English 1010

week 15

matt66 — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 21:10:27 +0000

I am going to write on the peer review process. To be honest I do not think that the peer review process works. Because frankly half of the people in the class are there just to get their general education credits and get out. Most of us including myself would never want to use english unless it was required that we do so.

I am learning nothing from the peer review process because it doesn’t tell me what I am doing wrong it is just a bunch of X’s and underlines that mean nothing to me. I look at the sentences over and over and do not understand what I am doing wrong. So eventually I just give up and say screw it and don’t even try to fix it because every time I think I have it some other rule of grammar comes up. So in conclusion I don’t believe this process works and is a waste of our time.

Week 12

matt66 — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 19:02:21 +0000

This week like last week it is our choice on what to write about. So I will write about my joy that on paper five we can use sources other than peer reviewed journals. Praise everything. Joy to everybody. Halaluja! Now that I am done celebrating I will write on why I am so happy. I am so happy because I can actually understand information now. When I read a scholarly peer reviewed journal I don’t understand it because they are using words that are out of my vocabulary level. Concepts that go over my head. When I read something that is written by someone at my level I can understand it a lot better. When I understand things I can branch off of them and create my own ideas and concepts and learn even more. So praise everything that is good. And that is all I have to say about that.

Week 11

matt66 — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:56:40 +0000

This week it is our choice on what to write on as long as it is related to our work somehow. I will be writing on the difficulty that I had researching my topic.
I decided to write my paper on foster care and when I typed in foster care I found that was too broad of a topic. So I narrowed it down to foster care in the United states and then to mental illnesses caused by fostercare. I thought that this was a pretty good topic to write on so I began to research it further.

What I found however is that there were two articles relating to the topic and I needed five. I know enough about english to know that you can not write a four page paper with two sources. So I had a dilema what should I do. I had to think abstractly, something that I am not good at. I was able to come up with some things that made my paper ok, but it still sucked.

My question is this. How are we supposed to write a paper when we are restricted by peer reviewed journals? The answer is we can not. I believe that to write a good paper we need to be able to expand and that is all I have to say about that.

Week 10

matt66 — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:39:06 +0000

This week we are told to write on what we are learning on our research topics that we have come up with. Well, this is kind of hard for me because after four days of researching I have not found anything that is even half way interesting to me that has enough articles on it. I have found something on kangaroos but there were only two articles on it.

Maybe I am doing it wrong. Does anyone know what the hell we are doing. Help? I have read the assignment sheet and still don’t understand it. I have tried other topics that seem to interest me but I have only found one with the number of articles that are required and it still comes up one short.

If you have any suggestions on topics I would appreciate the help. All the topics that seem to interest me however either don’t have the articles or the articles are just quick blurbs on books on the subject.

So far I have found this thing on a proposed project called the tree of life. Like the human geonome project it is going to research DNA. One exception though is the fact that it is going to link all of the 14.7 million species together in one big family tree.

Week 9

matt66 — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:10:39 +0000

This week we were told to write on anything that pertains to what we are doing in the class, or our thoughts on one of the readings. So I am going to write on my lack of understanding in the class and how I am going to work on improving it.

In the class we have many readings from scholars with huge words in them. My vocabulary is very limited and I have a hard time understanding and learning new words in complicated text. This makes me feel really stupid when the rest of the class seems to know what it means. I just nod my head and pretend that I know what I am hearing. Reality is though that I can probably say with at least ninety percent accuracy that there are others in the classroom who are in the same situation that I am.

So why do we read these papers, when we don’t take the time to learn the words. The way that I am going to fix this is I am going to bring a dictionary to class and when I don’t know a word I will look it up in my little dictionary and then I will find time to use that word at least three times that day if not more. In this way I believe that I will learn more words in a timely manner. This will create a more extensive vocabulary and will teach me how to spell. Another thing that I am really bad at.

One other thing is peer reviews I am going to get someone really smart to edit the grammar on my paper so that I can learn the concepts over time. I believe that kids have gotten more stupid over time because teachers fail to see if their students understand the concepts. There are thousands of kids like me who do not like to speak up in class for fear of sounding stupid. If you are like this feel free to email me and we can chat. Jappenman@yahoo.com.

