This post has nothing to do with battleships at all, I just thought Battleships as a post topic would be pretty cool, a little out there and kinda relates to what I’m going to say.. which confusingly enough has nothing to do with Battleships. ANYWAY, what I’m getting at is basically how this semester at uni is absolutely kicking ass. It’s like I’m playing a game of Battleships and sinking the other guy’s (Life’s) battleships and he isn’t getting any of mine. Am I cheating? no, I’m just rocking out.. hardcore, seriously, superduper.

This is a Star Wars Battleships game but the concept is the same.

I’ve been getting results back, from the mid semester stuff and I’ve become elated with what I’m seeing, 98/100 for a C++ assignment, 58/60 on a test.. yes! a TEST! I suck at tests, I do not test well in testing circumstances at all. I hate tests, I got a 58 out of 60, this is a big deal peoples! Other assignments and whatnot include my Java assignment which I didn’t do very well on (82.5%) and an Internet Protocols and Services assignment which I can’t exactly recall what I got but it was a high distinction. All in all, I’m happy with the results I’m getting, and the quality of education I’m receiving from the university this semester, it seems like I’m on the ball with all my assessment items and overall university is just coolio.

But it isn’t all good news, I live out in Boyland, stuff happens in Boyland, I’ll tell you what kinda stuff, nothing-stuff.. The worst kind of stuff. It’s not pleasant. I’ve submitted my Kansai Gaidai Application and should be receiving my host package in about 2 to 3 weeks (more info here).. after that the mission is to attend a seminar, get my visa and kick some more ass at uni.

Life’s good, let’s hope it lasts.

Gah! so I’ve been doing alot of work recently on random Internet related stuff.. you may or may not have noticed that I have added a nifty ‘episodes’ section to the site that links over to another blog, in this  case my Kansai Gaidai Exchange Blog, anywhos that’s not the only thing I’ve been doing. Well on top of trying to get this website all nice and neat, I’ve also been vying with Jace to try and get my website / blog to rank well with Google and many other high flying search engines out there. This has let to alot (not really) of research into Search Engine Optimization.. that is, how to get Google to love your website more than the other websites out there. Ahh so it’s been a bit of a battle, Jace has the overall tactical advantage.. heh, but yeah, it’s healthy competition. What we’ve been doing in addition to pimping out our sites, is going out and making accounts on other sites to try and get ourselves as much attention as possible. We’ve gotten pretty dirty associating ourselves with Xanga.. and Jace has got some advertising up on his website now, so he’s a real slut. Buuut, now I’ve got a new weapon for my arsenal.

Tumblr -- a different sort of blog.

Yes so Tumblr or a tumble blog, however you want to see it. It’s a bit of an interesting concept and really is like a halfway point in between micro blogging and having an actual blog like Wordpress. Anywho, it’s something I’m going to experiment with and see if I can maintain a 1 post a day policy. This being said, don’t go expecting anything mighty awesome now, it’ll probably just be a picture of something I see when I’m out and about because I’ve got a fantastic super mega awesome HTC Dream.

Annnyway, I just thought I’d let the competition know and anyone else out there that would like to give it a go. Check out my very own Tumblr blog that I spent alot of time trying to get this theme touched up just the way I wanted it to be.. Go here to see it.

Ahhh.. in other news and related category, Google Images has an awesome new features (what I can only assume is new) that allows you to filter your image searches based on colour! it’s quite simple too.

Ohhh technology, how I love thee. Til next time.

Title says it all really, it wasn’t especially hard as it was only JPLT4 but I’ll post an awesome picture anyway because we all love awesome pictures.

.. what a stupid name. What kind of parents did this guy have?

_

Anywho, as insignificant as it was, it felt kinda like this.. and I know I promised an awesome picture but once again it seems I lied — is this becoming one of my latest habits?

Stay tuned until next time to find out!

Soo, Master Mitchell, why?
I’ll tell you why. As you’ll know from the blog I posted 5 minutes ago I’m going overseas to Kansai Gaidai on exchange for 9 months now instead of 4, as such, I will ultimately be called Master Mitchell. Yeah, didn’t really answer the first question — I will be starting a masters degree, not when I get back but after I graduate my Bachelor of IT, the one I’m technically yet to start. Ahh life is good in the land of Master Mitchell, more explanation?

This will basically be me minus the aging and adding a fancy graduates hat.

