our project individually and as a team. I have not posted to the mailing list yet today because I would like to wait and see if anyone on my team has anything specific they would like to add or report or ask before I post. Also, the request we got from one 'Blitzkev' (whom we now know is named Kevin Hockey) has turned into a reply from a message we sent him. He is basically here to help us as we need it and make comments on our wiki for things he feels he can help with. He said that he programs on Fortune Hunter and also on Math Maze (which was another game we were looking at in the beginning). He seems to be very kind and I think with him so willing to help, the rest of the semester and this project should really begin to move smoothly.

I know this was a relatively short blog...but there will be more (and it will hopefully be more exciting) :)

Until next time...

Four's Company makin' moves :)

Hello again all,

I don't have much to update regarding any homework or assignments in my class...Right now the main focus is on our FOSS project and getting our contributions complete. If you would like to see a detailed list of the tasks we are trying to and have accomplished, please check out our Timeline and Calendar. Although the steps aren't huge, we are making steps in the right direction and it looks like we will get a good bit accomplished before our presentations.

We also decided that we're going to do a poster for the 22nd Annual Scientific Research Poster Session, which I'm pretty excited about. This gives me a chance to go a little out of my comfort zone (by talking about gaming and things I'm not very experienced with, as opposed to my research I've been working on for years) and get some more experience presenting a poster. It should be fun/interesting to see how it turns out.

That's all for now...don't forget to check out the Four's Company Wiki.
Until next time...