To me personally, there is no greater sense of achievement than what I have now achieved! I've finally finished my four long but fun years at Heriot-Watt University and have recently learned that I have achieved a First Class Honours degree.
I cannot tell you in words how proud I am to have achieved this!
I also posted this to Twitter:
I'd like to also congratulate all my friends and thank them for supporting me through this time! I really couldn't have done this without all the support from them.
On the subject of support, I also must thank my lecturers for their support as well, since there is absolutely no way I could have done this without them.
My poster is finished. This means I have done all of the work other than presenting my poster and I have finished all of my uni work. :-)
I now feel epic and that I can finally relax! Thank you to everyone who has supported me throughout my time at university.
I'm finally done with my dissertation and whilst the last few months have been a disaster for my health (well, technically not, it's been more of a disaster for the NHS and messing up their own diagnosis), my dissertation is, in my eyes, one of the greatest things I have ever produced! I'm nearly finished my degree too so I can have a relaxing few weeks to recover from everything and get back to a bit of stress-free normal life.
2015 was generally a really good year for me.
First of all, third year of university, I managed to get 6 Bs and 2 As, which is good enough for me and I achieved an average of 67% (if this average continued I'd be en route for a second class honours, although a first-class honours is not impossible either).
My fourth year at university started out good, and I got several good marks back; 86% for one coursework, 74% (part one of my dissertation) for another and then 70% for another. The rest of my courses seem to have gone well too, so we'll see what happens with them.
This year, I was also formally asked if I wanted to become a lab helper in one of my favourite courses involving one of my favourite aspects of computer science in a course called Web design and Databases. I've always wanted to be a lab helper, so this is a great opportunity for me.
On top of this, I finally got the opportunity to work in school as a teacher as part of one of my university courses. This has been one of, if not the, greatest experiences of my life. I am thoroughly enjoying this.
As a result of one of the courses I did in this year of university, I also improved my own programming language, finally bringing an end to BlackRabbit Script and replacing it with my new Zenith Language. Most of my free time this year has been spent on the Zenith Parsing Engine (or Zengin) and now it has become one of the most, if not the most, important projects I work on now. In March I started ZPE and then it was restarted in May with a proper compiler.
In terms of my website, I would say it has been at it's best since I started. This year I focused on reducing the size of my JavaScript files and CSS files and I managed to reduce over 30KB of data. On top of that, I managed to reduce the amount of HTML produced on mobile devices using a PHP library called Mobile Detect. I also finally made the decision to stop tweaking the design of my website in September after I changed the sidebar. The vast majority of the website has remained consistent since then. One major change did happen after that, however, with the change from my inconsistent curved style to a much flatter design. One example of this is what I call my pill inputs:
The new 'pills' design that came to my website was all about creating a flatter look.
2015 was also a very successful year for my website. Across the whole year, 1,940 users have visited my website and over 40,000 pages have been visited. Of all visitors, 1,940 of the pages visited are also by new visitors. As well as this, Zengin has been downloaded some 500 times since May!
My tutorials featured on my website also got recognised by the online tutorial maker Udemy. They claimed to really like my website and the tutorials that I have written.
I also brought my own menu to my website, called JBBar, a free and open-source menu bar that can be downloaded from my website. This replaces the jQuery Smartmenus menu that came with a lot of extra baggage.
As well as this, I created my first website for a business, which went very smoothly and has been named very 'innovative' by many. In fact, I'm so proud of that website that it also backwards inspired my own website.
JBlogs also got a huge upgrade, becoming object-oriented and easier to use. Not only that, but a lot of security issues were patched and the design became more flexible to other websites. It took me less than an hour to put JBlogs on to a Bootstrap themed website (more on that in the new year) and it integrated pretty perfectly. JBlogs also became more efficient than it was at the end of 2015 as a result of this new design.
I also managed to achieve one whole year of being a pescatarian in September this year - something I'm very proud of!
Just before I finish, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who has been there for me this year, particularly when I've had problems! The main people this year are my good friends Jonathan, Mark and Merlin, who have made this year much easier for me! I'd also like to thank Rob and Helen (lecturers) for convincing me to stay and helping me feel up again! Of course, I cannot forget to mention all of the other people at university, who have also always been there for me.
So that's another year almost over. 2015 was generally a great year. Now let's hope 2016 is also a great year!
After serving power (and heat) for 46 years, Cockenzie power station came to the end of it's service life as coal fired power station on the 15th of March 2013 at 8.30am. Since then, the people of East Lothian have been awaiting it's demolition and today on Saturday the 26th of September 2015, the landmark chimney stacks finally came down.
But it was not to everyone's liking. I personally miss it already. It was someone's architectural idea and some team's work in building it.
In my eyes though, because of my concern for the environment, the closure was a wonderful thing.
I'd have liked the towers to have remained as a monument but that was never going to happen.
It's also sad that I really wanted to tour the power station before it went but it is long too late now!
Below is my YouTube video of the chimney stacks and turbine hall coming down:
This is only the third time I have used Java (ie twice last week at university) and I have now cracked it. I am now remembering my semi-colons and braces that make up the Java language syntax.
I must say I have noticed my work getting better as I just created a simple program to get each pixel in an image and invert the colour of it. The image is specified as an argument to the application and it runs through the application and saves it. I am very impressed with my progress and this makes a fourth programming language that I have learned.
Well, I am going to place this here to say how brilliant my 21st birthday party was - both of them! So thanks to my friends and family for attending! Both parties were truly a success and I have to thank my mother for this. However, the past few days have been incredibly difficult for our family as it splits and tears even further.
I am really scared about my dad as he is drinking more than ever, and it's scary. My mum is very upset and there is not much I can do, but she needs to bear in mind, I am still recovering from a serious difficulty in my life, and I need her to be strong for me, I really do.
I do not know where this is going but I do know that I have been quite depressed for quite a while now, and it's not doing me much good when they argue. But then again, they argue every day that they see each other, but they are too scared to do anything about it.
My life is being swayed from side to side like a ship in the ocean, as my parents will not stop their bickering. I want to one day become independent, but I can not do that yet and I am sick of hiding behind a mask and saying everything is alright, whilst I run away from it all. Something needs to be done soon, otherwise, I am not going to make that recovery that I need.
And just to let you know, I am still physically and mentally very weak, and I am still struggling with depression. But it's getting worse, as my father drinks more and my mother cannot cope with it.
The advantages however are that I do not drink, and I do not hang on to things that I do not need - learning from his mistakes. My life for 15 odd years has been living in a house full of hoardings - stuff that is barely ever used - where churning is a regular activity that we all have to do four or five times a year because my father cannot get rid of anything, and where arguing is the essence of our family. It does not stop and it makes me do things I would not normally do like get angry with people and run away without telling anyone. I am sick of this, and to that end, I am now considering leaving for good and never coming back to them. It seems like that is really the only option I have to recover - to become self-dependent, although I should have someone caring for me, my weekends are what leave me like this through the week.
It is now 01:00 in the morning, and I am still typing, despite being exhausted earlier, I cannot sleep. This is always the case on Monday and Tuesday evenings, and it comes because of the weekend before - and it is an example of bad depression affecting me. My dreams are nightmares most of the time - ones where my friends are the people that hate me, my dad drinking and my parents arguing. I cannot go on like this. It is way too scary.
Anyway, I am going to try to sleep. And I hope for no more bad dreams. This blog post has helped me to conclude what it is that has been troubling me since about the middle of my life. I have finally got it out there for all to read.
