Versatile Blogger Award

Little did I know that when I started my venture into the world of social media at the beginning of this year that others out their in the blogosphere could nominate you for awards. I was delighted to see today (30^th April) that I have received a Versatile Blogger Award.

A special thanks to Sharing My Italy … The Blog  (30^th April 2012) for this nomination (see post), I again received this award two weeks ago from Zen and Genki  (16^th April 2012 (see post)) but hadn’t blogged about it at the time as I was trying to decide on what other blogs I should nominate, now certainly seems to be a good time to do this.

As per the rules of being nominated, I am to:

•  Thank the person who gave me the award (Done!)
•  Include a link to their blog (I’ve done that too – above!)
•  Select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow regularly.
•  Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award and include a link to their site.  Here they are:

1. Dreams and Zeros
2. Alex Mufatti
3. Brian Gaynor Photography
4. Sam Whelan Art & Technology
5. Klaus Rossler Photography
6. Observatorydiscoveratory
7. Travelwithscott
8. Clive Jennings Photography
9. A New Yorker in Paris
10. Postcards for Colorado
11. iPhone Photographer
12. The Blissful Adventurer
13. Craig Hill
14. The Thesis Whisperer
15. Ramblings of this guy you know!

And finally – Tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.

1. I enjoy TV shows such as Battlestar Galatica, NCIS, CSI & Star Trek to name a few.
2. I lecture is subjects ranging from computer programming to graphics, video & multimedia.
3. Signed up to SETI@Home over 12 years ago (during its first year of operation).
4. Have a keen interested in distributed computing (hence SETI@Home).
5. It’s only been in the past month I have build  a computer myself from scratch, done lots of upgrading in the past, never a complete build.
6. Have been interested in Astronomy for as long as I can remember.
7. Archaeology has always been of interest (perhaps due to watching Indiana Jones so much).

And finally to end this post with a spot of colour

A Semester of Social Media

Late yesterday night I received my 10,000th wordpress view. This is well timed as the semester has just come to an end. Friday was the last day of classes, from what I heard during the week quite a large number of students were planning on seeing the Avengers movie at the cinema once they were finished. I am sure all the honours project students have been busy over the weekend as they are due to submit their final reports and implementation tomorrow (Monday 30th April). I am supervising five honours projects this year & have received quite a few emails late Saturday night & into the early morning – 03:30, with yet another batch between 08:00 and 10:00. They seem to have been quite for the afternoon so far. I have a few MSc’s who will be submitting reports on Tuesday, with some having already submitted this past Friday. Looks like next week is shaping up to be a series of Honours Project presentations, meetings & marking of about 250 courseworks. We will then be into exam season the following week.

I started blogging on Saturday 7th January this year with the first month varying between 100 to 200 views per week. This more or less doubled for the following two months, with the month of April generating the most views. As it presently stands, I have 265 Blog post followers, 19 comment, & 91 twitter followers, giving a total of 375 followers. There may of course be a little overlap between twitter and wordpress followers.

I posted my 1000th Tweet just a short while ago “The 1000th Tweet, Best of luck to all the @RGUComputing Honours Project Students who will be submitting their reports within the next 24hrs”, so this weekend has seen two milestones – 10,000 wordpress views & my 1000th tweet. This post will automatically be posted to twitter creating my 1001st post (or 9th if you think in binary). Views of my youtube channel are moving along as well, presently at 8,411 and 17 subscribers. Can’t really say how much of an influence / number of embedded plays I have received from the wordpress site.

My dive into the world of social media began with the setting up of a wordpress, twitter and youtube sites. Over the intervening 17 weeks I have gradually added other social media elements such as last.fm, klout, google+ and about.me about the only thing that is missing is a Facebook account!

Who knows what the forthcoming weeks and months will hold in store. What is the future of social media, will it become the main mode in which we communicate with students. It does certainly seem that they don’t read their email that much. I guess they prefer to opt for a more mobile means of keeping in touch.

I have seen many articles of late saying that the average attention span is about ten minutes. This is something I find quite strange as when I was in school the general norm for the duration of attention span was considered to be between 45mins and an hour, hence the holding of 45 minute classes in secondary school. Is this reduction of attention span an inherent component of the hyper-stimulated “digital age” in which we live.

As people become accustomed to multitasking – watching TV, while playing a game on a mobile / sending a text & studying on a laptop all concurrently, have we lost the ability to just sit down and concentrate on a single task for a substantial amount of time? From a health and safety view point its recommended to take a break from VDU work every ten minutes or so (I know many don’t actually do this), but is this perhaps adding to our shifting attentions.

