A very ego filled post from 2015 Try #2: The post I couldn't help but writing

My blog does not represent the views of Murdoch, Cisco Ltd., IBM, The Australian department of immigration or any of their affiliates. 

This blogs opinion of people of Irish or Russian origin or the population of Madison, Wisonsin are not actual views of the blogger and were exclaimed by a freind while he was intoxicated. Honestly.

All posts are NOT to be taken seriously and are written only for entertainment purposes.

Selections of text below may depict particularly graphic circumstances, but if you are alive enough to read this, chances are they won't be particularly interesting.

It's a beautiful Thursday, the sun is shining in a completely empty blue sky, I can hear the wails of the undead, stumbling around on the beach 12 stories below me, there's a dank smell of rotting flesh in the air and I can see the exciting scene all up close and clear through the scope on top of Dave's rifle.

Our new spot is awesome, hunting through the reception desk of this beach front hotel (unfortunately the name has since been stripped of the building by loiters, and replaced with a badly sprayed phallic.) we acquired the access card to the penthouse and have commandeered the several bedrooms and bathrooms as a fortress of solitude on which to kill time in.

This has been a very plesent week all round, as the emergency broadcast system has confirmed the crisis over, and we are now promoted from "Fighter's of the resistance" to "Clean up crew." Which means if you're reading this from a secure area camp, congratulations, your stay is almost up, and you have survived and soon will be returning the central city areas. Of course, I question what will actually happen when the populace returns, we were overjoyed to find in the building opposite that there is a collection of soldiers also doing "clean up" with the remaining walking zombies. We were even able to gain their attention and play a rather riveting game of charades.

I do feel happy about this all almost being over and are sad to hear; the large amounts of causalities that feel victim to the violent undead, the lack of sanitation of the over populated camps and the fact it will still be several months before I can order a pizza.

It's been an interesting couple of years, the explosion of infected dead persons, meeting different groups of resistance and the interesting tales of how they obtained their firearms. I would like to take this opportunity to mourn the dead, and for us to think about the work that now needs to be done to rebuild.

Thinking time is now over.

On the beach, Dave and Emma have now emerged from the beach front shopping center with the newest delivery of milk and long life food, Dave makes a pass at Emma. Emma hits him. You know, usual stuff. He should be more considerate, just because she's the only girl in the group doesn't mean he can hit on her, she knows how to use I rifle, you know. I'm considerate. I'm going to wait until a few minutes after she gets up here and settles back down to pitch my lame pick up line for the day.

Further down Curtis is trying to push the latest cannon fodder from last night into the sea while being ambushed by seagulls. They're after him now... he's fallen over... Oh bugger, I better go down and see if they're all right.. Nah, Dave's going

As for me, I'm sitting here abusing internet, writing junk and just loving the fact that I can just sit back and do nothing, a lot of people hate the idea of having nothing to do, they need to be getting energetic, not wasting the day away. Me, I'm glad I can just have this little bit of time to myself to sit back and relax.


But before I have my mid morning siesta, GRAFFITI OF THE WEEK:

That's Curtis' gun in shot, btw, dunno why he wanted to look so tough... he he... he can't even lift that mini gun we found.


Neither can I, but that's NOT THE POINT.

Until I get zombiefied myself, goodbye.

A very ego filled post from 2015. Try #1: All goes well, and I end up in a grad program I like.

My blog does not represent the views of Murdoch, Cisco Ltd., IBM, The Australian department of immigration or any of their affiliates.

This blogs opinion of people of Irish or Russian origin or the population of Madison, Wisonsin are not actual views of the blogger and were exclaimed by a freind while he was intoxicated. Honestly.

All posts are NOT to be taken seriously and are written only for entertainment purposes.

It's a beautiful Thursday, the sun is shining in a completely empty blue sky, I can hear the beach slowly coming in to the beautiful gold coast beach twelve stories below me, I can the salt water below is putting a, er, nice salty smell in the air, and the taste of this nutella straight from the jar is just that much sweeter knowing that I don't have work today, you'll find out why shortly. I could of actually laid in bed forever, staring at the celing had not Charlie started to play with my hair.

