The advantage of being 25

Byrichard
Reading Time: < 1 minute

The advantage of being a 25-year-old student is the following. You’ve been insulted, you’ve been threatened, you’ve been in trouble, you’ve shown that you’re an honourable person and more.

Tonight there was a party in my flat and I asked for the mess to be cleaned up and it has been. For such a request I’ve been labeled a fucking prick. If only it were true. That’s part of life. You make demands and get abuse for the demands. I’ve had my door banged  on at least twice in the past half hour to an hour but frankly, I don’t care. I’m not going to lodge a complaint. I just want responsibility for parties to sink through.

Anyway, goodnight, and see you tomorrow.

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The FIBA 2006 is over

Byrichard

The FIBA 2006 is over and yesterday was the day where I recuperated by sitting in the sun in the morning and editing a short video clip in the afternoon. Both were nice occupations to unwind from the past three weeks.

it’s been fun and all that remains from this work is a highlights tape filled with cheerleaders. Next time I hope to be at the event in person rather than on the sidelines.

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Unreasonably low – a rant against a certain ISP

Byrichard

Dear Victim,

Yesterday you exceeded the daily usage limit of 500MB as referred to in our Terms and Conditions.   This type of activity could have a detrimental effect on our network and therefore we cannot allow this to continue.   Should you continue to exceed the daily download limit we will, unfortunately, be forced to downgrade your service to a throughput limit of 56Kbs dial-up speed, for a period of 5 days.

If you exceed these limits on a regular basis, we may be forced to suspend your account.

For users of Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as BearShare, Warez, Morpheus, BitTorrent, iMesh and KaZaA note the following:
Most P2P applications you install will usually be configured so other users can access your hard drive and share your files all of the time. This constant file transfer can degrade your computer’s performance and generate heavy traffic loads on the network, making it difficult for other users of the network to work well. The network is a shared resource and we all must use it responsibly.

Network bandwidth consumption is monitored. If your users could possibly impact the overall performance of the network, your computer may be blocked until the situation can be discussed.

Should you have any queries regarding this email, please contact Customer Services

Regards

Appallingly crappy ISP

I’m a third-year media student who has spent the past decade online practically every day. I know where to find content. I understand the nature of the medium. I’m not your garden variety fifty-five-second user.

I’m the type of user that would wake up every morning and download a gigabyte or more a day when at home. I go to the uni network and I’ve downloaded 600 megs within about ten minutes and my daily allowance is a pathetic 500 megs.

Five hundred megs is not even one full copy of Linux. Some video podcasts are over a hundred megs each. Podcasts can be up to 100 megabytes in size.

I hate their false advertising and promises. I have no choice though, I’m not the one selecting the ISP.

afterthought

Where did Yahoo go wrong with their implementation of advertising along the same lines as google? They took two years longer than they should have to implement what belonged to them. I hope they go bankrupt.

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Enjoy the stairs

Byrichard

Myspace was used to advertise a pyjama house party and I went for a number of hours. It’s amusing when you’re at a party in your pyjamas. It makes a change from all those fancy dress and I began wondering about the walk of shame and whether wearing pyjamas on the way home constitutes the walk of shame.

The party was good although it did not really begin till later on when everyone arrived. There were lots of people I’ve known for two to three years by now. The stories were good and the conversations too. Some were interesting whilst were some left you a little confused.

I went to central London with one friend and we stayed in a night club till the first tube in the morning. The club was quite full of people because the top musical act of the week had played there an hour or two before we arrived. I don’t know the group so I’m left indifferent.

This part of the night continued till the early hours of the morning. We caught the first tube home. I gathered my stuff from the friend’s place. Two people were sitting in the stairwell chatting, saying that they had not gone to sleep but that everyone else was trying to sleep. I encouraged them to enjoy their stairwell before continuing on my way.

Back to halls where I encountered some french-speaking friends. Conversations and random activities continued until around 7 in the morning.

It had been an 11hr night/party for me and I’m surprised at how quiet everything is today. It must be the calm after the chaos of a good night out.

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Podcasts and Bandwidth

Byrichard

There have been a lot of discussions between podcasters and the amount of bandwidth that is needed to serve these files. Successful podcasters shift several gigabytes of data with each episode of their podcast and since everything is automated everyone requests and receives the file at this time. This means there’s a massive peak.

