Spring/Summer 2021 Chronicles: Week 1

On Thursday at 6:12 PM, I finished my IT 567 (Cyber Security and Penetration Testing) final and concluded the Winter 2021 semester! 

It was a weird semester. I started it off violently ill with stomach flu -- I was in so much physical pain that I actually thought I was going to die at one point, lol. After that, I dealt with some major brain fog for a few days (felt like I was living in a dream), and could hardly focus on anything. After recovering, I tried to catch up in CS 513, Robust Control, and quickly realized that despite my math minor, I was not ready for the class. Multi-page proofs with differential equations inside of calculus problems, holy heck. So, I withdrew from the course (first time I've ever had to do that) and instead focused on IT 567 and CS 456 (User Interface Software), while working at BYU ASG part-time and beginning the HackEDU certification. 

I plan on taking CS 513 (for real this time) in winter of 2022, or -- worst-case scenario -- winter of 2023. Whenever I have finished powering through all the prerequisites on MIT OCW. Which, hopefully, will be sooner as opposed to later. 

This semester, I learned a ton about Dart, Flutter, 2D geometric math for widget design, and UX design principles such as the gulfs of execution and evaluation. I also learned about Kali Linux, Nessus and Greenbone vulnerability scanning, hacking in Metasploit, password cracking in nCrack/hashcat (especially the excellent hashcat toggle rule attack)/John the Ripper, writing malware, writing a port scanner, and the penetration testing process in general. Furthermore, I worked on Stowaway and learned about pyrotechnic and fracture simulations, though I need to do a lot more work on the film next semester if I hope to develop a solid demo reel. 

Overall, despite the rocky start and absolutely brutal conclusion, it ended up being a pretty good semester. 

I began my "summer" (let's be real, it is still very much spring) on Thursday night, doing taxes, aw yiss! It sucked and it was boring and I hated it and now TurboTax is taking up valuable SSD space on my PC build. But at least I get more money. On Friday, I slept in, did a nice workout, and did a half-day at work. I debugged some issues with Angular material tables, and then we went to CPK. Saturday was Lagoon and Texas Roadhouse. And today, I slept in, reorganized my life, set some pretty lofty goals, barely squeezed into my church clothes and consequently decided to actually get serious about not eating like absolute freaking garbage, went to Riverwoods for a bit, and overall just took it easy. 

And the cherry blossoms have been beautiful lately. 



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