One has recently reached the dreaded blog cringe: the moment in the life of every Web journaller [sic] when either he stops posting due to ‘real life’, or realises that perhaps past posts were too unpolished (i.e. crap) to ever have been put online.
As we all know, blogs are due to die a slow and painful death. Syndication allows you to subscribe to thousands of your favourite sites and to be informed whenever they have new content, without ever going to the sites again. This is pretty nifty, but as they say “where is the love?”. I’d conjecture that in fact the love is not there.
The author of a popular RSS-less site tells me it is nice that people have to actually visit the site to see if there is anything new.
Blogs that indulge the author’s need to write about news and current events without discussing his or her personal life will be the first to go. Yes, this means that most LiveJournals are safe for the time being, as people often have a need to transfer their emo feelings to a diary and LJ is simply another medium for that. Thanks, LiveJournal (thiveJournal).
Eventually, the blog cringe will end those ones as well, as more and more people take their blogs offline to stop family members or prospective employers reading them and finding out their secret desires and crazy revenge fantasies.
Indeed I started this journal to give myself an opportunity to write, because neither my study nor my job really required any real writing to be done. That has now changed due to this being my honours year, and thus there is much thesis (and other) writing to do and not quite enough time to do it.
A few people have asked me about honours and some of the questions are answered here, so some of this may be informative so anyone looking to follow the increasingly-seldom-beaten track to an honours year in CS or IT.
So how did you get into honours anyway?
This is a good question. I’m something of a reformed slacker and getting into an honours program generally requires some kind of sustained academic performance. However, IT at UQ only requires you to have an average grade of 4.5 across the final year project (CSSE3004) plus your four most recent ‘third year’ courses. I kicked all kinds of arse in third year so that allowed me to get in. Basically, as long as you got at least 4s and 5s across those five courses, you can get in—it’s as easy as that. Nonetheless there are still very few takers.
What’s your thesis on?
Video similarity search: using video to search for video, as opposed to using text to search for video. Just as one can gauge the similarity of two text documents, by counting the common words for instance, so too can one compare two videos using some measure, from a simple concept like colour or texture to a more abstract one like places or faces. I’m aiming to build a simple video similarity search engine predominantly using techniques that already exist.
Is that a one person project?
Yes; it started with two, but the other guy seems to have cracked the shits with honours after just six weeks and didn’t return to uni after the mid-semester break. I haven’t heard from him since.
Was that a pain?
You bet. It wasn’t a show-stopping problem, but it did scale back the scope of the project to (in my opinion) little more than a glorified assignment with the time I am able to dedicate to it.
Not to give the guy a hard time, I wish him well. But if you are thinking about doing a shared project, choose somebody who you are positive is focused on honours and hasn’t got huge work burdens competing for his time. Ideally this will be somebody you knew and worked well with in previous years.
Would you recommend it?
I’ll just say “know why you are doing it”. I’m doing honours partly to set myself apart from the crowd, and partly to set right my appalling academic record from when I was fresh out of school and didn’t really want to be there. That’s probably good advice for school leavers actually—if you aren’t positive you want to go to uni or are not sure what kind of career you want, it’s better to leave it for a couple of years and go travelling or something, rather than to plunge into it anyway. It’s always important to start with the end in mind. Of course some people do honours as a gateway to a PhD or an academic career, which is not altogether bad if the university atmosphere agrees with you and you’d like to keep working there. At this point, I’d rather get pushed in front of a train.
See you in another six months.
Love,
King Smo