My dissertation deadline is set for the 11th of April. Currently leaving me 40 days to get what is essentially one of the most important thing I will ever write. Looking at it in a matter of days rather than a date on the calender encourages me, via the use of fear to keep working on it.
I spent most of yesterday and this morning sitting on my bed surrounded by books and journals with yellow sticky notes and a pen reading through and marking the content I want to use within my report. I need to ensure I have enough material to fill 10,000 words of quality writing. The problem is writing has never been my strong point. My mind draws a blank every time it comes to writing a report and a struggle to product the content into a report format.
I think this is why programming is my strength. I can see the logic within programming and it's methods but writing has no measurable objective or output. Writing is something that can only be measured by another human and that is only by matter of opinion.
This is what I find hard to grasp at university. I am judged on my writing ability and not on my technical skill which is far greater than any report I can write. We are bought up to work as academics writing reports and documenting everything we do. Yet in industry the aim is to get the job done. Most of the time no one cares how you get something done as long as it's done. I don't see anyone asking Facebook for a report on how they built it before they get paid.
The way I see university at the moment is a piece of paper that will help open doors for me but my technical ability (and charm) will be the thing that gets me through them.
Hopefully in years to come a more vocational style of education will be implemented, allowing people to get merit for what they can do rather than for writing a report.
The past week has been completely hectic with being in the middle of a new website build in conjunction with nzime, on the new Beowulf Racing website. With nzimes fancy design work it was up to me to build the functionality of the site allowing the Beowulf Racing team to update the site as the information comes in.
The blog system is a custom build with permanent URLs using the title as the URL, increasing the pages search rank. On the home page the headlines are pulled from 2 RSS feeds on motorcycle news the 2 top entries are from the British Superbike feed and the 2 bottom entries are pulled from the World Superbike feed keeping the site with up to date information.
The main challenge of this build was the custom built gallery I wrote specifically for this website. It allows creation of multiple galleries and with the use of Imagemagick, automatically resizes and create thumbnails of each of the uploaded gallery images.
The final main piece of functionality for this project was the YouTube videos that are displayed on the home page and videos page. These are automatically updated via the YouTube user RSS feed allowing easy video management via YouTube.
On another note I decided to install VMWare Fusion. The few times I have rebooted into windows it made me feel dirty and I just wanted to be back within the haven that is OS10.5. I am currently trying out the 30 day trial and so far I am very happy. Installation was extremely easy the one roadblock I encountered was that my windows installation on my bootcamp drive had corrupt and required me to restore my last known working configuration (which took all of 30 seconds). Most of the time I have windows running in Unity that allows me to run Windows application within the OSX interface. They don't look as pretty as all Mac windows but they work great non the less.
The current setup gives windows 1 processor and 512MB ram which is more than enough and I haven't even noticed any slowdown in OSX.
The rest of the week will need to be spent working on my Dissertation, Showcase and finishing work for clients so I don't get behind.
Lets face it few of us ever thought that the HD DVD would ever take off despite it having backing off some of the biggest names in the industry. Microsoft never really committed to the cause by not fitting the xbox360 with a HD DVD drive if this was the case I am pretty certain that HD DVD would have stood a chance.
Sony knew what mistake not to make after the embarrassment of Betamax and Minidisks. I have to cower and admit I did buy a sony mini disk player at the time and still have it sitting in some dark corner. If lived a short life.
One of the reasons Blu-Ray was always going to win is because of the Playstation 3 it's killing 2 birds with 1 stone. Just like the Playstation 2 being one of the main DVD playing devices of it's time and still is today.
When all of the studio that were backing HD DVD started to move over to Blu-Ray Toshiba finally realized it needed to cut its losses and that day was today.
Toshiba drops out of HD DVD war
I was a Blu-Ray supporter from the start but still wouldn't commit as I rarely invest in new technologies before they have been tried and tested for a few months/years. Also at the moment I am not in a position to invest in a Highdef TV and Blu-Ray player especially as my iMac is my main film watching resource. As soon as iTunes sorts out HD rentals for the UK I will have all the HD I need until I finish University.
So a farewell to HD DVD and long live Blu-Ray.
This morning I want to the doctors to get this 6 day headache checked out as I haven't been able to look at a screen properly for nearly a week now and it's starting to affect my University work and delaying work for clients which is something I don't like to happen. They said everything seemed ok and my blood pressure was fine (115 over 76) but I should get my eyesight checked.
Specsavers have me booked in for 4.35 hopefully I won't need glasses and still have 20/20 vision. But spending 10 hours or more a day staring at a screen can't be too healthy for them.
Hopefully I will be back to full working order soon and be able to get all my work out the way and into the portfolio (if I ever get time to update it).