Author Archives: Jamie Chung

Me a Hokie? I think so.

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This past weekend, my family and I took an awesome trip to Virginia Tech. I wanted to at least visit all the campuses before I made any decision about the colleges I got into. We drove for fourteen hours starting from the greater Fort Lauderdale area, Coral Springs through South Carolina, North Carolina and finally ending at Blacksburg, Virginia around two in the morning. It was forty degrees outside (which is very cold mind you, compared to the seventy’s in FL) and we definitely went to bed pretty fast, cuddling up under the comforters. We woke up in the morning with forty degree weather to attend Hokie Focus, a special event being hosted at Virginia Tech showcasing the different colleges and programs offered at VT.

I will admit, that I was pretty impressed with the campus. It is pretty spaced out, but not too much and the weather was just really nice with clear skies. Apparently, one of the catch phrases that the students like to use is that “Blacksburg is one of the only places that you can experience all four seasons in one day”.

One misunderstanding that I’ve had about these old looking colleges is that everything about them would be old: their facilities, buildings, technologies.  That is one thing that I am glad that I straightened out on the visit.  I’ve realized that the “old look” is just an image of the buildings.  Inside, you would find high def flat screens, projectors, WiFi.  I only got to look at the classrooms inside the CS (Computer Science) building and they looked pretty contemporary.  The chairs are fun to sit in and each seat comes with a power outlet and Ethernet cord.  Can’t really go wrong with that to be honest.

In contrast, I did visit the UCF (University of Central Florida) campus on the way home.  As soon as I arrived, I did like the feel of the modern upbeat campus life, but I didn’t get the same pull from the campus as I did from VT.  The campus was definitely larger than VT’s and beating with activity everywhere.  However, on the inside, I didn’t like the idea of being a big school near a bigger city as much as I would have thought.  Suddenly, the smaller town ran by the larger college seems a lot more interesting and fun.  I can’t put my tongue on it, but there is just something about being a Knight that didn’t win me over.

My final decision comes down to these two schols: VT and UCF.  Frankly, I’m really liking the idea of becoming a Hokie and I’m getting excited about it.  Now I just have to find the $400 deposit money…

Art Show: Reflection

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Overall, I thought my art show was very successful.  I feel that I integrated the main goal of my art show into my pieces very well and the response from the audience was great.  I wanted to force the viewers to question what they were looking at, whether it is abnormally placed or just an interesting composition of objects.  I saw that on people’s faces when they were going through my show and it is a good feeling.3157_1068767514839_1095600109_2035321_5911180_n

I must admit that when I started this senior year in art, I was unsure about how I was going to accomplish all the requirements.  I didn’t feel that I had that strong enough of a connection with art in order to produce quality pieces or research to show my ideas and concepts.  I am thankful and relieved that I took the initiative to translate my artwork digitally.  It produced nothing but amazing artwork and I am definitely a lot more confident about myself as an artist on a whole.

I am glad that I was able to sell some of my pieces.  What is also a great thing about creating digital art is the ability to make multiple copies of it for all those who were interested in purchasing one for themselves.  When people wanted to buy my artwork, it made me feel even better about myself because it showed that both my artwork and myself as an artist has achieved a higher level of credibility.

Learning Ruby on Rails

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Today is the second day of my dive using the RoR framework. I’ve been trying to read up on some tutorials and demonstrations using Ruby on Rails. I must say that it is quite interesting so far and even though there is going to be a definite learning curve coming from over 5 years of development using PHP, I don’t think it is an impossible one to overcome. What won me over was the 15 minute demonstration on how to deploy a pretty minimalistic blog in under 15 minutes. (check it out here: http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts)

I think it is time that I try to learn another language and so far, RoR is the path that I am going to take. With PHP, I had to write every line of code by myself and even with a framework such as CodeIgniter or CakePHP, extra time was needed to integrate the javascript and other fancy effects. Switching over to RoR, a lot of these external items will already be built in, speeding up the process. Not trying to say that I am turning my back on PHP, but a new pal to run along with won’t hurt.

Again, I must admit, after learning web development the long way, a little convention over configuration can only make things better.