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.
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.