Towards the end of my placement at NPL a few months ago, I was asked by Kingston University to write a short bit of text about my time on placement such as how it helped me, and what it’s given me for the future. Then, after providing the uni with a photo of myself the piece was published a few months later in the 2009 Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics prospectus.

Below is an excerpt of the piece;

“I’m nearing the end of my placement at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington. I’ve been working as a technical coordinator in the knowledge transfer team doing web development and managing technical setups at events and conferences…” More…

 If you fancy seeing the page it’s on you can download it as a PDF here.

I can’t believe that two years ago I was sitting in examination rooms my 6th Form Westlands, completeing my A-levels. Now, two years on I’ve completed my second year of university, and boy what a year! From going to America and getting adjusted to life over there, to then coming back to Kingston for the second semester to get re-adjusted back; or atleast try to get re-adjusted.

Four months, three final exams and enough coursework to feed a starving goat later, and I’m done for this year. All packed up and after leaving Kingston earlier today and after a quick stop off at Stonehenge for a photo spree I was back in Devonshire for two months over the summer, hopefully with a long well earned break if I can call it that. The summer will be me bracing myself for a year working in industry during an internship starting in a couple months, which will then be followed with my final year before going into the real world for good!

Hopefully there will be plenty of time for other stuff too though over the next couple of months; such as photo sprees and even perhaps our very own British photowalk! There’s also another Open Day and then Broadcast Live later this month which I may be attending which will be good, as well as some other events if any happen to come my way!

So the second day of being an ambassador at Kingston University for the Computing, Information Systems & Mathematics (CISM) Faculty at an Applicant Open Day for prospective students commenced earlier today. (My fellow ambassador Myles blogged about the first day over at his blog.)

So, motivated with Red Bull and wearing my CISM t-shirt this time expectations were higher than the February Open Day where the number of students was far fewer than anticipated… but how we were wrong… Yet again the anticipated number of students due to attend was lower than expected, however was still much higher than the first open day. The day went well, ferrying customers from the main exhibition hall (where I was stationed) down to our faculty ‘base room’ which was where prospective students could speak one-to-one with tutors (in theory all good - in practice this doesn’t seem to work very well, due to a lack of students going there!). As well as helping random people every so often who were lost on thier own travels around the maze which is the Penrhyn Road Campus, I also had to take a group around a tour of the computing facilities later in the afternoon.
Yet again it was a good day, a fun nice experience which I would be happy to do again!

So, 50 days and 3,000 miles later, here I find myself in a lecture room in Kingston, with all the characteristics of an everyday lecture back in Charlotte… other than the accents being different… oh and they spell colour correctly!! But, what else is really different from my American counterpart? Well… here it is… hopefully relevant for you folks on both sides of the pond… a little insight and run down on Charlotte vs. Kingston!…

Now, granted the University of North Carolina (UNCC), had many, many buildings, sports fields, residence halls - parking! everything, whereas Kingston Uni Penrhyn Road, in a nut shell is 2 buildings with 1 giant portacabin plonked next to it… here you can decide which one looks more inviting!…

The main entrance to Kingston University’s Penryn Road Campus with sign!;

UNCC’s entrance sign - and with thier big campus it can stand proud on its own!;

Kingston Uni’s main teaching building;

One of many teaching buiildings at UNCC; (much newer and nicer!)

Kingston Uni’s main… corridoor;

UNCC’s main… er… path?…;

 And finally, to get some scope on the size differences of these two campuses… here is a satelitte image of Kingston University, Penrhyn Road (in red);

Compared to the University of North Carolina, Charlotte’s campus below at the same scale;

Binary… its used by computers… for computers… its simple. Millions of billions of trillions of lines of 1’s and 0’s make up everything we know of about computers, and everything computer related. The behind the scenes stuff - which makes everything tick. Its all the code which a computer can read to generate everything so we understand it… because, well, humans can’t really understand it for obvious reasons - the title for one would have most if not all of you baffled. But! Obviously if your computer ever fails and you still need your important emails delivered - there’s always an alternative. Yes. You could encode it yourself into binary, and pour all the 1’s and 0’s down into your phone line to be sent to your recipient. Its true - I’m calling it the SEI - the Self Encoding Initative, where we reduce power usage by self encoding emails - and thus - no use to use up electricity powering the PC as you don’t need it.

