Thursday 6 February 2014

NVP Day 4

Nearly a week's worth of lectures. If I'm not mistaken the last of the lectures for this course happen tomorrow. This is very condensed, but it seems to be effective. Today's topic was finance, an interesting enough topic if you like money. Some of the systems are quite intriguing, but I feel a little bit like it was rushed. Probably because it was, due to needing to finish early for the majority of the class to attend a memorial service. This rush impacted a little on how much could be covered. Also, our lecture venue was locked (the purpose of which is unclear) and so we had to start a little late.

I did manage to improve my note taking techniques though, which was good, so I have a nice document with notes that will hopefully make sense to me if/when I need to look over them again for reference. That makes me feel a little more confident about the course. Also the brainstorming and planning session we held this morning before the lectures was very good, we decided the basic idea of what our App will do, clarifying quite a few of the necessary details. I feel a little bit useless in this section, but I will bring my skills in the admin stuff into play again, and I will do things around the edges, like writing an introduction and a conclusion, and consolidating the work. If it is me who does that, and we don't do it all together.

We have to get the skeleton of this done and dusted by Wednesday for our preliminary presentations for the communications course. This is actually quite a good thing, in that it forces the work to continue, although on that note I must remember that I have other work to do as well for another course. This other work comes from the interesting extra week that was tacked on to our year due to some administrative mix ups. The extra week has been taken to be quite a good thing by a large portion of the staff though, and may well be repeated. Odd how circumstance changes the way things are run.

Now that I am running off in a spiralling line outwards from my original topic, and reflect on the fact that blogging about a course for which I have not been particularly enthused (and am technically not required to take) has taught me more about myself. This is something that often happens when I blog though, that I get sucked into these introspective and soul searching posts. Not very typical, and possibly not very good for the readership, but hey, its not like the readership is very wide here anyway, and I might as well be honest, albeit a little monitored due to the public availability, and not wanting to condemn myself on the internet.

So, finance and risk stuff. It seems weird to do this all before the business starts, the idea of the cash flow thing, surely no-one would put a negative cash flow study in their business plan? You know if your cash flow thing is starting to look bad that you need to do something to make it look better before that. Perhaps put a few cash flow projections, with different initial investments to show how the investment amount can impact the success of the venture? It is something I would do, but then I am a scientist, and I believe in asking for money to do research (or to pay for research I've already done). I know that this is a little bit different.

Now I'm just going off on tangents, so it is probably time to stop writing about doing things, and actually do them.

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