Openlog - A Uni Blog

To show just how lax I've been over the past week, I have not written on any of the days. Argh. Well, this means I better get to it now, of course. ... Before next week comes along and I still haven't done it. But this is only going to be a short summary ...

Monday = CITP

Looking at sources and seeing if they are reliable, unreliable. We started off talking about what makes a document reliable. And afterwards we moved on to.. an example, I suppose you could call it, in the lecture notes booklet. At first I was wondering if I was doing the right thing there in the table which was given.

We were meant to work as a group, but I ended up just kind of working with Julie again. xD The width of the tables (as in, a physical table in this sense) made it a little hard to talk with the people opposite, I suppose, although it seemed alright later on when we were deciding a team charter. Perhaps we just needed time to warm up....

Er, after the example, we did a whole LOT of other samples, which we then had to present. Thanks to my perfectionist trait, my booklet got hauled up to be displayed from the projector.

(All the links above are images I scanned for Su, who was sick and thus, away.)

I'm not sure if I was very thorough with mine, but at least it was pretty detailed to the extent that I could make it, so I was pretty pleased with the work I did .... We had to form groups afterwards for our assignment. This is where the team charter comes in. We have to make a set of rules for us to obey, and then all sign it. As well  fill in a form that says that we have someone to interview.

It was all in all a pretty enjoyable lesson as always. Hehe. We had to make some name cards at the beginning of the lesson too, and me and Julie wrote Japanese on ours just because... well, we could. It was amusing. xD We used the leftover paper and made two cranes too...

Then I met Sebastian for a while... went to Karebear, he got a KHR ring, I gave him some stuff... we had the sponsor meeting... not much else I want to report here.

Tuesday = IIS

I... am not sure what happened here this day. IIS and I don't really directly connect. But I met up with my team for the assignment (though Sean was missing) and we tried to work on some questions and a video store. At the very least we decided on a video store, and Amy did good work making up questions, but ... I wonder how well this is going to go.

We were meant to have a surprise quiz during IIS, but once again, the tutor decided he'd just do what he liked (I know he has our best interests in mind, but I would at least like to know what I'm missing out on from the other classes...) and although we did do the roleplaying like the tutorial sheet said, we spend the latter half of the tute drawing diagrams of the system in the roleplay. Although it was potentially helpful... all the diagrams looked remarkably similar, AND the writing was bad and small so I couldn't even read it, and thusly could not focus.

I'm sorry, don't blame me.
This subject I admit is not going that well...

Wednesday = Programming Fundamentals

Also one of those subjects in which I scream and die.The lecture was alright, although I did drop my Netbook on the floor accidentally. O_O At least it's alright. I recorded what Ryan did during the lecture although not sure how much of it was processed. I guess this reflected in the lab. Although I did alright in the tutorial, always manage to do alright in that, actually, but I had a hard time during the lab, and Joel helped me out a lot (THANK YOU SO MUCH IF YOU EVER READ THIS). I think I better go back and do all the examples and that again to try and get a better grasp of programming.

We also got our assignment. This is slaughtering me. :P
I do believe something happened before I went to the tute and lab, but my memory fails me at this moment...

Thursday  = No Class

Tried to make a start on the assignment. What a miserable failure it was. I wasted a lot of time, and ended up switching to trying to complete some LinuxGym instead since I find UNIX much nicer for me. T_T

Friday = Web Systems

Great. :D This was pretty much HTML day and I was quite happy about that - it was like visiting an old friend. Ah the good old days of HTML coding in Year 10. Soo fun ('cos Dreamweaver is such a .... ok... hehe) In any case, I figured out the problem I had yesterday with Linuxgym Chapter 7. It was because you had to set the folder permissions, and anyone who had read everything properly would have realised. I'm not 100% sure how I missed it, because I did (attempt) to read everything on the front!! But I fixed it... Yay, and fixed it for Julie too... who had also not read the first page, obviously. xDD; Whoops...

OH RIGHT, yes, first off on Friday, I volunteered for Bandaged Bear Day with erm, people from my course, but I only ended up working with Bianca, Alex and Alex's boyfriend. We wandered around Central going, asking 'Would you like to support Bandaged Bear Day?' 'Would you like to buy a Bandaged Bear?' Bianca had to leave about... 10? So then I worked by myself. We were supposed to be on shift from 9-10, really, but we ended up working from about 8.45-10.45 (at least I did).

That meant that I was late for the CITP meeting we were meant to have... urgh. In any case, when Alex finally arrived at the First Years' Lounge, we organised a few things, but we still couldn't get that much done...

Saturday

==> Had a msn conference with group members of CITP assignment. James shall be flogged for not turning up!

... I feel somewhat under pressure today... for reasons I will not disclose. It mostly has to do with getting ahead of myself, when I should just sit back and relax (as if) about it (alright, maybe just... not worry so much... which is a lame and inadequate answer...) - but I guess I really am a woman worrier. Or am I woman warrior? Oh Mr Phillips, I am confused. xD
(I apologise for all the ellipsis, but it reflects my current frame of mind...)

