This was also senior year in high school as an in-class assignment. We had just read Beowulf and were supposed to write a soliloquy. While I didn't quite follow the idea and format of a soliloquy, I liked the end result.In marvelous life-green grass,
The young son plays. In sorrowful fields where ceremonies exist, The father mourns as his heart is torn. "My son, stolen from me by god almighty, On my arrival we shall stand hand in hand." A father of honor, pride, and glory, All he wanted was his son to die a warrior, Not by illness at the mercy of the life bestower. "It is you lord who I blame for my long lonesome lethargic nights. However powerful you be, I will draw my own power from the bitter bare anger you provoked so strongly within me, And we shall battle. With the life revoker drawn and firm in hand, The father looks up at the sky; No fear but still one tear. He braces himself as best as he can, then sends the sword through his stomach: Through skin, through muscle, through organs, bone, through skin; Through life. Angry but beautiful, The father absorbs heaven; Surreal. He can barely squeeze a fist. And when he is most indulged in the euphoria of it all, There shines an obscured blinding light. When the light faded, Still in heaven, New scenery is shown. In marvelous life-green grass, The young son plays. "Son! Son!" The father's heart is solid and is beating at an unearthly rate: Zero beats per minute. With his son in sight, His beautiful innocent and young son, He can't hold any anger. Not at such a moment. Pacification abolished all the father's impurities. In sorrowful fields where ceremonies exist, Lies the anger of a million men, All within the heart of one boy. "No father you are of mine. All your pride didn't stop you from your wine. My death could have been prevented if you just gave me proper attention. Leave me now! Leave!" And with that said, The father died twice.
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This is another writing response senior year in High School to what I considered the most difficult challenge in life up to that point. Throughout my life, many challenges have been imposed upon me and some I took upon myself. These challenges throughout life affect us in different ways and teach us life lessons. Of the challenges I have undergone, none were as difficult as the challenge of recovering from my accident in 2002. The accident caused the biggest revolution in my mind up to that point and it will probably never be surpassed.
In 2002, on February 24th, I was struck by an ATV (all terrain vehicle), better known as a four-wheeler. The accident was exactly that: an accident. I was watching the operator perform tricks when control over the vehicle was lost and it struck me. I was just four months into my tenth year in life. Because of the severity of the accident (causing a huge increasing volume of blood loss), I was airlifted to Arnold Palmer Hospital in downtown Orlando. The damage toll: compound fracture to tibia and fibula on right leg, fracture on left tibia, concussion, severed artery on right leg, huge tissue loss on inner right leg requiring a skin graph, and a fracture on my right knee. This is where a challenge "imposed" itself upon me; the challenge was the recovery. Before I could even recover, I had to have several surgeries, all for my noodle of a right leg. That type of recovery was not easy and the new disposition in social life was extremely difficult to adapt to for a 10 year old boy. In the challenge of recovery, I literally had to relearn how to walk. I went from a hospital bed to a wheelchair to a walker, and finally, to upright walking without any support. Transferring from a bed to a wheelchair, which I had to do whenever I needed to use the bathroom in private, was extremely painful with a badly broken leg and skin graph. Although the challenge of recovering from my injury was difficult, I will never wish my life had taken a different course. The experience was an epiphany for me. Then, I learned some things about life that other children didn't learn till years later or maybe still never have learned. I became more independent, perhaps because I was extremely dependent during my recovery. The entire experience humbled me greatly, and at times, I can be apathetic but mostly appreciative of life for almost no longer having one. To successfully accomplish the challenge of recovery, it was as if I had to completely rebuild all my beliefs, morals, and philosophies: I could no longer be the innocent ignorant child and continue to think with the "why me?" attitude. I had to have the, almost bitter, stoic, attitude of "it happens." To this day, I don't wish my life had taken a different course. The challenge of recovery I had to go through made me the person I am today and I'm content with that. Here is something I wrote 10 years ago when I was writing regularly. It's really starting to hit home again. It's time to pick up an old habit and therapeutic tool. The paper, alone, in canvas form,
