Merry Christmas

I've been quiet busy in the latter months and the amount of blogs clearly shows this. I'm back at university for my forth and final year. The work load certainly shows it's my final year but I'm just about coping under the pressure. The year consists of four main units and also my individual project. The project is weighted so it's equivalent to two more units, so it's large. The project its self is a model railway controller which is detailed at railwaycontrol.co.uk. I'm learning some exciting stuff and strangely it's the first time in a while I have really enjoyed computing. This may sound odd being someone who promotes technology on a daily basis but after a while things become a bit samey. After you have got through the hype and marketing of any new technology you find that it's the same old thing repackaged and this becomes very disappointing when I see it time and time again. So with the project I am learning a new skill set and it's very interesting. Firstly I'm fiddling around with electronics, something that due to my brothers, who both studied it at university, I have always been interested in but never actually studied myself, not even at GCSE. There's bit of a learning curve here, and unlike software, one mistake and you create irreversible smoke. Secondary I am programming embedded firmware to be loaded onto microcontrollers. Unlike desktop computers, these microchips have limited resources so it has improved my skills as a programmer and has made me be not so wasteful. So far everything is going well. The summer just gone I spent prototyping and testing the platform I built to see if it could do everything I wanted it to do. Hopefully no major problem will occur but I have been developing software products for long enough to realise that something is bound to happen, I can only wait and see.