Week 29: Belated and Deflated, This Boat is Sinking and I'm at the Helm

I will admit this, I have neglected to update this blog in some time. Last week I was cruising around the Mediterranean sea, visiting places such as Marmaris, Turkey; Rhodes, Greece; Ashdod, Israel. I forgot to take any revision notes with me, so I was sat on a boat for a week with a constant flow of alcohol and food, being stared at by golden oldies because I don't need to use cod liver oil to keep my joints in decent condition (I was hoping to put going on a cruise off until I myself was about 60).

Anyway, that doesn't mean I can't make a decision - I have recovered from my jaded binge of Singapore Slings and Banana Banshees.

Digital Media. That's my chosen route.

Talking to my lecturer throughout the year, I realised that Digital Media would be the best route for me. I looked in to the other routes (one of them got dropped, leaving Networking) and they had all of the things that didn't appeal to me, so it was a simple choice.

We also have revision for loads of exams this coming week.

Relevant to exam season

So that's it. That's the last post. Two images for one! Have a party! We might need to do some more blogging next year, so I will save up as many of these stupid pictures for your pleasure.

Week 15: Networks and HTML5

Over the past couple of weeks, we've been doing a load of labs on different networks and network topologies in Hardware & Networks. We learned how to make a CAT-5 cable; stripping the wires, untangling them, figuring out which ones to pair and twist, and then how to crimp it in to a connector. Tedious work - definitely not for me, but at least I know how to do it now, which will come in handy for any assignments and exams.

We got some worksheets for HTML5, too, in Dynamic Web. Felt a bit daft learning regular HTML up until now and then having HTML5 sprung on us - why not learn the industry standard from day one? Then it's straight in to your head for a life of web design and coding, instead of fumbling behind with an older standard - most websites these days use HTML5.

Me (right) disgruntled with not learning HTML5 from the start

Counselling meeting went well; problems identified in full and a course of action planned out to try and help me with those problems.

Week 14: Set Theory, Web Assignment, Walkthrough Prep and MoreM

We got some stuff this week about set theory and Venn diagrams; they're both different ways of looking at the same thing. What's in A? What's in B? What's in C? What's in the AC overlap? What's in the ABC overlap but not anywhere else? What's the meaning of life? {42}
Venn diagrams are a visual representation of set theory classes and set theory is the written way of describing what's in a Venn diagram.

We got a Dynamic Web and Media assignment handed to us on Thursday. Group work. An absolute joy - depending upon other people to pull their weight (a harsh term, but necessary). Nick and I agree that it's going to be a drag, considering Scott and Jasmine barely do any work in class anyway - they're always off to Tesco or Sainsbury's, or "working" in another room. I get the sneaking suspicion that they think we'll just do the work ourselves and just get whatever grade we get, especially after working with them before.

Speaking of which, next week we have a SAD walkthrough to get ready for. We barely have any of the finalised work printed off at this point, so it's looking like a real grim prospect. We got a document detailing what we would need for the walkthrough, and half of the work is missing. Scott and Jasmine had plenty of chances and time to do the stuff that we all agreed to do - we shared the whole assignment up between the four of us, but now it's looking like me and Nick are having to do finalised documents without drafting anything up; so it's looking like we might end up losing some marks for this module.
"Yeah, we'll get a distinction easy", Scott's words echo annoyingly around my head. Try saying that now.

Accurate picture of me screaming at the idiocy

I got a call from Steps2Change on Tuesday. They want me to come to an appointment next Wednesday, after college. Christmas was nice, too; saw my family and friends a fair bit. Nothing else to say on these things, really. I guess I'll write about the counselling when I know what's up.

Week 13: Data Store/ Entity Cross References, PDPs, Therapy

So we got ran through how to cross reference Entity diagrams and data stores, this week, which may or may not have bored 70% of the class. We got told about our assignments a little more, and that this would be included in the exam next year. By the sounds of it, there's a lot of stuff to revise for, and do for the Abraham Heights Hotel assignment study.

There was a PCDS tutorial about Personal Development Portfolios, too, where we were introduced to websites like LinkedIn. It's a really good idea to have a LinkedIn profile because of how versatile they can be; you could be looking for a drummer for a band you're starting, and you could look for them on LinkedIn, and the same applies to any industry - council work, acting, production, civil engineering, and the list goes on.

I've also been for a talk with a local counselling group called Steps2Change to see if I need help with anxiety and other troubles (which I feel uncomfortable talking about on this social platform), but those problems do exist and I will need to combat them.

I still have no idea, truly, what I want to do at the end of this entire course.

