Technology Tools

The only thing that I am really familiar with from the technology tools that we will be covering in class would be image editing. My experience with image editing is very basic as I have only really used paint and gimp to edit images. I really want to work on my website skills this semester because I would like to create my own website when I have a little more free time. I think that would be a very fun learning experience. This blogging experience is unlike one I have ever had before but I am very excited to try it out as it seems like a fun thing to start doing everyday.

 (Photo of Technology by skeeze)

Class Assignments

(Photo by the DoD)

I have to say the assignment that I am most intrigued by would be the reading as I am very interested in reading different stories covering different myths. I am also excited and nervous about storytelling as I think it would be something fun to do but I am afraid I will be terrible at it. I guess that is part of coming back to school.


The extra credit assignment that grabs my attention would be the Wikipedia Trails. My friends and I would play a tangentially similar game in middle school where we would start off at a random Wikipedia page and try to get to a different one using only links found in the page.

Growth Mindset

Growth Mindset Memes Blog

I have never heard of Carol Dweck or the growth mindset before. I first learned about it from your assignment. I will say however that what she said in her first video hit very close to home as I have experienced my classmates acting like that. I went to a “special” high school where you had to take a test to get in and everyone thought you were smart if you were in that school. The teachers would constantly praise us for the smallest things and constantly put down the kids at other schools where they did not have to take a test to get in. We were told that we were better than other kids and what we learned was way harder than what the regular kids learned.

What Carol said about kids being more focused on the A rather than learning was very true. A great deal of my classmates would rather cheat and get an A than actually learn the material if it meant they did not get that coveted A. There was also this mindset at my school that you were the smartest if you did not study for tests. There would always be this conversation after a test where people would say they did not study at all in order to seem smart. I found this topic very interesting and it makes me wonder if my classmates and I would have performed better if we were not given as much praise as we were and instead were told to focus and enjoy hard work.

Introduction to a Future Computer Engineer

My name is Adrian Phua and I am a computer engineering student at the University of Oklahoma. I (hopefully) will be graduating this spring at the end of this semester. I believe the coolest thing about my major is that we get to work with both computer programming and the electronics that goes to support it. The best class I took last semester was Digital Design Lab. It was my favorite because it really blended all the things we had learned in our major. We worked with both analog electronics as well as microcontrollers to create all sorts of cool projects. An example of one such cool project would be my memory game knock off.

(Image Information: Microcontroller Memory Game; photo from December 2017)

It would allow you to select a song and then it would play notes from the song for you to play back to it from a keypad. As you followed along the notes from the song would get longer until you were finally able to play the whole song from memory. Then if you lasted that long the computer would play the song back to you as a reward. Other than working at my internship all break the only real exciting thing I got to do was go to my friend’s wedding in Colorado. It was really nice seeing them so happy together. This is a photo my friends and I took together while getting ready for the wedding.

(Image information: My friends and I getting ready for the wedding; photo from January 2018)

I really like watching movies and I own a moviepass which has allowed me to see every single movie in theaters. So I probably have seen any recent movie you can think of. My long time career goals are to eventually work for a civilian space company and put something that I worked on in space. Whether it be a microcontroller helping to flush a space toilet or a computer program that allows astronauts to phone home. My current hobbies when I am not being lazy are either training for long distance races (like marathons) or trying new recipes to cook.

Indian Storybook Favorites

Hogwarts: The Loyalty of Brothers

(Harry, Hermione and Ron. The three main characters from Harry Potter.)

The topic of Harry Potter is something I know a great deal about as I grew up reading the books and watching the movies. The title definitely gave me a good description of what the story would be about as that is what drew me into reading the story. The introduction was very good as it was written in the style of Harry Potter but had a new twist on the story by adding some Indian characters and swapping them in for some of the original Harry Potter characters such as the heads of the four houses as well as the main antagonist. I liked how the story pages were placed in the top right but I did not like the use of banner images as I do not like how you have to scroll to view the whole image as it makes it very hard to view.

Ganesha: The Elephant-Headed God

I have heard of Ganesha before as some of my family on my mother’s side are Hindu. All I knew from the story is that his head was chopped off and replaced with an elephant’s head and that is why he looks like that. I was told that his head was cut off in battle and his father replaced it with whatever was near and that is why he has an elephant head. That is different than the story presented here but I guess with all these old myths there are always more than one story for how something came to be.

India Travel Journal

I really liked how this travel journal was written like a diary. The other storybooks I have read were basically just stories but this one was different in that it was written in journal entry form. This was nice as it was different from the rest and presented a unique way to absorb the story. I think the design was a bit lacking but I think if I combine some other designs I saw with the journal entry story form I think I could make a pretty cool storybook.

My Favorite Place: Kuching, Malaysia

Kuching, Malaysia

I picked Kuching as my favorite place because I grew up there as a little kid. The thing that I remember most about Kuching was that there were a lot of cats and cat statues.

(Kuching Cat Statue: Wikipedia Commons)

Up until I wrote this blog post I did not know why Kuching was known as the city of cats or why there were a bunch of cat statues littered around the city. You can see an example of this in the image I picked. After looking it up in Wikipedia it seems that there are several theories on why the city is named "Kuching" which translates to cat in Malay. One such theory speculates that when James Brooke a British traveler landed in Kuching he asked a local guide what the city was called. The guide misunderstood what he was asking and thought he was pointing at a cat and so he gave him the Malay word for cat which was "Kuching".

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