Skin of Stars

I’ve had many jobs. My full CV is unprintable in a comfortable digest. Though all were useful in their own way, it was still a means to an end. Rock superstardom… so four years ago I decided to retool in what was then a time devouring hobby. So far, things have been going pretty well. I got a decent degree and have had two awesome jobs in a row, the second of which I still happily work at (whiteoctober).

I’ve been keeping my head down for some time now. I’ve really been wanting to get good at what I’m doing before I start to think of other things. But I’m happy to say that recently I’m starting to ‘get it’ with many of the techs that I’m using. I know I still have sooo much to learn, but it’s a good feeling to be making progress.

Oh yeah, I use Ubuntu for both work and play now. Good times

Hmm, what else is new… I move in a couple of weeks, to a place in Headington. At the moment there are five of us living in a four bedroom house in East Oxford. It’s fun and communal and all, but I’m really looking forward to moving in with just myself and Emily. You should check her blog by the way: emilychiang.wordpress.com.

Actually, I think that’s it for now. Take care.

Well if you’re not going to blog about your degree results, what are you going to blog about? Firstly, I want to say that I’m happy to do it in the three year time period. I know that is what is normally expected, but I know so many people that are having to take extra semesters or even years that I’m happy to have just got on with it so I’m able to move on to other things. Anyway, let’s cut to the chase;

I got a First Class Honours BSc in Multimedia Systems and Communication, Media and Culture.

Shocked I was. Smiling, but shocked. I knew that it was mathematically possible, but I was really just aiming to get a good 2:1. Perhaps that be seen as aiming low, but I didn’t come to university to flog myself every night for a grade. Yes I wanted to do well, but what I really wanted was to spend the time thinking and learning more generally. I wanted to learn many things and being at university, in a learning environment, I could spend time discovering so many other things. For example, I developed a somewhat nasty habit of wanting to learn Linux stuff. Not just the technical system management but also how open source as an idea can be used in so many aspects of life… Anyway, the point is that I wasn’t targeting a First, my target was to do everything well, just good and solid with treats thrown in here and there and still time to live a little.

I saw the grades themselves first before I knew the final result and I knew it was looking good. Nothing was below B+ and I had a nice collection of As. I was pleased to see my dissertation had got an A, I knew the coding was pretty good but I felt my sociological investigation of open source development had been a little weak. I’d also got 100% on my final web design module, which is unheard of (I suspect the tutor may have had some explaining to do there!) so I felt good for the 2:1. I checked my percentage and saw 68.7% (the boundaries are 40%=3rd, 50%=2:2, 60%=2:1 and 70%=1st). How tantalisingly close, within 2% of a First. I did as anyone would do and promptly posted what I believed to be my result to Twitter. Feeling pleased I decided to have a look around the results pages a little when I came across the line stating your degree result, “First Class Honours”. I could do little more than point and look at my girl Emily who’d also just got her results, a 2:1 in Linguistics.

Well as it turns out, if you score four or more B+ or above in your final semester (my final year was 5 As and 3 B+s) then they lower the bar for a First to 69%. I’m guessing this is to allow for improvement over the two years. And of course we can’t have decimals points in the percentage, they need to be rounded.. up in my case. I got a First within a margin of 0.7% (they round up all)! Twitter needed an update! With exclamation marks!!!

For one thing, the narrow margin certainly means I’m not complacent in the result. I know I could have done better and probably should have done. But it certainly makes the future look a little brighter. I don’t expect prospective employers to be pulling my arm off, but when looking at future Masters I know that I will now have a greater choice. The biggest bonus though is how proud my family are, my Mum said she had a little cry. Not too bad a result for someone who left school at 16. Guess I need to hire a gown now.

Hey All,

Just thought I would tell you all about a new site that I’ve created for homework. It’s for an Oxford based band called Branch Immersion, a three piece acoustic outfit, some friends of mine. The site is hosted on the uni servers at the moment but I expect we’ll host it here at SkinOfStars towers soon enough once they’ve bought their domain name and I’ve ported the static pages to WordPress.

