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My dissertation had been finished and ready to print since yesterday afternoon but it’s today that i finally printed out the entire document for handing in to the university for assesment. it’s 10,800 words for some of the most highly produced work I have ever done. It feels good to have handed it in and never to have to worry about it. Many of the others have handed in the work and it’s going to be celebrated tomorrow although the prospect of spending my first real day of freedom hung over does not appeal to me therefore I’m planning on not drinking. Now what to do with all this time I’ve got. Find a place to live, find a place to work and more. Everything is there, absolute freedom to do anything at any time i want now.

Mariuca - May 5, 2007

Hi Richard, wow you’ve been busy! Congrats on completing your dissertation! I bet you’ll do great and all the best to you :) :)

  If you love reading the news and seeing what’s going on around the world then Trendio is an interesting site for you. I looked at the events that are going to take place and whether Trendio already has them listed. If it does then I decided to buy some stock for those words and as their quantity increases so it means I will get some income. Knowing that the French elections would take place I bought stock in two of the key elements to see by how much they would increase. As you see the increase isn’t that bad. I also saw some other events in the news so bought those. Overall it’s about understanding the news cycle, what stories have a long life, which ones are going to be short lived and which ones will generate the most hype. If you buy words before a key event when they’re low and wait for the event then you can make a lot of trendilions within a short amount of time. It’s an interesting distraction and I’d recommend people take a look at it. Trendio.com

Those words were magic, a writer can expect to review his work over a hundred times. That so many times. Can you imagine going through something one hundred times? By the end, you’re going to go mad. Actually, when I’m working on video it’s not unusual for me to watch the same five minutes 20-30 times till I’m satisfied it’s perfect. I’ve been applying that procedure to my dissertation which is why I still haven’t completed it. I was feeling discouraged this morning but this afternoon when I heard the sentence I’m now using as a title for this I felt encouraged. Of course, it’s hard, of course, it’s repetitive but if you want to write well you’ve got to give it the time it requires. What’s the point in having a dissertation to write if you’re going to do it within two days. What about all the thought process. What about all the conversations you’re missing out on. I joked with someone who was still taking notes today, “45 credits…. ah that’s worth at least 45 minutes of work”. She probably hates me for saying that but come on, it’s your dissertation. It’s the first time that people want you to blab for so long about a topic of your choosing. No one else tells you what to write, only how you should write it. Some friends are smart, they chose the subjects they love. So did I, means you’re studying even when you’re not. Add to this the process of writing. It’s enjoyable. Put some music on, zone out for an hour or two and just write, research, and learn more about what you love, then write more. Write to learn rather than the other way around. I love the thought of writing to learn. It’s a book I read several years ago, when still at La Chat in Geneva. I think I’d like to be a writer. I don’t mind academic writing as long as I have as much time as I want, or else organise my time so that I fool myself into believing I have as much time as I want. There’s one paragraph that’s taunting me at the moment, I’m going to trick it though, and it will be tamed into a relevant bit of text.

Too much academic research and concentrating on dissertations has cut me off from world news to such an extent that apart from tech goings on I had no clue. I hardly followed the French elections, hardly noticed the death of Yeltsin, hardly noticed the regional elections. There are three reasons for this. England is a hard news vacuum with it’s slightly islandish mentality (don’t yell at me for this view, I’ve been here a fifth of my life), online news resources, (finding the news I want) and thirdly researching and writing my dissertation. It’s been a break from the world and it’s coming to an end and I need to resynchronise with the Hard News world once more. It’s going to take a few days of reading news once the disso and work experience folders are handed but I’ll do it. I also need to decide what to do, whether I stay in London, whether I go travelling and scuba diving to become an underwater cameraman or whether I go back to the beautiful landscapes of Switzerland where my social life is lived through a computer because I am so tired of the motorway to and from Geneva these days. Another option is getting a motorbike license, getting the scooter and driving as far as I feel like on a daily basis and seeing place after place. Time will decide of course.

