With All the Formalities

I'm currently in the process of plowing through the end-of-semester rush of assignments that always comes at university; it's like all the papers forgot they have to get another assignment done, so they hastily tack it onto the last week or second to last week of the semester. Of course this is never the case; assignments are planned out at the beginning of the semester, so those of us who have to do them can't use the old excuse "it crept up on me and covered my eyes so i couldn't see it".

One of the worst things about doing a report is the level of formality usually espected. In my first Practical Work Report (Practicum 1) for engineering, i had my mark downgraded because the report was "too personal", and "felt more like an essay than a report" to be fair the man was right. I used the letter "I" far too much, but my excuse was that i was writing about a personal experience. How else am i supposed to write about diagnosing a problem with an offshore tide monitoring station. My computer didn't diagnose the problem, it didn't diagnose itself; I did it. For my latest statistical report i decided to make it pretty casual: the lecturer is a fairly laid back and funny sort of guy, so i thought i'd throw a few colloquial terms in there, use "I" alot (after all I was the experiment), and talk about walls of text.

It got me thinking, why can't all reports be like this? I can see how it might be regarded as unprofessional to not be as objective as possible, and how you could get bored of someone talking about themselves. But when describing what actions you took, surely the use of "I" is not prohibited. For me it's boring just writing like this about personal experiences. I can be objective about things that just happened in my presence, or decisions that were made not just by me. Anyway objectiveness is just the tip of the ice berg. I also tend to be the sort of person that doesn't make good use of appendices; i prefer not to include irrelevant material in my report, and if it's that relevant it should really deserve to be up front, in the body of the report itself.

Ah well i guess it's all hopeless in the end. So much depends on standards and compliance in the modern world. I'll learn to change my ways in the end.

In the beginning....

There was me.... now there's a blog.

I guess i should start in the logical place - me. That is after all what this blog is supposed to be about right? Me, my intrepid adventures, etc. etc.
First, the name. I hear you saying "What sort of name is GenBattle?", well here we go: when i first started playing online games (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault/Spearhead, i was about 14) my online alias was General Specific, from the cartoon Sheep in the Big City. Anyway eventually fter circulating my way around that whole scene i moved onto other games in a series after this point, most prominently including the game Freelancer which i played for almost 2 years, and on and off for a bit longer. Anyway with thisgame came a new game name for 2 reasons: firstly freelancer game names couldn't contain spaces and were a bit limited on length, so "General Specific" wasn't the ideal phrase; secondly, it wasn't a very space-themed name. Since it was a space game, and at the time the new Battlestar Galactica series had just started, i thought up the original name of "Battlestar". From there it was a series of morphs from not being able to get the game name i wanted on different games/servers/services (like gmail) so i merged the two into a combination that was (by and large), unique. Of course i was proven wrong when i bought an Xbox and this name (nor any morhping of it) was available.

So now that we have the name out of the way; why am i suddenly making a blog? I didn't have one yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that even. I've never really been a person to be motivated about anything that contains the words "social networking", mainly because i do believe that there is no such thing as private information on the internet. Also because i just haven't had the time or motivation; i've never thought i really had much to write about, yet here i sit, probably talking to myself. Anyway, i've been sidetracked. Why i started this blog. There's a combination of reasons; one is that i've decided to at least have a go at trying to develop a few creative ideas i've had for a while but not done anything about. As one of my lecturers always used to say; "Smart people are lazy". We later got him back with this whenever we were late for something, like many university students are with assignments. Another reason for starting this blog is to try improve my communication skills, and let other people know what i'm up to. Yet another reason is just to fill time; i'm a university student and gamer, but at the moment there's something missing as far as time filling goes. I could go into the WoW addiction that has left this hole, but that's a completely different story/post altogether.

As i've already said, i'm not a big fan of putting information on the internet with the intention of no one ever seeing it. Lately my ego has been inflated to the point where i have come to think that what i post online could actually be useful or interesting to others. And what do i intend to post online? Well i suppose it just depends. As i said, there are some personal projects i would like to make a decent start to, which it will be good to document, as much for my benefit as for others. I've never been good with keeping track of things in my mind, but at the same time i've never been in good habits of writing anything down. There's a first time for everything. I will also try to post any technical information i stumble across; as an example i'm currently in the middle of taking apart one of my Xbox 360 controllers because the trigger failed just as i was going to sell it. I'll post something on this when i've got nothing else to post about.

For now i think i've just about killed my fingers with all the typing, and to double it's getting late here in New Zealand. Until next time my dear blog.