Either you are already aware of this or you are about to... because it's driving me utterly insane! From Zen, to time-management to GTD, to day planning to outright anarchy, the thousands of baying hyenas all try to ravage your sanity with the silver bullet for the organised soul.

Organisation makes no actual sense. I mean, personally, I possess the basic abilities to turn up to lectures, tutorials and labs with a modicum of sanity on my person, but yet I still can't actually take the information that they throw into my brain and parse it into some form of relevant concept to act upon. Like some form of disturbing sideshow act, I'm being yelled at in an abstract form of Farsi and it makes about as much sense to me as a solar-powered shotgun.

Now, this isn't meant to seem as a criticism of the University proper, but rather a full-blown exposé of my inability to organise and manage my own time and personage.

But, dear reader, do not lose hope. I offer you bountiful suggestions to make your University career bearable in the truest sense of the word. Step one, ignore alcohol. Alcohol and organisation have an inverse relationship, if you consume one you severely reduce your availability to do the other. Alcohol makes the meek wise, the foolhardy loud and the homicidal bearable. However I couldn't in good faith recommend it.

My honest suggestion when it comes to some manner of organisation is tackling those unwieldy stags, the subject guides. Download and print off ten copies of each (if you're anything like me you'll print off more due to a deep-seated loathing of trees and all those who seek to photosynthesise) stuffing each copy into the nearest form of organisational tool you can find. I'd recommend a Moleskine diary-cum-thingwhatyouwritein, choose your own adventure.

Anyway, I feel that this blogpost has taken a turn for the instructional, so here's what I do to keep away the unorganised masses of failure that constantly embargo my productivity. You don't have to spend most of your day wading through the monosyllabic dross that is push-emailed to your crackberry in order to keep up with the world... you just have to essentially do things before times at which if they weren't done, would cause you grief.

There you go, you've passed basic concept management (arbitrary number here). I've passed on my own malformed nugget of wisdom in the encapsulation of a blog post for you to gestate within the broken lobes of your own mind. I hope some, if any, of this made sense. Returning to Uni is quite the trip.

Posted by Dan on March 9, 2008 11:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's usually at this point of the adventure that the pipe smoking detective says something clichéd like "I've gathered you all here today…” Unfortunately for you, the viewer, this isn't dodgy 1910-esque Crime Fiction with an implacable and obsessive detective. It's a blog. Now we've had numerous definitions of blog but basically it's a place where you see my thoughts/rants/aneurysms.

I'm currently enduring/enjoying (Your mileage may vary) a Bachelor of Engineering majoring in Software (For the spoon fed in the audience that makes me a 'Software Engineer' or 'Imagineer' [Disclaimer: I am not an Imagineer]). I believe this blog shall, to a certain degree, be an aspect of my personality, gently prodded into submission and discarded in a stream of protons to you, the viewer's, eyes. In order for this not to sound like a personals ad I'd like to outline my negative characteristics and allow my positive ones to become a puzzle- esque game, where you're constantly trying to find them in amongst the haystacks of negativity. I'm unhealthily cynical, I'm caustic, I'm judgemental and more often than not I'm usually correct.

I'm sure if you've been paying attention you'd think that the engineering building has a sign "Damned all who enter here". Your logical gymnastics would however, land you far from the truth. Sure, Engineering has its negatives, just like every other profession. If you think you're going to find the perfect profession and never have any conflicts or issues, you're either independently wealthy or inconceivably naive. I'm choosing to share with you a selection of inside views of the profession of Software Engineering. Now, I'm not going to talk it up too hard, and I'm not going to lie and say it's all sunshine and gumdrops, but I've gotten most of the barbarities out of the way.

Charles Stross' (Famed Sci-Fi Author and all around hero), book "The Atrocity Archives" has a very telling phrase in the novel introduction. "Computer Science and software engineering is the only profession in which the words that you type literally come alive." You can be a writer, a designer and any other form of Engineer, but Software Engineering and Computer Science
is an art in and of itself. We are blessed in a way so unheard of in the modern world. As we move towards the service-economy, the place of the writer, the place of the artist become the realm of the independently wealthy; (The Rutherfords and Bacons of the 21st Century) there is one stronghold. We have the rise of blogs (mea culpa), the rise of communal creativity and the rise of social media, but there is still this aspect of pure magic available to all. What we write literally comes alive. Our algorithms, our data flows, our logical concepts, our theories all come to life the moment they're thrown ham-fistedly through a compiler.

It may be stressful, it may be sometimes thankless and it can have a downright negative impact on your social life. Yet not a single aspect of that diminishes the magic of the process. Programmers, coders, designers are the (and I use this term loosely) magi of the 21st century. Our code snippets and mathematical constructs transform in to biddable golems with a single mouse click.

You, the unwilling user, just reaps the positive (and negative) consequences of a greatly expanding body of work. Modern Operating Systems, Browsers, Applications are all independently their own internal libraries of Alexandria. Just as every great novel starts out with a single sentence, every massive and complex program started with just a single line of code. Plain, simple text. That's our magic, and that's the magic I experience every day as an Engineering Student. You may not see it at every single second but looking at the big picture, it's shimmering in the foreground.

Posted by Eddie on November 14, 2007 1:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)