Freedom Dreams

There’ve been quite a few interesting things that have happened me over the last week. Firstly, last Thursday, I finally (after 2 months of waiting), received my A-Level results – AAAA, in Maths, Chemistry, Physics and General Studies – so, I will definitely be going to Cambridge University in about a month’s time. Also, well done to everyone else who got their results, A-Level and GCSE, and good luck with your new colleges/universities.

Secondly, last weekend, I went with the rest of DFEY, to Young Rewired State -  an event to get young (~15-18) coders doing cool stuff with government data. Me, Joe and Richard worked on creating something to give bloggers opinions on the various bills currently going through parliment – Blog-o-tics. This uses Google blog search, and then does a manual count of predefined positive and negative words – as a result, it is heavily inaccurate, as our word lists were limited and language can be used in confusing ways (this is not *good* at all). I do plan on reworking blogotics to use a different, more reliable source of sentiment data at some point, but I’ve not got round to it yet.

The event it self rather good, and accommodation and travel costs were kindly provided. The venue used was Google’s UK offices, which was quite cool. The food was okay, not amazing, but much better than at 2morro (the other event DFEY attended this summer). The whole thing seemed quite well structured, each group had a mentor to help them along. I would very much like to thank Prem (who also blogged the event) for being our mentor. I don’t think our group would have managed to pull it all together without him.

Finally, this week I’ve be coding the innovative new Web2.0 app, pokebook. Which has just as much importance and relevance for the future web as its ad campaign suggests.