Zac's Portfolio | Just a place to put my stuff!

Back to University again, and taking some very interesting courses. Currently I am taking Physics 121, Calculus 121 and Computer Science 160 and I’m attending school every week day. It’s great to be back doing what I like.

Physics is going great, I have learnt some good tips for both theoretical and practical parts of the course. Right now we are covering Classic Mechanics, such as Motion concepts, and getting into Force concepts.

I’ve taken Calculus before and this time I am striving to surpass my goals from last year before the strike at VIU. Back in March 2011 I had gone on a week long trip to Cuba for a Wedding and vacation. On my return a Strike was initiated only a few days after and the strike lasted to long for me to catch up and maintain a great looking grade. At the time it looked like dropping out of the course was the best choice, as there were no penalties for doing so. With the knowledge I’ve obtained last Spring and the review I will get this year, I should be able to increasing my grades by a good portion.

The programming language that I am learning in Computer Science is C++ and I have a little experience in it from high school and personal studies. I am hoping that there are no tricky parts this year as I am working ahead as much as possible to make room for my other courses. Also, to compliment my educational path that University is leading me, I am trying to parallel the projects in Computer Science with JavaScript to. I am hoping to learn the differences and similarities between each language so that I am able to adapt my personal projects to a certain languages that may be needed for specific tasks.

I am still digging away at the Cyclotron Project along side my schooling, it has been very educational to bring some unknown into a project. Last week I had some time to clean some of the equipment that the project encompasses, and doing so I found some issues to be addressed. As of now, there are still some pieces that need to looked into, mostly to do with the vacuum rigging.

In essence everything is going great, and the future looks bright.

In the beginning of 2011 I was introduced to an idea, with a small team of engineering enthusiasts including Matt Vanosch, Owen Peer and myself The idea was to engage ourselves in a long term project to build a cyclotron. We had to come up with a game plan to complete this, we started by breaking it down into some simple stages first. This was a completely new project to accomplish for the most part, so we declared the first stage of the project “Understanding the Cyclotron”. This is the stage we currently are working on, and we have little time until we need to start making progress on our next stages. The next stage is the “Design” stage, once we understand what we need to do, we will need to plan how we are going to attempt to build it, How its going to work and will it be safe? There is a lot of work in the second stage, anticipating every outcome and fallback will be challenging. Once the design has gone through our own process of refinement, we will ask for assistance critiquing it further, until it is deemed safe to proceed.