I’m interested in the reception side though. I’m on a university network and I’ve used it when you would get a throughput of at least 400 kilobytes a second. That’s quite fast and pleasant. It’s changed since then. Digital village, part of Catalyst has throttled our bandwidth, offering 8 gigs a month paid for by the university but limiting to 500 megabytes a day.

What this means is simple. Anytime I leave iTunes unattended up to a gigabyte of podcasts may be downloaded at once. No problem, when you’re at home with 2 megabits per second or within uni but a big problem. I’m constantly watching over the files and their size in order to stay below the bandwidth limit. It’s frustrating.

Last night I went to have a little fun since I was having a denial of service from Digital Village as they were refreshing the database at the end of the “service month” as I will refer to it. For 8hrs they cut off my service.

In the meantime, I’m only 5 minutes’ walk from the uni library and it’s open 24hrs a day. This university has good download speeds. Using the wifi connection I downloaded 2 gigabytes worth of podcasts and videos within about one hour. The connection speed for university fiber is fast. It’s at least 600KB/s sustained. That’s a 40 meg file within 4-6 minutes when you’re downloading three at once. It’s a great feeling.

In halls, it’s disappointing and frustrating. I don’t like Catalyst. They’re behind the times. They provide a sub-standard service and I feel that people should know about it. I’ve spent at least 11 years online now. I know what to expect from an ISP. Digital village doesn’t provide it.

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Dissertations Are Demanding

Byrichard

Spending almost all of the time when you’re awake to complete your dissertation is hard, especially when you slept no more than six hours after a good night out.

I’ve spent almost all the time I’ve been awake working on my dissertation and it’s progressing well but there is still work to be done and although sometimes I feel good at other moments I feel like it’s never going to be completed. That’s a good sign.

By this I mean that I’m going through all this pain and stress, wanting for it to be finished but as it’s written it’s a matter or re-organizing and elaborating on certain points rather than typing the whole document.

I’ve got the time and resources to add graphics, tables, write the bibliography, and more by the deadline. I’ve still got more than a week but I’m pushing myself to get as much done now rather than later.

When discussing the dissertation with a number of people they seemed to find the topic interesting therefore I hope that when it is finished and people get an opportunity to read if they enjoy the process. Long live the handing in of the dissertation when I shall burst into laughter from the relief I will feel.

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On dissapointment

Byrichard

Student unions are one of the best places to meet people and make new contacts. It’s a place where drinks are cheap and normal rules no longer apply.

At least that’s what they’d have you believe. The undercroft is one of the worst student bars in the United Kingdom for a number of reasons, firstly the prices, highest in the UK, secondly the location, a basement with rats scurrying about. thirdly poor management, the reason for which many of the staff quit the job.

For over two months now I’ve been unable to go due to the management, not the staff, taking a dislike to me.

I went in today, not planning to get anything to drink because a friend wanted to drop down. The manager took a minute or two before he asked me to leave. I had not had the time to do anything of any sort.

I’m disappointed because tonight is the first night that everyone is back from holiday and I can’t go to be with those I’ve studied and had fun with for two years. I enjoyed the convenience of that bar being so close. After tonight the bar is so empty there is no reason to go anyway but tonight could have been different.

On the positive side, I’ve just started my six-day weekend and one friend in the same year is wondering what to do to occupy all our free time. Shall we find work, shall we live at home and commute only for the lessons? Shall we spend three or four days a week on dissertation work? I think so.

I need to find work. I need to carry out phase two of the research, interviews, and discussion groups before starting phase three, the first draft, and subsequent copies.

Last night I watched the Nile DVD and it’s interesting to see how different it is. It’s an anthropological documentary, taking time to speak first about the geography of the place, secondly about the people and thirdly about how they’re affecting the environment. It’s an interesting documentary that lasts about 100 minutes, 50 minutes per part. Already I’ve written notes about it and I’m getting closer to seeing how it’ll fit in as one of the case examples for what I’m talking about.

I still need to read through the two dissertations I have. It’s going to be interesting to have so much time to work on one project. A documentary about the differences and similarities between the two documentary genre.

Hours of fun as long as I organise my time so well as not to feel any pressure.

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