Copied from MT2: http://multitalk2.com/index.php?msg=163714
I have a big off rant about my uni, and I need to vent, while I have it in me. So here goes.
It’s basically about why in the fuck am I doing this shit. Out of four “courses” as they call them, I’d prefer the term “units” only one has any relevance to what I want, the other three, are utterly pointless towards what I want to do.
The first, Computer Modelling & Applied Maths is pointless, because it’s on MATLAB, a software package and language, I never even knew existed. I have had very limited interest in Maths ever since I was 16 (I’m 23 now) so I don’t see the point, what’s more, one of the two lecturers on that is completely monotonous, he just reads straight off the slides and it really annoys me, and we had him last year as well, he couldn’t even read the damn slides properly either. The maths part is for some part, converting between Binary, Octal, Decimal and Hex, all relatively pointless, why in the hell should I have to know how to convert between them on paper. Who gives a fuck about that unless you’re a colossal nerd. It may be easy, that doesn’t mean I care.
Next, is the Intro to Networking, another thing I don’t give a fuck about. I’m a programmer slash web designer. I don’t care about networking. Never have. Never will. And it’s a major weakness of mine for that reason. So why am I doing this. In college it was different because it free, and it was compulsory to the course I was on, this is different, because it’s not compulsory, nor is it free.
The moron lecturer on that one claims “you need to know about…” my statement would be “You need to know about how to shut your face because otherwise it’d have a meeting with my fist” but I’d be done for assault. The guy doesn’t explain anything, he just expects us to magically know about whatever it is he’s yammering on about, so he’s just as monotonous as the other guy, so much so, I end up falling asleep in his lectures because I’m so uninterested. If a 30% mark in a multiple-choice “test” (which is weighted 5% towards the final grade) doesn’t mean “I don’t give a fuck” then I don’t know what does outside of blatantly saying so.
Further I hate him as it stands. He tried to guilt trip me into getting a Del.icio.us account, which I am not comfortable doing for reasons, I’ve already stated, I value my privacy to extreme levels, then he mouths off saying that “Just use a fake name” my response was no, because of reasons of what happened between the MT2-PDD war, people can see through my fake names, as well as being a matter of principle.
Finally Computer Principles. Which is more about the hardware side of this, and knowing about the hardware in a microchip is pointless to a software programmer, how many programmers care about the contents of a microchip? None I bet. So why should I care? And why should a programmer learn how to strip a PC apart, which is pretty simple anyway as any idiot can pick up a screwdriver, or how to Solder something together, while at the same time, why should a network guy learn how to code HTML? The funny thing is, with that there was a lab titled “Is this Necessary” which in itself is kind of ironic, as my answer to that would be “No, it’s not”
The last one is Programming, which is on C#, most of it is semi-new, but I’m drawing a lot of things from PHP which is extremely similar.
What’s pissing me off is the fact that I’m PAYING for 3/4 of something that I don’t give a fuck about, and won’t use, nor does it count towards anything on my final degree, yet will totally fuck me over for getting me towards the stuff I actually DO care about, but I’m not the only one that shares these feelings. Why should a programmer learn about networks, and stuff inside PC or to solder, and the same in the other way, why should a network admin learn how to program something with C#?
We paid for courses or as they call them “programmes” at the university to do a subject in a field of our speciality. Why are we doing something TOTALLY UNRELATED to where we want to go?
Post responses on MT2. Comments are disabled on this post because of spammers.
26/06/2011: THINGS HAVE CHANGED SINCE THIS POST, AND THE COMMENTARY IN THIS POST IS NOW REDUNDANT.
So, we all know what happened in January on SM.org I hope. They booted a lot of people out, and made up all sorts of rules in an attempt to make things better. They failed. Epically, and as a result SMF has been on a downward spiral. Several people have left. Some for personal reasons, some because they became dissatisfied with how things are being run by those who are power hungry, Cathy (Amacythe) came to mind, they elected Kindred as a PM to help move things forward, at first he did a decent job, but then he too, fell victim to becoming power hungry.
