Published February 22, 2007 by

As for Ipods

sad-mac.jpgThere are a few things I’ve sworn I’ll never do.

  • Join Myspace
  • Buy an Ipod (with this comes you know, being a Mac user)

As you may well know, I am now definitely an owner of a Myspace account. Not a very proud owner but it’s good for killing time and commenting on those frequenters where it’s seemingly the only way to keep in touch.

I have long ranted about Ipod ‘brand-name’ horrors, Apple’s ‘think different’ slogan doesn’t help, however I have come around and now admit that they have got a very nice interface and one would be very helpful to a) store music – a lot more than my little iRiver can hold, and b) act as an external hard-drive. That of course immediately means I’m after a video Ipod and that adds a few hundred dollars on the price.

(I want one)

And then being a multimedia turned design student there’s the harsh exposure to this foreign operating system for a girl extremely adept with Windows. A slow and painful but secretly exciting journey into discovering new shortcuts and extreme frustration over having only one mouse button.

And then friends get Macs and Geoff gets one from work and Bec see’s and drools. Stunning interfaces, remote controls, kind-eye graphics, stability and other niceities and in turn has to peform doctor to her ever decreasing hard-drive size, uninstalling programs reluctantly to conserve space, going with Windows Media Player over Itunes (the could-be compromise of at least one nicer looking program) but there’s no room for wma conversion to mp3. Sad. And she cries in her mind when someone says they still use Internet Explorer and so on and so forth.

(I want one)

I can probably get to a point of justifying it – it would be extremely helpful for uni and whenever I do go to buy a new computer it will be one.

How often do you update your whole computer? Do you know anywhere I can get a super-dooper cheap Mac, not just Apple Education prices – something like: not quite the latest and greatest and then have the miraculous happen a thrown in Adobe CS2 (Mac version).

Alas. I feel materialistic. I feel poor. The closest I come to owning anything Apple is an Ipod magnet.

Technology

Published February 22, 2007 by

Half Day

creative-thinking.jpgThere you go. Orientation day. An all-day thing that lasted until, you know, lunch-time.

Of course it was replete with your standard bouts of: disorganisation, lecturer who can’t show up for yet another 30 minutes, library-equivalent staff who have to ask the new students how to run their PowerPoint presentation on a Mac and close the toolbox on top of their slides, awkward ‘Do I clap now?’ moments, people dressed to the nines (or coolly playing it down), free lunch that disappears as fast as it shows, awful mug shot on the student card that has to last four years and the odd task of meeting people you hope you’ll have maybe at least one class with so you don’t have to start the stranger every time.

Overall I was reasonably impressed. The academic staff seem a whole lot more… competent or perhaps professional than those at Deakin. And the front desk ladies have been excessively helpful. I spent the morning with two girls who also knew no-one. Beth and Hailie, both very nice. Not Melbourne, born and bred and not fresh out of school. It is strange knowing what to talk about, it seems if you stick to uni, work and basic family life/living situation and the goings on around you, you can at least last a few hours.

As it turns out the intake for Communication Design is at 160 this year – quite high although it’s still only about 10% of the people that applied. To my surprise the majority aren’t immediate school leavers.

I start officially on Monday and am quite looking forward to it. I have a funny feeling that there are going to be all kinds of little expenses along the way – especially in looking at the ‘materials’ list. And that doesn’t include textbooks.

I might get to try my hand at some illustration. Something I hadn’t thought too much about. Very scary. I’m reconsidering whether I’ll bother trying to get an exemption (that has to happen two weeks in) I don’t so much mind doing the class – but I guess if it relieves me of $890 more dollars of debt it could be beneficial.

I wonder how many trees they got through printing all the different flyers?

I wonder why parents don’t teach their big-kids not to ride bikes across roads when there are cars still coming? Drivers don’t appreciate it.

General Uni