Week 12: Web Page Design, Number Systems Assignment and some SaD Stuff

There seems to have been a bit of confusion regarding which weeks we are doing what activity, so this post is probably going to be as big as King Kong's banana budget.

Dynamic Web & Media had us laying out web pages all pretty and stuff, making sure that paragraphs and line breaks and pictures and navigation bars are in the right place and that the page doesn't look like it just came out of a typewriter that can print images of cats and vegetables.
The main idea is to use a CSS file (Cascasding Style Sheet) to keep things flowing; you can use it to space out your paragraphs and style tables how you want.
For example: You could make all of your tables have a thick border and colour that border lime green. This is possible in CSS, and it makes your HTML code a lot easier to read (you don't have to dredge through a huge <...> tag to see what's happening - just open your CSS file and it's all there).

We got our first number systems assignment. I have Christmas coming up; birds to eat, mountains of food to climb and conquer, I don't need another birden on my mind.

Logicalisation. Ah yes. Lovely. It sounds hard, but we've just got to write down what the system's doing at the minute and then write down what we think is ought to be doing when we design the final database. Thinking about what the system should do is a bit of a brain tease, but it's no sudoku, so it shouldn't be too hard!

Week 11: LOOP DE LOOP, SaD Interviews, Web Accessibility

This week we did some more array work, but this time the lecturer threw in some loops.
A loop (sometimes called a for loop) is a way of making a subroutine run continuously until either a specified parameter is met or the user ends the subroutine or entire program. We were told that in a few weeks we would need to find a way to implement loops and arrays in to a mock assignment.
The class didn't seem too enthused at the prospect of a mock assignment, considering we'll have a few assignments coming our way soon enough.

This week we also sat down and interviewed the manager of the Abraham Heights Hotel. Well... It wasn't actually the manager, per se, just a member of the teaching staff acting out the role of the manager. Nick and I interviewed the manager whilst Jasmine and Scott interviewed the receptionist. We asked questions such as, 'How do you think the system could be improved in a specific area?', and, 'Do you have a budget in mind for the new system?'.
Me and Nick ran a bit over time and Steve was ushering us to finish, but I think we came away with all of the information that we needed in order to complete the assignment.

Dynamic Web & Media had us looking at how to make a website accessible to a wide variety of audiences. A website should be intuitive and easy to use anyway, however sometimes you need to account for those who may be red/green colour blind and those who have dyslexia.
To someone with red/green colour blindness, a red page will appear a shade of green, thus making it incredibly difficult for them to make out which parts are supposed to be red and which parts are actually supposed to be green.

RG Colour blind (left) - Original image (right)

The photo above (source: http://www.washington.edu/news/archive/images/20090916_pid52016_aid52015_colormarket_w400.jpg) details what life is like through the eyes of someone with red/green colour blindness. Anything that is red to someone who does not have the blindness is green to someone who is (as you probably figured).

Week 10: Troubleshooting, Web Accessibility, Resources and Arrays

We restored the operating system of our virtual machines on Wednesday, which is crucial to troubleshooting a computer. If a program that has recently been installed is causing issues with the computer, but simply uninstalling it does not solve the issue, a system restore can be performed in order to set the computer back to a previous state - one before the software was installed. At first this would cause concern about the files saved on the computer, but the system restore tool does not affect saved files; only what programs have been installed and uninstalled on the system. This saves the user from having to remake all of the files that would normally have been removed.

We learned about how severe red/green colourblindness can be and how it would affect someone using a website with the condition. There are several ways to make things easier to see for someone with this disability, one of them being to use a different CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file for those who tell their browser to use it.
Another disability that severely affects computer users is dyslexia. More often than not, most fonts that are easy for non-sufferers to read and understand will be significantly more difficult for a sufferer to read and understand. The same can be said for certain colours; most computer monitors these days have an option programmed in to them that allows a user to tell the monitor to use a specific shade of a colour that makes large chunks of text easier to read, however not all computer users will know about this in-built feature, thus forcing web coders to use either a specific set of colours and fonts that will be easy for everyone to comprehend, or have a different stylesheet again for those who suffer from dyslexia.

In place of our Professional, Communication and Digital Skills lecture we had a woman come up from the main campus on Infirmary Road and show us how to use the resource finding tools that the college provides. This is incredibly convenient and well-timed considering we are being given a large assignment next week that will require us to use this service that is very similar to Google Scholar.

Arrays came up in programming. They're pretty much just fancy lists that start at 0 as opposed to 1, which is illogical - though I guess it wouldn't be the same if programming followed the logical conventions of society.