SMF is now being run rampant with poor management, and leaders unable to maintain their team, the Customise Team in particular who has a leader who does nothing but insult people and look down on them, I am of course talking about Matt (SlammedDime).
Recently I offered to go back to the Customise Team to help with their abysmal theme approval management, by abysmal, I mean non-existent. I wait a few days, and I get a message saying that I’ve been posting elsewhere that attacks them and I can’t let bygones be bygones, and I would have to prove myself. Here’s the message I got:
Thanks for your offer to help out with the customization team. We appreciate your interest in working with the project again and could indeed use the help. Unfortunately, some of the team are concerned about the recent attacks and other posts on various sites which had your name attached to them. We’d like to put you into the “customization approver” group for the moment in order to give you the opportunity to prove that the “nay-sayers” are wrong, that you are willing to let bygones be bygones and that you CAN work with us…
I thought fine, I’ll do it their way for now, I gave them one month to decide. Not many other people were impressed with the teams idiocy, of turning down help, which quite rightly they were doing, I wasn’t too happy either, as it clearly shows that they themselves can’t let bygones be bygones either.
A few weeks in, they start to talk about the Dream Portal mod and the fact that they are treating the authors as criminals because they are working alongside ccbtimewiz who was previously banned for reasons I won’t go into. I wanted to have the mod treated fairly, but all the Cus Team members were again, refusing to let bygones be bygones.
I informed a few friends with a few screenshots, just to let them know what’s going on, which I thought they deserved to know. I requested it not to go beyond that topic, but evidently someone went behind my back and informed both sides, so I was stuck in the middle, the images were later deleted.
When ccbtimewiz, though indirectly insulted me about it, I blocked him. Permanently from all messenger clients, he was under maybe four or five different addresses among the clients I have.
Then further on, I call up the Cus Team on their dates on creating polls for team access, then Matt sent me this message which I shall break up.
It was brought to our attention and confirmed by other sources that you deliberately screen shot the discussion topic for the Dream Portal mod and posted it on Bryan’s forum without the consent of any team members here. You know these are meant to be private discussions for team eyes only and you betrayed the trust and access granted to you. We would not tolerate this behavior from any team member and surely will not from anyone being given access to team boards helping us out.
My response to that is that the posts from within those topics are not really that secret anyway, generally anything in there will move so that the author can see what’s going on, they may cite they are doing it to be anonymous, but that is in fact false since prolific authors can, will and have picked up on certain approver posting styles.
He goes on to say:
Regretfully, I have removed your Customize Approver access and the Steering Committee decided we will not be conducting another poll to bring you back to the team.
I replied stating that if he doesn’t want my help, then that’s his problem. But, declining it will only hurt his reputation more in those that know what’s going on, and his reputation isn’t in that great of a condition anyway as more cus team members have left under his leadership than anyone else.
Lastly he returns to the insults with:
We had hoped that you would prove some team members wrong and shown that you could be a productive member of the team but this was not the case.
Many, myself included thought that I shouldn’t have had to prove myself in the first place. If people are offering you their assistance, you would be a fool not to take it.
Granted, maybe I shouldn’t have leaked that topic, and I even apologised for doing it, but I still feel that they should’ve known that they were going to be treated as criminals, but I was evidently proved wrong on that front, and that it was actually warranted with ccbtimewiz’s attitude, and that wouldn’t be the first time he insulted me on DP.net either.
Apparently, where ever I go, all I get is shit tons of insults.
Depending on their responses I may demand that they take down my badges as I do still maintain copyright ownership on them as I never signed their CLA.
So to answer the title, has the team learned since January? The answer is quite simply, No. They have not. So much so, I’m trying my hand at playing around with phpBB and MyBB, both of which have progressed leaps and bounds over SMF.
-Gazmanafc
Y’know what’s annoying about life online?
