The day of the presentation

Ive got everything ready but im sat here wondering if i should have brought a vga cable with me because if Roy doesnt bring one im goosed. Its not really the presenting that bothers me when im giving a presentation im usually pretty well up on what im talking about, its equipment failure and because i have to set up in front of the group and not before hand it is a concern.

practice went well now i had better get on with my report.

So practiced in front of my wife a couple of times she said it was good and she is super critical because she is a teacher and give presentations everyday. I'm choosing not to use the script i prepared because it makes me sound a bit wooden, i prefer to add lib bits and go with the flow. I'm looking forward to getting this over and done with to be honest then i can really concentrate on my networking class, because i have several exams and although i'm good at recalling info from the night before i'm not so good when it has been a few weeks. Maybe an almighty cramming session. I think although i found some of the content in the lectures for this subject a bit dry and they are generally things i have done before, i wouldn't have ever started blogging nor would i have had any experience of interacting with opensource world, i think overall it has certainly been worthwhile. i haven't finished completely yet and i don't want to stop blogging although the subject matter may change slightly.

got my presentation done just need to practice

progress on other blog

after a night on the town last night i have a couple of suitably funny stories to add to my other blog, i just need to remember and document some more. A glass or 2 of wine may grease the wheels of my memory. Assignment is going reasonable well i don't think i will have the artwork project specifics before my presentation but i am quite excited to get involved, also it is a good way to keep a bit of a focus over summer on my degree.

I had I reply and may have a job soon

I had responses on Linkedin a couple of people commending my efforts to help and a direction to the marketing mailing list. I'm enjoying this interacting online lark. I have also featured an open office t-shirt at cost price on www.badwoppers.com my t-shirt printing website. Im thinking this could be a way to generate some donations for the open source world if I put the prices up and donated the money directly to the projects featured. Im doing a similar thing for unsigned bands as well at www.klinkhaus.com.   


My Message to the apache openoffice marketing, mailing list 
Title; Looking for a Job.
Hi,

I'm Currently studying a degree in networking and security and one of my first assignments is to interact with the opensource world. I have looked at a lot of projects and I don't really have any programming skills and I don't want to make a pointless contribution, I do however have some design and marketing skills you may be able to use. I really like openoffice and I want to get rid of my MS office and start using it for everything.

I have already printed a few t-shirts and I am featuring an open office t-shirt at cost price on our website WWW.badwoppers.com, but it only includes postage to the UK, I'm doing a presentation at university in 2 weeks and my goal is to get a whole group of computing students downloading and using openoffice.  

So I'm looking for any tasks I can help out with.

Kind Regards

Martyn Headley

Director

John Hunt Photography Ltd   

I await a Job!

Busy Bee

Just posted a forum request about converting MS word docs to Open office writer documents, I am not checking Google as i would normally i am doing it the interactive way, this could lead to a bug find or development suggestion.
I plan on completing my presentation next Saturday, but yet again the obligation to drink alcohol socially may leave me at a disadvantage.I could choose not to drink but if i'm going out the general public irritate me and i am best presented to the masses intoxicated. I am much more friendly with wine inside me.

requested a project

I joined the linkedin group for open office and i requested an artwork project. i will stick it on the artwork mailing list soon as well.

Open office- the perfect selection for this assignment

I have been really looking into the open office suite and i am impressed, although i don't really have the skills to contribute to the bugs and bug fixing I do however have the skills to contribute to the artwork and marketing sections of the project. I am going to be including a bit of open office marketing in my presentation and report.
I have signed up to the marketing mailing list, This is a project that is actually really usable and something that I can bring to the office and cut cost on our office software.
I have started working on my presentation and i will be producing both the presentation and the report on open office. At work we can also produce t-shirts so i will be giving the presentation in an open office t-shirt, and making part of the presentation "why everyone should use open office" which will get out the word to a class full of computing students. I have sent an email to the mailing list for any suggestions on artwork they need and i will see if i can knock something together for the project.
I have a solid plan now....  

Getting on with it.

Posted on several forums today, reported a couple of bugs in different games but I'm not confident about responses as there hasn't been much activity on those projects. Mailed the MAME mailing list asking about a problem with the installer, I don't think it's a software bug I think it's an id10t problem. Struggling to find problems with OpenOffice. I will keep on with it.

Jobs Done Today

• Signed up to the Apache OOo Bugzilla mailing list and forum
• Chose to interact with the project open office

Renewed direction

I was in university today, it sort of redirected me to what this task is actually about, giving a presentation, writing a report, writing a weblog, and interacting with forums. What I was concentrating on doing was actually making some substantial contribution to a open source project rather than the points that this assignment is marked on. I do a lot of presentations in my professional life so I think this should be a breeze, if I get the content, I don't think that telling people about my interaction with the open source world at present will be that interesting, I could tell people about that in about 30 seconds, so I intend to include some content about what stopped me from interacting with the open source world. I will of course have some interaction and I will document this but I think when you are giving a presentation like within a group of presentations that last in a total of 3 hours there needs to be a slight element of entertainment, and not just dry facts.

