Work

planning the week ahead

Image by Rakka via Flickr

Next week i’m off college, but i’ve a lot of work to do. I have about 80% of footage and sound to work with so i can begin to put together a ‘final’ demo version of our college video.

At the minute, i have over 300 video files sitting in a folder, 500+ sound effect files and over a hundred images. Over 13 gigs in total of raw material. That’s a hell of a lot of work.

I’ve renamed all those 300 video files and sorted them in to folders as it’s vitally important i’m well organized. You have to be when producing any sort of lenghtly film with loads of footage and effects.

At the minute i have some titles/introduction complete, plus the finale. In total, about 20 seconds of actual video but it probably took me 8/9 hours to do. I also have a custom mp3 made which runs over the introduction.

This week, i’ll need to start cutting up video and using our different camera angles to good effect. I’ll also draw out a timeline of events for myself to keep me on track. The final video will be about 30 minutes in length and i’d imagine i’ll be swapping angles and changing scenes every few seconds to make it look as polished as possible.

I’ve no idea what the final product will look like, but i’ve already got some ‘world class’ stuff in it which will definitely blow people away. Our plan now is to make this in to a dvd with full menu’s and fancy introduction + an actual DVD case & cover to present the dvd in

God help the other groups who are doing similar projects - that’s all i’ll say - they don’t stand a chance

1st term over

Image via Wikipedia

It’s been a very long first term for me in college. I started back on September 7th and it’s only now i’m getting a ‘break’. My timetable has also been harsh this semester… 9-5 daily and i get off at 4 on a Friday. Living about an hour away from college, you can slap another 2 hours on to that 9-5…

I get up at 7am, leave at 7.30am and aren’t home ’til just after 6pm. Add to that study time at home and assignments etc… and it’s a long week.

I also try to blog daily here, inevitably i’ll suffer from ‘burn out’ if i keep that pace up, which is the reason why i’ve taken the odd ‘day off’ like yesterday on this blog.

Yesterday i completed a custom made mp3 file for our video project which took some time. I’ve also completed several short animations and effects for it. The bulk of the work will be done next week when i’m off from college for a week

This video project is by far and away my biggest college project to date and also by biggest video project to date. Even though it’s not actually worth *that* much, it’s just something that we’ve all decided to go for and do to the best of our ability.

My plan from day one was to average around 70% in all exams and so far i’ve managed that. At the minute my average is around 75% and my lowest score so far in any exam has been 57%, which is also my worst subject.

Ultra Portable Options

I’m still keen on getting an ultra portable or nettop, netbook, webbook - whatever you call them.

I’ve decided it’ll have to have;

• xp or linux (preferably XP although i could buy the linux version cheaper and install XP myself if i wanted )
• 1gb RAM
• Processor not too important.. any ‘Intel Atom’ would do the job.
• Min 80gb hard-drive (i need my space and peace of mind that i can download anything)
• Integrated webcam
• Integrated bluetooth
• Integrated SD slot
• 6 hours minimum battery life - the more the merrier
• Screen size - below 12″, nothing lower than 9″

Currently, i can’t buy a laptop with the above specs, even though some now exist. Here’s the options i’m considering, although i’ll not actually be buying one of these for another couple of months, i might even wait until the new year to see what sort of netbooks are on the horizon but at the minute, here’s what i could get;

MSI Wind U100

10″ screen with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom and 1 gig of RAM. Has the camera + bluetooth. Around 5 hour battery life. The U120 is due out in December which means it’ll probably hit the shores here around December 2010 At the minute though the U100 comes in at about €400.

Acer Aspire One

My Acer Ferrari served me well for over 3 years and the Acer Aspire One is definitely worth a look. It starts off at around €300 but you only get 8gb storage. The 120gb version with 1gb RAM costs about €330. It lacks bluetooth and the screen is a tad small at 8.9″ but it does have an SD reader. It’s also a bit heavier than the MSI wind at 1.26kg. Battery life is around 3 hours.