Should we rethink the concept of the traditional one / two hour lecture. Do students more readily engage with videos than real people – as seems to be the case with the Kahn Academy – where people can pause, rewind, and replay segments of a lecture / tutorial and learn at their own pace. Is the future of learning self paced learning, and if so should we all become proficient video editors embracing youtube for the presentation of lectures and tutorials, make use of twitter to communicate with our students and use wordpress to bring it all together? What will the future years of the “digital age” bring especially in terms of education and engagement. One needs to just open the door and step through to see what’s on the other side.

Have added a few photographs to this post just for that extra splash of colour, enjoy.

Gardens at Muckross House, Killarney, Ireland

Muckross House and Gardens are very well know by anybody who visits Killarney, Co. Kerry. Located about 6km south of the town, the house and gardens are situated by the shores of Muckross Lake and Lough Leane making up two of the three Lakes of Killarney. Along the shores one can also find Ross Castle and Muckross Abbey.

Corsair Dominator DDR3 32GB RAM Unboxing

Unboxing video of the Dominator 32GB DDR3 1600MHz memory modules from Corsair.

Killarney National Park, Ireland

The following are a few scenes from Killarney National Park taken about nine years ago. The view out across the lake is located directly in front of Ross Castle.

The Pantheon, Paris

The Panthéon is located in the Latin Quarter of Paris and is quite close the Saint Sulpice church (about 1km of a walk) as detailed in my previous post. One can find further information about it by visiting http://www.pantheonparis.com.

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Saint Sulpice, Paris

The following photographs are of Saint Sulpice, Paris. Well know from being featuring in the film the Da Vinci Code starring Tom Hanks. Its the second largest church in the city, being only just a little smaller than Notre Dame.

Should you wish to visit yourself then the map below should be of use.

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Intel Core i7 PC Build Components Unboxed Overview

A series of panning shots showing the unboxed components used in a PC Build within the Cooler Master Cosmos 2 PC Case. Components include the Intel Core i7 3930K processor, Cooler Master 1000 Watt Silent Pro 80+ Gold PSU, Corsair Dominator 32 GB DDR3 RAM, Corsair Force 3 Series SSD Drive, NVidia GTX 570 Graphics Card with 2560MB GDDR Memory & 480 Cores, ASUS Sabertooth X79 Motherboard, 2 TB Hard Drive, Pioneer BDR S06 XLB Blu-ray Drive and the Corsair H100 Liquid CPU Cooler.

Notre Dame Gargoyles Gazing over the City

Notre Dame, Paris is such a wonderful place one could easily spend days just photographing all the detail to be seen. It’s really interesting to see all the Gargoyles and think about all the history they have borne witness to over the past centuries, looking out across the city from their lofty perches.

Intel Core i7 PC Build Boxed Components Overview

A series of panning shots showing the components used in a PC Build within the Cooler Master Cosmos 2 PC Case. Components include the Intel Core i7 3930K processor, Cooler Master 1000 Watt Silent Pro 80+ Gold PSU, Corsair Dominator 32 GB DDR3 RAM, Corsair Force 3 Series SSD Drive, NVidia GTX 570 Graphics Card with 2560MB GDDR Memory & 480 Cores, ASUS Sabertooth X79 Motherboard, 2 TB Hard Drive, Pioneer BDR S06 XLB Blu-ray Drive and the Corsair H100 Liquid CPU Cooler.

Some Photos along the Western Road at Night

The following are just a few photographs taken on a recent trip to Cork. The first photo below is taken from the main gate into University College Cork, looking out of the gate towards the T-Junction that lies directly outside it.

The next photograph is of some apartments that are lit-up with some nice reflections to be seen on the water, they are located on the Western Road, 5 minutes of less from the city centre.

The final two photographs are of the River Lee Hotel, that was built about five years ago, once again this is situated on the Western Road about 3/4 minutes from the main gate of UCC.

NVidia GeForce GTX 570 Graphics Card Unboxing

Unboxing the Nvidia GTX 570 Graphcis Card featuring 480 Cores, 2560MB GDDR5 Memroy, 2 x DVI, 1 x HDMI and 1 x Display Port.

Double Rainbow, Giant’s Causeway where’s the Gold!

Have you ever tried looking for the end of a rainbow, searching for that all elusive Crock of Gold. Well, if you happened to be visiting the Giant’s Causeway on the first of September 2005, you just may have had a chance of not just finding one Crock of Gold, but two as a Double Rainbow appeared, just after a heavy shower of rain. One would have had to navigate some rocks and perhaps undertake a spot of swimming, but as you can see below the rainbow was really strong and stretched right down to sea level. If ever there was a chance of finding a Crock of Gold it would have been on this occasion.

