Bloody University

Another one so soon.

I felt it was time for a slightly less intelligible rant than my last. Keep in mind that as I am writing this I am rather tired as I had a smidgen under four hours sleep last night as I had my 18th birthday party last night and we stayed up well into the morning, and I am listening to the music on my iPod which I resurrected after a number of years of abandonment. Thus I am listening to a selection of shit music while writing this. Now I just have to decide what to rant about. So many possibilities: Religion, politics, death, life, people, animals, aliens, small furry creatures from Alpha Centuri, music, sport, software, women, men, those who have not yet decided, transvestites, or obscene, pointless lists which people read because they expect that they wont in fact be obscene, pointless lists.

Alas, It will be none of these things, but will in fact be about the stupidity of the institution called 'The University of Southern Queensland' which I am currently attending. Keep in mind that this is not news, but is in fact a rant which is several months out of date, and I am simply writing this because the factor of it shitting me is increasing exponentially. Namely the destruction of the 'Bachelor of Science - Information Technology', and the formation, in it's place, of the the 'Bachelor of Information Technology'. On paper this sounds like a great idea, you might say "That sounds like a brilliant idea, now the course is more relevant to students who want to study IT without the the interference of the faculty of science." (That was almost worthy of a dramatical reenactment on a current affairs show). However in reality it is utter codswallop (and here comes one of those shit songs that I had to skip). What you will in fact discover (if you don't already know about the situation which chances are if you are reading this you already will) is that they have taken the course and divided it up between the faculty of science and the faculty of business. What this means is that (no offence to any business students or indeed lectures) that we have to study utter crap that has absolutely no relevance to what future career path I wish to undertake. At the moment I have only one subject in the faculty of business called 'Censored so that if this is found by someone who's feelings could be hurt, they may not know what I am talking about' which essentially teaches us what computers are (argh bad music!), along with the basic hardware and software concepts, coupled with how to use Microsoft Office. This causes dilemmas on two levels:

1. I hate Microsoft and the greater majority of their products. At home I use Ubuntu (a GNU/Linux distribution) and thus can not run office on my computer at home (neglecting Wine, I don't want to pollute my beautiful Linux computer with dastardly Microsoft software anyway). To a greater degree we are using Office 2007 which is even worse, so in fact we are using shit software with an even worse interface.
2. I KNOW HOW TO USE IT. I DON'T FUCKING CARE ABOUT THE STUFF YOU ARE SHOWING ME, I EITHER ALREADY KNOW IT OR DON'T WANT TO (by that I mean that if I ever have to publish any written thing that requires more than a text editor I will either use OpenOffice.org, or in the case of a professional report I may chose to learn LaTeX, though not too soon).

This is by no means the extent to which they shit me (Wow, a good song), there are many other things that I have issue with including the fortnightly powerpoint presentations that form part of the assessment, the chief lecturers self obsession displayed by using a (shit) text-book that he co-wrote (there was something else that went here, but it ran away from my mind), the obsession with observing things from a business perspective (especially with regards to profits), and the general simplicity of course material. The list goes on, but to spare you, I wont.

I'm not sure if that is what I intended to write when I started this post, but my mind is so all-over-the-place that it doesn't really matter.

Otherwise I'm fine.
Tim Westcott (Necius)

P.S. I had a good birthday, thanks for asking, apart from having to spend three hours of it in the aforementioned class.
P.P.S. Sorry

What I believe and what I don't.

Hello again.

It's been a while without a post, and I think this one serves as an interesting enough one to last another few months.

Today, at Uni, I was sitting talking to a Christian friend of mine (hello Isaac if you are reading this), and there came a man from the 'student life' group, a conglomeration of the many of the vast number of Christians who study at USQ (my uni). He walked up to us, sat down next to me, introduced himself, and after talking to Isaac for a period of time, turned his attention to me. After asking me what my beliefs were, and asking me what I thought a Christian was (both of which I answered rather tentatively as I didn't want to offend), he proceeded to list his beliefs. Then asked me if I wanted to join his group and/or attend the 'Christianity explained' course. I politely refused his offer, rather than telling him where to stick his illogical, superstitious beliefs, because I didn't want to be rude.

Unfortunately he caught me rather off guard, and I erred on the side of caution, so as to be not rude, and unfortunately didn't debate the point much at all. This evening, however, in my boredom, I created a list of my own beliefs (as well as some things I don't believe), so that if faced with a similar situation I may be able to recall some of these points (or alternatively link him/her to this post).

