I am currently back in Nottingham sitting at my desk in front of the trusty iMac listening to Coldplays album X & Y. The seat I am sitting in has started to shape itself into the shape of my rear, due to the huge amounts of time I have been spending sitting here over the past few weeks.
I am at full speed heading towards the most important deadlines in my life to date. My dissertation is due in 10 days from now. As this is the case it's the one piece of work I have the least motivation to do. When it comes down to it I am a systems/web developer not an academic report writer. Where some people will get their greatest marks through their dissertation mine will be from my final showcase project. Well even that is marked via it's report. My aim is to get my dissertation finished by the end of this week which will allow me 6 days to treble check everything and get it printed/bound.
Meanwhile I need to keep development up on the new e-commerce system I am building for my final year project. I finally have the foundations of the system built in full OOPHP5 using many of the techniques I have absorbed over the past few months. Over the last week I have started to implement the functionality I have built into the display pages. For this project I have a deadline of the 1st May with the live date on the site being the 5th May.
Once all of the deadlines are out the way I will be glad to have a few days with nothing to worry about. Then move onto job hunting as an unemployed summer isn't an option I am willing to take this year. I also have had enough of the whole education process I will be glad to get into full time work.
Google is the gateway to the internet for most of the Internet enabled population. They started off in a garage and now dominate the internet market in pretty much every way you can think of.
Whilst doing my usual daily news searching I came across this this interesting article that gives you a tour of Googles office in Zurich.
After watching the video it makes you realise how a business should be run and how looking after your staff will in turn increase your profit margin in the long run. Google is up there on the success list with Microsoft being it's main competitor.
Google have managed to get it right though especially on the PR side. People love Google it is seen as the good guy in the big nasty world of corporations. The reason I see Google as a squeaky clean company is down to how it makes it's money and what it does with it.
Google takes money of these companies and uses it to help the little people (us users). It's a sad state of affairs how most of us wouldn't know what to do if Google had an outage. The internet would grind to a halt as no one would be able to find anything. I also am a victim of lazy internet use. Rather than type in a web address I use Google and click on I'm feeling lucky or click on the website I am going to.
They are currently theory's going round that Google is taking over the internet and personally I don't mind as long as they carry on with the same business model and aims as they have now.
Lets face is Google pretty much already is the internet.
On another note on my last redesign I built this site to be more search engine friendly with the aim to climb the natural Google ranks. I can now happily say I am on the first page for John Knowles. My next battle is for the top spot and I will keep you posted on how it goes.
Google really know how to make an office
I have been spending most of my time recently working on my dissertation with very little time for anything else at the moment. Spending 12+ hours a day sitting at a screen starts to get to you if your constantly working on the same thing. This is where YouTube has been my saviour. I have been on a trip down memory lane looking for adverts that have left a lasting impression on me over the years and three of them deserve some air time on my lowly blog .
The most memorable advert in my mind is the Cadbury's Gorilla advert which hit the world by storm. This marketing campaign started off playing the full advert but then as with most adverts ran a cut down version a while after release. But due to demand the full advert are ran again much to the delight of the viewing public. It still baffles me why they didn't run a full campaign with the glass and a half full productions setup.
The next advert that sticks in my mind is an advert by Honda that was run a few years ago with parts from a car setup to cause a chain reaction (like a line of dominoes). There was a lot of hype about this advert whilst it was run mainly down to the fact minimal CGI was used.
Another advert that was pure genius and respected due to the epic proportions gone to, to make this advert. The Sony Bravia Jose Gonzalez - Heartbeats advert was a classic that will go down in history. Something like 250,000 bouncy balls were used for this advert down a street in San Fransisco.
They also released a video showing he making of this advert
There are many other adverts out there that should be featured but in my mind these are the three that leave a lasting memory.
After posting this blog a few more adverts that deserve a spot came to mind:
A few of the Coca Cola Adverts:
Also the Dove Evolution of beauty advert is brilliant how it shows the distortion of our perception of beauty.