holidays
I suppose I should blog that yes, I am finished all my exams and projects (at least for semester 1, 2009) and am on holidays! This means of course that all the things I haven’t had time for because of exams and projects take centre stage. We’ve been redecorating, good bye 1979 styling. I’ve also been working on some hiking gear, been to a football game in a stadium (my first) and general recovery from the stressful exam period. I don’t get my results till the 17th, so I’m just going to enjoy the holidays. (Ignorance is bliss, yes?)
Ah, holidays.
almost there!
So, I’m just about to head to bed after my last stint of studying. I’ve got an exam tomorrow, and after that I’m on holidays for about a month! (The exam is FIT2004, algorithms and data structures.)
I’m looking forward to the time off- we’re going to head up to Sydney for a friend’s wedding, and I’ve got some decorating and remodelling to do to my room. I’m excited about the colour scheme! I’ll definitely post some pictures to flickr and maybe blog about my experiences. This is the first time I’ve been allowed to paint my own room, so I should have lots of fun!
As a side note, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.8 without a hitch.
study to do list
Here is the list of due things from a few weeks ago, with some modifications.
- Algorithms and Data Structures:
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Prac every other week requiring about 4 hours of work.One and a half to go! - Final Exam on the 16th of June (this is a little ways away, I’m not so concerned about it.)
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- Technical Documentation for Engineers:
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Assignment 4 due 15th May. -
Assignment 5 due 29th May. Almost complete! -
Final (Prac) exam 1st of June.
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- English, Children’s Literature:
Test on Friday (1st May). went well.
Artemis Fowland The Book Thief left to read.2,0002,500 word Essay due 5th of June.
- Spanish, Discourse Analysis:
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Tutorial every week requiring reading and proper preparation.No more to do! -
Oral presentation in the last few weeks.Did it today, was pretty happy with it. -
Test 21 May.Did really well! -
Final essay due 5th of June. ( Still to do. )
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So, I now only have 5 things to do before Friday next week (5th of June), and after this evening that will be 4…
Tech Docs assignment (pulling together and polishing only) Followed by a Tech Docs Exam, Followed by a Prac for Algorithms and Data Structures, then two essays. After that comes STATE YOUTH GAMES and then two weeks to study for my final exam.
who told you bed time stories?
I’m running a survey to roughly figure out who tells more bed time stories- Mums or Dads? It’s not a very good iron-clad survey, which finds out where you live, how old you are and other environmental factors that might affect the data, or help me to interpret the data, but I just want a rough idea so I can make an offhand comment to it in an English essay due soon.
So, please take this survey! Bed Time Story Survey. Tell your friends.
Moving!
So, this website is moving to a new server, thanks to the generosity of my host and all round good guy. This means that there might be some down time, but when the website is switched back on you will still be able to drop in to creativehedgehog.com for this blog. To make the move easier, I’ve switched off comments temporarily, so I don’t lose any in the move.
Your regular broadcast will resume shortly.
big scary due things
So, it’s week 8. Around this point you can count on one hand how many weeks are left till the end of semester (5) and the assignments are starting to loom on the horizon. I thought I’d write them down here so I can get my head around them all.
- Algorithms and Data Structures:
- Prac every other week requiring about 4 hours of work.
- Final Exam on the 16th of June (this is a little ways away, I’m not so concerned about it.)
- Technical Documentation for Engineers:
- Assignment 4 due 15th May.
- Assignment 5 due 29th May.
- Final (Prac) exam 1st of June.
- English, Children’s Literature:
-
Test on Friday (1st May).went well. - Artemis Fowl and The Book Thief left to read.
- 2,000 word Essay due 5th of June.
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- Spanish, Discourse Analysis:
- Tutorial every week requiring reading and proper preparation.
- Oral presentation in the last few weeks.
- Test 21 May.
- Final essay due 5th of June.
On top of this add Girls Brigade, family life + home renovations, and a social life… I’m going to be very busy!
So, Spanish-English-Algorithms-TechDocs-Algorithms-Spanish-English-TechDocs-Algorithms-Spanish-English-TechDocs-English-Spanish-TechDocs-English-Spanish-Algorithms looks like the general “work on this next” pattern.
I had a transport filled day today. I got a lift with my Dad (in my car) to the Railway Station, caught the train, then the bus to uni. Caught the bus to a different train station after uni, caught the train into Zone 1, got off, bought a ticket for Zone 1 (I have a month-long zone 2 ticket), caught the next train, attempted to catch a city loop train at Richmond Station. After the doors closed I realised I should have stayed on that train. Changed platforms and caught the next Flinders Street train. Changed at Flinders Street and caught the train to Melbourne Central. Met up with my family, rode in their car to dinner and home again. Wow!
If you’ve read down this far, my host is changing server set-up, so this is advance notice that I will soon be locking down this site in preparation for the transition. I’ll post again to inform everyone.
blooding #5
I just got back from giving blood for the fifth time, after a break of over a year (due to travel). It was just about the same as usual, I had to wait a long time in the chair (stuck, elevated and my arm in the blood pressure cuff) while they sorted out my paper work. I didn’t feel faint this time, which is a plus. On to the stats!
