I’ve been talking to a lot of people and there is hardly anyone that seems to take the re-write seriously. Most people see the writing phase as the end of the work. There’s a secret I’ve been hiding for some time now. Re-writing gave me a twenty percent boost in grades. That’s the difference between merit and distinction. That’s the difference between a 2:1 and a distinction for the dissertation. Now take into consideration that the dissertation is worth 45 credits out of 120 for the year.
There is a copy and paste culture on the web and I don’t like it. When you go to Digg, to Youtube, to myspace and other websites what you find are short comments. They’re contributing nothing to the debate, in fact they make the online experience online less enjoyable. There has been quite a vocal outcry from certain people about the HD DVD codec and how forcing articles to be pulled down and deleting user accounts was going against their user rights.
Being at the stage I’m at, and having discussed the work with the tutor there are three things I must make sure to do before handing in the work. The first task is uniformity. I need to go through two or three sections and make sure that I tie them into the overall structure of the dissertation work. It’s meant to flow from one section to another. That’s something I’ve got to work on.
I’m almost done with uni but it’s so hard. I’ve been working on and off on three projects now for at least three weeks and I’ve spent so much time on these projects that today I finally met my saturation point so I left the computer behind and dropped down to the bar for a drink or two and for company. There were only a few people watching a football match and no media students from my year.
Zattoo is a little bit of code that allows you to watch streaming television from the comfort of your laptop rather than using a television or other device. It’s better than Joost because they don’t discriminate against PowerPC users. It means I can watch BBC 1, 2 3 4, ITV, C4 CBBC, BBC news 24 (that’s the crappy England only version). I’m happy to see this change. I had tested it months ago in Switzerland and found the product interesting.
There are about nine days left before the deadline and I’m up to revision five of my dissertation and I’m feeling fairly happy about it. i’ve spent two days working off the printed copy before transferring these changes back to the electronic version. I’ve got almost everything I wanted to do done for today. The next step is to get all the graphics, tables and the bibliography in order. In this detail alone I may expect to spend two or three hours if things go well.
Last night I was feeling good about how my dissertation was going so I got my shoes on and walked to the cinema, feeling good about what I had achieved in the day. I went from my dissertation being a collection of words on the computer to it being printed out for visual inspection. What I found as I looked through the thousands of words I have written is that I am quite happy with the way it’s going and thought that I’m going to meet the target date for the handing in earl, if everything goes well from here on.
Spending almost all of the time when you’re awake to complete your dissertation is hard, especially when you slept no more than six hours after a good night out. I’ve spent almost all the time I’ve been awake working on my dissertation and it’s progressing well but there is still work to be done and although sometimes I feel good at other moments I feel like it’s never going to be completed.
person “you walk fast” me “I like to walk” person “I thought you were rushing somewhere” me “nope, just stride as I walk” On average every step I take is two and a half times longer than most people therefore I cover distances in half the time it takes others to do the same. That’s because I love walking. I used to walk an hour a day after high school and the distances expanded over time.
At the moment I’m re-reading the dissertation and going through every paragraph individually to make sure that the content is good. It’s currently floating at about 9900 words and I’m feeling fairly confident with the content. there is still work to be done but within the next three or four days I hope to be done with this piece of work. Once more I went walking around the library and I met almost only girls from my course quite amusingly.