She's put on a bit a weight now, so she back to being quite healthy. Waking up and the first thing I see is someone else's eyes is no longer scaring me, but instead just a sweet reminder of how nice it is for the manager of my building to allow me to keep a pet rabbit in the apartment. Be able to say that my first home away from my parents has been this high rise apartment just a few streets back from the Gold Coast is a very awesome feeling, somehow, this place was in my budget when I was fresh out of uni and accepted into IBMs grad program for networking type stuff (you don't want to get me started on what I do, it is the reason I don't attend fancy dinner parties, all I'd talk about is layer two of the OSI model, which is of course the data link layer which encompasses all switching technologies and, you see? I'm terrible, I'm turning into one of those people who lives to work. But I love it.) which unfortunatly was only avalible in the terrible location of Queensland. As you've probably read in a post a fair while ago when I got this place, it's a 80's One bedroom apartment, but it is only a stone's throw away from the beach (although, if you do actually throw a stone, you've got a one in two chance of hitting a macca's.

It's interesting to think that it's now been 2 complete years since finishing my grad program, and it's already partway through this year, but I'm very glad I somehow scored a job here. I love the place, I love the people at work and I love the fact that I'm allowed to have very little social life apart from after hours on Friday (Unfortunatly, like IBM's latest spanning tree development, I'm not really legally allowed to talk about it without being hunted down and shot.)

and that brings us to the reason I contacted you all to read this (Mum, you can stop reading now, you know I'm alive and well and eating. Go.. Do something else now...)

Yeah, I have a hand in a cast...

Pretty much for the first time in my life I didn't just stick to the Midori's like I should of, and experimented with a few more interesting drinks. The guy's realising one of them could be exploited again (There is that other tale of Blake and some fun with a magic marker, which I have posted about several weeks ago at new years.) deciding to nicely walk me to my apartment decided to see if I could walk up my last flight of stairs unaccompanied soon saw me back around the landing they were on. With one of my hands on a very odd angle.

Thankfully, somebody managed to get me to the emergency room and everything got sorted out and I have a few weeks of. Without pay mind you. That sucks a bit.

But anyway, I feel pretty good concidering I can no longer give people the bird. But anyway. That's all that has happened in my very uneventful few weeks since my last post.

Grafitti of the week:

This comes from a toilet near the office I work in

Great advice...

Until I get banned from the network, or break another limb. Goodbye.

The Not-so-bad-bits and Murdoch after dark

My blog does not represent the views of Murdoch or any of its affiliates. All posts are NOT to be taken seriously and are written only for entertainment purposes.

Before I get on with this weeks post, I understand, due to the fact that the sweet new micro site is up and I'm on said site I thought that I might get a few new visitors, eagerly awaiting my post to try and show that I still have what it takes to get visitors and not cause a fuss, I though I'd direct their attention to some of my most proud moments, answering such questions as

What do they mean "Leaving assignments to the last minute?"

and what about your advice about new bloggers?

All I've read is some advice for year 12 students about proper advice on how to use lampshades

Why do most of your pot have a discloser statement? Is that why they call you controversial? HEY? WHAT DID YOU DO?

Did you really compare exams to having sex?

Or Death?

REALLY? Your kind of creepy... How did you get this job again?

Troll through my archive, there's some stuff hidden there that even I've forgotten about. Like other things you can do with a pen during an exam.

No I'm not linking that up, you have to find it yourself.

I think I'm going to chose option A for my next blog, might be up by the end of the day, may cram this list in again in an entirely different way.

Anyway, the Feature Presentation

Murdoch is one of the biggest university campuses in Australia, it's the biggest in W.A. anyway. It's got lots of grass (the unsmokable kind, for those concerned.), forrested area and places filled with sheep. Though normally filled with an excess of homo sapiens, it is when they all go home that you see the true nightlife of this place come alive and during an incident with a box of red bull during a MITs LAN I got to see the true campus at 4.30 AM.