“And that is all I have to say about that.” -Forest Gump-

Week 8

matt66 — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 19:51:35 +0000

The article I read last week was about smoking and how the lady was against it. This week for journal number 8 we were assigned to read a similiar article and then compare them. I readan article titled, US Distributing Free Anti-terrorist Cigarettes In Iraq.

Whoever wrote it was definately against smoking. They tell in the article about this new plan to sell Iraqi’s cigarettes that have an anti terrorist number on them. This will remind people to tell on their neighbor if they are a terrorist or terrorist to be. I don’t really see the point in the article, other than to be funny.

However, this is a real thing that is happening in our world to day. Who would have thought anti-terrorist cigarettes. First they tell on their neighbor and then they die of lung cancer. Its a catch twenty-two.

These articles both are against smoking. As well as being very sarcastic these articles look at smoking from a liberal point of view. They are different because one tries to be funny and the scholar is all grouchy and serious. What is up with that. Have a little humor that everyone can understand. And that is all I have to say about that.

Week 7

matt66 — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 18:56:22 +0000

This fine stupendous week we are supposed to write a short response to an article that we read in our Allen and Bacon english book. So I read an article by a slightly deranged lady about smoking.

I didn’t understand this article(big suprise). Yet I think it was talking from a point of view that I somewhat agree with. One that hates environmentalists. In this article this lady seemed to do everything that she could to insult or bring down the environmentalists. Everything from being sarcastic to straight out saying that the environmentalists were stupid. Well not exactly but pretty close. It was awesome. She also had quite an attitude towards the situation that I found quite comical.

One thing that I did not agree with is the fact that she was pretty much endorsing smoking. This is one habit that I find to be disgusting. I am not critisizing anyone that smokes, because I have many friends who are chain smokers themselves. I find it a disgusting habit for the simple fact that it is something that people become dependent on. I believe that if you are dependent on something then it is not good for you. I believe that no one should be dependent on anything. At any given point a person should be able to pick up and move at a moments notice taking nothing with them. I believe that this should be the way things run.

The only exception to this rule that I can think of is committed relationships. I believe that even if you move you cannot leave behind either the relationship or the imprint of the relationship. Yet with smoking you are dependent on it. If you are not on it you get grouchy and shake and get headaches and nicotine cravings. Its not good all around.

The second thing that she insinuates is that the whole world should be open to smokers. I know for a fact that would be a bad situation if the whole world were filled with cigerate smoke. There are people like my friend who are alergic to cigerate smoke. Would that be morally right to permit people like that to get sick all the time and possibly die because you want a few minutes of pleasure from a cigerate?

Then there are the people who just can’t stand the smell. What about them? I don’t have a solution to this problem but I believe that we should all start coming up with a solution.

Week 6

matt66 — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 18:00:03 +0000

This week we were told to right on anything as it pertains to what we are doing in class. Right now all it seems that I am doing in class is discussing and doing homework. This is not very benificial at the moment because of my work schedule. What has happened lately is that I stay up all night doing homework, am exhausted go to work and go to school. Then I start all over again. When do I have time for friends/social life. The answer is never. I will never have time for a social life.

Recently I have gotten back with my girlfriend and I find myself wondering if there is even a point to it. This is because when am I going to spend time with her? When do I have time for anything in my life. I don’t even have time to sleep half of the time.

The question is, how come schools give so much homework instead of just teaching the material in class? It is like the teachers think that we have no life. Which in my case is true because of the massive load of homework that I have been given. Ok, maybe I am exagerating a little, part of it is my fault for working. However Work+School=NO LIFE. For some they still manage to have a life but I really don’t know where they find the time.

How this pertains to my schooling is this. I want to sleep in class. Sometimes I don’t even feel like coming, knowing that it will be a discussion on readings that I don’t understand even though I stayed up half the night trying to understand them.

This also effects others schoolling because when one person has a bad attitude they pass it along like the plague. This leads to disinterest in school and in some cases termination of schooling. Therefore if students didn’t have as much home work they might have a social life and sleep. Sorry if this is a little blunt but I can say it no other way. Sorry again.