So here they are (I'm not sorry if you are offended, as these are not offensive and if you think they are you are probably a gimboid):

• I believe in the Scientific Method.
• I believe in evidence.
• I believe in logic.
• I believe in Occam's Razor.
• I believe in evolution.
• I believe in the Big Bang.
• I believe that the Earth is a Giant sphere of rock, that orbits around an even larger ball of gas, which itself revolves around a large cluster of large balls of gas.
• I believe that when I die, I will decompose.
• I believe that there is "no hell below us, above us only sky".
• I believe that I only have one life, and thus I don't want to waste it.
• I believe in freedom of thought, speech, and beliefs.
• I believe in gender equality.
• I believe in sexual freedom.
• I believe in choice, on multiple levels.
• I believe in mathematics.
• I believe in the separation of church and state.
• I don't believe in a cruel, vindictive, violent, petty, arrogant, illogical deity.
• I don't believe in any other deities, be they ultra-powerful men, ultra-powerful spaghetti, or teapots that are not where they are supposed to be.
• I don't believe that the threat of such deities should be used to control (and/or to make money out of) the population.
• I don't believe that such a disbelieve should lead me to be killed, attacked, pitied, or 'saved'.
• I don't believe in slavery.
• I don't believe that life is just something to be endured on the way to something better.
  
• I don't believe in torture.
• I don't believe in indoctrinating children into a potentially harmful set of beliefs.

This list is not exhaustive, I wrote it in a relatively short space of time. If you have any comments, or additions I may add them (if I agree with them). Once again, if you are offended, you are probably taking this to seriously.

Goodbye again.
Tim

URL button concept

This is just a quick concept image of what the URL bar would look like if it used buttons instead of text for a path. It's not intended for people to just stumble upon, and will most likely bore anyone who did not intend to view it.
In my opinion this would only appear when a page has already been navigated to, on the opening of a new tab the standard URL bar would appear.
A reference of what it looks like now (taken from the blender website - art gallery):



What the same site would look like with buttons:



There would be benefits and deficits to this design:

Benefits:
- Less issue with 'information overload'
- Would integrate more fully with the modern operating system (the button design is taken from Nautilus in Ubuntu, but a design could be made using the Vista 'arrows')
- Aid usability enabling 'drag and drop' onto the tab bar, etc.
- Easier to go to a higher level of the site.

Deficits:
- Difficulty implementing (with many weird URLs involving numbers and automatically generated content, e.g. this blog ends in 'post-create.g?blogID=944926393326072880'). This could hopefully be overcome using intelligent programming.
- When a user wants to type a URL on a page that already has content, it would require an extra mouse click (This could surely be overcome by someone good at interface design, i.e. not me). Alternatively all users could learn to use 'CTRL + L' :).
- Some users would not accept this very readily, we saw this with the Awesome Bar.

I'm sure there are other positives and negatives, please feel free to comment. Please note that I am not necessarily talking about the near future, but I feel that eventually the interface will go this way and it would be good if we were first.

P.S. Just for anyone who is registered with Ubuntu Brainstorm, and haven't yet voted for this idea (but want to):

"Oh no... Not again"

I Say Hello,
Once again I have returned the the irrational boredom that convinces me to write a new post. It has been a while since my last post, but don't worry, you haven't missed much.
I am in a state of stress once again. Tomorrow I must do a summative (actually counts towards something) pract report on a transistor amplifier circuit. I also have a Maths C (the hard one) assignment due next week which I have barely begun. So in all honesty I shouldn't be bored, because I should be working with no end in sight. That said, I just don't feel like working... and posts on useless blogs that I doubt anyone will ever read seems like a much better use of my time.
That's all I can think to say, essentially I just decided to write about how bored I am, even though I know that no-one cares (nor should they).
I Say: "So long and thanks for all the fish."

An inspiring first post...

I've decided, after months of having an empty blog, that I should finally post something. So here goes.
I am bored, on the far end scale of boredom. I'm also sore, for today we had our cross country, and, in my infinite wisdom (and fitness) I decided to run most of the darn thing. The result... an uninspiring 34th for me, it's not as if their were a large number of runners, or indeed any particularly skilled runners, so it seem that I just need to learn to run.
In other news I've finished the last of my exams, and handed in the last of my assignments and I've just realised how inane and boring this post has become. A sad product of my endless boredom. I have, however, started a mini-underground resistance against the computer administrator at school (when I say mini, I really mean just me with a large number of people thinking that I've completely lost the plot. The plan is, in case you want to hear, which I'm sure you don't in which case you're probably wondering why you are still reading, to create a small text file, titled "Mr insert name of administrator here Please read this", in which on every second line I have written a small (or large as the case may be) complaint about the school network, slow computers, slow Internet, blocked sites, no Linux, are the types of things I'm talking about there. On the other lines I have written "If you are looking at my screen... THE COMPUTERS ARE TERRIBLE... Please rectify the situation". I hope that next time he invades my privacy (which he seems to do on a regular basis) he will find this document, read it, and if I can get enough people to follow my lead he may get so frustrated that he could possibly (just a very slim chance of this) do his job for a change.
If you got this far, I am impressed with your ability to stay focused, thus I shall not torture you any longer.