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Who said I wasn’t stylish?

The words “Full Time Education” scare me now.

Summer’s come and gone, freshers week at the university past by at lightning speed and now, going into the third week of the third year at university, I’ve realised that this semester is the equivalent of a 9 to 5 job. Until this semester I’ve never realised the term “full time education” (at university) actually meant something. Somehow I got the impression university was an easy task; occasional work surrounded by lots of parties and playing Nintendo. At least that’s how it’s been so far.

I presume it all started in first year, the time of my life I lived in the central part of the University of Aberdeen. It took me a mere 5 minutes to walk to the furthest lecture hall, or about 2 minutes to most others. Mario Kart races were a norm between lectures and going to the pub down the road was a near daily activity. Course work was simple and easy, exam revision was a quick task and getting into second year was quickly accomplished. At the time I never realised just how much spare time I actually had.

Then came second year. Having moved into the city centre I had stumbled across a daily walk of around 45 minutes to university. I never had a problem with the walk, and still don’t, but spending around 1/12 of your day walking doesn’t help when your time table starts building up. Still, I managed to find time to go to weekly pub quiz’s, gigs, Mario Kart sessions at friend’s flats and all the other usual student activities.

Then this happened;

A monster of lectures, workshops, tutorials, practicals, mentoring sessions and group meetings attacked my timetable. I think I’ve finally figured out why this course is part of this “full time education” program.

Moo.com Business Cards!

Rather than getting the usual bills, ads, vouchers and newspapers in the mail I actually got something pleasant! My [free sample] Moo.com’s business cards have arrived! I always liked the idea of having some, even though I know I’ll never use them the way they are meant to, and when I saw that moo.com was doing free samples I didn’t hesitate to start my design. The free samples do have a small ad banner across the bottom of the front, but I didn’t really mind this since I mainly wanted to see how my design would look on paper and how the actual cards felt.

The design I went for was something I’ve seen many do these days; simple and effective Google logo with your name as the search term. When you Google Kyle Saric you do in fact get a page full of results linking to several of my sites. On the back I decided to simply put the logo of my website on there with a couple of words describing me. Have a look below!

5 simple ways to avoid studying.

It’s the day before my first exam and I’ve just been thinking of all the random stuff I’m doing when I should be studying for exams. Here’s a list of the 5 most time consuming, study time wasting tasks you may want to engage in yourself:

• Completely redesign your website, blog and twitter profile so that they all have the same design layout. Task roughly takes 20 hours.
• Clean your room, wash your clothes, do your dishes, empty out all bins, and repeat every day until exams finish. Each cycle can take roughly 3 hours.
• Partition/format a drive and isntall Windows 7 on it. Once all drivers are installed and Win7 is fully working move on to install Steam and your favourite games. Whilst these games are downloading and installing be sure to not revise and waste more time by watching trailers, previews, reviews and gameplay videos of the games you are downloading. Once the games are downloaded be sure to try and max out your Steam stats by gaining achievements and getting a Steam rating of 10. I can suggest The Orange Box (currently just £16.99) as a perfect set of games to get as a pre-exam time waster; there’s something there for everyone (fantastic single player FPSers, awesome online multiplayer FPS and an amazing puzzle game!). This task varies anywhere from 4 hours to 20 hours.
• If you ever do find yourself finding the urge to start studying don’t worry! It’s always simple to find another excuse to get a break. Make sure to drink lots of liquids throughout the day as to make yourself go to the toilet as often as possible. Make sure to eat often in small portions. This helps you get away from the desk especially if you live in a two floor apartment you’ll have to spend more time walking down to the kitchen. You’ll probably find yourself running out of food too so a stop by a local sommerfields (or equivilant) to pick up haribos is always welcome! While you are on your way back why not stop by the the nearest (or furtherst if you want to waste even more time) Starbucks for a lovely Dark Berry Mocha to make yourself feel better while studying. These tasks can vary anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 hour.
• If you still find that you’ve not wasted enough time before the day of your exams why not blog about it? This is an excelent way to share your thoughts with others and waste yet another half hour. Of course once you’ve finished blogging about it you’ll have to twitter, facebook and e-mail a link to your closest friends. Total time for these tasks combined is roughly 1 hour.

So there you have it! A list of 5 excelent time wasters for that special pre-exam time!

flickr pro account totally worth it!

25$ for a years worth of flickr pro goodness… is it really worth it? I have used flickr for random photo hosting for a couple of years now and just recently hit the 200 photo limit of a regular user. I started thinking about upgrading to a pro account around that time, which was also the same time I started using iPhoto ‘09 which has flickr uploading support built in. It never worked for me however as I had reached the maximum limit of sets for free users (3 sets) and you must upload each iPhoto album to a new set. I final went for it and upgraded.

What the pro account got me:

• Unlimited uploads and storage.
• Unlimited sets and collections.
• Access to your original files.
• Stats on your account.
• Ad-free browsing and sharing.
• HD playback for high-definition video uploads.

The main feature I love is just being able to upload full resolution sets of my iPhoto library. In the past week I’ve uploaded roughly 2000 photos, most of my ‘nice’ photos in my iPhoto library. Stats are also a fantastic feature. Being able to see photo specific stats on top of regular stats is just amazing!

Overall I just think it’s a really great way to share your photos with others and having unlimited sets, uploads and access to your full resolution versions is fantastic!

Links:

My flickr profile

Nearly 6 months with my unibody MacBook…

… and I still love it as much as I did on day 1. Time flies by, and the past half year passed by quicker than ever! I feel as though I’ve been using Macs forever now. They are so much more user friendly than windows machine! And the software is outstanding, there’s beautiful applications for just about everything you need (see my list below).

I’m happy to now be a Mac user, and probably will stay like this for a long time to come

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