It’s all pretty simple, all you have to do is generate the polynomial as X^4 + X + 1 and then encode the bits 1001001101. Or atleast that is what we were asked to do ‘on the fly’ in our Midterm Networking exam the other day… nice…

Anyways! to you and me the title in other letters means ‘1/2′ indicating that tonight, we are exactly half way through our time here in America - which is pretty weird! It doesn’t feel that long we’ve been here, but, there’s plenty more to do in the coming couple of months!

In a lecture in Networking… granted the teacher is Chinese or something and seems to struggle with English in a sense.. but… Im pretty sure if there was such a thing as one-sided paper, it would be a world-wide thing? Not just in China?

What I’m getting at here is that our teacher seems to believe there is such a thing as one-sided paper. Now. How would this work? Surely everything in existance has to have more than one side to have a physical state? Lets work this out… if there was only one side… there would have to be a void in time and space on the other side, as there would be nothing there… but… because there isn’t another side, there isn’t even another side for the void to exist and so would create some sort of paradox in the space time continum?

What if you somehow worked out how to move the paper… obviously you couldn’t pick it up as there is no sides to hold onto… but lets say you managed to move it - What would happen to everything behind it? Would everything disolve and fall through a crack in time or something? As nothing can survive in pure nothing-ness - what even is pure nothing? Maybe the space between 2 parallel worlds? As stated on Dr Who, there is absolutely nothing inbetween parallel universes… not light, no time, no gravity, no nothing - just -nothing-.

As you can tell I’m pretty darn confused. If someone can work out a plausable way as to how one-sided paper could exist in physical form I would like to hear it…

Well, here I am. America. I’ve been here a little over eleven days, yet three weeks ago it still seemed so far off; a distant dream if you will. But now its here and after getting settled in and then experiencing a weeks worth of lessons I don’t think it has really sunk in yet. Other than a tedious eight hour flight and then three hours of aditional delays, it doesn’t really feel like much has changed. Yea, its a lot more humid, and the cars drive on the other side of the road and all, but it just feels like any other day, kinda as if we’ve been here for ages.

 Maybe it’s because I havn’t really felt homesick, I’m guessing because I ‘left home’ last year to go to Kingston as well, and so this year it hasn’t hit me. Or its just because we’ve been kept busy, from endless shopping trips to get everything from essentials to food, to taking photos and attending classes.

 As soon as we got off the plane and out of the airport the heat and humidity here hit us. I think we are slowly now getting used to it, and with every building air conditioned we can get around, its just a little burden when you want around in the mid-day sun. We’ve been meeting a few people here and there, mostly other international students as we spent virtually the entire first week with them, from orientation to a meal, and we live with most on our floor in our halls accomodation. Over the past few days we’ve started to slowly meet a few Americans, and most would seem friendly enough. Everywhere we go it seems there are people amazed at our accents, and in shops we often get comments made towards us! - In the nice way that is!

So, down to the campus - its big - and very modern. So modern virtually everything looks brand new. Photo’s on the gallery to follow soon! There are blue light boxes scattered around the entire campus which you can use incase of an emergency, or if you want the police to drive you back home at night! - I havn’t tried that yet!

 Anyways, I hopefully plan to start keeping this up to date again while over here in America, and will start posting pictures of my time here in the gallery soon. Until then though… have a good one!

…oh! Its just someone breaking into my flat!

 Yep, Tuesday morning between 4 - 5am (I think), someone tried to break into my university flat - thats the main top floor flat, not my individual room! Anyways, after hearing at about 4am what I thought to be just a flat mate returning home being noisy, I ignore it and go back to sleep. All be it at 9.30am I get awaken by Halls Management after the cleaner discovered that parts of our door had been hacked with what appears to be a crowbar…

Well, that was then - but now! I come back from a mates flat and I find our door has been silverised! Showing lots of lovely fingerprints….

No doubt I’ll find out whats going on at some point - but I’ll keep yal’ posted!

Well, what can I say? It’s been a hell of a year, packed full of life changing events, situations and outcomes, one of the most hectic years of recent times.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, the New Year as it was then a year ago had a very daunting outlook, I had no idea where I would be, or what I would be doing this time now. Full of mock exams, never-ending ICT coursework and the constant expectation of my UCAS application kept me on my feet to say the least.

The A-level work continued to pour in throughout the next few months, and the UCAS replies trickled in, one by one until eventually I had my offers - and I had to choose, either way which ever I chose I knew I would be leaving everyone, after all, it was my choice where I picked the unis anyway, and with them all being far from home, it was an inevitable outcome - but at that time, the prospect of all of that was ages away, nothing to be at the forefront of worry anyway at least, even if it was always at the back of my head.

