Wek 1 - Introduction Blog Post

 Welcome!

Hello and Welcome to my blogging page. Here you will find weekly posts discussing whatever course content I found to be interesting to me or that I would like to apply my own understanding of. I have blogged before but in terms of doing different blogs for IT-related work, I am new to the space. 

Before I get into any networking information, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jaden but you can also call me Jay if you would like. One thing that I enjoy doing is working on my computer to see if I can make small optimizations to get performance improvements. To accomplish this, I sometimes do something small such as applying an overclock on my components all the way up to making changes in the UEFI (Bios) to see if that makes a difference. I say this to say I enjoy tinkering with my components to see if it makes any sort of improvement. I will admit, that sometimes some changes are perhaps placebo. But, if it still feels like a positive change and doesn't create instability why not? I primarily do this for you guessed it...gaming! I really enjoy playing games with first-person shooters being the main games I play on my PC. I also play other genres of games as well such as multiplayer horror games and single-player games (such as The Last of Us). When I am not gaming, I am usually working my retail job, hanging out with family and or friends, and or watching different types of content. With the content being YouTube, Twitch, or shows from streaming platforms such as Hulu and Netflix. One particular interest I have are in gaming mice. I enjoy purchasing them to see which one not only may help improve my performance in games but to see which one is comfortable. I like to think of them as toys almost. At this point, I have worked on about 6 computer builds to date and occasionally like to upgrade parts of my PC. Recently, I decided to upgrade my GPU to test out a Radeon GPU. 

Now, if I move into the specifics of networking I don't have much experience. Although, I have done a few things to my PC to see if it would help increase my network speed in certain instances. One of the tweaks I tried a long time ago was to try and apply a DNS to my adapter settings to see if that would make internet productivity slightly more responsive and faster. I used the Google DNS for this. In my experience, it can help on systems that may have lower-end network connections. While it certainly does help, it hasn't made too much of a difference on my current network. I will say in the past, I have noticed that it has helped with improving ping on certain games such as Minecraft. That being said, DNS connections can certainly be beneficial to use. What exactly is a DNS? DNS stands for Domain Name System. A DNS server holds public IP addresses that are used to connect computers to websites. Domain names of websites use the Internet Protocol or IP address to establish the connection. When researching, I found the comparison to be made to that of an internet phonebook. This way you can quickly "call" upon a connection with the actual IP address (which has variables). A random example of what an IP address would look like would be something like this. 109.145.258.96.A DNS server essentially makes it much easier for the computer to route to the actual IP address without having to actually memorize the server. This is why changing your DNS settings to a Google DNS (such as 8.8.8.8). If you haven't already tried it, I suggest you try it and give it a go.