Scrapbook 1 - Comcast hasn't figured out how to count

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/tales-from-comcasts-data-cap-nation-can-the-meter-be-trusted/

1) This article is talking about Comcast charging a customer for using 3TB of data during one month and charging the customer $50 per 10 GB over the 300GB cap. Customer service was unhelpful despite the fact that this kind of usage would require somebody watching HD video 33 hours a day for the entire month. It turns out in the shocking Shyamalan-esque twist of the century, Comcast had incorrectly recorded the customers mac address and that a small family of three people did not use enough data to run a small business.

2) I chose this article for two reasons. First, access to the internet is one of the most valuable resources on the planet. Anything that makes that more difficult or expensive is a very dangerous and relevant topic. Secondly, I have and hate Comcast.

3) I have to admit, the sources for this particular article are not particularly credible. While the article does include photos and screen grabs of the exorbitant bills received by the customer and a quote from Comcast admitting their mistake, much of the content is derived from consumer testimony.

4) Telecom company's have found a way to act like drug cartels except they do not have to kill people. Often times people have no alternative provider to switch to and are stuck with the terrible treatment of their area's major provider. This is an example of a company behaving unethically by holding an extremely valuable resource hostage.

Week 4

So this week was a mixed bag. I seriously need to get my CSUMB hosting up and running as the course work is getting more complicated, spending several hours trying to jury rig an analogue with the worlds cheapest web hosting is becoming less and less viable as a strategy. On the bright side, I'm really excited with the coursework. All of the work I had previously done with HTML and web development in general was with an extremely constrained environment. Having access to a completely unrestrained environment is like taking off the training wheels. There is so much potential and cool stuff to be done.

Week 3 - PHP and Forms

This week I got to learn a little bit more about back end web development. It was a bit of a struggle for me especially compared to last week because I was already pretty experienced with html with my last job giving me a head start in the class. However, I had never used PHP before and found myself making classing programming day 1 style mistakes. It was certainly a good learning experience though and a good reminder that I am an idiot. Don't get me wrong, I think I'm a pretty smart guy but it is always good to remember that nobody on the planet is immune for making stupid mistakes every once in a while.

Week 2 - Introduction to PHP

PHP is awesome. I desperately wanted something like this at my last job. Unfortunately, php was not supported on the platform the website I was responsible for was on so I was extremely constrained in the amount of stuff I could do. I have always enjoyed scripting languages and PHP is no exception. I can think of some pretty cool ideas for different ways this could be implemented so I can't wait to see what else we can use this for. It is also making me excited for JavaScript because I like the idea of something I create running right there in a web browser.

Week 1 - Basic HTML and CSS

This week's content got me very excited about this class. I have experience with HTML from a previous internship so I am looking forward to learning the material in a formal setting. My previous training consisted of my boss walking into my office and saying

"Hey Kev, you're building this website now. You should probably learn some HTML. I need it done in two weeks."

It was nice to learn this stuff academically instead of just hacking together stuff that just kind of worked at 4AM.

Week 15 - Finished

This was a pretty fun class. I enjoy programming so needless today I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the writing class. I learned quite a bit about how to program in python as well as how to work with images and audio; something I had never done before. As for my future career, I was not planning on ending up in any kind of multimedia work so that is not terribly useful but python is everywhere so being familiar with it is definitely helpful.

Advice for future students would be to make sure to save your code since about a third of the labs are basically restructures of stuff you have done in a previous lab.

Week 14 - Heavy Lifting

I absolutely loved the assignments this week. Nothing but coding and it was all new challenges for me and the team. This was the kind of week that makes me happy I have chosen this major. Lots of fun problem solving and lateral thinking. I hope more weeks are like this. I am a little worried about the final project since it seems pretty ambitious but I'm sure our team will do fine.