To many people are after a quick buck. For those who have been around on MT2, will know of the story of John Slater, who did anything for easy money, he’s probably changed by now and started to earn his money, but that doesn’t erase his past of producing shitty PDD and LBO merchandise just for a bit of money.
Then there’s the story of Stephen who produced site after site filled with shitty content, some of which was stolen, or drawn exclusively by Leif, and filled with errors so that he can get some ad revenues at the expense of Google. He even resorted selling one of his sites for cash.
And finally there’s probably the biggest culprit of all. vbgamer45 on SM.org who either releases shitty mods which violate god knows how many guidelines, have no design to them and has code that’s a total mess. What’s worse though is that he’s a fucking CUSTOMISER for the team. (how he got on the team I’ll never know as he doesn’t really do anything inside the team).
He releases these mods that are low quality, filled with bugs, coding errors and guideline violations, and then he has the gall to charge upwards of $100 a pop for them when there are better alternatives that are free.
Worse still, when several authors left the community in January, he either bought the rights to various mods, from those authors, or made inferior clones, and then made pro versions of all of them. Citing that keeping them around would benefit the community. (Which I don’t have a problem with, but charging said community? No sale) Nor does he test the mods he releases, which is just calling for trouble.
These money grubbers who are looking for nothing other than a quick buck make me sick. Being in a community like these should be about having fun and helping people or discussing your favourite things in pop culture, not making money.
-Gary M. Gadsdon
Sorry, I’ve been playing FINAL FANTASY XIII recently and got back to Gran Pulse. Anyway, we all know what happened way back in January on SM.org right? Where the managers booted everyone out of the team boards and forced them to sign some retarded agreement to get back in right?
No? Well, the gist of it after that is many team members at the time, refused to sign it and left, forming SMF-Friends.org. Most of the dust has settled, and things are starting to restore to normal. But some problems remain.
Each person has their own restrictions on why they wouldn’t return to the team, for me, it’s because of two people, namely Cathy and SlammedDime.
In Cathy’s case it’s because she intentionally tried to hold me back in becoming a lead of my appropriate team should I have been seen as a worthy applicant. And her flat out lies. She once said that she didn’t hate me, when in fact, it’s quite clear that she did.
In SlammedDime’s case is because he’s a major douchebag. Simply put. The guy doesn’t know how to manage his team, or is too stuck-up to learn to seek help. He’s probably caused more customisers to leave than anyone else. He can’t manage his team either since they seem to just sit on their asses twiddling their thumbs. I admit, I may not have done much but at least I did *something*
What’s more retarded, that just a few days ago, Cathy requested that all instances of her name be switched to Amacythe for some reason, despite the fact that her name has been listed in every SMF Forum, as well as the official SM documentation. I’m still trying to comprehend any logic changing the database served.
SMF is great software, but when will these people let go of their pride and do what’s truly best for the software as a whole and step away, and move onto something else that wont negatively effect the fates of tens of thousands of websites, as their stepping down will actually bring back dozens of people and help make SMF progress so much faster!
What’s more important, your pride or SMF’s future?
Good news.
I passed my uni course. Well. It’s not official yet, but all my grades are above the pass mark, which I would think to anybody is a clear indicator to passing would you not agree? 
Also I managed to get my student loan application approved for the second year of uni. I was worried about it as other members of the course I was on, have has theirs denied, the gummymint is trying to save moneys or some shit, which is the most retarded thing I ever heard as they are putting a lot of student’s careers in danger.
Well… Almost. I have a couple more modular exams to take care of online, which I can do in a couple of days, there’s only three of them, and a “final exam” which I’m not really sure what entails, and it’d be held in the lecturers office of all places with all six students on the course present (that’s right, there was just six of us)
Currently, I’ve been told that I have at least passed, but that was a while back and in one unit of the course, I am unable to fail as I scored 80% on it, and that has a 50% weight against the entire unit, and the pass mark is 40% so, you can do the rather obvious maths.
With that, I can start to concentrate on the new site that I’ve been building for the past year, to replace TCB, as well as the Simpsons Fantasy fan game.
