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first day of fourth year

September 13, 2010

So today I started back at college for my fourth and final year and as expected I did absolutely nothing all day. I arrived into college a little after half 8 thinking that I might have classes at 9, the reason I said might is because I had received an email from the college saying some classes may not be starting until 1 or 2pm!

It turns out my course was one of those that wasn’t starting until 1pm. Fair enough I could have accepted that if I had something to occupy myself with. Usually I would pop out the laptop or use one of the computer lab’s pc’s to go on the internet but once I tried that there was no luck there. The entire college has no Wi-Fi because the IT department are upgrading the services, they say it should be working next week but I have my doubts.

Image via Wikipedia

It is about time though that the Wi-Fi in the college got an upgrade, you could sit in some lecture or lab rooms and struggle to get any reception at all, the Wi-Fi service the college is installing is the same that the majority of the other college’s in Ireland are using which is called eduroam. this Wi-Fi service should apparently give us 100% coverage in the new carrolls building which is the new computer department and then at least 80% coverage for the rest of the college :D.

It seems a lot of work has yet to be done in the new IT department, but hopefully they will get it sorted sooner rather than later, I would assume all the IT technicians are working overtime to get the place fully up and running.

Also I have yet to get my full timetable. The college have made a great new handy site that has our class timetables but it is not fully up to date yet, according to some of our lecturers we should have more classes than what is on our sheet so that should hopefully be changed over the next few days. The new timetable is no longer manually updated, if the head of the computing department makes a change to the timetables, the site get updated automatically. That may not sound like a big deal, but to be honest, for our college that’s huge!

The new department is definitely a huge step up from the old one though; from what is complete it does seem excellent. The computers have 64 bit windows 7 operating systems with 8 GB of ram and huge hard disk space, also the projectors are brand new and there are speakers in the labs which will be useful for when we have to give presentations on our projects.

back to college

September 12, 2010

: Image via Wikipedia

So tomorrow I will be finally be going back to college for my fourth and final year. For some strange reason I am actually looking forward to this year, and I think it will most likely be much more interesting than previous years.

I always say that though, I always think the next year will be better and then it is just the same. I know in many ways this year is already going to be better than the previous three years as we should now have fully working equipment as we are in a completely new building, however until I see the new equipment I refuse to say that the upgrade to the computing department has been a success.

Tomorrow though I will find out, it is now back to the early nights of sleep, or at least a lot earlier than my sleeping pattern has been for the past few months! I am going to try and start tomorrow off on a good note and get into college somewhat early.

If I want to get free parking or even any parking space I have to be in for about 8.30 so that will motivate me hopefully to get up tomorrow morning. I also hope to get packed as close to the new department building as possible which is at the other end of the campus in relation to where I usually park my car.

Anyway tomorrow I will see if the investment the college made in the new IT department was worth it or not. So for now I am going to sleep, goodnight! 😀

A blast from the past!

September 08, 2010

It’s not too long ago now since broadband became mainstream or at least here in Ireland. Although it was just a short time ago, it still seems strange to hear the old dial up tone that your computer used to make when connecting to the internet!

The good old 56k connection, and you would curse the life out of anyone who would dare pick up the phone while you were on the internet because you knew you would have to go through the whole process of connecting again.

Back when I first joined Bebo I was still using dial-up! I remember trying to load a video that someone had on their profile page, it would take hours just to load a short 1 minute video.

I think it was around the Summer of 2006 that I got broadband first in my house, the internet became a completely different place, I soon became very addicted to YouTube because I could actually watch videos without having to wait for them to load.

Now though as fast as the internet is, it is still not fast enough. I have a 3mb connection in my house and apparently that is the fastest that can be pushed to my house, and it’s not like I live very far from the closest exchange point!

I think this day and age broadband should be going a lot faster than it is, I know that Eircom are rolling out fibre powered broadband and it will be available here in Louth between September and December of this year. So at least that will help but I still don’t think it is fast enough.

The new fibre broadband from eircom is going to be 8mb and apparently it should be a steady 8mb, it should never drop ridiculously low like down to 0.5mb which is not uncommon at the moment!

So from 56k dial up where loading a page with one image in a minute was pushing it, we now have high speed broadband where we can load thousands of pictures, videos & music within seconds, that is a huge leap and as long as it continues the internet will only become a better and more useful (than it already is) place.

Registered for college

September 07, 2010

Today I went up and registered for what will most likely be my last year in college! I can’t believe I have already completed three years of college and have earned a degree! This next year at college is to make that degree even better and bring it up to an honours level degree.

This next year is going to be different, it is a whole new building for the computing department so I already have no idea where anything is and at the moment I am not exactly sure what classes I will be studying this year. I had applied for iPhone Development but I recently found out that it is not going ahead!

We were asked to fill out other modules that we would like to take if we were not accepted into our first choice, as iPhone Development is not going ahead that means my only other module I put down was Data Warehouse Design which I am not looking forward to, I think I will try and switch out of it!

This is my last week off from my summer holidays now, my classes start on Monday September 13th at 9am! I am looking forward to going back, I want to get through this year so I can focus more on my future and getting my life career! It seems strange that there is only one year between now and when I potentially start my lifetime career!

Web Design – One Week Deadline

September 01, 2010

Today I have begun work on a new website design. The site is for a local business and it is a huge upgrade of their current site. I have already made some minor changes to their current design, but not a lot could be done with their current site, I did not design the current site! In case you haven’t guessed what the site is, it is a site for wedding cars and limos, as well as a taxi company.

Above is a picture of how the site currently sits, as you can see a lot of work needs to be done to it to make it more inviting and to add some life to it. Currently the site is too dark and dull and does not contain enough information for the visitors or potential clients.

My client is in a bit of a rush to have this site upgraded, so a deadline of approximately a week has been set. This is a tight deadline, considering the amount of work that needs to be done, I am used to having more time to complete a site.

So what all I am going to be doing to this site? First off it is going to be sitting on an entirely new domain name, at the moment the domain name is a bit of a mouthful at 19 characters in length! The current domain is annavillalimousines.com , it is just too long to expect someone to remember when going to look up your business and it’s not exactly snappy enough either. The new domain name however is much simpler to remember and I will keep it quiet until I have the site launched.

The next change is the biggest, it is the entire site! From concept to design to code and implementation, it has all been left to me to create something new, brighter and more inviting to potential customers. I will be designing the new site in Photoshop, and work has already begun on that, last night I made up a quick draft of the site and today I made lots of changes to it in relation to colours.

Tomorrow I will be showing my design idea to the client to see if he likes it or if there is something different that he wants done with it. Before I used to hate having to build websites from scratch, I am great when it comes to the coding side of things, but design is not my strong point at all. Now however I have learnt how to use Photoshop to get the results I like so I am a lot more comfortable with designing sites from scratch and I now find it much more interesting and fun!

Once the design gets the go ahead it will be on to making the rest of the content for the remaining pages of the site and then I will begin the stage of coding! I want to build this design using the WordPress platform, it is my native platform that I use for websites and I know it inside out by now.

I used to never know how to build a theme for WordPress, but over this last summer I looked into building WordPress themes and I realised they are really simple once you get though one.

Also by using WordPress it gives me the ability to enhance the websites presence online by adding some strong SEO to the site, thanks to the many plugins available from the WordPress community.

The final step to this site will be to create a Facebook group and promote it, it’s always great to have a client that wants there site to be a bit more modern and integrate it with social networks!