University

I’m almost done with uni but it’s so hard. I’ve been working on and off on three projects now for at least three weeks and I’ve spent so much time on these projects that today I finally met my saturation point so I left the computer behind and dropped down to the bar for a drink or two and for company. There were only a few people watching a football match and no media students from my year. They don’t have the luxury I have, of being able to leave everything for an hour or two before coming back to it and I do. I took one of the booths and sat there thinking of nothing and doing nothing. It was nice to do nothing but rest, the only sound was football and then some music. When I went outside a very amusing conversation was to be listened to and I laughed, feeling the pressure decline at last and being more sedate once more. It’s so great to think that in a week I’m done, that I have complete freedom. I can’t wait and I could get it within three or four days if I work really hard. I’m no longer worried about the calendar, no longer worried about the deadline, no longer unable to say dissertation without feeling a sudden excess of stress. Instead, I’m calm, relaxed and it’s really nice. I just can’t get to writing anymore. I’m going to have to re-write my conclusion taking the main points from my analysis and making sure that it’s clear and concise, a paragraph per point, and a summary for the conclusion. That’s the results and conclusion that I’m talking about. Long live the end, the end of my academic workload, and the beginning of adulthood once more. Three years in the making.

There are about nine days left before the deadline and I’m up to revision five of my dissertation and I’m feeling fairly happy about it. i’ve spent two days working off the printed copy before transferring these changes back to the electronic version. I’ve got almost everything I wanted to do done for today. The next step is to get all the graphics, tables and the bibliography in order. In this detail alone I may expect to spend two or three hours if things go well. I’m happy to have got this far as I can still change anything that i feel really needs changing.  Tomorrow I may attempt a smooth read, making sure that everything is  as it should be.

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.

At the moment I’m re-reading the dissertation and going through every paragraph individually to make sure that the content is good. It’s currently floating at about 9900 words and I’m feeling fairly confident with the content. there is still work to be done but within the next three or four days I hope to be done with this piece of work. Once more I went walking around the library and I met almost only girls from my course quite amusingly. They’re at various levels of stress as you’d guess. Some are quite confident, feeling that they’re well on their way whilst others prefer not to talk about the subject. through the status messages that one guy put on Facebook I thought that he had progressed really well but a message today led me to the opposite conclusion. It would be inferred from what he has written that he has not done as much work as I had thought initially. In other news, I tried working on the work experience module but I found that I simply ended up angry so I gave it up as a bad job. It’s curious how that happened. I’ll work on it in a day or two when I’m feeling more open to it.

Here’s the result when looking up three terms for dissertation on blogpulse

For the past hour or more, I’ve been listening to music and working on my dissertation and I’ve just hit 9500 words on my dissertation (disso as it’s affectionately referred to) and it feels great. I’m so happy that I have two weeks in which to proofread, re-write, and improve what I’ve written. It’s the first time in my life that I finish the writing part of my assignment two weeks earlier than the deadline. I’m not crying victory yet (french expression: mieux vaut ne pas crier victoire), after all, I’d expect myself to do at least another ten to fifteen hours of re-writing. I still have to format the references properly and look for video captures that can help illustrate my points so that the layout earns extra points. Reading this post you’d be led to believe that I take this work seriously, and the truth is I do. I started it last summer when I came back to London looking for work. I applied to at least twenty jobs without luck and as I was growing demoralised I dropped by the library when no one else was there and borrowed as many books as I thought I could carry without a surtax on the plane. Over the summer I worked through over twenty chapters about film theory and created a documentary over 50 pages long and 25,000 words in depth. I also watched hundreds of hours of documentaries. Aside from the website, it’s the biggest project I’ve ever taken on. I hope I do well.

