Candace and I were talking last night about our futures and one of the things that came up was that she didn't know what I wanted do as my career job. Which has has me thinking since last night, and I believe that I have an answer. To put it simply I don't know.

Through out my computer career so far I have had several ideas about what I wanted to end up doing. Here's a quick list followed by a brief explanation of each.

• Computer Technician
• Web Designer
• Game Programmer
• Network Security Programmer (i.e. Anti-hacking)
• Operating Systems Kernel Developer
• Web Applications Developer

When I first took Mr. Roth's A+ Certification class in high school I thought that I'd be perfectly happy doing computer tech stuff for the rest of my life. But after taking a sort of internship at St. Louis Community College, Florissant Valley I realized that it wasn't quite what I was looking for.

Since I liked doing this tech stuff, but not enough to do it as a career I looked at my other hardware option, computer engineering. I like computer hardware, I like math, but I don't like physics, and this was the downfall of this career.

So I started thinking about what hobbies do I have that I could pursue as a career. At that time I came up with two. Web design and games. I had already been working on The God Squad web site and liked doing it. So I thought I could try to pursue that line of work. Designing, building and maintaining web sites. After a year or so of this I realized that most well designed sites have really good art (images). And after creating some images for various sites I had worked on I noticed that I just wasn't any good at that. I realize now that my art had a name, Bad Programmer Art.

Games have always interested me. I've been hooked since the NES days. I still love playing games. And through the years I have been a pretty avid reader of game development sites such as www.gamedev.net. I especially liked reading the post mordems of games (the stories from the developers about what they did as the made the game), and the developer journals of amateur and indie game developers. This has always been in the back of my mind as an ideal job. And until recently one that I thought I might still go for. In the last couple of years I've realized through reading a few books and online articles that being a game developer is not all it is cracked up to be. First off it is extremely hard to get a job in the industry. And once you get the job you are expected to work up to 70 hours a week. Which means that I'm probably getting paid more per hour at Dillions than I would working on games. I wouldn't mind working 50-60 hours a week during crunch time, but I'm sure Candace would.

Next we move onto Networking Security Programmer. This is the anti-hacker. These are the people that try to thwart the hackers from breaking into their systems. Off and on I've been reading about encryption (computer and non-computer) and computer security. I like the subject and I'd really like to learn some more about it. Unfortunately the best way to learn these methods is to learn about hacking(cracking). Which is illegal. So it makes it hard to learn these things. This is still something that I haven't thrown out of the hat yet, but something I definitely need to learn more about first.

Last spring I took my Operation Systems course and I loved it. To this date I think it was my favorite class. In the class labs we got to go through the source code for the OS we were studying(Minix), and change it. I really enjoyed doing this. I seems that for one to do this they'd have to really understand the system and the low level programming of C. I don't know either, but I am willing to learn about it.

And last but not least is Web Applications Developer. This is what I currently do at school. This isn't design. We take templates of the design that they already created and just put our applications into that design template. For the most part this is enjoyable. At times it gets a little repetitive, but I think that happens with any job. And maybe if I was doing it as a real job instead of a student worker I would get to work on some more interesting things.

At the moment we are working on a Mod for Half Life 2. This is giving me some better experience into game development. I also want to take a look into maybe doing some development work for Linux. That will be a long shot, but I think I'd enjoy it.

Simply put I don't know exactly what I want to do, or where I want to work. Its not that I don't care, but more like I can't make up my mind. I'd be just as happy working at a university doing some coding for one thing or another, as I would be if I were living in Washington working for Valve or Google.

I figured that since I've been too busy with school to post anything here I'll just bore you all to death talking about those classes. Because being my last semester I have all interesting classes(yeah right!). So here they are.

• GEP 397 - Capstone Course for General Education classes.
• PHY 391 - Advanced Mathematics for Engineers.
• CSC 482 - Senior Seminar for Computer Science Majors.
• CSC 440 - Intro to Artificial Intelligence.
• MTH 345 - Statistics for Scientists and Engineers.

GEP 397 is basically a special topics class that you are forced to take so that they can say you are more well rounded, but really we all know the real reason is to suck some more money out of us. The section I'm taking is taught by advisor so it computer science related. It is called "The Digital Inquisition" and covers things like ethics in computing, security, encryption, digital rights management, etc. Overall it seems like it will be one of the more interesting classes I have this semester.

PHY 391 is a math course that picks up sometime after calc 3. It is for engineering and physics engineers. I'm taking it because it will cover my other 2 hours that I need to my physics minor. I'd really like to not have to work this much in a class that is outside my major, but this one is better than thermal dynamics.

CSC 482 is my senior seminar. It is 2 hours long, only on Mondays, and is a block class. So by the time midterms roll around I'll be done with it. It covers a lot of the same things that are covered in my GEP class. Although it focus more on the ethics/privacy.

CSC 440 is my last real computer science course. I started out with high hopes of this course when I first read about it in out course catalog. Then I had a class with the teacher who always teaches AI about 2 years ago and I realized that I didn't think much of him. I didn't agree with his teaching style (which was too lax). Then going through the catalog again a few months ago I was trying to figure out what elective to take and this was the most interesting of the bunch. I figured that since this was going to be my only programming class of the semester I might as well make it something I'd actually be interested in. So after the first week of class I was starting to regret my choice of AI. Same teaching style, but this time with 40 people instead of the 8 I had in his first class. So when he asked the class how we wanted our game to play out I just thought "Oh shit." Of course everybody had different ideas and we didn't get anywhere. That was Tuesday. Today we come in and he actually has a decently rigid design done with really the only thing we have to figure out now is the AI (instead of the whole game like it seemed on Tuesday). So now I think it is a toss up on whether or not this class will be good. It is looking better but only time will tell.

MTH 345 is my statistics class. What can I say about stats that won't bore you to death? Its one of those classes that I can see being kind of useful, but I'd still rather not take it.