Personal

Sometimes I post things that are kind of personal, so I make sure to put them in this category. If there is a password on any of these posts, then the password will be my date of birth, in YYYY-MM-DD format. If you know me reasonably well, then you should know that (or just ask me and I’ll tell you).

Nerdalicious Sub-Conscious PHP Debugging

I’ve dreamed in binary before, no big deal. When I was learning it (properly) and working with it a bit at university, I got a little carried away and would write my name on things in binary, that sort of ultra-cool nerd thing. Now I’ve stepped up from binary to PHP, and things appear to have accelerated from there;

Last night, I debugged the code that I was writing before I went to bed, in my sleep! I was working on my soon-to-be-released PHP Atom API package last night, as has been the case on many nights recently, and it got to be pretty late. I showered up, went to bed and all was well.

When I woke up this morning – I had memories of dreaming my way through the code that I had been working on the night before (1,500 lines, so no small feat 😉 ), and in my dream, I had found a style of catching errors on some of my processing which wouldn’t actually catch anything, and would always evaluate as if there was no error. I got up this morning and checked it, and sure enough – I was more coherent in my dream than I was while sitting in front of my PC coding.

My friend Ray dubbed this “nerdalicious” and I think that’s a pretty awesomely descriptive word for it, so I’m calling this ‘nerdalicious sub-conscious code de-bugging’.

Politically Incorrect

Anyone who knows me very well knows that I’m not a very ‘political’ person at all. Despite that, right now even I can see when the general public makes a stupid mistake. How about this for one way of looking at things; ignore his platform, ignore his past, ignore his could-be-conceived-as-really-corrupt oil connections, and ignore the whole alleged vote-rigging a few years ago. Ignore all of that, it will only cloud your judgment. OK – now make a straight decision between a man who can barely string a sentence together, and a man who speaks well, seems to have something going on inside his head, and can have a conversation with a journalist without cue-cards.

As one of my co-workers said – Today is a sad day in the history of America.

Swingers Quote

If you haven’t seen it, you should see the 1996 movie, Swingers – it’s excellent! This is one of my favourite scenes (part of it), which I just had to transcribe because it’s so good 🙂

Mike: “Look, we’re gonna spend half the night driving around the hills looking for this one party, and you’re gonna say it sucks, then we’re gonna go look for this other party. But all the parties, and all the bars, they all suck; I spend half the night talking to some girl who’s looking around the room to see if there’s somebody else that’s more important she should be talkin to, and I’m supposed to be all happy because she’s wearing a backpack. You know and half of them are just nasty skanks, who wouldn’t be nothin except that they’re surrounded by a bunch of drunken horny assholes. And I’m gonna tell you something T, are you listening?”

Trent: “Yeah I’m listening”

Mike: “I’m not gonna be one of those assholes, alright? It just makes me sick; it’s like ah, it’s like, some nasty skank who isn’t half the woman my girlfriend is is gonna front me? It makes me wanna fuckin’ puke!”

Back To School Special

I’m officially back to study as of Monday, and this study period looks like it will be an interesting one. I’m doing 2 units again, both through Curtin, so no more dealing with RMIT‘s poor efforts at online education.

There are a lot of people who I’ve studied with before in my classes, so it kind of feels like I’m getting to know all the other people who are currently studying the BA Internet Studies. I’ve also looked at my assessment timeline, and it’s pretty solid – basically something due roughly every 2 weeks for the entire study period 🙁

We’ll see how things go this time around! New computer just in time as well, nearly finished getting it set up and configured, just a few more things to do and then it’s all go.

Study Period 2 Assignments Online

I realised that I hadn’t posted any of my previous assignments, so here they are for your reading pleasure (or not!).

27.4Kb PDF Document
REA11 Assignment 3 – Revision of analytical structure diagrams about Objectivity and Blogging, and a re-write on assignment one

13.9Kb PDF Document
NET12 Assignment 2 – What Do We Think Of The Web We Weave. This essay talks about the key assumptions driving current views of the ‘Net

25Kb PDF Document
NET12 Assignment 3 – The Internet can teach us about the relationshop between society and technology – I talk about it here in specific relation to the economic and business aspects of that relationship.

Here We Go, Here We Go, Here We Go…

First day of study period 4 today!

This time around, I’m only doing one unit, called EBS11: Strategic E-Business. This should be interesting, if for no other reason than it’s offered through RMIT, rather than Curtin, which delivers most of my other units.

The unit has 3 assignments, worth 30, 40 and 30% of the total, in order. They look like they are going to be a bit of writing 🙁

On first glances, I can make the following observations;

  1. Their LMS, “SERF” looks terrible. The UI is a shocker, and it’s not intuitive at all.
  2. The unit looks quite comprehensive, although I suppose that will remain to be seen once I start reading etc
  3. There’s an external text book, but I think I’ll hold off on buying it unless I really need to (this is an elective after all).

I’ll keep things up to date on here on the way through, and hopefully this unit won’t make my festive season too much of a drag!