Week 5

matt66 — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 18:20:32 +0000

I read an article on the orgin of the term bug as relating to computers. This article was called Micellany: etymology of the computerbug: History and folklore. I read this and was very interested because I had never found out why people should be calling a problem with a computer a bug. It is an absurd idea to be doing this. I wanted to know the reason behind the maddness. So, I read on. Turns out the author of this piece had the same idea as me. Where did the term bug come from. However, unlike me he did his research and wrote a scholarly letter on it. We had the same question but I had a different answer from him. I being more literal said that it was probably something that was creepy crawly and green in the computer. However in this situation I was right. He said that it was because of a moth stuck in the supercomputer MarkII making it so it wouldn’t work that the term bug came forth. There for the term de-bugging came from the process of the scientists crawling in there and actually finding the moth, and disposing of it. I thought this was very interesting. He then went on to talk about how other terms surrounding computers have been named and people think one thing and it means another.For example, if you were to hear the word byte what would you think. Of course you would think of something biting something else such as a little kid biting his sister. But they sound the same therefore they must be the same. Wrong, a bite would be one character on the keyboard or one set of binary numbers. (1000010010101). Through these bytes I am typing this paper one byte at a time. So far I have typed one thousand six hundred and seven bytes. I read this scholarly letter and I will admit I was bored the whole time and didn’t get much out of it as you can see in this paper. But the one thing that I got out of it is this. If you are going to name something make it fit the situation.

Thank you for reading this very excruciatingly boring blog. Reply if you got a single thing out of it.

Week 4

matt66 — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 20:27:23 +0000

The question of the week is what is our major? Why did we pick that major, and what are some typically asked questions that people in our field may ask?
I have always wanted to be an engineer of some sort. Building and designing has always been my passion. When I was a little kid I built my treehouse with very little help from my dad. I was the one who designed it, added on to it ,and had fun in it. My dad did all the serious work to make sure that everything was structurally safe and sound, however once that was done I went to town.

Not only did I make a tree house with two levels, I made a treehouse with a plethera of additons. A drawbridge, pulley system and a rope bridge, a trapdoor, and a bridge to a nearby tree. However, I didn’t stop there, I wanted more. So I built a hideout in a grainery on the land that I was staying on. I rigged up a pulley system and pulled board after board up the side of this grainery till I had a nice little hideout. I did all this at the age of eight.

Needless to say I always thought that I would like to do something in the building industry, namely a mechanical or civil engineer. I had my heart set on this throughout middle school and junior high. When I hit highschool however, a whole new world of engineering opened up to me.

In school I was a nerd. I will be the first one to say that I was a nerd. I had no life I loved school and I loved to daydream. My greatest hobby however was reading the newspaper on the internet, especially the science and technology part. It is sad to admit but I was the steriotypical nerd, glasses and everything.

One day I was reading about new technology that scientists were coming out with regarding blind people and computers to help them see. I thought this was really cool. I had scene blind people around the country in my travels and I had always felt a sense of guilt at looking at them and saying to myself they are blind. I always took for granted that I could see, hear, touch, smell and taste when others couldn’t. I always as a little boy thought what happened to them, were they bad and something happened to them. I was not a very understanding person so when I read this article about them building hardware to put into the lobe of the brain that controls sight for people who have lost their sight, I was amazed. They weren’t bad people they had lost their sight either by environment or by birth.

This was great. I thought that building computers to help people would be more cool than designing and building things. So I had a purpose behind my major now. Also because of my life experiences I was always wanting to help people as my way of paying back the people who helped me through out my life, so when I saw this opportunity I took it.

I began studying everything about computers as a hobby,life and passion. Some questions that computer hardware engineers ask are, “How can I get this to run faster, and more efficiently? How can I design something to make life easier for the consumer? How can I fix this problem?” These are just some of the simple questions that face computer engineers today. To get here I need to take a lot of math and computer classes, and of course this english class for my general ed.

That is my major, thanks for visiting my blog and I hope to hear from you.