The first thing that is noticible is the odd amount of lighting in the campus. It's all very ambeint, on bush court, a lot of the lights are yellowing with age. You can only just make out the rabbits maintaining the large amount of grass land, and run like crazy when you walk anywhere near them. It's a very dark an errie place, disturbed only by the flashing green of the ANZ ATM and the TV in the library showing that there is currently very little solar activity.

Is it just me, or is there some irony there? Largest solar grid in Australia, yet we still don't mind consuming energy with the computers left powered on in the library. I'm not talking just one or two, I'm talking all of them.

I know it is probably more hasle to turn them off, they probably take an age to boot up but there is such thing as getting the moniters to turn off automatically and.. SHUT UP LACHLAN. Look, I don't mean to cause any problems, it's just, I tells it like I sees it. I really do like Murdoch.. honestly.

But other then the library and select people doing all nighters in classrooms for projects and study sessions. It's a black hole. The sounds of crickets and birds just make the area seem so natural and beautiful, peaceful. It will definatly be one of the places I visit when all of humanity is wiped out. (No, I still don't know why I survive I just do, and NO I will not be setting my 2015 post during the zombie apocolypse even tempting as it may be... Should I? No. Better not. sigh.)

Oh and your sign is broke.

Lol.

See, Look how screwed up my phone's camera is from bright light in the middle of pitch blackness.

However, I do recommend during your time at Murdoch, after one of those all nighters in the library, get outside and watch and listen to the sun rise, it's warm, the birds get into their full swing and you're sick of watching episodes of Animorphs or Where's Wally? airing at the LAN. (Yes, you can become sick of these, no matter how awesome they look at 3.30 they look pretty bad at 5.30). It was worth staying if not for the Invader Zim, for that beautiful smell/sound and sights that Murdoch provide when no one else is around.

So yeah, if you were waiting for my 2015 post it'll be up sometime this weekend, and we leave you tonight, with this Grafitti of the week.

"I still love Steven." in ECL 3

Now I must go and kick this person off my couch

and wish that someone would do my 218 for me.

Underwhelming - To fail to interest; usually used in response to something that was presented as exciting

My blog does not represent the views of Murdoch or any of its affiliates. All posts are NOT to be taken seriously and are written only for entertainment purposes.

Yes, I wanted to put "Ask me about: A GOOD TIME" too.

Ho hum. 6 Hours of unpaid work. actually, did get a shirt, it's not too bad, it's got long sleeves, don't mind promoting Murdoch. Would of been like $25 at the Alumni building... Actually, quite worth it.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure that a lot of people got stuff out of open day, I'm sure parents were relieved to think that their son or daughter was looking at university (especially as one as cool as Murdoch.) And this post will not be ridiculing Murdoch, it's more about being pissed at I.T. and the way it's presented. I'm not really sure where to start, but a second disclaimer is probably a good idea.

A HELL OF A LOT OF ORGANISATION GOES INTO ORGANISING OPEN DAY. Lots of cleaning up, tables, advertising, volunteering, lecturers, signage, stickers and pamphlets have to co-oridnated to produce a good show of the stuff that is available at Murdoch. But in my confine of ECL, it unfortunately wasn't very evident. I did see the bunch of marquees in Bush Court with people talking about every course, directing new comers. I saw the live music, and the horrendous waste of custard.

But, it wasn't right.

At one point in year 11, I had my heart set on Marketing. I loved the idea of going into advertising, the way of creating a memorable lol or slogan for people to get stuck in their heads. But, instead I chose to go down the IT route when I realised how much of a sham it was. Companies mindlessly twisting facts and screaming slander to make their product better then the competition. It simply came down to the bottom line, rather then creating a short story adding the product as an after thought. I chose IT cause I didn't just want to be there to make some company money. I wanted to provide a service to make a company better compared to itself. IT can be actually perceived like that, improving software, security or a network, to make it simply... Better then it was.

Open Day, was well, trying to show that Murdoch was better then the other uni's. And although I love being a Murdoch blogger (although probably not for my longer. :) ) and promoting Murdoch's awesome IT Majors, the day itself was all a sham. I really don't want to post this, and I may be asked to take it down.

(I will, if emailed at 30788034@student.murdoch.edu.au you don't even have to supply a reason!)