Long time no see

Hello, I haven't posted for a while so I have some catching up to do, It has been the Easter holidays and my intentions of getting my project done went right out of the window as I had a product idea at work that needs a significant amount of work. We need to use several open source software applications for this project but we need to get a database together and I need to learn some stuff before we really get started. Some of the proposed software we will be using is mySQL, django or Ruby on rails and we will see what other bits of code we can find out there and interact with the open source world. That of course does not help me with this assignment.
I spent a weekend in Barcelona on a stag weekend, this had been planned for ages, way before I even considered a degree. It was fantastic although I got a major case of sunstroke, I may post a picture of the evidence, that reveals how my white pastey skin reacts to the sun without any protection, not only to show you but to remind me so I do not disregard the very wise Australian slogan "Slip, Slap, Slop" ever again. This weekend involved drinking copious amounts of alcohol and having very little sleep, so much so I pronounced "I will not drink until the wedding" I opened a bottle of wine two days later.
After a serious Back injury in August 2011 I am suitable fixed to restart my training regime again, I have increased my mass by 25 Kilos and its not the good sort of increase so I have committed to running (jogging and walking) 8km four times a week and a gym session twice a week. My primary goal is to get my weight back down as when I'm running (jogging and walking) it feels as though I have a backpack full of bricks on my back, hence the jogging and walking and not running. This Regime means being in work at 7am everyday so that I can finish earlier to get my running done and get home in time to see my daughter before bed.
Anyway that is what I have been up to for the past couple of weeks.      

Not easy

This is much harder than it sounded I found an open office program that sounded good called Feng Office, I thought I could do my final presentation on it as well but it has been inactive for ages. Then looked at MAME GUI's but they have been inactive for ages. MAME has been going since 1997 I'm definitely leaving it well alone.

MAME project to well established I'm out of my depth

This is definitely to much of a well established project for me to work on, nice idea but at least I now have an arcade emulator set up on my work PC. I can play Metal Slug on my lunch or even if I'm bored, if only I could get away with using an arcade stick at my desk a key board is rubbish.
  

Social networking pariah

Cutting myself off from Facebook has made me much more efficient, so tomorrow I will be removing all social elements from my Xbox live account. I haven't missed it and my phone battery is lasting much longer.

Thisislegal.com

Just found this awesome website, let's you practice security testing on websites. Ive been on Lynda.com as well starting a programming fundamentals course because I feel as though I can't make any great contribution to a project if I can't even understand the code. I'm going to start with some Java, HTML 5 and CSS I will be doing these in my first year uni modules so I think it's a good start.

Facebook deactivation

Just Deactivated my Facebook account hopefully this will increase my productivity in general.

Bloody ROMs

I still cant get this to work, I know what I will do for the community I will write an idiots guide to installing this program, suitable even for me.

Early Start

After getting to sleep at 23.30 I was awoken at 1.30am by a surprisingly chipper ADT call operative, she was ringing to inform me that there was a fault on our works phone line which was causing problems with the alarm. I suggested that this could probably be sorted in the morning, she agreed, then added "but if anything does happen between now and then you may have a problem with your insurance". I thought I had better get down and check things out, everything was fine as expected but I decided because my daughter usually wakes up around 4.30 and it was 2am now I might as well just stay and upgrade the operating system on the other company directors PC. I have been putting this off for some time due to other peoples inability to back things up adequately yet remember everything they needed when they get the formatted PC back.
Anyway while installing the operating system and software I have made some progress. I have downloaded the MAME code, I have discovered that I need a separate front end but best of all I have found some contributions I can make.
The one problem I have is that it isn't completely open source it cant be used for commercial use, I don't think it matters too much its more the interaction that counts I think. I have a lot of documentation to read so I hope it is OK.
I AM TIRED!!  

This is a distraction

I am finding this weblog a distraction and rather than working on my assignment I am thinking of things to blog about. I now have 3 blogs.

Distractions are everywhere

I set aside time both on Saturday an Sunday to work on my assignment, and go to the gym, between my 6 month old daughter and Netflix I have achieved very little. I ate a family sized pizza and watched the first 2 seasons of Dexter, which is very addictive.
I still have most of the day left but it's mostly going to be used to buy toys for my daughter then work out how the batteries go in. My sister is also visiting from Portsmouth so I will be going to see her for a bit. I'm actually visiting Portsmouth next weekend so I won't be getting any work done then either.

First mobile post

Just installed blogger onto my iPhone, how have I not been introduced to the world of blogging before. I love to tell the world what I am doing and I never have enough characters to do it with, well now I do.

University Project start point

I have been given an assignment at university that asks that we interact with the open source community, our tutor suggested picking something we are interested in. I could pick something we could use at work, I considered GIMP the opensource image processing software but its just not as good as Photo shop and I don't think I would use it in the future.
Recently we have introduced a Retro Games section on my T-shirt printing website so I figured I could do something with retro gaming to give me some inspiration with my designs. I am familiar with MAME as I had it on a modified  Xbox I had when I was younger (I did not modify it!) and I love Neo Geo games.
Progress so far: I have downloaded the program from the main website http://mamedev.org/ It appears I will have to read the documentation to get it working. I am determined not to use the version with the added GUI, and use command prompt. 

Hello World!

Is enjoying a lovely session of core skills at bolton university.