I have accepted a place working as an intern at Kodime, a Mobile Marketing and Application provider. The company makes SMS based marketing solutions for companies wanting to expand their marketing campaign into the ever growing Mobile industry. Kodime work with all of the major mobile operators such as Vodafone, Orange O2, Verizon and Cingular. The Company is based in Kingston with offices in Sydney, Australia and a presence in New York.

My position will be Platform Manager and I will start in August 2007, where I will be assisting with the day to day operations of the system – making sure the systems are working. I will also be assisting in supporting clients, developing parts of new products and other random stuff.

I look forward to joining the team.

A few months ago I received an email from Kingston University about their scheduled applicant days:

You have been recommended to me by the placements office staff as someone who would be a good ambassador for the Faculty and Kingston University

The reason for the recommendation I assume was the fact I studied in America for the first semester but that line got me thinking, what was the selection process; were some people less likely to be good ambassadors? Was I chosen for my superior wit and intellect or just because I had a good CV? What were the entry requirements for such a position?, I don’t have much of a history brokering deals with foreign governments neither do I recall attending any functions in the name of international relations…

Months went by and finally the day arrived, these things are held on Saturdays because there is more chance of people being able to attend. The volume of people expected was in the thousands, me and Lloyd were just 2 of many ambassadors who were expecting the hoards of people to outweigh the amount of us there was to help them. We were outfitted with CISM T-shirts and armed with the knowledge that we would need and were on our way…as the morning progressed however it became clear that something was wrong…

The volume of people seemed a little on the empty side (for our faculty at least). For the first few hours all we did was direct Journalism students to room 41…a mere 3 rooms away from the CISM base room, we tried our hardest to convert these poor lost souls but to no affect.

After a few hours of standing and joking around with the other ambassadors about the ‘rush’ of people (or lack thereof) it became clear that the only thing to do was to walk around and look important, so we mingled with staff and attendees alike, it’s actually surprising that most lectures have a sense of humour.

In the end only 6 students that had applied turned up, leaving us with the odd tour to conduct and help with, putting the crazy person aside it all went according to plan although I suspect the next one (about 3 weeks away) there will be a lot more to do. There will be photos of the next one, and lots of our amazing CISM t-shirts

If you read the archives you will see a completely different landscape, there are posts dating back to the dawn of time, some good some bad, updates were pretty regular and some of them were heartfelt.

The further you get towards the present you will see less updates and less of the ‘good ‘ol’ posts that I was once famous for. It has been noticed several times and constant reminders have been given but the fact is life got in the way, I’m not saying there wasn’t time – I’m just saying that I used the time in different ways.

The ramp up to coming over here to North Carolina was pretty stressful add to that the impending terror threat it was hard to find the time to sit down, clear my mind and write a good post.

Since coming over here I’ve posted a few, but nothing compared to the past, like I said, life got in the way.

I’ve written a few posts on saying goodbye’s and leaving, and I guess you can call this another one, In less than an hour I’ll be leaving my apartment here in Charlotte and jetting back home into the sunset.

Of course in reality there is no such this as ‘jetting off into the sunset’ we all know the metaphor, and using it within the context of going back to England isn’t really the right use.

The time I’ve spent over here has truly been a wonderful experience and I wish it never had to end, the fact is if it weren’t for things outside my control I would stay as long as I possibly could, the time has gone so quickly, I guess time flies when you’re enjoying yourself.

For all the people I’ve met over the past 4 months, to all the people that brightened up my day and to all the people that cared I wish you all goodbye, I wish you all the best in the future and I hope that someday we will meet again.

Farewell

Looking back at years gone by – things didn’t seem to be as bad, I mean the stuff that happen was inexcusable, but at least there was a point of expression.

There is a saying, If you can do, if you can’t teach, there are a lot of teachers and professors that I admire and respect for their teaching style and aversion to the crap that is sent their way, people at Westlands will know the people I’m talking about, those few teachers earn respect from their students because they exude qualities of genuinely nice people, the others that have attitude problems and a myriad of other personality disorders never have and never will have my respect and are what is wrong with the teaching profession.

The joke in this story is that the people we expect to teach us in a university are at times worse than the people in state education.

For the most part professors are good, there are the exceptions of course, some of them you have to wonder why they bothered coming to work in the morning because their focus defiantly isn’t on getting people to learn – but 99% of them are genuinely passionate about their work, to the people who are the rest of this post isn’t referring to them.

Right here, right now, I’m bringing into question the role of the so called ‘teaching assistants’ that lecturers seem to have here.

Teaching Assistants (if we can call them assistants) seem to be regular students that are taking the course, and have an interest in either becoming a teacher or just showing off their over sized ‘I know everything’ ego. Not only do they think they know it all but they also think everyone else should – one in particular – my only question to him is WHY are we at university in the first place: to learn….

