Welcome back and to the New semester

1 x Project; Assignment & an exam - Mum's 80th birthday @ Radisson - delayed flights - shuttling back & forth to airport - new semester kicks in . .

Well here we are back in the 'ole uni of Strathclyde again - broke up / finished off late December - conducted my interview with Sabrina round about 19 December – that was for my assignment – interview with an entrepreneur for IT in Business - wrote up my notes – had about 10 pages – wasn’t happy in a few areas – went back to her and clarified a few things and I was quite happy – what is her business I hear you ask?

Making an online auction space available for people that have had to cancel holidays that they have booked and are liable for payment. As well as attracting people who are looking to purchase holidays to come and pick up what is on offer online – this will allow people who have bookings to now be able to minimise their losses. Travel Salvage is the name of the company and it is my understanding that they are going to go live any day now.

My Internet Programming project was to design a dynamic web site which allowed you and other people to register your dietary requirements and then let the web site suggest the restaurants which were most suitable for the group based on there selection . . . .that was in theory – I managed the following HTML - front end i.e. the web pages with selections etc., i.e. forms – had the CSS sheets in place for the look and feel – had client side validation with JavaScript – created the tables for the restaurants; users and groups – and created (allowed borrowed heavily from lecturer’s examples) PHP pages including creating sessions and additional server side validation . . . .having said all that I consider it to be a disaster – why? Simply because it is not working . . . as with many development projects I ran out of time – should I have spent more time on it – damn right I should have – perhaps I should have cancelled Christmas and New Year whilst I was about it . . . I took a decision not to attempt anything between two big holidays – spent time with family and loved ones . . .and had a great time . . . got back into the swing of things and had to organise my Mum’s birthday party as well as brother and his family and nephew arriving . . .worked flat out on project –frankly underestimated PHP programming language and in retrospect spent to much time on Java (for obvious reasons) ignoring PHP thinking I would have plenty of time to pick it up . . . all I can hope for is a pass mark and may face the possibility of having to do it over as it may not meet the minimum requirement. That was for the Friday – Monday I had to hand in my interview with Sabrina – I was all for just handing it in – in casual conversation one of my fellow students said but it has to be no more than 1000 words – which is the hard part taking your 10 pages and reducing it to about 20% of the interview . . .anyway managed that for the Monday and then just to keep us on our toes we had an exam on Tuesday – when did I study for this – well was up till 4am on Friday morning – handed in project (Internet Programming) @ 12h00 – worked on Interview and finished it on Friday and then was able to study from then until Tuesday afternoon (day of my Mum’s actual birthday) – had to go into uni on Monday to hand in assignment . . .which meant with travel time and all lost 2 hours and I do have evening classes I give on Monday – so there was very limited time – but at the end of the day I was very happy with the exam – what a lovely setting – we wrote in an old church – see photo’s – Now whether or not the people who mark my exam paper will be as happy as I was with the exam – remains to be seen.

My Mum’s birthday was on Sat 20 January – Judi, myself my Mum, Samantha (my daughter) & her boyfriend Hud all booked in at the hotel on Sat afternoon – Sam’s suitcase was lost by airline and she was in a panic as her & Hud’s outfit as well as present were in it – pleased to say it turned up but a little late. Everything went fine – the hotel was very well organised and I was really happy with everything – 18 months of organising over in 2 and ½ hours – Judi was fantastic with a number of suggestions and coming up with the cake as well as booking the rooms for my Mum (as a birthday present) and then for us . . . It was the little things that made it in the end.

The new semester has kicked in and still getting used to the time table – subjects this semester will be E-commerce; Project Methodology; Systems Design and my two electives are Artificial Intelligence and Designing usable systems . . . . early days but thus far Systems Design is going to be all Java (Yippee! Java is back . . .) DUS is self study and AI is going to be very mathematical and logical . . .

See ‘ya all next week - will get back into swing of blogging . . . .

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