Winter-een-mas Celebrations!

Well another Winter-een-mas has come and passed at Pacific. But hopefully it did not go unnoticed! In an effort to celebrate Winter-een-mas (The holiday for video games and those who celebrate them), a series of 7 events were held (1 for each day of the Holiday). Students were encouraged to celebrate some of these on their own and with their friends. Here is a list of all the themed days:

Tuesday: Console Gaming Day

Gather around a console and play a co-op game or go head to head with a friend.

Wednesday: Hand-Held Console Day

Break out your GameBoy, PSP, Smart-Phone or even your tablet and spread the word of gaming through a public display of rapid finger movement.

Thursday: Trading Card Day

Give you batteries a chance to charge and pull out your trading cards! This was best celebrated by ACM through our joint program with the Multicultural Center. ~35 people came out to learn/play Magic the Gathering and to have some discussions about the gaming culture and the effect it is having on society, college students, and personally.

Friday: Lazer Tag

ACM had its largest turn out to Lazer tag in a while. We all went to ZapsZone here in Stockton and got our physical work out trying to keep up with Dr. Cliburn.

Saturday: Table Top Gaming Day

Bust out some board games, or even some dice and play a round or two with your firends.

Sunday: Online Gaming Day

The easiest day to participate, you don't even need to leave your room. Jump onto your favorite online game and find some other Pacific students. (We set up chat channels so students could find and play with each other on Starcraft II, Heroes of Newert, and Steam)

Monday: Retro Gaming in the Lair

What started as a way to play some N-64 games in the Lair on the big screen projector, turned into a "Brawl" fest when we made the executive decision to switch things up. We had 60+ people play with us, 120+ spectators actively cheering for characters and debating the merits of Marth vs. Roy, and of course 500+ people actually see us playing in the lair wondering who the heck we were. All in all, lots of publicity, and good fun all around!

I hope you were able to celebrate Winter-een-mas in your own way, if not, you can always join our next network games to play some games and meet new people!

David Benefield

Former ACM President 2009-2010

Former ICPC Coordinator 2010 August-November

Farewell 2010, Welcome 2011!

Hello everyone!

Just wanted to make a quick post and wish everyone in Pacific ACM and in the Pacific Community a safe, healthy, and prosperous New Year!

Also, the pictures are finally up! The photos from the End of the Year Prank on the Computer Science Professors! Check them out using the link below:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/skerns557/sets/72157625712296802/with/5309213838/

All the best and see everyone in the New Year!
Shawn

Pacific ACM Hosts ICPC!

This past weekend on November 13th, the University of the Pacific ACM hosted the annual International Collegiate Programming Contest. This year 21 teams from all over California competed to be given the opportunity to travel to Egypt for the World Championships. Our own Pacific teams were among those in attendance for the event.

The John T. Chambers Technology Center proved to be an excellent location for the contest, boasting flexible work spaces and Gigabit Ethernet throughout. This years ICPC was truly a success.

I would like to take a moment to thank the many who worked with me to help put ICPC @ Pacific together this year. Dean Ravi Jain and Dr. Louise Stark for their assistance with the new building. Professor Mike Doherty for being an excellent site director. Pacific OIT and David Lundy for providing excellent network support and for working with us in a limited schedule. Pacific ACM officers for their hard work in helping me plan the event and gathering of food and resources. Theta Tau for supplying many helpers for the event. And the University of the Pacific School of Engineering and Computer Science (SOECS) for the tremendous amount of support and putting up with over 100 people in the Chambers Hallway! And many thanks to all those who helped out and took time out of your busy schedule to lend a hand!

And, while the contest was going on, I managed to grab a few photos!

And after the event, after cleanup and re-imaging the computers, ACM held it's first Official Unofficial LAN in CTC 114! Here are a few photos to prove and show what fun it was!

If you have photos of ICPC or the Post ICPC LAN, please send them to myself or Professor Doherty.

Thanks again to everyone for their help and congratulations to our three teams!

Shawn Kerns
ACM President

Update! Finally...

Hello Pacific ACM! and our Alumni!

It has been a while since the blog has had a new post and it was about time to make a new one! This is mainly an information post to let you know about the events coming up and a little more about next semester.

To start off, the University of the Pacific is hosting the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) in the brand new John T. Chambers Technology Center! This year, the event is being run by Professor Mike Doherty and Shawn Kerns. The venue was a last minute change from last year's Raymond Great, but it should be a great way to break in the new building and show how big of an involvement Pacific ACM and Computer Science have in the University. If you are able to help out with logistics, please get in touch with either myself or an ACM officer immediately! The event will be on November 13th, 2010 from 8am to ??? Please join us in making it another successful ICPC year at Pacific!

Second, the annual ACM End of the Semester, aka the Winter Dinner has been set! We will be going to Valley Brew in Stockton on November 19th at around 6pm. If you are interested in attending, please RSVP using the poll on the right. Instructions: If you are attending, please vote 'YES' if not 'NO.' If you would like to bring a friend / additional person, please additionally vote the 'PLUS ONE' option. If you would like to bring two friends, please vote the 'PLUS TWO' option. If you are wanting to bring more than two additional, please contact an ACM member for further information. As always, this is a pay for your own meal event, but the costs are usually under $20. Please join us!

