My Time at Swinburne

Here is the short presentation I made about my time at Swinburne.

You’ll have to download it to view it – sorry.

My presentation

Fifteenth and Final Day

Today was my last day, and I was happy to finally finish my report on university faculties. By the end of it I believe there were about 67 pages, which I was happy with . Apart from that it was a pretty relaxed day – I had finished the report, so I could basically do what I wanted. I spent some time in Flash while listening to music on thesixtyone. I love fast internet .

Louise was going to a meeting, so before she left I gave her, Rob and Ramiro a card and some chocolates to say thanks for the great three weeks. Perhaps I should have included some fertiliser for the plants…

All in all I had a good 3 weeks, and enjoyed hanging out working with Louise, Rob and Ramiro at Swinburne.

Days Twelve to Fourteen

Well, I forgot to post again. That was naughty. Anyway, I will do so now.

The last three days were pretty uneventful. I worked some more on Flash tutorials, finally getting through all the ones I wanted to. They were very good, and it was nice to be able to load them all without worrying about download limits and things . I have almost finished the analysis, which means that I will finish it tomorrow – perfect timing! I think it is at about 60 pages now. They are mainly tables, charts, and things like that, not all text, though . That would be quite excessive. I think it looks pretty good.

I will miss Swinburne when I leave on Tuesday (I will miss Monday because no one would be in the office), but it will be good to start holidays.

Eleventh Day

Today was a good day. I spent some time doing more tutorials, and did some work on the report. Ramiro gave me some extra criteria to add to it, so I worked on finding those things.

I arranged to meet my friend, Angus, for lunch, and we met at the train station. We went across the road to my regular café, and went in. I had a bruschetta, and he had a hamburger. They both proved to be quite messy to eat…

We spend about an hour discussing the Model-View-Controller model, and how we could implement it in a project we keep saying we will work on. It was a good discussion, but we must have looked like the biggest nerds on the planet. Oh well, it was fun.

After lunch, Angus and I went up to the office so that I could show him where I was working and introduce him to Louise, Rob, and Ramiro. We also went up to the fifth floor, because Angus is looking at a course there, so we talked to Andrew, the guy that runs it. We just quickly talked about what the course covers, etc.

After that, Angus went home, and I got back to work. I got a large number of the new report criteria done, so I should be able to do more flash tutorials tomorrow .

Day Ten

Today was a pretty laid back day – everyone was going to the University Christmas party, so I got to go home at lunch time . I basically just mucked around in Flash today, tweaking and changing things I had made from the tutorials. We talked a lot about things, because none of us were really in the mood for doing hard work we thought that long rests would be beneficial to our work flow. We found a hilarious parody video of a film clip, and investigated the whereabouts of a giant worm theme park on Google Maps Street View. So, as you can see, not a lot happened today, apart from me experimenting with Flash .

Days Six to Nine

This post doesn’t have a lot of detail in it, because for most of this week I have worked on the analysis for Louise, and doing some Flash work. I watched a whole heap of tutorials, and have learned a lot about ActionScript, including how to make some basic games.

The one I watched yesterday was about making a game using ActionScript 3.0, and it was really good. I made the game, then spent a few hours today improving it, adding enemies, incremental speed, etc. I had lots of fun playing around with the code. At one point I broke it somehow, and couldn’t work out why, so I just loaded the most recent save. Much easier than fixing it .

I mostly brought lunch from home, because buying it was getting very expensive, but I still went and got a smoothie at the place across the road. Free wifi is good . Hot chocolate from the staff kitchen in the afternoon is also great .

Day Five

Today I did a bit more work on the analysis for Louise, and then Rob got me started with Flash. We talked about some work that another work placement student had done in it, and then he got me started with some tutorials put together by the guys in the Multimedia Faculty. I watched how to do some basic drag and drop stuff, and I really like the language.

I went and had lunch at Subway, then went to get my usual banana smoothie from Boost and **SHOCK HORROR** IT WAS CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS!!! I was mortified, so I went on an epic quest that took me to the far reaches of the other side of the road. There was a café that made smoothies, so I went inside and ordered a banana smothie. To my delight, I saw a little sign on the table saying “Free WiFi!” This meant that I could chat to friends, drink bubbly banana-y goodness, and still be back before my lunch break was up.

I spend the rest of the day watching some Flash tutorials, just basic stuff like making things happen at events like mouse presses, etc.

Fourth Day

Today I continued with the report.

Louise showed me the kitchen, which, with it being on the fifth floor, we had all forgotten about. I made myself some tea and then sat down to do some more work.

Lunch was another Subway-esque roll (not from Subway), with a Boost smoothie (how did you guess?).

I got back to the office, and just as I sat down Louise said “Jonathan! Can you really quickly do a job for me? I need someone to grab some forms from the SPW Building while I run upstairs. Do you reckon you could do that?” With that, I took off and walked across to the SPW building. It went something like the picture on the right.

In the 10 minutes it took me to walk across the campus, the person I was getting the forms from didn’t manage the 20m walk to the desk to drop them. Oh well, I finally managed to get them after the receptionist went to get them.

I did a bit more work on the analysis, then went home on the train.

Second and Third Days

Hi there! I missed posting yesterday, so I’ll post double today.

Yesterday was my second day at Swinburne, and it was pretty similar to the first.

I did some more work on the analysis task Louise set, and finished looking at RMIT’s webpage.

For lunch I went and got a roll at a Subway style place in Hawthorn, and that was cheap, so I went and bought a Boost smoothie as well. I signed up for a Vibe card at Boost, because I think I will be going there a lot .

Today was again pretty similar; I had a look at another faculty at RMIT. RMIT is different from the other Unis in that they use heaps social networks – I mean heaps. They have accounts on Facebook, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, and heaps more. You name it, they’re using it.

Lunch today was an actual Subway Melt and Boost smoothie. Yum .

Rob says that in a couple days he will get me to do some Flash work, so I look forward to that.

First Day

I have just got home from my first day at Swinburne, which was really great.

I got shown around the building by Louise, and then we talked about things like lunch break, etc.

I spent a couple hours doing some research on other University’s ICT Websites in comparison the Swinburne one – so far, Swinburne is winning. Ramiro and Louise set up some criteria for me to investigate and report back on.

I had lunch at a sushi place in Hawthorn, which was good. I love sushi. After that I went back up to the office and finished off another section of the analysis.

After a couple hours it was time to go home, so I said goodbye to Louise, Ramiro and Rob made my way down the 3 working escalators and 1 temperamental one. The temperamental one wasn’t working today.