Games tech, for example was promoted with a bunch of consoles showing Halo 3 and Guitar Hero (No, none of the games tech units do directly code for consoles, proprietary reasons, but you do pick up some of the language that works on them.), rather then students own work, a selection of PREVIOUS year's was on posters and one projector. Robotics was shown with a PhD students work from about 10 years ago and a few toys (although it did show two current very interesting research projects, one involving object identification and handling as well as movement systems in bipedal and climbing robots.) There was also a nice walk through of Game Maker, which is used in first year games tech. Then there were personality quizzes (a open day staple for the IT department.) and then four computers which had the two disk images from last semester's Cyber Forensic unit (Yay!!! Even though I only got a credit for it, it was still a lot of fun going through Miss Hill's HDD.) But I mean, there were a few of us explaining the sort of stuff that was made up of the Cyber Forensic unit, and the sort of things that were on the hard drive images. It just didn't feel.. Right. I'm sure that most people who left there were sure that the Cyber Forensic major simply had that course in (I know I did when I attended open day a couple of years ago.).

The day doesn't teach about the real student experience. I was too scared to even promote this blog, any of the other blogs, or even the blogging competition, because it didn't seem the type of student life that the open day organisers wanted to promote. They wanted rose-tinted, so I gave rose-tinted.

"Yes, I find the Cyber Forensic course easy and I quickly adjusted to the more difficult assignments given by university units."

They didn't want to about how sloth I've become, how I've enjoyed the MITS LANs as one of the best things at uni, that people should stay away from the cauliflower cheese at Carve-A-Roast (you don't want to know.). They didn't want to know that I gave up my time on Sunday which I should of used for an assignment due tomorrow (at the time of posting this) at 12pm, wish me luck for tonight!

I chose Murdoch because I loved the fact that they had a networking major there, that, when I asked at the open day I attended, they didn't mind admitting they had, and even one of the volunteers there showed me my first console window to a Cisco router. Another uni ( I won't say which.) were pushing for me to do computer science rather then their own networking unit. Another one didn't even really want to say they had an IT school. Sigh, I choose Murdoch, cause Murdoch seemed to want me. Mr Boddington (Cyber Forensics guy.) said last Sunday that more people need to get into IT, and he wouldn't mind if it became a more gender balanced field.

One uni is currently pushing that their Computer Scientists end up coding for the WA police force to stop cyber crime.

1. They don't actually have a cyber forensics course, so they don't really know what they are dealing with
2. WA isn't going to well with stopping cyber crime
3. Cyber crime won't be stopped by code alone, it needs actual police work
4. You can't just jump straight to coding for that, they aren't actually saying how good the coders they are churning out are, they are just making me more scared about how poor the fight against cyber crime is
5. Sorry, this ad REALLY needs to be taken off TV, it just pisses me off

I, personally, couldn't see the promotion needed at this open day.

I know in other fields its different, it may actually be a challenge to chose between universities (pick Murdoch anyway, it's got the biggest Campus in WA! Okay, so a lot of it is currently covered in sheep and their excrement.) but in my area, Murdoch was the best choice.

Some people may just see a uni and stick with it, meaning attending a open day just is pointless, they have their heart set on a particular uni, okay they may not like it in the end, but... This event just seems annoying. And redundant. I'm not saying stop it, there are people out there who don't know what they want to do, want to see what uni's are offering doing.

I'm just saying I wish they'd do it differently...

But what do know, I'm just a second year, average student with a blog and too much to say.

Yes, this was unfortunately a serious post, but if it got me annoyed, I'd hate to see what it did to someone who was actually wanting "a student experience"

My advice, for people wanting a student experience

1. Stay awake all night
2. Drink a red bull
3. Make your way to campus
4. Skip the lecture anyway

The truth hurts.

Grafitti of the week!

While we're on the topic of poor advertising a post it note, left on the back door of an ECL toilet:

"Lacto bacillus can improve the digestive system and reduce diarrhea ask you chemist for Blackmoore's Lacto bacillus."

It's one hell of a weird collection of students. I do hope you join us next year.