Going overseas for 9 months unfortunately will have some negative ramifications that I will have to deal with, more specifically I won’t have enough units to do all the units I wanted to do before I graduated. So, what to do? after drawing up a ton of battle plans and a bit of consultation with the BIT course coordinator I arrived to the conclusion that basically was, postpone my plans for JET (”The Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme”) for a year and complete my masters in 1 and a half years. Great plan right? well looking at it from outside it doesn’t look all that bad. Initial guesstimates for my life was basically as such: Kansai Gaidai for 4 months, spend 2 more years at uni, graduate BIT, wait 6 months and start JET. What seems likely to be the case: Kansai Gaidai for 9 months, spend 1.5 years at uni, graduate BIT, start masters, graduate masters and start JET.
Now I don’t need to waste that 6 months working a full time job and I can use that plus another year to come out with a masters to boot. Sounds vaguely like a plan that I’d probably go with, like I sound confident so I must know what I’m talking about so obviously I’m on board with it.

Ahh, so that’s all I got with me becoming a not so ancient looking master with a coolio graduates hat. Now we play the waiting game.

So I haven’t been posting too much, that’s life. But alot of things have happened since my last, rather quaint post. Yes, I have a HTC Dream now, I love it to bits but there are more bigger issues to talk about, bigger life changing stuff is going down.
For starters, I’m blogging again.. woo, hey yay. That’s great news, yeah thanks guys.

More specifically this post is directed to the little thing that happened the other week, alright I’ve lied twice here. It’s not a little thing and it won’t technically be a year. I will be on exchange to Kansai Gaidai in little old Hirakata, Osaka, Japan for 9 months and not a year.. so yeah, that’s two semesters, each around 4 months each with a 1 month break. 4+4+1 = 9 months. Now I said a year because come on it sounds sooo much cooler and that little small fact that students, such as myself, identify two semesters back to back as a year for all intensive purposes. It’s basically another unit conversion: 2 semesters = 1  year.

Heh, I wish I was going to Tokyo University of Technology.

Wow, alot of Math today. So alot has happened since my last real post and I plan on addressing all that in their own separate posts, not because they deserve their little post but because I’m trying to stick categories with their categories and clean up the quality of my posts.. basically, keep track of what I’m posting. So when a visitor clicks “Kansai Gaidai” they’ll get all my posts that are completely related to Kansai Gaidai and when someone clicks QUT they’ll get my uni posts and QUT specific posts. It’s a super complex blogging system I know, but I’m going to try stick by it because if I intend to keep blogging I need to keep it clean. And not clean like a nasty Australian clean feed that that Conroy bastard is trying to implement on the aussie internets but clean as in.. hey, that’s a neato desk!  clean.

That’s my post, will post another soon. Promise.

Sexy, beautiful, awesome, dreamy.

I have one and I love it.

That is all.

So it’s been a while since my last post. Have I been busy? no, not really. I think what has stopped me from blogging or whatnot has been the balancing act of life. Yeah, it takes a bit of effort to coerce myself to write about stuff. Well I suppose that a few things have happened to talk about but generally I’ve been severely unmotivated to do this. But as of late I’ve been jumping back into it all, hence I am here now, writing this piece. So I title this entry as the Balancing Act because more times than I can count, I find myself choosing between what I want to do and what I deem necessary for me to do. There’s a difference because obviously the former is something of choice and the latter is something that I begrudgingly need to get done. Even now it takes a little pressure to coaxes myself into writing line after line, with the only motivating factor not being the concept of a blog more specifically my blog but the acceptance of the fact that after I do this entry, I’m free of guilt and responsibility until at least uni returns. And I think that is what this is all about, me not being able to go to uni and do my thing; I miss my friends, I miss the workload and I miss the lifestyle and to be honest, I think the 3 month or so ‘respite’ is too excessive.

But, what have I done to date? since my last entry? well as you can imagine, my last entry was a distraction merely to keep myself comfortable with not touching this blog for a while, but again, as you can imagine such a small inane post can’t do alot in that respect. So, again, what have I done with myself to date? Ahh well.. for starters I started and finished a temporary job, it was pretty boring which I think just added to my unmotivatedness but the money was decent and it kept me doing something for which I am grateful. That in it’s entirety neared two months but still left me short from the commencement of the semester.