Tuesday = Introduction to Information Systems.

Lecture was pretty much about Business Information Systems. I think I might need to look up more information on this topic, although I guess it all depends on the level of detail they go into in consecutive weeks - more stress though. Ugh assignments....

Speaking of which, lecture we did follow the sheet this time, although most of us are still under the impression the tutor cannot really speak properly. Well, I have nothing against his accent... but I'm just not sure what he's wanting part of the time. Urgh. >_< Still at least we have a GROUP formulated now! Yet, we have no name... and we were supposed to send our group details to ... our lecturer? I forget so I need to find that, wherever it is! *gets a stressed feeling...*

Also in the group, there are two second years, and two first years (a boy and a girl in each), so I feel a little intimidated. Just a little.... or a lot.

Tuesday = Introduction to Information Systems

Agenda:
- Teamwork

Todays IIS was so-so, teaching us about teamwork. I'd read some of the resources posted on the UTSOnline beforehand - which made all of us groan upon reading the dreaded word belonging off the screen off my Netbook - and had thought over some of my experiences of groupwork before, seeing reasons which people would work in groups and the way some groups function.

My experience has not all been good of course. No finger pointing, but obviously there have been cases of some people not pulling their weight and not meeting deadlines (of course, they tell me this is something definitely to be expected). Given the opportunity, I think I can be a pretty good team leader, it's just that although I can be somewhat organised, have direction and so on, I'm just too lenient of a person, and if someone ends up not finishing something or there's something unclaimed, I would go and do it myself. Perhaps some of it has to do with the fact that I rather like to do some on-hand work - which is why I've always been a little apprehensive about Management positions. Do they still get the chance to actually do on-hand work rather than to instruct others on what work they should be doing? So far, I get the impression that it's not all like that, of course, from the sponsor visits, however, this still has not completely reassured me. I suppose time may tell.

In any case, although the teamwork session was not necessarily something I would not have realised in due time, I know now what to look for, since it has been pointed out to me. When you hear about it, the reaction you get is that it's not something that you don't know (at least if you are thinking rationally), but when in the actual situation, it doesn't hit you until later... This is nothing particularly surprising, and is often the case. I hope that I can see such a situation approaching before it happens and causes us a dilemma however.

Tutorial
My first tutorial was somewhat odd. The teacher is a research student currently at UTS. Although we had been distributed sheets during the lecture about what would be happening within the tutorial session, we did not follow the sheet at all and instead did a lot of chatting about information systems.

After a cursory going around of the room with each person merely reading out their name and their desired result from the subject (obviously I'd want as high as I could...), we started talking about different information systems. I'd actually been looking forward to walking around in pairs, learning more about my class, but this obviously was not to be and was somewhat a disappointment for that reason.

Although the information systems discussion may be useful in the future (the failure of an information system), there was a point I mentioned about the speed of a system, like the speed in which it responds. I'm not exactly sure what he thought I said, although he seemed to grasp the point at the time, and yet he mentioned it again barely 5 minutes later, and I just sighed.

We formated our groups for Assignment 1. But due to the fact that I really didn't know anyone, since we pretty much skipped what we were supposed to do in that class, mostly the class appeared to form groups with people in their immediate area - obviously some of them knew each other - while the others sort of wandered around until they were invited into a group still missing members. Me and two other girls were at the front, and we looked at each other and asked where we lived. In terms of area of residence, it couldn't be a bigger nightmare, to be perfectly honest. I dread to think exactly how we shall work on the assignment with all of us present, unless we do it all at UTS, and yet we cannot pick a video store to research within the CBD (was this mentioned on the sheet, I am not clear, however I was not told this and someone else told me this).

At any rate, I'm not totally sure we were communicating in that class. A class about communicating, yet I felt like I was missing the tutor's every second word and he was missing every second word of ours, judging by the things he neglected to write up on the board as it was said. (Also I could not read his short hand. AC DE is what exactly? I can only GUESS it's supposed to be Account Details, since we were going through a diagram he'd drawn of a Banking system which I felt was seriously flawed.)

I am concerned.

Wish me luck.

01/03/2010 - 05/03/2010 + (07/08 Activities)

This is only to make a small recount of the first week. The order of my subjects is as follows:
- Communications for IT Professionals (Monday)
- Introduction to Information Systems (Tuesday)
- Programming Fundamentals/Object-Orientated Programming (Wednesday)
- Web Systems (Friday)

CITP::
To say the least, this subject doesn't exactly cover something I don't know, but I suppose it's a good idea to try and develop my communications skills further, for all that the subject appears to be like English for Uni. I admit that my oral skills could do with a polish, however. Even so, an upside of day one was being let out early. ^^

IIS::