Back in the arms of tertiary education

Well I got in. Turns out I had nothing to really worry about after all, and I am now a full time student again. Which makes my current projects a bit crimped for time, but I still managed to find time to shoot a CD cover, and I’ll be working on the design later this week. Have to plan a couple more shoots coming up over the next few weeks as well which will keep me very busy. But I like being busy, keeps me from spending too much money.

Today was my second day, and I’m glad that I did this. Even if I were to learn absolutely nothing (and that’s not the case, I’ve already learnt a few things) the networking opportunities are tremendous! If you are in my situation, a course like this I think will take you from the mountain top to the stratosphere, since quite aside from the things you learn you get to put your work and your work ethic in front of people who can break you into the industry. I’m really, really excited about this course, I can’t wait to get deeper into the work!

TAFE Interview 2

The interview was dead easy, but there was probably going to be about 250 applicants for only 30 full time positions so the competition is pretty tough. I thought it was a bit strange though that the interviewer asked me lots of questions about my equipment, but not one about my motivations. I have no idea if that means that it doesn’t matter, or he thought I was crap and will never get in and therefore not bother. The other interviewers in the room asked about motivations and goals…

…anyway I find out next week. We shall see.

TAFE Interview

Tomorrow I will be heading off to an interview for a Photography course at TAFE. I studied Graphic Design at university, and while I still enjoy doing design work (I’ve still got a couple of websites and some posters in the pipeline) I don’t feel it is my life’s calling. The one thing that I noticed was that while I was at uni, you had a support network of people who wanted to see you succeed — professors, tutors, other students, visiting lecturers — something I don’t have now that I’ve decided to change my focus. I don’t have a specific photographic qualification, but worse than that I don’t have any real contacts in the industry, and I am hoping that this TAFE course would fill in the gaps in my knowledge, but also give me that support network to succeed. So I’ve spent this week putting a book together for the interview, and hopefully all will work in my favour tomorrow!

How do you survive for a weekend with only $20?

I’ve been following this series of posts by Sudhir Venkatesh on the Freakonomics Blog for a little while now. Venkatesh is an economist who did his PhD in the economics of a drug running gang in Chicago, as featured in Freakonomics. He has been studying how people at the poorest end of American society survive, and he has also been consulting for various young and inordinately rich kids who are interested in philanthropy, but has no idea where to start. In this installment, Venkatesh brings Michael, a multi-millionaire, and Curtis, a squatter who lives on $5000 per year, together so Michael can get an idea of what it is like for the poor to live.

Meanwhile, Michael drove his rental car around the neighborhood. When he returned to meet us he was exasperated. “The food here is awful! No fruit, vegetables are moldy. Only meat, canned food, and soda. What do kids eat? The guy at the store told me no one would eat fruit unless it’s in a can. Is that true?”

Curtis shook his head. I told Michael, “When we get back to New York, I will talk with you about diet and quality of food availability in poor neighborhoods.”

I am not a multi-millionaire, but I have never been lacking for anything that I needed, nor most things that I wanted. It was an eye opener to read about how people can live with such little money, and how creative they were in managing what little they have. It’s a great read.

The smartest interview I’ve seen in a while

Dear Blackberry

If you’re making a phone that you hope will be an iPhone Killer, lose the Comic Sans. Seriously, don’t you have a single designer working for you any more?

A brief rundown on what I think of my Treo 500v

The battery life is horrible. Admittedly I push mine very hard, I have the data connection on most of the day for push email (more on that later), and I like to read the news, and occasionally listen to music on it. I’d struggle to make it last much more than 24hrs, especially if I throw in a little Google Maps use.

There is almost no user-generated information about this phone online, which tells me: people who are likely to write about this stuff isn’t interested in this phone, or it’s not selling very well. Which is a shame, it’s actually a pretty good phone.

The microphone is very loud, and has excellent noise cancellation. I’ve been asked to speak softer by a few people on the other end of the line even in noisy places.

The keyboard is very good, I’d say as good as a Blackberry Curve. It is a tiny bit stiff, but the keys are well spaced and I can almost touch type on it. The only thing I didn’t like is the spacebar, there are two separate buttons on each end, and when you press it feels a bit inaccurate.

The “carousel” menu, which is only on the Vodafone version, is very good — if you’ve never used a smartphone before. It provides no customisation options, it’s hardwired to show only the programs that the phone ships with, so if you prefer Opera to Pocket IE, you have to navigate deeper into the menu structure into the basic Windows Mobile menus to find it. On the other hand, the menu is very clever, displaying favourite contacts, messages (email and sms/mms), recent programs, upcoming appointments and the like in a slick interface.

There are very few user customisable features at all, although this may be because this is the Standard edition of Windows Mobile. It is rather annoying that Microsoft ripped out all the bits that would be too hard to navigate without a touch screen, rather than spending a bit of time solving the UI problems.

(If you are comfortable with digging through the registry, I’ve found a few of the keys that can be edited to customise the phone. More in a later post.)

The UI itself suffers from all the general Windows Mobile problems, but the smartphone verison isn’t as fiddly as the touchscreen version, and can quite easily be used one-handed. One thing it does fall down hard on is you can’t quickly switch from one active program to another, the way that you can on a Symbian phone (which uses a special hardware key to do it). It’s pretty dumb, given that you can’t actually exit most applications from inside the application, you have to dig through a billion menus to find the Task Manager program to close applications. But, overall, it’s not too bad, and it’s snappy enough most of the time.

Push email and Activesync in general is awesome. This is my first exposure to Microsoft’s Exchange/Activesync/Outlook triangle, and I have to say that I am very impressed. I can definitely see why this is so popular for businesses, and why Apple licensed Activesync. That’s not to say that I haven’t had problems, though the problems seem to be network related rather than phone/server related. Combined with Mobipush, a free push email service, I now get push email straight from Gmail, with HTML, without having to pay Blackberry tax.

The camera, in good light, is exceptional — for a phone. In bad light? Forget it.

A Practical Guide for Asian Men, Redux

So, quite some time ago, I wrote about a book by Adam Quan called How to Date White Women: A Practical Guide for Asian Men. An influx of comment spam reminded me of that post, and I thought I’d go check out any new comments about the book on Amazon… and I found this one:

GREAT!!, December 17, 2006 Personally, I am an Asian man. And by Asian, I mean Asian. When I got this book, I realized the error of my white-woman-hunting-ways. Now that I’ve seen the light, I can lure them in like moths to the fire. THANKS Adam Quan! My love life is more bubbly than a 100 degree pot in high altitude.

I’m not sure what he means by “Asian”. But at high altitude water boils at lower than 100 degrees due to lower atmospheric pressure, so a 100 degree pot in high altitude would mostly consist of hot gas… which is a pretty clever piss-take comment.

Now we wait for the Guvernator to save all our arses

The Brits have just finished launching a series of satelites that give their military worldwide control over autonomous military assets. The name of said satelite system? Skynet.

No shit.

Best quote ever

From Gizmodo, about the USAF Cyber Command’s, uhm, options:

“It depends on our target; it depends on our rules of engagement—are we conducting open warfare with an adversary? If that’s the case, then we don’t really need to be discreet about it. When we drop a JDAM [Joint DIrect Attack Munition aka "big mofo guided bomb"] and leave a big smoking hole, that’s not very discreet.”

Indeed.