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!