Of GPR's and Soul Destroying

Not posted in a while so allow me to summarize what I have been up to. Not a huge amount. This week kicked off with the placement briefings for the second years here at SM. That's going ok, after doing the myBU inductions at the start of the year it's a piece of pie now. Plus it takes me like two minutes to do.

However I have received a little criticism from two people who shall remain nameless in case an angry mob decides to hunt them down. I've been told that I wasn't positive enough. See, it's hard to be positive about things when you know that it's not going to get used a lot. I mean, I take pride in all my work, even this. But it was incredibly easy to set up, easy to populate and now I know, because I hate myBU too, that hardly any of the students are going to use it simply because they won't think they need it. They have the hard copies of everything and even if they lose them they will only go hunting for another copy if they think they need to.

So how can I be positive? At the end of the day, I'm showing them it's their and making them aware just in case.

Other than that barrel of laughs I've been playing with another large barrel of laughs, dissertations. I've been given a little stack to go through (electronic versions) and take out all the pictures, etc that haven't been sourced properly or aren't needed. Soul Destroying. And just crap to be honest. I'm an IT student, not a typing monkey. If I knew that I didn't have to do it I wouldn't. But we need to keep our jobs don't we? Still it's not taking me too long to do them and I only have a few left, though those few are PDF's so I'm having to convert them to DOC's first. Honestly, why can't it be specified to hand in in both formates? Bah.

Finally, Half Life 2 is awesome. It's taken me a long time to play it (3 years...) but I have finally bought it and wow. It's completely amazing. I think it's an almost perfect game. The graphics are spot on, the physics are amazing. Voice acting is good. And the episodic releases after the main game is a brilliant idea. It's only of those games where you need to know what happens after the main game ends. We can only hope (and pray, we have to pray) that Ep.3 comes out fairly soon!

Then of course we will be waiting over half a decade for HL3 of course... hahaha.

Btw, if you don't get GPR it stands for Gordon Propelled Rocket. It's an achievement in HL2:Ep2.

Of Future and Work

Good news, found out yesterday that I've had my contract extended until the 31st of August! Which is good, plenty of money over the summer which hopefully means I shall be able to put some money aside to fix my car and go on holiday. I need a holiday.

If I hadn't of gotten the extension then my placement would have finished on the 16th of May. 40 weeks has gone so so quick. Just can't believe it. Ah well, at least they like me enough to keep me on. Hopefully I can play my cards right and get a part timer here next year as well. Then I can avoid places like Tesco and no offence to any one who works there, I already have, and I will not be going back!

The placement site has gone very well. It's pretty much finished now, if not finished. Just a couple of tweaks and rewording here and there. First placement briefing next Tuesday with students so that should be fun. I can show them exactly how useless it is. Nah, it should be fairly useful and if I'm honest I wish DEC had something like it for us. But never mind eh.

Anyways, thought I'd share the good news with the bouncers that come on this site because of my misleading tags and Google's amazing ability to put me on page one of a search.

Of Road Rage and Disappointment

Wasn't even 9am when the excitement of today started! I was sat at the head of some traffic at a junction this morning, got a little room in front of me to roll into the road I was joining. So fat man in the passenger seat of his Mrs's car has noticed this, gets her to beep at me and then starts flapping around at me trying to get me to go forwards. I don't take well to suffocating walrus's flapping around at me so I middle fingered them. She just sort of ignores it and rolls her eyes, but he sticks his thumbs up at me then decides to get out the car. Comes storming up to my passenger side only to find me smug in my knowledge that I have central locking. At which point he starts kicking my car and I roll away smoothly. All in all, I wish I had gotten their bloody license plate and I would now be taking it to the cops and also posting it on here. Still, never mind. No harm done though I really hope he hurt his foot. At least he will have used a few extra calories today.

Now with some disappointment, talking to Andy yesterday it looks like I won't be able to help him with this web project he's looking at getting. Because it would be too much work along side my dissertation. Which sucks big time, guess it's back to the drawing board! Luckily I did come up with a title and little idea for a dissertation, The Impact of Web 2.0 on E-Learning. Dibs by the way. I like that title, it sounds... like I know what I might be talking about...

Of Geotagging and and Maps

Andy and I have been talking about a large bid he is trying to get on to at the moment and it sounds like a bloody good project. Basically it will be a large website with maps of Bournemouth and a timeline. Thus you will be able to go back into different parts of Bournemouth's timeline and view all sorts of different things. We've been discussing how we could implement everything and what directions it could take.

We started off with the idea of a pretty large website that is constructed modularly with user accounts for putting in data, etc. Then we came up with the idea of using Flickr as an image deposit with a central account and then lots of smaller accounts for different schools and individuals to join and add to the image library. From that we could then get Microsoft involved and use PhotoSynth to build points of interest such as Bournemouth Pier. As another way of getting Microsoft involved we thought about using Deep Zoom to hold all the images that get collected about Bournemouth. Expanding upon the PhotoSynth idea we thought that you could have different photo sets from different time periods so you could see what different land marks looked like back through the ages.

From there we thought about getting local schools involved and having them start taking photos but also getting them to geotag the photos as we can pin them to the maps.
Thus it all starts to come together as a community project. Also by bringing in Microsoft and using their software we take down cost and time and also bring up the support level. Microsoft of course then get lots of advertising and a bloody good showcase for different bits and bobs, everybody wins.

I of course hopes he gets the bid because then he could employ me and help him with the research and I get something fantastic to do my dissertation on. Andy wants to take me along to a meeting about the bid on Monday to talk about everything we've discussed today and pitch it to the others in his team. I think they will agree with it, it's damn good as as long as it's built on a solid, modular framework it will be easily expandable and we can sell it on to other cities to do for themselves. If enough people take it on it would eventually become a huge, geotagged historic record of the country.

Of Models and Snow

Finally my 3D model of a hair dressers is almost complete. Just got some texturing to do. It's so easy to do it all in Sketchup. Absolutely love it. Once it's complete I'm not sure it will have a use but it will have been a good exercise. Though hopefully I'll be able to find a way to use it, maybe not as as interactive model but certainly as a show piece.

Also been doing some more tidying, etc on the placement site I've been working on. Gonna get some more work to do tomorrow, can't let me self have no work.... eh?

And finally, it's been snowing! I can't believe it! Snow in Bournemouth! HA! Though it's been odd weather for it. It's snowed pretty hard one minute then been warm and sunny the next, then snowed again. Odd. At the moment there's a light drizzel.

Oh and I've watched two amazing films recently. The Bucket List and The World's Fastest Indian. Two of the most beautiful films I've ever watched and I highly recommend them!

Of Derren Brown and The Same

This weekend I went to see Derren Brown's new live show. The only thing I can say is fantastic! It's utterly amazing to see him do it there in front of you. If you get the chance to see him I highly recommend it. I'd upload the photo I have of him signing my programme but it's a bad photo... of him. haha.

But seriously, go see the show, it's amazing!

Work wise, it's all much of the same. Getting the placement area ready for this years placement students. Going to start on the other areas that I've been asked to set up soon. And hell this is a short post! Enjoy!