With regards to social life, I haven’t went out too much, it’s actually been so long since I blogged that I don’t know if I’ve documented recent such events or not. But again, as the start of uni is nearing I find myself trying to squeeze in some fun. Last weekend I went into the city with Jace and Tim and some of Jace’s peeps and we went to some snazzy out of the way bar / club-like place near the Gabba called the Chalk hotel or something.. I’ve gotta admit that it was a pretty sweet place and I will definitely be going back there some time, it had the best setup imaginable.
I’m hoping to go ice skating with Tim and hopefully reunite the entire gang before we go back to uni, which providing it happens, will be completely awesome. We have unfinished slapbets that need to be fixed up and Anthony owes us all a ton of drinks.. furthermore he will be the duty manager at Fitzy’s near the Hyperdome meaning I’ll be immune to getting kicked out of there when he’s there, which again, fanastic.. even if I hardly ever go to Fitzy’s anyhow.

Life is a balancing act.

University and Exchange -

Well with uni drawing near I’ve been checking out my units and what it will all entail and I’ve gotta be quite clear and honest and say that I’m not looking forward to one unit in particular, Data Structures and Algorithms.. or was it Algorithms and Data Structures? regardless I’ve done a bit of research and I’ve found that it involves some of the stuff that I, and surely many others despise. Math. Yeah, in a nutshell, to my understanding.. this unit will encompass a bunch of random stuff that allows us to code better. Everyone knows there are alot of possible ways to code a program, by the end of this, we will know the best possible way to code a program — that is to say, one that runs fastest and uses up less resources which in turn when applied to mass amounts of data being processed is a valuable skill.
Despite being a nice something something to add to the skillset that’s not exactly what I need, or rather what I think I need. You see, over the holidays I did a bit of research into what exactly I wanted to do when I decided to pursue my professional career. You may think this is silly, I’ve been at uni for 3 years now and I don’t know what I want to be? well you’ve got to realize with IT there are so many complex specializations that one can choose and it takes an understanding of these roles that need to be furfilled within the IT sector that can only be gained by working through your degree and fishing out what you like to do and what you don’t.

I’ve decided upon a VoIP Cisco Network Engineer. Why? simply because I believe there is and will continue to be a great need for the service and it’s right up that little lane that has all the things I’d like to do and that I am interested in. Plus it’s one of the highest paying IT jobs out there.. muaha $120k is a very long way off from being a fantasy. So with that in mind, I’m able to plan the rest of my degree accordingly, pick up valuable skills and whatnot.. so I’m happy in regards with the entire IT career department thingo.

Moving on, tonight I received an email saying officially, even though I had unofficially known for a while now, that I would be nominated to go to Japan to my selected university. This is great news for me as in this email I received a bunch of helpful links which gave me an abundance of info regarding the complexities of what I’m to undertake and the challenges I’ll meet. This is nice as I’m one to plan, always have been, always will be. Basically, I’m the guy you want in one of those zombie doomsday scenarios because I’ve already meticulously planned that out.

Oh, so I’m also officially an adult in Japan now, turning 20 on Monday, which in Japan is the age of ‘manhood’ / legal age to drink alcomahols.. which is nice. Lucky me, I now have the entire collection of Scrubs on DVD to date, seasons 1 to 7 and I’ve been watching them daily. I was going to have a Scrubs-a-thon but I’ve decided to hold off and actually have a mass Scrubs-a-thon with alcohol involved (on the first night at least).. I’ve also found a renewed vigor to get my website up and running with the formal acknowledgment from the university and 3 week countdown back to uni.

Ohh and a bit on the bad side of my update is me announcing (I’ve made a habit of that as of late) that I won’t be able to formally study Japanese at university anymore. In what I suspect is a bid to reduce expenditure, three universities — QUT, Griffith and UQ have banded together and formed a language ‘alliance’ of sorts and are now only offering higher level language units at the UQ St Lucia campus and consquently their time tables now clash with my IT units and I wouldn’t be arsed to travel to St Lucia anyway soo it looks like I’m going to do self study. It shouldn’t be so bad as I’m going in for an appointment with the Japanese Head Coordinator to just have a chat about some stuff and I’m going to see if I can mooch some powerpoint slides from previous years to help me with my studies. Shouldn’t be a big ask as I’ve spoken with her before about my exchange to Japan. Fingers crossed though.

I think that’s all I need to report, sure I’ve left a few things out like the fact that I’m moving to nowhere but I might remember to talk about those random facets of life another time.

Sayonara. Til next time.