Is where thoughts and ideas are born; Where revolutions happen within words themselves. It's my aid and my coherence's biggest help. In my absence, The paper seeks lead scent of weeks. In my rage, The paper cries of its new shape in which it is tweaked. The paper admires what truth is wrote, And laughs when lies are cynically spoke. Yes, The paper hears and the paper sees. The paper is lonely when I withhold from it; My conscience knows of its abandonment. What I hide in speak and refuse to show, The paper will always later know. The paper is troubled because I am too. I hear it when gone, "I miss you." I previously wrote about a Half Adder circuit and how to design one. Now, it's time to explain how to design a Full Adder Circuit that is similar to the Half Adder circuit except that it also considers a carry bit coming in for the addition operation. To design a Full Adder circuit, we first have to create a truth table that shows what the outputs should be given the different input possibilities. Here is what that truth table should look like: With this truth table, we then have to generate an SOP (sum of products) expression for each output (If not familiar with SOP expressions, it's basically an expression in boolean algebra in which different products are summed together. Simply put, it's an expression that says what the inputs are when we have our desired output). After creating the SOP expressions, we can create K-Maps to simplify the expressions easily or use boolean algebra rules to simplify the expressions. The SOP expressions derived from this truth table for the Sum and Carry out outputs are below: Below are the K-Maps for each For the Carry out bit K-Map, we can find 3 groupings of 2 to simplify our SOP expression to AB + AC + BC; however, for the the Sum K-Map, there are no possible groupings so we have to use Boolean algebra to simplify Now that we have both expressions simplified, we can use logic gates to create the circuit. This is what it looks like: Here is the circuit again but with switches showing the addition process Now, when there is a carry bit coming in, the highest possible Sum is 3 which is 11(read one one NOT eleven) in Binary. This is significant because it allows us to keep the HIGH output in the Sum position and have a HIGH carry out which is necessary for accurately adding binary numbers greater than 1. It will allow us to string Full Adders together to create multi-bit parallel adders with the Carry in bits being the Carry out bits from the previous Full Adder in the circuit. I'll cover how we can use the Full Adder circuit to do exactly that and make a 5-bit parallel adder that will add two separate 5-bit numbers together.
A Half Adder circuit is a circuit that can add two input signals and produce a HIGH sum output if only one of the two input signals is HIGH or produce a LOW sum output and a HIGH carry output if both input signals are HIGH. If both signals are LOW, both the sum and carry output will remain LOW. Simply put, a Half Adder circuit performs addition in Base 2 or Binary. This is what the truth table for a half adder circuit looks like: By looking at the truth table, it is easy to see that the SUM output is only HIGH when one of the two inputs is exclusively HIGH, meaning one or the other. That means that operation can be performed by using an XOR gate. For the carry bit output, it is only HIGH when both inputs are HIGH which function can easily be produced with just an AND gate. This is what that circuit looks like: And on the breadboard One thing that isn't considered in a Half Adder circuit, is a carry bit coming in. To consider a carry coming in, an entirely different circuit would need to be built. That circuit is called a Full Adder.
Do you see her? The little kitten nearly camouflaged with the tree. That is Spike. She's about 5 months old now. She was the neighbors kitten that has kind of become my own. She sleeps inside with me but spends most of the day outside. I walk into the backyard for some air and a stretch only to catch her at the very moment she is sprinting towards the fence but then suddenly shifts her direction towards the tree before climbing up it. It was so beautiful of a moment because I could see how much fun it was to her. It was completely improvised. It reminded me of what it was like when I was a kid at a playground and nothing else mattered but having fun.
Now, as an adult with responsibilities, relationships, work, and school, I have to remember to have fun. It's easy to forget that and to always be in a state of stress or worry instead. The time in between when I was that kid and now seems almost non-existent; I barely remember anything. It all happened so fast. Soon, I will be saying the same of the time in between this post and when I am an old man. I don't want to regret that I didn't enjoy myself in the interim. So thanks for the reminder Spike! Here are a few more pictures of this little teacher. For assignment number 4 in my advanced java programming class, we had to create a Java class that is used to write individual bits to a file or a string of bits to a file. The difficulty in doing this, is that the smallest data set that Java can write or work with, is a byte which is 8 bits. This confused me at first as to how I was going to accomplish this but it became clear to me the more I thought about it. One thing Java can do, is shift the bits in a variable, or for what I was working with, a byte. So it became clear, if I just iterate through the string of bits and write the numeric equivalent of the char bit (either 0 or 1 char data type in Java) to a byte, shift the bits left each iteration, and OR the byte as is with the byte representation of "1" which is 0000 0001, this would add a "1" bit to my byte. If adding a "0" bit, all I needed to do was shift the bits left. By keeping a counter of how many times I have shifted bits left, I can control when I have added 8 bits and write to the file at that point and reset the byte and counter back to 0. Simple. For convenience, I printed to the console the bits that I was writing to the file to compare them with what was actually written and what was requested in the assignment instructions. Using a HEX editor with the file I wrote, I could see each individual byte that was written and the bits that composed them to compare to see if they were correct. They were.
Overall, it was an interesting assignment and a good start to working with data at the bit level. I'll have to play with manipulating, reading, and writing bits more to become proficient at working with data at the bit level because this was just a simple assignment. |