Campaigning is not an easy task. At the moment, I’m campaigning to be elected one of three Student Trustees for the Students’ Union. Now I thought this wouldn’t be much work, comprising of printing off a few posters, getting some t-shirts done and generally having a great time plodding around campus canvassing for votes. But no!
As well as having multiple coursework deadlines looming, I also have a job interview, hustings (twice in a day) and what is left of a full day’s work on what is supposed to be my day off! At the same time, I am also trying to co-ordinate visits to the University’s other main campus, poster-sticking campaigns and handing out freebies.
I am lucky to have two capable campaign managers, an official spin doctor (!) and an enthusiastic group of individuals called “Team Ruben” ready to plaster the campus with large photos of my face, but there’s nothing like having the candidate there in person to interrogate. I don’t want to be someone who gets elected by proxy and then spends the next year shying away from the public. I want to be out and about around the people I will be representing to find out what they’re thinking and saying, which is why I’ve dedicated what is left of my free time for the next two weeks (until voting is over) to being on campus as long as possible and accessible to everybody.
Let’s just hope that it works!
RSS feeds are fast becoming ubiquitous and there are a wide variety of applications where they are used to great effect.
The Careers Advisory Service at the University of Reading (where I work part-time) has just moved into a brand-new building kitted out with the latest in plasma screen technology (!). They have also just grasped the extent of RSS and have keenly moved to make their latest jobs and events features RSS-enabled to allow people to subscribe to new job and event alerts from their browsers, email applications, websites or desktops.
Seeing all of this, one of those imaginary light bulbs switched on above my head as I had a great brainwave - why not combine the two to create an application that gets the jobs or events feeds from the web and displays it full-screen on those under-utilised plasma screens?
I announced this idea to my boss who took an interest in it but basically told me to get on with it myself and see what I could come up with. The amount of work made him sceptical of the implementation, but I had confidence. I opened up Visual Studio and found a very handy RSS screensaver starter kit. I took that as my base and ripped it apart, taking out all the screensaver code and changing the rest to reflect what I wanted. Two days later and I have a completed application ready to be tested out. I even checked it out with a profiler to make sure there were no memory leaks since it will probably run continuously for many days or weeks at a time.
There’s a nice large screenshot waiting for everybody to have a look at. I’m not releasing the code just yet - there’s still probably some work to be done on it and a lot of stuff needs to be cleaned up. There’s also a lot of CAS-specific code in there that needs to be taken out if the application is released. Until then, take a look at the screenshot and show your love!
I’m at the point in life when I have to start thinking about my future more than ever. Of course, I was thinking of my future when I decided to go to sixth form and now university, but the life of work is where the most thought must go.
Next year, as part of my four-year university course, I have a year out. This means that I have to find a computing company offering a one year internship for me to join. This isn’t the diffcult part. The part which takes much more effort is pursuading the companies to interview you and consider you for one of the few internships that exist in contrast to the number of applicants.
I’ve seen this first hand, being rejected by one company I applied to after reaching the penultimate round. I’m not bitter because I understand that I got some things wrong during the assessment centre (the fact that they provided individual feedback means that they do care somewhat for applicants) and that not all applicants are successful.
I’ve applied to three other companies at the moment and am considering applying to others. I want to keep my options open and increase my chances of being accepted by at least one employer. If I have a choice of employers then that would be great, but I would love to work for any of the companies I have applied for so that’s not so much of a problem.
Hopefully I’ll be accepted by at least one company because the experience that a year in industry will provide will be indispensible especially when it comes to finding a job after graduation. Some companies even fast track you through the graduate entry process if you’ve already shown great aptitude during an industrial year with them.
Careers fairs are always popular events at universities around the world. They are a good opportunity for student to meet prospective employers and ask them all the pertinent questions that students ask, like how far the office is from the nearest pub, or what the salary’s like, or what the perks are…
Virtual careers fairs are a natural extension of their real-life counterparts. The benefits of holding a careers fair online are many: employers have to spend less to attend, they can be spead over long periods of time, and students can access information at a time suitable to them, to name but three benefits.
However, there do not seem to be any commercial-grade virtual fair applications to allow educational establishments to be able to run their own fairs. A few universities have to date made their own custom applications, but I think that a general purpose one that can be customised may be welcomed in the education sector as an easy way of getting information to students as well as getting them interested in work and also the careers services that many universities run.
RedGloo is the blogging system of the University of Reading’s School of Systems Engineering. It’s somewhere where people can write about their course as well as daily life and get feedback and help from their peers and staff.
