I’ve just added the City School of Motoring website to my portfolio! Feels good to have done the first website for about a year.

I did write an entirely nice big blog post about this, but instead of pressing shift+w for a capital, I pressed ctrl+w, hence closing it and losing the post. As I really don’t want to type it all out again, I’ll summarise

In the last six months, I’ve seen a massive change in my life. I’m no longer a tax dodging student and finally out earning some money! There’s something satisfying about working and getting paid for it rather than working, paying for it, and your supervisors telling you you’re good enough. Thanks for that Donal…

As a freelancer, I’ve got a couple more websites lined up, so keep an eye out for them in the coming weeks/months. One thing I’ve decided on is to use a framework for coding. It’s something I used to think was the easy way out, but after finding out in the past few months, they’re really powerful things, allowing you to do your job alot quicker! I quite like the look of CakePHP, but it seems a bit labourious at times, so I think CodeIgniter might be the way to go.

On a more personal fun level, I’ve recently given in to myself and finally given World of Warcraft a decent run. I’m finding it a lot of fun at the moment, massively different to the dark, dull space of Eve! I’ve got a level 26 Human Warrior and level 12 Blood Elf Paladin at the moment. Both are pretty fun to play with, after trying out lots of other classes, I seem to only like chopping things with a sword!

Anyway, that’s pretty much the update on the last 6 months…let’s try to not leave it that long again!

Exams – the bane of my life at the moment! Although I luckily only have three during January, two of them are subjects I really don’t get at all!

For example, on Wednesday, we have an exam for requirements engineering. Now although I can see the importance of getting requirements from people to build systems, and also to model them…why on earth do I need to know how to model time?! It just isn’t going into my head in the slightest, which is a bit concerning…

Semanic Web (note caps for the proper W3C representation!) is the other problem area this January. Again, I see why the Semantic Web is useful, and understand how it works – but in an exam, why did I mostly get asks to write essays about it, than demonstrate a knowledge of how it works (such as RDF, SPARQL, etc.), that was a bit irritating.

My last exam is somewhat easier – Advanced Databases. Although it claims to be ‘Advanced’ – apparently introducing the concept of a database backend to an application counts as advanced…even though I’ve been doing it for two years

Anyway, revision break over, let’s try to understand some more Requirements Engineering…

Since the beta release, I decided to get my teeth into Windows 7. After seeing numerous demos of the new features (a la taskbar), I wanted some of that pie!

After close to a week of using it, I can say it really is the future. Even for a beta, it’s very refined, and I’ve not had (m)any issues with the 64-bit version (32-bit decided it didn’t like my network card at all). Also, because I’m now running two monitors, it’s real massive sexiness in an OS form.

Posted a pic, so everyone can see how nice it all really is – and I implore you to experience it for yourself while you can.

The link to the beta is http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/ – make sure you get it soon

Damon