Howdy y’all! I hope you had a great winter break! What with jaw surgery and prepping for the new semester, mine was sure relaxing. It’s a new challenge with my recovery, but my spring semester is already off to a great start with my first iPhone game and file archiver already done!
First off, my winter break started with, well, a break! My first day back home I got bloodwork done and prepped for surgery, and the next few days are a little bit of a blur. My long anticipated jaw surgery was finally done and I no longer have to worry about damaging the joints. The rest of my break was pretty much centered around recovery; hanging out with friends and mostly just relaxing and letting myself heal. It’s been a little weird getting used to a smaller mouth, and the first couple weeks were pretty funny with me looking like a chipmunk! The biggest challenge has been adjusting to a mostly liquid and soft foods diet; since my jaw is literally screwed together, I can’t chew food yet, but I’ve been adjusting rather well!
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- 3 Days After Surgery
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- About a Week After Surgery
However, coming back to LA was painless, and I almost forget about the surgery in the excitement of my new classes! (Although, the whole liquid diet thing is a pretty good reminder!) This semester, I have a great lineup of classes with Professional C++, Marketing Fundamentals, Foundations of Accounting, Mobile Games Programming, and Algorithms. In my Professional C++ class, we started with a quick recap of the language and then jumped right into the the cool things you can do with it. Already, we’ve designed and programmed an application that will take in a file of any type and compress it down to a smaller size, just like a .zip or .rar file, then the same program can decompress the file back to the original image or whatever the file was. The cool thing is that it can also take in a whole folder and compress it along with everything inside! In my Marketing Fundamentals class, we’ve been going through the basics of what makes up marketing, like the processes of creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging value with a customer. In my Mobile Games Programming class, I’ve already got a working version of my first iPhone game, a port of the old arcade game Duck Hunt. It’s been really interesting learning how the concepts I learned about last semester with my Video Game Production class come into play even when making a game for mobile devices.
It hasn’t been all work though; with LA’s beautiful weather, Sarah and I went to the beach this last weekend where it was warm and sunny, even in the middle of January! The weather has been great, and the semester looks quite promising! I’m looking forward to giving you guys updates later on, but until then – Fight On!
~Patrick