March saw light to new personal works, I started the ABC1 site for one, which still continues today, even if Disney have their corner of their eye on it… I also continued my work of helping to assist with performances and filming activities throughout the school, with the much anticipated Talent Show, and the Torbay Sports filming competition, in which our team won first prize for the school.

Revelations came forth throughout April & May, or could it all have been called confirmation? Either way that was then and you all should know about that, was it all a good thing it officially came to light? I still don’t know really, and I guess I never will. By this time too, my Media & History work had all been done - only the mind numbing ICT work to continue with, and another filming project with Critch gets underway!

June saw me turn 18, finally complete all my ICT coursework - even if it was in the nick of time!, sit my A-level exams and realise that the life I had known for the past seven years was over as I knew it, I would never be with all my friends again most days like it was ever again…

…however I strived on, July was a time to relax away from all the pressures - but, they were still there, probably even more at the forefront of my mind than ever, but I was fine, they were my problems, and no-one else’s…

August was much the same, going out with my friends, and receiving my A-level results, and as always in true Westlands / AQA style they mucked them up beyond all expectations, eventually my correct grades were given, which I was very pleased with, and which got me into my first choice University - and that was it - confirmation for me - in little less than a month, I would be up London, at Uni - and that would be my life for the next four years.

September came round in a flash after that, and the next thing I new I was saying goodbye to everyone I had come to know as friends over the past few years, ad as Myles correctly stated, they were the best years. Then I was off, not knowing what to expect I set off to Uni… after an ‘interesting’ fresher’s week the university routine began, even with a slow start in my opinion to the class and no-one knowing anyone’s names, it seemed to get better slowly over time, and after I got into the work and such it started becoming the norm.

With the flat mate hunt in full swing, October was much the same I suppose, getting used to Uni life, starting the midnight Monday Tesco visits, oh, and trying to see every TV studio within an hour’s drive of me of course!

The end of October, beginning of November saw my first trip back down home for reading week, even though ridden with fiascos and flaws, all in all it went alright I guess after all I met up with most of my mates, and it was ok. But soon enough it was back to the daily grind of Uni life, with more work than before we truly learnt the meaning of deadlines!

With Midnight Mondays Tescos becoming an obsession it would seem, life continued like that, work, deadlines and expectations. Then, December was upon us, the second half of the term definitely seemed to go faster than the first, however, with the final work all handed in, the trip to Lee Evans and My Hero over with, it was time to back home again, this time for Christmas, much the same as last time the plan was to meet up with my friends, and generally just relax back at home, and much the same happened like last time too, but I met some of my mates again, went out and caught up with them and such until next time.

Click here for some of the Best photos and moments of 2005

So here I am, still here, waiting to go back up to Uni in a week or so, and with the same as this time last year, I still have no idea where I will be this time next year, and with even more decisions for me to make in the next few months and with exams looming in January - I guess 2006 will be as hectic as ever, and while everything can change around you, I guess some things also stay the same too, even though in the end after the new years night, January 1st is still yet another day, and not everything’s going to just change for the best cause its a new year, you still have to never give up trying to be what you want you want to be.

 Amicitiae nostrae memoriam spero sempiternam fore

Well, its the end of November and what a month it has been! Firstly, out with the old and in with the new so to speak with flatmates, with a new flatmate coming in to room 4, and the old girl.. leaving… maybe to another halls of residence… we arnt that sure really…

I also got pulled over by the cops a couple weeks back now… its apparently an all new craze, lol. I was on the way back from Wimbledon with Shane & Myles when after a few minutes being trailed by a cop car, the blues and twos start sounding and flashing, and the next thing I’m getting interogated by a cop… lol… na, it was only a few questions - even though I’m not really sure why they decided to check out my car in the first place anyway - but by going by the questions asked, it seemed as though someone my age is suspicious if they are driving a car 200miles away from where its registered… hmm… but nevertheless, it was all fine and they let me go on my way…

Most of the assignments are out of the way now, only got a couple ‘exams’ left and then thats it… the xmas break is upon me…

Well, anyway, that was my amazing blog post which you’ve been waiting for… and yes, I know it wasn’t as… hmm, whats the word… “fullfilling?” as some of my past blogs, but meh.

Have fun… and check out my press page damn it!

Edit: OH! - and next week I’m going to see My Hero being filmed, AND go see Lee Evans on Tour - YAY!