Today is a day of rest for me. I caught the tube into central London and went for a nice hour long walk through the center of London. Starting from Oxford tube station I walked through the throngs of people, dodging them and trying to fray the quickest path through them as possible without having to cut down on speed. I passed by Pall Mall and the Cabinet War rooms before walking along the South Bank where all the entertainers were Masses of people were queing for the London eye whilst others were eating at Wagamama, strada and other restaurants. I passed the Tate Modern and saw the guy with the birds, not a pimp, the reptiles that evolved into feathered creatures. He was there with his public. I pased by a few beggers, some looking worse than others. There was an opera singing girl under one arch and that did make a change, a nice one. Tired of always seeing the modern artists so seeing a more classical application is more interesting. I didn’t stop, and didn’t hear. I was listening to the i-pod. I passed by more objects before finally getting to London Bridge. By then I was getting tired, after all when I got down to the tube I had been walking for an hour at my cruising speed, above 8km/H. Think I covered quite a nice distance and saw many sights. Now I’m content, sitting in my room and I saw that the Digg word stock I bought on trendio went up by 7 points and s

I’ve just started playing with Trendio which seems like an interesting website. In the past i’ve played on websites where you’re playing the stockmarket with virtual money and you can see how you’re doing without the risk of bankrupcy usually associated with investment. I’ve only been using it a few hours now and I have yet to make a profit on the search terms but over a short amount of chance there is a chance that I will make virtual credit. I’ll come back to this topic once I have more experience of it.

I would love to go back to the countryside where I can sleep whenever I choose and wake up when I can. I love being around people, going out and partying but I also love being able to sleep and waking up to the sound of silence. It’s been hard these past few weeks with all the work I’ve been doing in the academic sphere. I would go to sleep between 10pm and midnight were it not for the drunks making noise till 3am and the cleaners and others making noise from 9am onwards. Six hours to sleep is plenty of sleep… theoretically. When you’re woken by the sound of others though and prevented from sleeping by the sound of some then the countryside’s pull is really strong. I’m day dreaming of getting out of the suburbs. They’re the worst of bost world. They’re crap because everyone commutes into town for work yet they’re not deep enough in the countryside to allow for the freedom to walk for hours without interruptions. I want silence. I’m exhausted at the moment, longing for nothing more than a full week of sleep cycles where nothing but my mind wake me up. The villager in me is stronger than the urbanite and that’s clearly visible.

Going out is great, especially to an empty night club when friends of yours are present. It immediately becomes less fun when one friend decides to enjoy the freedoms of nature on a fence whilst a police car is rolling past. At the time I was sitting in a kitchen with my back to the window when I hear the siren go off. What’s the cause of this I wonder and lookout. I spot two people I know and immediately I understand what they were doing. Harmless engineering term, up to you to figure out which one. A friend standing behind me decides to yell out of the room “stop them, they’re terrorists” which in itself would be a harmless joke except for bored policemen. They decided to give the guy they had interrupted when nature calls an £80 fine. That’s annoying for anyone who’s been fined. You know the feeling. It became more interesting when those two people came up to see me and ask whether I had caused those problems. Having a clear conscience I answered that I had not been the one to land them in trouble. Ok, who did, was the next response. This person Ok, now the situation escalated. At this point, both people knew who was responsible for what and they were willing to fight. I used all of my body strength to come between both individuals because I did not want to see a fight take place when I was a key witness in the unfolding events. No fight took place but the echauffement definitely did. I was asked to leave the flat although I had done my best to avoid a fight and everyone went their separate ways. That’s definitely not what I want to have to deal with after spending so much time and effort on the dissertation. When I wake up I’ll spend some more time adding the finishing touches to my dissertation before handing it in. Goodnight

I just noticed that I’d love living in Singapore because that’s the city where people walk the fastest. Copenhaguen is a city I’ve walked in but I didn’t notice it being particularly fast. Berliners walk faster than New Yorkers and Londoners walk slower than all of the above. I wonder how I’d compare to all these people and how I’d affect the averages. It’ just the type of news story I enjoy. Out of all these cities Malawi is the slowest. It’s 20 seconds slower than the rest. source