Lastly, the Retro Network Games is planned for November 20th, 2010 at 4pm in the Pine and Spruce rooms. This year, the network games is being run like an old school arcade tournament. There will be food and refreshments as well as all the classic arcade and console games of the past. This year, we have upped the console to the Playstation I. So anything prior to and including the Playstation I are welcome. There will also be DOS boxes setup as well as other fun activities. If you have a console, please bring it!

So there are the three major events for Pacific ACM over the coming weeks. Please join us for as many as you can and thank you again for your continued support in Pacific ACM!

Shawn Kerns
President - Pacific ACM

Review: HTC EVO 4G

Alright people, I know the review was supposed to be up last week, but honestly I did not feel that I could have given the HTC EVO 4G a proper review after only spending a week with it. As it stands, of all of the phones I have had in my possession this phone is the most impressive. The phone is a powerhouse, but it does have shortcomings as does any piece of technology. So alright now for the breakdown.

Hardware:

-4.3'' TFT LCD screen with 480x800 resolution

-1 GHz Snapdragon processor

-512MB of RAM

-8 Megapixel camera, and 1 megapixel front facing camera

-Runs on Sprints WiMax 4G network

So the hardware is incredibly impressive as far as specs go. The 4.3" screen offers ample space for anything from internet browsing, to watching movies. The pixel density may not be as high as the iPhone 4, however the screen is still very impressive. THe 1 GHz processor combined with the ample memory offers plenty of processing power for anything that you would want to be able to do with your phone. The phone handles 3D graphics fairly well, but when compared to phones like the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Captivate the graphics underwhelm. But that is not that the phone cannot handle 3D graphics, they just are not as shiny as you would come to expect from such an otherwise impressive phone. The 4G antenna offers some impressive speeds and you can definitely notice the bump in speed when compared to the 3G speeds.

Software

-Running Android 2.2, FROYO build

-Using the HTC SENSE

The user experience here is the same as it has been for a while now. The normal Sense UI here is all you get and if you are a fan for it you will fall in love with it. The processor makes this the best HTC Sense experience that I have ever had, and I have tried plenty of other versions of HTC Sense. FROYO offers some nice features, like bluetooth searching, dialing and the works. The update also adds Adobe's mobile Flash. Flash works seamlessly on the phone but at the cost of a huge drain on battery. Honestly its something that you would only use, if you REALLY needed to view something in flash and could not wait until you got home. The phone also offers you a YouTube widget that allows for viewing high quality videos which is definitely something thats more useful than it seems at first. So one of the biggest things to come with this phone is the 4G mobile hotspot feature. This allows you turn your EVO 4G into a wireless hotspot, where up to 8 other devices can connect to it and use Sprint's very fast 4G network. The phone can give you about 3 hours of hotspot goodness of a full charge, which is very impressive.

Design

Well what can I say about the phone that pictures cannot show you all, its honestly one of the best looking phones on the market, hands down.

Here is the phone compared to the Motorola Droid (sorry guys did not know anyone with a Droid 2 would have made for a better comparison), as you can see the phone is large but still very thin.

One of the coolest things about the design of this phone is this kickstand on its back. This seems like one of those features where everyone says, "What am I ever going to use this?" The fact of the matter is that the kickstand allows your phone to become a small screen to watch your movies or TV shows. I found the two times I used the kickstand the most was when I was listening to music while doing homework, right in front of me I could see which song was playing and could change songs without actually having to pick up the phone. The second use for the stand that I found was to use it as an alarm clock. You can get a desk app that acts like an alarm clock with weather information and your twitter and Facebook profiles, this was very useful especially when you do not have a normal alarm clock on hand.

Final Verdict

The phone is awesome, it is a powerhouse and offers some very nice features. The graphics may put some people off, but honestly the quality is there the graphics are just not as smooth as they could be. The battery life on the phone is impressive, but it still falls into the same pitfalls as all smart phones, you are going to have to charge this one on a daily basis. Honestly a daily charge is definitely an easy price to pay for the amazing feature set you are getting with this phone. We definitely want to hear from you all about your thoughts and feelings about the phone. We will have another poll up soon so we can figure out what you guys want to us to review, also feel free to leave comments here for suggestions on things to review.

Hardware- 9.0

Software- 9.25

Design- 9.75

Overall Rating- 9.25 (Note: this is a rating of the phone, not an average of the three categories)

Next Week Special Presentation!

Just as a heads up. Professor Gao, Shawn Kerns, and Brett Little recently attended the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2010) in San Jose, California. During next week's meeting, they will be presenting a brief overview of the conference, the latest technologies, and other fun and enlightening information bits! Please plan to attend this meeting and see what High Performance Computing has to offer! There will also be a major announcement during the presentation from NVidia!

Shawn Michael Kerns
Pacific ACM President 2010

Pacific ACM presents: Network Games #1 Recap

This past weekend, September 18th to be exact, Pacific ACM held the first official Network Games of the Fall 2010 semester! The event was held in the University of the Pacific Mc Cafferey Center Pine and Spruce rooms. Attendance to this event was higher than average and attracted many new faces. We are pleased to see new faces and hope they will continue to join us for this venue.

Also, a very big thanks to Graham Heaton, Pacific ACM's current Event Coordinator, and David Benefield, Pacific ACM's current ICPC Coordinator for making this event a huge success!

Here are a few photos from the event:

Have more pictures from this event? Please send them to s_kerns@u.pacific.edu

Thank you all again for a great LAN and next one is in a few weeks!

Shawn Michael Kerns

Pacific ACM President 2010