Hello World

I would like to officially make this blog. For Starters, I'm Jesse. I am a creator of many things technical with experience in robotics, programming, and computers general. Really, I love to learn.

To introduce myself, I was born in a small town in New York. My childhood was spent in Utah, my teenage years in Kansas, and post-teenage years were in mostly Maryland. All my life I’ve loved computers and anything that uses electricity to run. Much of my fascination with computing derives down to the basics of how computing works, and the logic gate level. My feelings are portrayed, just like how Daniel Hillis feels in his book ‘The Pattern On the Stone’. His introduction to the book I feel is just perfect and his honestly magical description of a CPU:

Logic Gates ¹

“I etch a pattern of geometric shapes onto a stone. To the uninitiated, the shapes look mysterious and complex, but I know that when arranged correctly they will give the stone a special power, enabling it to respond to incantations in a language no human being has ever spoken. I will ask the stone questions in this language, and it will answer by showing me a vision: a world created by my spell, a world imagined within the pattern on the stone” ³. My technical interests begin when I was around 10 years old. I found at a garage sale a video card. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but it fascinated me. I bought it, and found it fit into our family computer. (with my mom’s permission of course). Honestly looking back, I have no idea whether it improved it, or hindered it. But I replaced it on my own. Soon after that, my uncle who is a programmer by profession gave me as a gift a python programming book. At first, I really didn’t understand it. The first program had the command Raw_input(“Press the enter key to exit”). I tried changing the word ‘enter’ to a letter like ‘d’ so it said Raw_input(“Press the d key to exit”). Which… didn’t work as I had hoped. I got frustrated and put it down. Around a year later, I came back to the book and immediately understood what was happening and I studied that book thoroughly; falling in love with the language of Python. Around that same time, through my uncle again, I started to get to know Blender: a 3d animation software. I kept coming to him asking him questions. Eventually, he told me that he just didn’t have the answers for what I was asking him. Which for me was scary and exciting as a kid. That’s when I learned that there is a skill to searching for answers online. Took me a while, but after I learned it, my computer repair skills naturally blossomed. Later on I received an NXT, Arduino, and other things endeavor on many projects (most which were never completed). But I’ve always wanted to make a computer from the ground level, whether that be transistors or something else. Like ‘The Pattern On the Stone’ mentioned “There is no reason the tic-tac-toe machine (or any other computer) has to be built out of electrical switches. A computer can represent information using electrical currents, fluid pressures, or even chemical reactions.” ²

I’ve made a very simple 1-bit computer out of transistors on a bread board before. That took a lot of work. But one thing that would really help with any of my unfinished projects would be access to a 3D printer, which may happen soon. I’ve been able to accomplish many of my projects’ electrical work, but it’s making the frame/housing/mechanical aspects that I just don’t have the tools for.

One day I hope to be doing projects as a career, working in a group. Doing what I love. I’m going to Kansas State University and starting off in the road of computer science.

Bibliography

1. Gibbs, Keith. "LOGIC GATES." SchoolPhysics. N.p., 2013. Web. 01 Sept. 2016. <http://www.schoolphysics.co.uk/age16-19/Electronics/Logic%20gates/text/Logic_gates/index.html>.

2. Hillis, W. Daniel. The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. New York: Basic, 1998. Print. Page 10

3. Hillis, W. Daniel. The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. New York: Basic, 1998. Print. Page 1