JamieJakov Blog

I’ve Graduated

October 23rd, 2016

What a long, strange trip its been… I came to Australia in 2010, when I was only 17 years of age. I stayed with a homestay family and studied a foundation course in UTS:Insearch. Then after a year of that, I was accepted into UTS to start my 5 year double degree of IT and International Studies (Japan Major). Then just 5 years later I find myself graduated with distinction, with a full time job, living in a great apartment with an amazing housemate and surrounded by people who are made me who I am today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r88PGpRxoig

Of course I would like to thank everyone for helping me with this long journey. First and foremost – my parents. Without them, I wouldn’t be here; without them, I wouldn’t have had the knowledge or the skills to get me where I am now; without their support I would not have been able to 6 years of studies, work and life. So thank you mom, thank you dad. I hope I did good, I hope I made you proud, and that your investment in me will not be in vain.

Then my friends. Starting with the first even friend in UTS – Ruben, my weebmate – Tac, my housemate – Alex, my potato – Seb, my Eastern-European friend – Mad, my artsy-friend Amy, everyone else and ending with the new anime@UTS exec team for 2017. Thank you everyone for your support, for telling me off when I was acting stupid, for giving me a pat on the back when I did something good, and overall making my campus life as rose coloured as it could have ever been.

So after 6 long years I have finally graduated from UTS! *throws hat into the sky*

However, now it is time to embark on a new journey – I must change the world, one line of code at a time. And I hope that all these great people I have met in university will still be there by my side throughout my adult life.

Photos are right here, on my:

DuckDuckGo

May 12th, 2015

duckduckgo

A few days ago, my sempai Ruben wrote up this little blog post about DuckDuckGo and it got me wondering wether I should give it another go.

DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine similar to Google or Bing, but has one feature that all the others lack – privacy. With Google, Yahoo, Bing and pretty much all the other big name search engines, you get no privacy… at all. Everything you search is saved in some form to either be used for marketing, add targeting, search predictions, etc. But ultimately these companies called data about you, and then sell this data (sell you) to advertisers. Thats how they make money, thats their business model. With DDG, thats not the case, they don’t track you (well at least they say the don’t). But thats not the only good factors about DDG. The site has customisation options, a region switch, ! lookup operators, and other neat features, which I never knew I wanted, but am used to now.

Back when Apple released OSX10.10 Yosemite and iOS8, they added an option to make DuckDuckGo the default search engine in Safari. Thats when I tried it for the first time. It was a good experience I might say, but ultimately I ended up going back to Google as my primary search engine, when DDG failed to find results for relatively simple searches.

Now though after a good year, I think I will give it another shot. I have moved everything of my Gmail, I have pretty much cleared my Google+ and the only things left in GDrive is collaboration folders for uni group work. I am not quite sure wether I am ready to give up Google Search, but I will definitely give DDG a go for the next few weeks, and if it grows on me, I’ll stick to it.

Of course I don’t recommend that you all go out there and change your search engines to DDG and change your habits, but as an innovative and forward thinking person as I believe myself to be, I will seek the new solutions to the problems that we have been facing for years; the alternatives to established concepts; I will rebel against the norm and embrace that which is new and (arguably) superior. Long live the startups, long live the community.

Cosplaying

September 21st, 2014

cosplay

Cosplay, its an art of dressing up as a character from a TV series, movie, game or any other form of media. You get to pretend to be your favourite character, maybe act out a scene or two from the show/game.

My friends from anime@uts and JASS are doing this thing on Facebook where they talk about their cosplay experiences and tag other people to do it too. So I have been tagged, and instead of posting it on Facebook (ugh Facebook), I’m gonna talk about it here, on my blog.

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Ruben Schade

June 15th, 2014

!Ruben

I don’t write about people, heck I don’t even talk to people unless we have something in common. There are only a few people that have had a big influence on my life, I call them my sempais, my shishos, my senseis, my mentors. This post is kind of like a reply post, but also as a thank you post.

Embarrassing, Shy, Socially awkward. Yes those are words that would fit us well, don’t you agree Ruben? But yet, we somehow managed to talk to each other and start this ball rolling, and hey, I could’t have wished for a better first university friend then you!

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Preparations for Japan – Farewells

March 30th, 2014

Visa and plane tickets have been acquired, packing has been done, all my boxes have been moved to my Imouto’s and Lexi’s place, and now all the farewell lunches, dinners, and parties are now done. I have 1 day left in Sydney and then I am off to glorious Japan. Thank you to all my friends who took the time from their busy lives to meet me one last time this year, before I head off. Thank you for giving such a wonderful experience in so many different restaurants. Thank you to the anime club, drawing circle and JASS people (especially Ritchi) for organizing a farewell party last week before the Kyary concert. Thank you to all my friends from urbanest, all my Russian friends and my friends from back home for this last week.

Also 2 of my closest friends had their birthdays this week. Ruben and Tac.

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きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ LIVE in Sydney 2014

March 25th, 2014

Kyari

Kyaaaaaaaryyyyyyyyy, one of the most ‘unusual‘ J-Pop idols visited Sydney last weekend, and how better to celebrate your 6 month anniversary with your girlfriend, then by visiting this concert! It is the first time that Kyari visited Australia, and it seems that she rather likes it here! This one and a half hour concert featured all of her most popular songs, as well as some new and less famous ones. It was a very nice way to spend one of my last days in Sydney for 2014; together with my friends like Seb, Ruben, Clara, etc. I managed to take a lot of photos with Amy’s iPhone and she posted them all up: here.

Kyari is continuing her world tour now, and hopefully she will come to Sydney again next year! Better quality photos of the concert: here.

Trello.com

September 7th, 2013

TrelloLogo

Today I’d like to talk about Trello. Trello is a cloud based organsation and collaboration software which can be used in creating personal plans and schedules as well as work on projects with a team. With an extremely easy to use interface and a vast set of features I say safely say that I will be using Trello in the future a lot!

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Sydney Jazz and Blues Festival at Darling Harbour

June 10th, 2012

Jazz and Blues

Photo by Rubenerd (he has more good pics).

9th – 11th of June there is a Jazz and Blues festival happening in Darling Harbour Sydney. So yesterday we decided to go look around and listen to some music. We includes @Rubenerd, @Sebasu_tan, @hanezawakirika, @adasifs, @Keodara_, @alchmyest and me @jamiejakov.

At first we met up at the UTS tower at 3:30 and just went towards Darling Harbour, where we listened to Kira Puru & the Bruise fro about 30 mins. Then we got Ruben a hot cup of coffee to keep him warm and went under the big tent to watch the last performance of the day.

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