1st week

The words "Don't panic", closely followed by "I can see you're all panicking" cut through the silence on Monday morning. Zimmer was trying to calm the nerves.


I had no real idea what to expect from the next three weeks.


We gathered in the lecture theatre of the New Academic Building at Goldsmiths College for a quick introduction to our Digital Methods Bootcamp.

We were introduced to the computer labs and to both Python and Javascript within Emacs (luckily using an iMac rather than an eMac).


Between the hours of 10am and 5pm my mind melted beyond recognition, a bit like those candles you get at Cargo and the like, that smell of generic petals which ends up looking like the blood splatter on the face of the smiley from the Watchmen.


Yes, my mind was more jumbled and tenuous than that last comic book reference.


Day 2 morning was a little less mind boggling, and I even managed to work out how to adapt some Python script beyond what was on the handout which felt like a massive accomplishment after Day 1.
The afternoon session made my cerebral cortex misfire.


Day 3 was all about the written word. We were looking at manipulating and managing directories and files through mostly Terminal. Pipes (|)and grep were difficult to get to grips with, but I soon became a dab-hand at it (!). My favourite take-aways on the third day was the discovery of the built-in device files; "/dev" .
By using a move command in terminal, you can purge any folder/file by mv ~ /dev/null . There is also /dev/random which serves as a random number generator and /dev/full which always returns a 'disk full' message.


Our fourth and final day of the first week saw us work on some python scripts, writing in Emacs and executing them in terminal. It was great to start using some real world examples of the work we'd been looking at over the last few days. We used a few rss links, BBC News and Twitter searches to play with.
We also had Director Brauer of CAST come in and enthuse about the course, and more importantly us. It made us feel good to be getting started, and that perseverance was crucial at this stage. We heard rumours of the WSJ and Guardian speakers as well as real-time collaborations with Columbia University, a BBQ in our seminar room and sit-ups with our peers and lecturers in our booked time in the gym!


The week drew to a close we ended with some much needed drinks and musings on the last few days.


I then fell over a bell on the side of the road and into a traffic light.

(not my image)

Now I'm bedded in at the new flat and working hard in week two with html, xml and markup languages to look forward to.