Corsair H100 Liquid CPU Cooler Unboxing

As the title says the following is an unboxing video of the Corsair H100 Liquid CPU Cooler system. It’s a double rad with two 120mm fans. It comes as a sealed unit, so no need to change out the liquid coolant.

Chicken & Bacon Caesar Salad

Now for a change of menu from the past few recents posts dealing with unboxing and architecture, its on to food, specifically the Chicken & Bacon Caesar Salad, available at RGU:Union, enjoy.

St Fin Barres Cathedral Interior

Following on from a comment received about my recent night-time exterior photos of St Fin Barres Cathedral, Cork. I took a look through some of my previous photographs and found a set of interior shots dating back to August 2003. These photographs were taken on a 3.1 Megapixel camera, which had a 3 x optical zoom, which at the time wasn’t too bad. The photos below should at least give you some sense of what the building & space is like. I shall have to visit once again the next time I am in the general area as cameras have advanced greatly it what is almost a decade now.

Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1000 Watt PSU Unboxing

Unboxing video of the Modular Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1000 Watt PSU. This series of Power Supply Unit is capable of exceeding 90% power efficiency under load. The Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) is in excess of 100,000 hours. The PSU itself is 150 X 180 X 86 mm & features a 135mm ultra silent fan. If required its maximum capacity for output is 1200 watts. According to Amazon the boxed product weight is 3.7 kilos.

Deeside Railway Line Adventure

Quite a good footpath runs from Duthie Park right in the heart of Aberdeen out west towards Culter, one can continue onwards towards Drumoak and even as far as Banchory some 30km away with almost little or no need to cycle on any of the main roads. Some of the trackway snakes its way through some nice riverside woodlands along the way. The photographs below begin about 2 or 3 km west of Duthie park with some scenes over looking a golf course, then onwards to Culter and out as far as Drumoak.

Pioneer Blu-ray Drive BDR S06 XLB Unboxing

An unboxing video of the Pioneer BDR S06 XLB Blu-ray drive.

Tower Crane Removal RGU Garthdee Campus

Fortunately I was at the Garthdee Campus all day today hence I was able to pop by on two occasions to see the removal of the Tower Crane that has been on campus for the past several months to lay the foundations of the library tower and aid with the assembly of the steel work. A crew arrived early in the morning to start the disassembly process. I had a chance to take some photograph around 12:30 in the day by which time most of the crane itself was removed (jib and counter-jib), with just one jib section remaining. I was again able to check up on the progress around 16:30 at which time the final jib had been removed and they were just about to start hoisting the turntable down to the trailer waiting below.

Unboxing the Sabertooth X79 LGA 2011 Motherboard from ASUS

The ASUS Sabertooth X79 LGA 2011 motherboard features support for the latest 2nd generation Intel Core i7 processors such as the 3930K. The motherboard is quite heavy & has an ATX form factor. It has multi GPU support in the form of both SLI and Crosfire. Capable of a handlying a maximum of 64GB DDR3 RAM spread across eight DIMM’s at 1866/1600/1333/1066Mhz. It features 14 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports, 4 x USB 3.0 on the back panel & 2 x USB 3.0 ports at the mid-board for front panel support. Storage comes in the form of 4 x SATA 6GB/s connectors, 4 x 3GB/s connectors 1 x Power eSATA & 1 x eSATA port.

St Fin Barres Cathedral at Night

The following photographs are of St Fin Barres Cathedral in Cork, Ireland at Night. It is located just minutes from University College Cork. The following sites can provide additional information about the cathedral wikipedia, wordpress. It’s well over 140 years old, with its spires being able to be seen from across a large portion of the city. At night as you can see it’s lit up dramatically adding to the city’s skyline.

RGU Garthdee New Build – Photo Update 8 April 2012

Taking a look at the pervious photo update done towards the end of February one can readily get a sense of the amount of progress that has been made in the intervening weeks. Quite an amount of additional cladding has been applied to the north face of the build as can be seen below. The steel work for the library tower is now nearing completion with the final level well under way, thus one can now get a real sense of the full height of the tower.

In all of my previous photo updates I have always taken the photographs in the morning time, however just as I was about to start taking some pictures it started to rain, hence I held off until around 18:00 in the evening.

Corsair 240GB SSD Drive Unboxing

Unboxing video of the Corsair 240GB Force Series SATA 3 SSD Drive. One can read up on the technical specifications of the drive from the manufacturers website. The SATA 3 interfaces runs at 6GB/s, it has a max sequential read speed of 550MB/s and 520MB/s for sequential write. The mean time before failure is rated at two million hours.