Carl Furrow | iworkwithcomputers.com | <email> | <phone>
———————————————————————————————
http://www.google.com/search?q=carl+furrow

This article is kind of like some horoscopes–through the vague connections it makes, you can see that it fits in your own life, somewhat.  After reading the first few paragraphs, I couldn’t help but make the connection between what it was talking about, and my own life.  I’ve had videogames in my life since I was about six years old (1988), and didn’t get into “violent” video games until about middle school (1997).  Violent video games at the time were pretty bad–we still had Grand Theft Auto (the first one), and plenty of first person shooters, but they’ve only escalated in gruesome imagery since then.  The reason being is that the core-gaming audience has grown up with the industry.  The demand for more realistic and gut-wrenching games has kept a certain sect of the gaming industry pumping out more and more violent games, pushing the barrier each time.  Now, all this time that I was playing videogames, I was doing really well in school–A’s and B’s consistently, with little effort, but I can’t help but think that was more a product of my upbringing, than escaping to a violent fantasy world.  Let it be noted, that I didn’t play violent videogames exclusively, but, at least one was always in the mix of my current videogame collection.

“…boys relate to violence, no matter what their background is,” the article claims, and I have to believe that is true on most levels, with most boys.  It seems to be one of those ingrained pieces of our genome, that allows us to be more tolerant to acts of violence, and at some times, desire to see violence acted out through media.  The threshold at which my wife turns away from the TV is much lower than my own, but that seems to also resonate through our environment.  Boys and girls alike are told, throughout their upbringing, that boys are gross, and it’s understood that they have more violent tendencies. That doesn’t mean that a girl cannot have the same tendency, or that a girl is pre-programmed to turn away from certain violent imagery–sometimes I think they have better sense to do so.  I often wonder, at a very personal level, whether or not playing games like the iconic Grand Theft Auto series, or the more current Left 4 Dead zombie-slaying-fest, are making me more numb to violence in the real-world.  When I see violence in the news, of course I feel empathy towards the victims and their families, but, I often wonder if, in the absense of videogames, if I’d feel *more* empathetic, or sympathetic?  Are games hardening me, in how I respond to *real* human suffering?  Maybe at a very small level, they have.

Back to the article, has violent media made me a better student? Did virtual violence make me the learner that I am today? Did they make me successful? No, and I guess that’s not exactly what the article was talking about, but, even at its base argument–do violent videogames help boys focus in school?  I don’t think that’s it.  I think videogames, as a reward for putting in the time to do my homework, and making sure I prepared for my tests, was a great personal-strategy of mine to keep me excelling, and it didn’t matter if the game was violent, or otherwise. If I got enjoyment out of the game, it was enough of a carrot to keep me motivated to get my work done.  Not to mention the motivation of going to college, and getting a career that I wanted

• What is ASP.NET
  • Server-side language
  • Application on a server, waiting to handle requests
  • Event-driven
• More about ASP.NET
  • Diverse toolset for quick deployment (less “busy-code”)
  • Proven framework
  • Visual Studio IDE
  • Community Support
  • Separation of code and view (in most cases)
• Server architecture of a typical ASP.NET environment
  • IIS, etc
• Sample page (very basic controls) (an aspx file)
  • Show code-behind, code-infront, and rendered output
  • Show that it’s HTML, plus server-control markup
• ASP.NET projects (web app vs web project)
• Page Life Cycle
  • How the sample page was created/rendered, start to finish
  • What events are significant to data binding, dynamic control insertion, etc
  • What’s a postback?
  • What is ViewState/Sessions/etc
• Creating a custom control
  • Composite control
  • Custom-rendered control
  • Databinding objects to a control
• Debugging an ASP.NET application
• Master pages
• Introducing Javascript w/ ASP.NET
  • How to make them work together through ClientID, etc
  • How to write/render javascript from code behind (if necessary)
• Simple ASP.NET AJAX overview
  • ScriptManager, UpdatePanel
• Simple jQuery introductions
• Simple jQuery AJAX examples

The particulars have yet to be hashed out at this time, such as slide decks and sample projects, but I’m really excited to have this opportunity to teach what I’ve learned while using the framework for the past five years or so.  This is the type of class I wish I would have had back in college, which was only a scant three years ago–web development was not touched on very much while I was in school, and it was a bit of a disservice as the industry of software development has largely moved to the internet.  I’m of the understanding that that has since been changed, and there is at least one or two courses in web development, one of which is a requirement to graduate with a bachelors degree in computer science.  Anyway, enough rambling, I better get back to coming up with a game-plan for my talk.

Event info:
West Michigan .NET University
April 4th, 2009
GVSU Downtown GR Campus (map: http://budurl.com/gvsugr)
Site (coming soon): http://www.dayofdotnet.org/WestMichiganDotNetU
Registration (should be working): http://www.dayofdotnet.org/WestMichiganDotNetU/Register.aspx

I put together a quick graph of my Xbox360s’ lifespans, and posted the chart below. Enjoy!

• Retweet Functionality:  Next to each tweet is a new icon, “RT”, clicking it will open an embedded form below that tweet. You can modify and retweet without refreshing the page through jQuery’s AJAX functionality.
• Embedded Reply: Clicking the reply button opens an embedded form below that tweet. You can reply to a tweet without refreshing the page, as I used jQuery’s AJAX to make the post/update.
• Modified/Fixed Delete Button: I was having issues with the delete button not working–fixed now.
• Modified/Fixed Favorite Button: I was having issues with the favorite button not working–fixed now.
• Coming soon: Animations and highlighting effects, plus “Endless tweets” functionality.

Check out the script here:http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/41387

Video Demonstration: http://screencast.com/t/FPvj0p8w5HY

• “Endless Tweets”: This feature allows for “endless” scrolling on the main Twitter home page. No more clicking “Older Entries”, etc. Just scroll to the bottom of the page, and it will AJAX-load the next page, into the current page.
• Nested tweets: Tweets that are in response to another tweet, will be related and nested on the main Twitter page.
• Retweeting ability: A new button will be added to the right of each tweet, “Retweet”. This will allow for quick retweeting of a previous tweet.
• A common dialog box that submits AJAX posts for replies and retweeting (no more page refreshes!)
• Auto-complete of @reply names: As soon as you type an ‘@’ character in your status text, a drop down will appear with a list of all your friends. As you type, it will try and auto-complete the name with a username from your friend list.

Yes, there are other scripts that do exactly what I’m looking to do above, but, I haven’t seen any with this breadth of jQuery, plus, I want to make one myself so I’ve got more jQuery under my belt.  It’s a good webdev programming exercise.

I’ll be posting my results to userscripts.org, and will post that announcement here, when it’s completed.

I’ve once again updated the Twitter Enhancements: Retweet script, by adding a dialog box when retweeting. Previously, you had to be on Twitter’s home page in order to use my updated Retweet, with AJAX functionality.  Now, you can be on any twitter page (aside from the Direct Messages page) and click the Retweet button. It will open a jQuery modal dialog (thanks to Eric Martin’s SimpleModal plugin: ).

You can find the script here: twitter_enhancements_ret.user.js
Or over at userscripts.org: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/40414

Screenshot of Retweet in action