A Shady Browser

Before I begin, this is yet another post inspired by Michael C. Johnson, so I just want to give another shout-out to him!  Most of the code from this is just re-purposed code from http://www.learningwebgl.com/ as well due to laziness, so shout out to them too!

With all of this talk about shaders, I started thinking about the best way to demonstrate shaders through my blog.  I think they're pretty neat to mess with, and are very important to understand how to use due to the fact that they play such a huge role in 3D graphics today.

Photos of the Month - March 2014

Kicking off April, here are some of my favorite photos that I managed to take during the month of March!  Sadly I did not take as many as last month, but there are still a few good ones in here I think :)

A Rocky Beach Day - Taken on a trip to the beach one day.

Let the Games Begin - Taken at a Washington Capitols Hockey Game

An Afternoon Sunset - Taken on a trip to the James River for a friend's birthday.

My goal for this month is to take a ton more photos now :D

Replay for Life 2014

Recently it was announced that the Relay for Life organization would be coming to our campus here, and was doing their yearly round-up of student organizations.  Being as interested in charity as I am, I went ahead and started trying to gather interest in raising money for the event through the the Association for Computer Machinery chapter that I lead at Christopher Newport University.  The decision by a group of us was to create an event called Replay for Life.  If you have ever seen the speed-run charities online, then you know exactly what Replay for Life is, but if you haven't, it's a live-stream of classic video games being played as fast as the person can.  Some amazing things have appeared in these videos, and we are incredibly excited because we have someone doing a Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time speed-run using some incredible glitches.  We hope that everyone will join us and donate to our cause, and that you of course enjoy the stream!  It will be Saturday, March 15th, starting at 2:00pm EST.  You can find our Facebook event here and our website is currently www.replayforlife.org.

Our flyer, hand-drawn by a student!

Photos of the Month - February 2014

Many people might not know this about me, but I have developed a very strong interest in photography over the past few years.  Since coming to college, I've realized how much I want to have memories of everything I do, and so I take a lot of pictures.  Actually, that's become an understatement, because it's more than a lot.  It's something I've had a few people get upset about, partially due to some bad photos, partially due to the bulk.  In fact, I routinely have to go through them, or risk not posting the photos due to the sheer numbers.

This past year there were tons of photos that I never uploaded simply because of the time it usually took me to go through them.  I didn't (and still don't) have a nice camera, so I ended up using my phone, which means I had to manually go through each one.  With my recent Android phone, I can now do so much faster since they are automatically synchronized everywhere (privately of course, with the option to share).

Shape the World

I've contemplated starting a blog for quite a while now, and with 2014 starting off and my senior year getting closer to its end, I figured now is as good of a time as ever to start this.  The big question I've had is this though: What do I want to accomplish with my blog?

While I love to code and am a huge tech geek, I also have a wide variety of other areas I'm interested in.  I do ballroom dance, I like to draw, I am a huge music nerd.  I don't want just another "techy blog", I want something more!  At the same time, I want something organized, something inspirational to others, something that people can go to and get help from.  That's why I'm starting this blog as Shape the World.

Coding is a huge thing I like to do, but there are
other things on that list too!

The goal of this blog is to give me a spot to talk about the things I do, how I went about them, or why I think they're important.  While I'm sure this has been done before, I feel like I can bring new experiences to the table due to the wide variety of things I do, and the ways I go about doing them as well.  Maybe some of them are novel, maybe not, but there's only one way to find out, so I'm jumping in head first!

I of course would love to have feedback on people's thoughts with what I do as well as what more I can do.  I've got many ideas that I'd like to make a reality, and I hope this blog will give me a means to do so one day.  For now though, I'm just going to work on Shaping the World, one blog post at a time.