Asus Eee PC 1000

These babies start off at around €200 and go all the way up to €450. Similar to the MSI and Acer One but weighs in at 1.45kg. It does, however boast up to 7 hours of battery life. There’s also newer versions on the way. The S101 for example weighs 1kg and has all the features i’m looking for bar the large hard drive.

Dell Mini 9

Starts out at €349. Again, similar to the rest, but has slower RAM. It does have an SD card reader though. 4 hour battery life.

So there’s choice out there… the battery life is a huge factor for me. I hate having to charge things regularly whether it’s phones, laptops or cameras. I like to be able to take them with me fully charged and not have to worry about whether or not they’ll need to be charged before i get home. Being able to take a laptop to college with no charger would cut down on weight, wires and encourage me to use it more.

That’s the whole point of me gettig one - to turn not so productive time in to productive time. The faster and easier it is for me to whip out a laptop, the more likely i am to do so during those 10 minutes between classes.

Data Flow Diagrams

I’ve a test on this on Thursday, so i’m gonna kill two birds with the one stone here and turn it in to a creative blog post which (a) entertains you and (b) helps me learn about how these things work.

A Data Flow Diagram is a pretty cool way of summing up an entire organization’s ‘flow of information’ with a few arrows, circles and squares For a more boring, proper definition see here.

Now these lads seem like bread and butter, school-kid type stuff, but when you’re stuck with a few paragraphs of text and have to create one of these from your head, it’s not as easy at you may think

Circles represent systems, rectangles represent people and parallel lines represent storage/database and the arrows are the flow of information between the lot.

Here’s something which is so simple, yet invaluable as it sums up all of this stuff;

So you end up with a big pile of circles and rectangles and arrows all over the place. Looks great when done right, but one wrong arrow or using a rectangle instead of a circle fecks everything up and the whole system usually needs touching up then, at which stage things become messy…. so messy you end up scraping the lot and starting from scratch

Anyway, here are some cool charts / diagrams i’ve come across on the web;

Procrastination Flow Chart

Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart

Vista Decision Flow Chart

blog stats update

It’s been a while since i’ve looked at the stats for this blog so here’s an update…

For the past week or so, RSS subscriber numbers have been at an all time high. I’m now at over 120 RSS subscribers. That’s a great feeling because when i see a blog that has over 100 RSS subscribers, i’m much more likely to subscribe myself or read the content and stick around on the site. Here’s a graph of my subscriber count from February 2007 to October 2008.

If we look at the monthly traffic breakdown, we can see an obvious spike in traffic in July 2008. If we ignore that, we can see a slow but steady rising trend in visits per month and that’s what i keep my eye on… not spikes.

This month, i’ve passed the 300,000 word mark on this blog. I now have over 1150 blog posts under my belt with over 2000 comments - so on average, i get about 2 comments per post.

In terms of revenue, this blog has never been a steady earner or something i could bank on making ‘x’ amount per month. Recently however, i’ve had numerous requests for paid reviews and believe it or not i’ve had to reject one or two as i deemed them to be ‘off topic’.

It’s never nice refusing cash but it has to be done if i’m to keep bringing this blog forward. I can’t and won’t have unrelated reviews on this blog. If, however, the review is about an unrelated topic (say fashion or something) and the owner is looking for a review on the website itself (design/ layout / navigation / first impressions etc..) then yeah, i’ll consider doing a review as i’d consider that on topic as it allows me to review something i know a bit about

But so far this month, i’ve completed 2 paid reviews and there’s possibly 2 more on the way. Whilst it’s all dandy having a few paid reviews every month, i’m well aware that too many can kill a blog so i’m never going to do back to back paid reviews or have a paid posts:normal posts ratio greater than 1:5 per month.

So in terms of revenue, this blog is slowly starting to pay for itself but the irony is i’ve never been so inactive on it. This college video project is eating up all my time & will continue to do so until mid-November when we have to present it.