Just put on some music and now I’ll tell you about a typical day, just two weeks before the end of uni life for me. My phone is set so that it rings every morning at 9 am and the reason it gives me is “catch a flight” because I had set that particular alarm to wake me up before one of my numerous flights. It doesn’t often get me out of bed, I usually snooze till about 11 am and that’s when there’s noise from the cleaners. I open up the laptop and I start surfing around the world wide web syncing up with what’s happened whilst I was sleeping. It’s not until about two hours later than I do something productive like get out of bed, take a shower, and then get on with the public phase of my day. a few times I’ve woken up and got straight into one of the three assignments that are due within the next three weeks. I stop working when either it’s at least an hour later or I’ve run out knowledge and because it requires research I decide it’s easier to get sidetracked by something else. Around 2 pm I go for a walk, as an excuse to listen to a podcast. I get myself what is required for a sandwich and get some ice tea. Time to relax whilst eating. Until this point there’s a chance I haven’t been sociable so I walk over to the uni library, it’s only 5 minutes away so it’s no struggle. As I arrive there I go from one friend to another, getting a little insight into how well they’re doing with assignments. With certain people you find that they’re halfway through the dissertation, others are finished. Some were working on their advertising module course work and others claim not to have started writing. I’m glad I have. (slight understatement) There are a few groups of people I hang around with. Sometimes I go to a venue and I film a friend’s gig, as happened or I go to the SU bar (which hasn’t happened for the past two weeks and won’t happen before next Monday. The third option is to hang out with more friends in halls. Once I get home I do some more work, sometimes another two or three hours. I found that at one point I was so anxious and worried about my work that I couldn’t go to sleep before I had progressed with my dissertation.  I’m lucky that way. My mind has become the perfect nag. I’m grateful for this. Sleep is easy, I lie down, pull the laptop screen down and see that it latches. Listen to my ipod and fall asleep.

What’s the worst thing about being a student. The stress never disappears. What’s the best thing about being a media student? As long as you can find the theoretical background that goes with an activity you love you can justify doing a case study on the topic. I’m fresh back from the library where I went through looking for some books about the internet and society, the virtual community, reading digital culture, The World Wide Web and contemporary cultural theory, and finally the social shaping of Technology. I’m not going to read every single page but rather going to explore the notion of community and how it affects contemporary life. I know that the World Wide Web has progressed from such a point that being online is no longer the domain of geeks but rather the empire of all those with interesting lives. Look at musicians and sites like Myspace for example. Look at the FIBA website during the FIBA 2006 world Championship. Look at everyone posting pictures of cats on various websites. It’s part of the digital lifestyle. The premise of my case study is simple. Whereas five years ago being online was seen as something that only the least socially apt of people would do the opposite is now true, as demonstrated by the popularity of Myspace for a while, Facebook at the moment and then Virb for the near future. Those who saw the death of society because of how technology is getting people to stay at home without conversing with anyone in their physical world is a thing of the past. Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook (the mobile version) MSN messenger - the mobile version all ensure that we’re wired whether we’re sitting in a bedroom on a beautiful sunny day or standing outside under the torrential rain. Of course, there’s no rain but the point remains the same. A world where people can only be online from behind a computer is gone hence greater sociability. Let’s see how I manage to integrate that notion into my case study ;)

wham - Apr 1, 2007

yes fellow twitter that is the great wall of china–

Here is my daily good morning message from the ISP: 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 affect on our network unfortunately be forced to downgrade your service to a throughput limit of 56Kbs dial-up speed, for a period of 5 days. I download over a gig a day when I’m at home on average, that’s 30 gigs a months or more. Detrimental effect on our network: What about every time you cut me off for no reason, what about the interruption of service when I get beyond the number of hours allocated p0er month. What about the fact I have over 20 gigs of data transfer but can’t use it? Limit to 56K, It’s already limited to that speed. If you exceed these limits on a regular basis, we may be forced to suspend your account. So interruption of service for no reason isn’t an interruption of service? For users of Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as BearShare, Warez, Morpheus, BitTorrent, iMesh and KaZaA note the following: Why not stop whining about this and block those services rather than destroy the rest of the services 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 usage could possibly impact the overall performance of the network, your computer may be blocked until the situation can be discussed. One gig a day is nothing. Two nights ago I downloaded over two gigs of podcasts within an hour without any problems suffered by the University infrastructure therefore why can’t these people cope. If they’re going to block internet access from my machine then that’s a Denial of servic although not an attack. Just sub standard. Should you have any queries regarding this email, please contact Customer Services Context and analysis Diggnation is 120 megabytes per program and Nouvo by the TSR is around 80-120 megs as well. The BBC’s daily news is around 20 megabytes. This week in tech, this week in media and others are around 20 megabytes each. Diggnation =1/5 of my daily allowance, nouvo = 1/5 as well. Twim etc are a little less but quickly saturate the amount allocated per day. What’s more interesting is that they currently have at least 7 fibres for 100 people. If the Cern were using those fibers it would be the equivalent of at least 3.6 gigabits per second, as was tested at the 2003 Telecom world event. 7 fibers = 7 gigabits per second, at least theoretically. For 640 users that would be 10 megabits per second. compare that to the 50KB/s and you see why I’m dissatisfied with the service.