So here are the items on the charge sheet:

1. TA ignores me and Shane and helps everyone else – meaning that at the end of our final project evaluation he hadn’t seen ours, so we had no mark, despite the fact we had it ready a full 2 hours before everyone else.

2. He grades Lloyds lower than it should have been and decides that he’s going to have an attitude problem when Lloyd asks a question

3. He then proceeds to walk off

4. After his evaluation deadline, he tells us that if he hasn’t looked at it then its ‘tough’ and we get a 0 – forgetting of course that we’d been waiting 2 hours for him to come over.

5. When he realised that we had been waiting he gave us 3/10 for a project that he hadn’t even seen, which was less than we should (and would have got) if he had a clue and bothered to come over.

The guy is a moron and quite frankly shouldn’t be anything to do with teaching.

The funniest thing of all is that he obviously hasn’t read our files, we have a track record of “rocking boats” where things like this are concerned.

A few days ago me Lloyd and Shane went to the UNC Charlotte Vs Hofstra basketball game held here on campus.

The final score was UNCC 88 – Hofstra 82, here is the part that I would normally start talking about what happened during the game but I’m not really an authority on basketball so let’s just assume I’ve just given the play by play and you’re all informed about what happened.

As usual everything we go to include at least one crazy thing, it’s almost as if they throw it in with every ticket they sell to us, I can’t say I’ve seen the words ‘Buy one ticket get a crazy person free’ or even ‘for every ticket you get a crazy person half price’ on anything, but I guess something’s are in the small print.

The craziness extravaganza consisted (for the most part at least) of crazy mascot shaped things doing what crazy people do and messing around, round one consisted of propelling soft but possibly deadly projectiles into the crowd with a customised mortar based weapon, round two was a game of mascot basketball…

Now remember that these are mascots – people dressed up in furry suits that are about as durable as an iron bar in the Arctic, this combination made something that was pretty entertaining to watch, after all everyone likes to watch other people making fools out of themselves.

With all this craziness you would think that there isn’t any more of it within a 2 state radius, but nope, there was still enough for the Brass band to be infected with the spell too, either that or the gyrations and almost performance worthy um…performance was just part of the elaborate plan to steal craziness away from Norm the Niner.

Of course, most people aren’t reading this blog post for the not so up to the minute score information, they’re reading it to get the link to the photos of the cheerleaders (and who can blame you)

Anyone who’s been reading my blog since the first year of university (by that I really mean since last year) you will remember the whole Easy jet Presentation tomfoolery, after the presentation I made another post with a list of things not to do in a presentation, there are certain things that annoy me, bad presentations are one of them.

In the post I mentioned about having a backup plan, normally I have backup plans, enough of them to survive even the longest of silences and awkward situations however this time I didn’t, neither did I think I needed one…how wrong I was.

As I do more of these presentations I get complacent. One thing I’ve become better at is rambling on about something and making it sound as if I actually know what I’m talking about this of course is a useful skill to have. It was only a demoing presentation for my HCI module so it didn’t rate highly on the “stay up all night preparing” meter, the slides were prepared over a week ago and the talking was pretty self explanatory…describe what our proposed system does and the steps involved in getting it there, again, not hard since I was the one that designed the UI.

Probably the most common problem in presentations is technical faults, problems with either the equipment or the presentation itself. There are levels of problems in this arena, on one end of the scale you have the kind of things that go wrong at a professional conference as Chris Sells knows only too well at the PDC, and then you have the things that happen on my end of the scale. Admittedly the presentation didn’t have as many problems as his but it was the sheer stupidity that annoyed me the most.

I tested the slides just hours before we were due to present, everything worked perfectly, all the links worked, the slides were there and we were good to go. I wasn’t particularly concerned about the presentation because it wasn’t going to be that hard to ramble on.

So after overcoming a problem getting Vista, my laptop and the projector to work with each other instead of collaborating against me to make my life a living hell it was time to crack on. Mid way through (after getting a few murmurs of laughter from the other people in the room) came the third and final scenario to be demoed. Things were going ok until the slides that were in perfect working order mere hours before decided to conspire against me.

A few minutes of fumbling and attempts at both getting the damn thing to work and keeping everyone from falling asleep I finally managed to work around the problem leaving the rest of the presentation to flow without a hitch.

Normally this sort of thing wouldn’t bother me, I’m used to technology spontaneously crumbling around my ears and having to deal with the fallout, what did bother me was when I looked at the slides after I sat down there was nothing wrong with it, it all worked as it was supposed to and as it did hours before…something somewhere decided that it was going to mess up at the worst possible time – how can something that worked before suddenly break???

So there you have it, yet another presentation nightmare

I do have two more things to add to my list of don’ts in presentations however:

7. PowerPoint is and should be the only app you use to do a presentation, Internet Explorer is not PowerPoint

8. Clipart and animated gif’s are still forbidden, when are people going to realise this?