Summer Holidays

So I finally finished the semester, which is a great relief! I just found out that I got an HD on a scientific report, and I'm super-chuffed about that. I feel like I'm finally improving at writing reports. Now I have four months off Uni, and I need to find stuff to keep me entertained. I'm going to keep playing around on Trove, and I'm also going to learn JavaScript. Codeacademy, who I have talked about before and love, has a whole bunch of different courses that you can take online, all of them free. It's really good for someone like me who has never done anything like coding before, because it is simple, easily understood, and also updates in real time so you can see exactly what you have done.

After I've done that, I'm going to help a friend build an online store. She wants to sell all the vintage clothes that she has collected, and her brother-in-law was supposed to make her an online store, but I've known her for a couple of years now and he hasn't done it in all that time. So I'm going to do it for her. It shouldn't take too long, hopefully, and it will spur her on to get organised.

Other things - I'm going to take up running. I've never done it before, and I'm going to give it a go. I'm going to read a book called Sleepwalkers, about the first world war. I'll give my house a really, really good clean, which is boring but needs to be done.

Here are two digital information interesting things that I found this week: an article on The Atlantic, by Walter Kirn. If You're Not Paranoid, You're Crazy is about how pervasive digital technology has become, and how it's listening to us, and it totally feeds into my own concerns about information and privacy. Also, Internet Live Stats shows you in real time how many web sites there are, how many emails were sent today, as well as instagram, google searches, and other internet related items. It's pretty amazing to see the numbers tick over so rapidly.

End of School

The semester is almost done, which is a great relief! I've finished my classes, and now have only assignments to do. One I handed in on Tuesday, and now there is just one left, due on Monday. All that's left for that one is a bit of editing. It's been a tough semester, a pretty boring one, so I'm glad to be nearly done!

I'm sick of talking about what I've been studying, so instead I'm going to talk about podcasts. I love podcasts! I listen to them quite a bit. It all started with Serial, which I think happened to a lot of people. From there, I found a whole lot of podcasts to subscribe to. I listen to a couple of history podcasts, Hardcore History and Emperors of Rome.  This American Life is also terrific. But I've chosen a couple of podcasts and episodes that have relevance to what I'm studying to highlight here.

Note to Self is a podcast about technology and "finding balance in the digital age." One episode that I found really interesting was on Turnitin, which is the software used to find plagiarism in student's work. They use it at RMIT, and it's pretty amazing technology. Here's the direct link to that episode: judging your originality in a cut and paste world

Another podcast that I listen to a lot is Radiolab. It's a show about science and technology, and sounds incredibly boring, but it isn't, it's really good. I picked one episode that has more relevance to digital stuff; called darkode, it's about hackers holding your computer for ransom and also about the website, part of the dark web, where hackers can share information and code.

Reply All is all about the internet, and has a funny segment called "yes yes no", where the hosts explain to the producer of the show what some meme or topical internet thing means. I've been finding that I understand a lot more of what they talk about now, which is kind of amazing.

Maria's Sweet Treats

In class for the last couple of weeks, we have been putting what we have learnt about HTML into practice, to create our own websites. We had to make our own website, for a company called Maria's Sweet Treats, a cake store that supplies mini desserts for parties and other events. It was interesting, but very hard to do. HTML is very rule-oriented, and very fiddly, and if you don't close one of your brackets, you're totally screwed. It's very time consuming and detailed.

Huan got us to download Kompozer, which is a free application that helps you write your own code. While it was great when we were making tables and headers, when I started trying to do more complicated coding, often it would not recognise it or just disappear the code that I'd typed in. I attempted to use background images within a table with text over the top (impressive, I know), but Kompozer would not let me resize the background images to fill the cells. I tried and I tried, and sweated over it for a couple of days, until I just had to let it go and move on with my life. I think that if I was going to do coding on a regular basis, I would probably purchase a more sophisticated application, like UltraEdit or Sublime Text. They're not terribly expensive, Sublime Text is $70, but I don't really need it.

Anyway, here is my website: Maria's Sweet Treats. Check out that sweet fixed position navigation bar! That one took me ages. Hopefully it's all working: when I first loaded it onto the server I realised that I'd saved my images onto my computer and then used a link for the image from there, but I needed to use the image link instead. So I fixed it, loaded it again, took another look. Then I needed to fix a link. So I fixed it, loaded it, looked again. Designing a website is incredibly time consuming and really detailed. One of the customers at the cafe that I work at was telling me that he's recently hired a company to build him a website, and it's going to cost him over four thousand dollars. Originally I thought that this amount was ridiculous! However, after going through the stress of trying to get this website to work, I've changed my mind, and decided that they totally deserve that money.

Update: I don't know why the home button on the home page isn't working. It works just fine on my mobile's browser. I suppose it's kind of redundant anyway, it only refreshes the page, but it's annoying that it doesn't work. I think I'm just going to have to accept that it doesn't work, and leave it alone, and move on to other homework. Like figuring out how the cloud works.