Just before I began my time at the university, I started my own blog about university life. When I found out about RedGloo, this became redundant and I didn’t update it for months. Now, I’ve decided to get rid of everything on the website and redirect it to RedGloo, where it’ll be of more use. Along with purchasing RedGloo.co.uk, this means that students now have two easy ways of getting to the site and blogging away!
While finishing off the last parts of my programming work for university, I posted a reflection on my department’s collaborative blog, RedGloo. I noticed that over the past few days, as the deadline has been looming, people who I never even knew took the course had started using their blogs, if only to post their own reflections. This is because the reflection carries marks with it.
At other times, the blog is very quiet with only a few people posting regularly (one of them being me and the others being mainly staff and the odd older student). It’s therefore interesting to see that attaching 5 marks makes so many people dash to the website they’ve probably never been on since fresher’s week when they had to sign up.
I posted an article on the blog wondering why more people weren’t using the blog more regularly to post their comments and views on programming or more general computing issues. I got a comment from a fellow student that summed it all up: there are too many social networking and blog sites already out there that take many people’s time, and there is no time left for “minor” blogs like RedGloo. Even so, lecturers say that they’ve learnt a lot from it that they are going to take forward and incorporate into the modules for future years.
On a related note, I was tweaking my friends list on the homepage, and wondered who else I knew who had a website that I could add. I browsed through my Facebook friends list, but couldn’t find anyone who did. For computing students, this surprises me, since I would expect many of them to have at least a personal one-page site or maybe a blog. Maybe the time will come…
On another, still related point, I have decided to expand my student activities online - I will soon be opening up my previously closed portfolio of sites to students. Until now, I only designed a few, select sites, mainly for friends and the odd small business or organisation. From now on, I’ll be marketing my web design services to students, starting at the University of Reading. Also, I will soon be opening up a free-of-charge PC help site for University of Reading students and also offering my help with computing problems, which I’ve already been doing to an extent recently. More on this coming very soon!
Like my friend Andy, I also had the transreal numbers lecture by Dr James Anderson as part of my first year degree course. Like him, I also found it to be utter rubbish, with most of what he said appearing to be rehashed information which has already been available to the public for many years.
For example, the IEEE defined NaN (not a number) to use when the answer to a mathematical equation is not a number (i.e. infinity or undefined) around 20 years ago. James Anderson calls this nullity, denotes it with the Greek letter phi and call it his own.
If you think that’s bad, then have a look at how he proposes to solve the problem of dividing by zero as well as his ideas for a time-travelling “perspex” processor which can, in his words, “go back in time and tell itself to do work in order to achieve 100% CPU efficiency with zero idle time”.
I think Andy gets it spot on with his analysis of the lecture as a whole. Also, have a look at the lecture slides which Andy has posted on the entry for a good laugh.
Some of you may be asking this question since the uni section on this site has only been updated once.
Well, let me reassure you that I’m still here (although very busy judging by the frequency of posts here) but that I will only be updating the uni section during holidays.
Why? I hear you ask. The answer to this comes from one of my lecturers, who posted a nice little comment on my university blog rapping me in the knuckles for releasing source code for practical assignments so soon after their deadlines. I asked why this was a problem, and she answered that some people may get deadline extensions, and that publishing the source code was the same as giving them the answers.
So there you go - no more source code until Christmas. At that time, I’ll release everything I’ve done to date, including source code and compiled versions of all my programs.
For anybody who’s interested in what I do during practical labs, you can have a look at my programming blog which is available at RedGloo, the University of Reading School of Systems Engineering’s community for programmers.
If you’d like to see some of my programs and source code, I’ll start posting them soon to my uni section.
You might have noticed that I’m not posting here as often as I used to (then again, I didn’t really post that often anyway).
The reason is that I’ve started a new collaborative blog called readingblog, documenting my time at the University of Reading. Right now, I’m the only person posting there, but I have some plans to make it into a collaborative blog with guest posters to give a more complete overview of university life, as well as acting as a noticeboard for local events.
Check it out and see what you think of it. As always, any comments are appreciated!
I’ll be departing for university on 1st October (not too long to go now!) and so I might be a little quiet here for a few weeks until I settle in and find out what’s going on…
In the meantime, I’ve absolved myself of a lot of things in connection with this website - I’ve updated the writings page as well as my CV, about me page, portfolio and tools. I haven’t got much else to do here until I go, which means more time for packing (yay!) The only major thing is to get the Pink for October design finished and set up. I’ve also written a script to automate the task of switching the site to the new style and back at the correct time, and I’ve also included the Annual CSS Naked Day in this schedule to finish it off.
No more complaining of no work being done over here!