- Amount: 470mL
- Blood Pressure: 116/77
- Haemoglobin: 13.9 (down, grr.)
- Time elapsed: 10 minutes 50 seconds.
So why not? Give Blood.
technology in the midst of busyness
A tech-centered society is what we are supposed to be living in. When I’m on holidays I can see this as I wander the internet, play with different technologies and stay connected with my friends. When I’m at uni, it’s a different sort of interaction I have with technology, possibly because I don’t have the time to dabble, I just have to go with what is useful.
To travel to my university I drive, and then catch a train and a bus. Technology is obviously there, in the ticket validators and the website I use to check what train I need to catch. Sometimes I take my computer along, sometimes not. I take my notes in real paper notebooks, with a big margin for keywords. I have to remind myself to go back over the notes and fill in these keywords regularly. My lectures are recorded, and I can download them after the fact, along with the slides from half my subjects: the IT ones. This is handy for when the computer based scheduling system has given me a clash of a lecture and a tutorial: my computer downloads the missed lectures as a podcast. I put them on my iPod, but it’s handy to have the pdf of the slides to look at as well.
When I’m not in a lecture, I could be in a tutorial or a practical (also known as a lab.) I don’t tend to use my laptop in the tutorials, but it can be handy in the pracs, even though we have access to the lab computers. It’s nice to be able to do work at home- or at uni as the case may be.
My laptop is a fantastic weapon for productivity, but of course it’s a double edged sword. I use email a lot to communicate with my friends, professors and fellow students, and other things I’m involved in. I use the moodle websites for my course, but email is a big way that I stay in touch with what’s going on. Of course, there is also twitter, which I use to update my friends (and adoring public) on what I’m doing while on the run. I text twitter probably as much as I text any of the other people I send text messages to. Facebook and msn/gtalk/chat are purely social tools.
I usually have a quick glance at the news headlines, but don’t spend time getting absorbed in information. I have a (free) newspaper subscription (was included in something else I bought) but I don’t read that front to back either. It’s The Australian, not The Age (other option was Herald Sun, the age wasn’t an option) so that might be partly why.
My hobbies are still my website, photography and hammocks, but I don’t have a huge amount of time to commit to those as I have a pretty heavy work load with pracs and tutorials every week, all of which require prior preparation. (Besides assignments.) I’m not swamped, but I don’t have a lot of time for fun projects, or to get involved in technology.
potential visitor increase
Dear Stephen Conroy,
I read today in The Age that you are planning to start monitoring blogs as part of a new “media monitoring strategy”. You particularly mentioned Whirlpool, a site that has been critical of your proposed “Clean Feed Internet Filter” (as I have been.)
As a blogger, I’d love to know that what I write about has a wide audience. If your proposed monitoring does indeed spread its net wide over the internet, (though I would question whether this is effective use of tax payer funds) you may well be visiting this website. This would be a boost to my visitor count, which of course is the goal of most websites. (Isn’t it?). I encourage you to read around- maybe you would be interested in a List of the 13 dwarves in The Hobbit? (one of my more popular articles.) Or perhaps, you could introduce bean bag skills for those rowdy back benchers.
Sincerely yours,
titanium_geek
No, I wasn’t game enough to send this to Minister Conroy directly!
sharing photos
I like photography. I like sharing my photography- I guess it’s “showing off”- but hey, it’s fun. This is my process for getting pictures from the camera to the web.
- Take photos. I have a Panasonic DMC TZ3, but sometimes I borrow my parent’s DSLR.
- Transfer photos to computer via usb cable- I just copy the images to a folder in my “Pictures” folder.
- I name the folder something like 2009March18dump – this doesn’t give me full organization by date, but I can tell when the folder is rather than something like 20090318dump. Sometimes I give the folder an event name, if a lot of photos belong to that event. Usually I have lots of things mixed in.
- I now eject my camera and put it away. I go through the folder of images, sorting them into event folders, and/or picking out the good ones. (I usually make a folder called “gooduns”).
- At this point I might mess around with some photos in seashore or the gimp, (image programs) but not always.
- Now, I have either photos of people I want to put on facebook, or photos of a sunset, landscape, or of something interesting to put on flickr. I make a folder called either “small” or “flickrable” or “thumbs” (etc) and copy the good photos into that folder.
- The next step is to open up the terminal, and cd Pictures/2009March18/gooduns/small. Then, I run the mogrify command from imageMagick, like this: mogrify -resize 20% *.JPG. This resizes the images to a size that is more friendly for the internet.
- From here, I open up flickruploadr, and open up that folder. I can batch tag images, and add descriptions, set privacy permissions as well as rotate images. Once I’m happy, I hit “upload” and away they go to the flickr website. (Or, use the facebook website to upload photos.)
- I can always tweak names, permissions etc at the flickr website. Then I share the most recent upload on twitter.
So why not use iPhoto? I don’t like the labyrinthine ways that it uses to organize photos- I like to be able to find my photos without having to rely on another program. Sure, iPhoto can upload images to flickr, resize images and categorize them. I prefer a manual gear box to an automatic one when driving, I prefer to have the fine grained manual control over my photos. What about you? what’s your photo processing process? Am I wrong about iPhoto? Let me know by leaving a comment!