This is an original design and I must be honest, one I am very proud of. Please check it out at the temporary address (I’ll update with the final address later):

http://wwwusers.brookes.ac.uk/06021836/u75131

http://skinofstars.com/branch_immersion

I’m preemptively titling this post as Boxfire 1 as I know there is more info to come. My dissertation produced a website, or should I say that I have produced a website for my dissertation. Either way, it’s a collaborative news filter for Oxford that relies on user interaction to find the most important news story for the area. Please try it out and tell me what you think:

http://boxfire.co.uk

Well, it’s been busy over the festive period. Back in Thanet for Christmas then straight to Jersey for New Years Eve. Home in Oxford now, it’s good to be back. I’ve got a busy semester coming so I’ve decide to just throw myself back into work. I’m planning on have my computing part of my dissertation finished by the end of January, thereafter leaving me eight weeks to write 5000 words on the open development of my computing dissertation in a suitably applied social sciences fashion. Lets start with a little open reflection what I’m constructing.

I am making a news and events information filtering web application. It works like this: News and event announcements comes in one end via submission, XML feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) and possibly some kind of easy tagging widget thingy. Once they are in people get to vote on which is the best story. We have some pages for displaying the popular stories which can be customised by the user based on factors like time or category. These customised filters can then be collected in XML, like Netvibes or iGoogle or just Firefox bookmarks. I’ll probably also throw in some social networking tools as well.

The site should be going live at the start of February and will initially be targeting the Oxford area. At roughly the same time the beta code (built using Ruby on Rails) will be made available on another site with a suitable open license.

I shall post further updates through January on this very blog.

I’m not going to give you a major post this week. I’m in the final stages of the semester so I’m having to do schoolwork. This week I am doing assignments on:

Political Situation In The UK
3000 words on the current political climate in the UK, includes social mobility from Marxist and Fiskian perspectives, political compass and Modernity via Giddens, language and power in the vein of Brodieu and power relationships in general.

Identity and Culture
3000 words looking at composition of identity by examining representative items. For this I’ll mainly be looking at sexual consumerism (bring on the Chomsky!) and post-modernity pastiche.

Next week I have two exams. One in Networks For Media which includes both wave form mathematics as well as computer networking structures. The other in Programming With Objects, which will include writing structural programming designs on paper (which will be odd).

As I’m sure you can image, I’m not going to be posting big next week either. Take care all.

Kevin

Today is the start of a new academic year at Oxford Brookes. As we would say here “Week 1″. I get to start this new year with no lectures today, which frankly is quite lucky as I still have many things to sort out. Still, I decided to get up early, well, early for me, 9:30am. A habit I’m going to have to get into as I’ve been tending to sleep till noon through the summer. There always seems to be something I need to do at 2am.

Last week was freshers week (Week 0?!) so I tried to go out and party a little. Since moving into my new house and taking some time gardening I’ve found that I wasn’t really going out, so I decided to make a bit of an effort. We were convinced that Saturday would be a big party at a student union club, Blitz. It had always been one of the best nights of the week, which left us convinced that it would be so this time with many old friends around. Guess we were the only ones who thought so. There were a few friends there, but to be honest it was only the ones we’d invited personally. Still, a fun night regardless.

Recovery from a Saturday night is easy when the sun is out. We are lucky in our new house in having a small gate from our back garden straight onto one of the largest parks in Oxford. South Park has one of the best views over the city so we had little to do than lay back, drink tea and soak in the view. An absolute treat considering the horrid weather we’ve been having of late.

And now to work.

And the heavens opened. Does the summer really have to end so abruptly?

Here are my marks so far for my first year of Uni. Not too bad considering how drunk I was:

Computer Systems – A
Multimedia IT Skills – A
Human Development and Learning – B+
Human Communication – B+
Communication in Groups – B+
Playing the Game: The Culture of Digital Games. – B
Structured Programming – C

It would seem that I’m at my best and my worst when I’m with computers, go figure.

Hey, hope everyone out there in bloggerland is ok. Life is still fun up here in Oxford. We had proper snow the other week and we all got trapped on the hill we live on, so we had a mass snowball fight with about 50 people. Its nice being on the little campus that the main uni forgets about. We’re like a big family.

Thought I’d give nay of you reading this a link to help you get a better understanding as to how Google does it.

Take care.