Well, I’ve made a new update to my blog for the first time in more than a year. There has to be something special right? Well, no. Not right now. I have too much on my plate, mostly to do with uni. Maybe in the next couple of weeks. For now there’s nothing new. I do plan on redoing the portfolio, particularly of my SMF themes, and have actual demos of them live on this site.
Speaking of which, the site has now moved to a more personal address, a full domain name, since TCB was having problems connecting for some people I decided to move and I might as well claim a free domain name with it. So the address is now http://garygadsdon.com!
Well, a while back I decided to have another stab at applying for Uni. Same field as I did two years ago, being in Web Development. I picked two courses with the same Uni, so if they say no to one, I might be screwed.
My primary choice is an Honours Degree in “Internet Engineering and Web Management” which covers the likes of PHP, MySQL and Javascript. The usual. The second is a more limited HND. For my primary choice, I’d have to move out, since though it’s more local than some places, it’s not local enough for me to commute daily.
As an advantage, applying as a “Mature Student” academic scores mean less then they would if I had just left college. So my work at Simple Machines should be of interest.
I finished my Personal Statement yesterday, and I also received the statement from my Reference, so the final step of the application is to pay £17 (Which is kinda stupid) I should be able to do that come Tuesday, leaving two days before the 15th January deadline.
Here’s hoping I guess.
January 10th,2009
Education
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No Comments
Well, the long awaited Dissidia Final Fantasy has finally been released in Japan on the PSP, and a lot of people seem to be playing around with it with test battles.
I’m psyched for this game when it crosses shores to America around June (my prediction) as I’ll be importing it.
For those who don’t know what Dissidia is, it’s a Fighting Action RPG game by Square Enix to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Final Fantasy series. It features 22 Characters from the core twelve games. A hero and a Villain from 1 through 10, a hero from 11 and a villain from 12. With the 11 and 12 characters being unlockable.
The heroes are: Warrior of Light (1), Firion (2), Onion Knight (3), Cecil (4), Bartz (5), Terra (6), Cloud (7), Squall (8), Zidane (9), Tidus (10) and Shantotto (11).
The Villains are: Garland (1), Emperor Palamecia (2), Cloud of Darkness (3), Golbez (4), Exdeath (5), Kefka (6), Sephiroth (7), Ultimecia (8), Kuja (9), Jecht (10, Judge Gabranth (12)
The story is your classic save the world deal featuring a classic Final Fantasy cliché, the crystals!
Initially, I’ve been planning on playing as Tidus from Final Fantasy X first, but seeing some gameplay videos on Youtube, I get the feeling that I might go with Zidane from Final Fantasy IX. I dunno who to go for now, but it wont be the Warrior of Light that’s for sure.
When I get the game in my hands, that’s when I’ll post a proper review.
December 18th,2008
Video Games
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2 Comments
As people have noticed, well, at least if you have a Playstation 3, Playstation Home is out. At least in it’s Beta phase.
The current amount of items is rather crappy, and the content is rather limited, but hey, it’s a start. I’ve joined up, despite not thinking much of it. A lot of the unique content is either unlockable via a Hong Kong PSN account which you would then need to keep or you have to pay REAL cash for it, if you had a virtual currency that you could earn via various methods or converted from real money that would be different. No way am I paying money for a virtual cowboy hat, actually, I wouldn’t pay money for a REAL cowboy hat
Though the content is rather lacking people can be creative, in creating Running Man Dance Trains, mostly on the EU server, this one was started by me and Joe Leslie, who also uploaded it! Not to mention starting Riots in front of the Home gates to save Woolworths, among other things.
On the US server, Nikki and I had a game of bowling and for three frames the first balls I shot were gutter balls, from the fourth, I was pulling back with a lot of Spares and Strikes and managed to win the game 131 to 101. In your face Nikki!
All in all, there’s alot to do in Home for Final.
December 16th,2008
Video Games
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1 Comment
