This week’s blog post will be much shorter than usual, mainly because I don’t that many new things I can talk about, and partially because I’m extremely tired. I was pretty proud on Friday as a CURVE support specialist. There was an instructor teaching an anatomy class, and she needed some help setting up her tablet to display on the screen. I came to the rescue obviously. Other than that, I spent most of this week telling innocent students they couldn’t come into CURVE to just study and kicked them out. Hopefully this news will get spread around more quickly. Apart from that, I believe I’ll officially be working on the arcGIS project starting this week. I’m not completely sure what I’ll be asked to do, but I’m ready for anything, pretty much.

Compared to my last post, I’ve spent a great amount of time in CURVE, as expected. In terms of project work or anything really specific, nothing wasn’t really assigned so I haven’t done anything in regards to those. However I did choose a project I was sort of interested in. I chose the arcGIS Outreach project, mainly because in my first semester of college I was taught by Brennan in a seminar titled “Mapping Atlanta.” It was actually a fun class, and we had some interesting projects we had to work on. We gained experience with arcGIS and actually went out in the field and mapped points on the arcGIS application in parks and forests miles away from Georgia State. It was enjoyable for the most part, so I figured I would continue to work with this. I’ll see how that goes.

Like I just mentioned, I haven’t had many experiences dealing with the projects I’m working on, well because I’m not working on any projects. But I am spending all this time in CURVE each day, passing the time by messing with the interactWall and the other workstations. I’m a Computer Science major, so I have been thinking this past week on what were the possible uses for all this technology for those in my field. At the official opening ceremony, I was behind the support desk, supervising everything as usual. I’m not sure if it’s called the support desk, but it sounds like a good name to me. However, as I was there, multiple people, including both adults and students, came by and asked me questions about the space. What I wanted to mention specifically was a conversation I had with one of the students that came by. I believe his name was Jonathan, and he was a junior studying Computer Science as well, so off the bat, it was pretty easy to start talking for a bit. Throughout the few minutes he was there, we were brainstorming ideas on how to use the technology, and although we didn’t go very far, this made me a little excited. His first question when he approached me was how would a Computer Science student use this technology, and I didn’t really know. But that doesn’t discourage me, as now I’ve made it a small personal goal to do some research on software and ideas for this purpose. And considering programming has developed into a team-based effort for most cases, the collaborative work stations seem like a perfect fit. There’s a great solution somewhere, but I just have to find it.

Greetings to everyone. Since this is my first official blog post, I figure I’d first introduce myself again, as I’m guessing most of you won’t recall anything I mentioned at the SIF orientation a couple of weeks ago. My name is Rumman Ahmed, but I like to go by Shakib. I’m a sophomore here at Georgia State studying Computer Science. I spend my free time playing basketball, on Xbox, and watching Netflix. I also love cats. But enough with that, I believe I’m supposed to discuss CURVE here. This is also my first time writing any sort of blog or anything like it, so bear with me…

Honestly, I have not spent much time in CURVE as I should have in the past couple of weeks, but that is changing. However, this doesn’t give me a lot to talk about as I haven’t really done much. I asked for advice on what I should write in this blog post, and among other things, I was told to “daydream” about how I would use some of the technology, so I will do exactly that.

I love the InteractWall. I think that’s the official name for it. It just seems so innovative and futuristic to me, and the fact that I’m allowed to basically mess around and experiment with it is just great. When I saw this, along with the 4k screen and the other large computer screens in the space, one of the first things I imagined was playing video games on them. You can’t really blame me, can you? But obviously (and unfortunately), that probably won’t be allowed. But there’s an exception. I’m studying Computer Science, and with this very broad subject comes programming. Now I enjoy programming a lot. And there are many things you can program. I’d figure the most common use is for automating small processes, but then there are larger programs and software with many, many different possibilities, and then there are phone applications, and finally there are video games. Originally, I actually was planning to avoid video game programming because as I’ve heard, that involves learning more about shapes and object collision etc. physics, and I greatly dislike physics. But I have been thinking that I might even follow this pursuit once again if I have the chance to test it on these large screens. I’m telling you, playing a high definition game on something like the InteractWall or the 4k screen is any video gamer’s dream.