This week’s guest

How much does it make a person want to do a PhD after today? I think I am one of those people who has been contemplating whether I should think about studying again after doing Honours. Sure, it is about time to stop relying on the parents’ money to help pay for food and the random impulsive grabbing of items off of racks or clicking the BUY IT NOW option but, being somebody who is fairly positive that things aren’t going to be a given as it is right now, studying again, possibly doing a PhD, is on the big to-do list. It will take time and a lot of my blood would be sucked into it and I’d probably die with a 40 thousand word thesis in my arms. However, that being said, I am kind of ready to join the work force at this moment. I’m not quite clear about the reason why – other than earning money – but I guess it’s some kind of norm that I have to follow and obey.

Anyway, the talk earlier today made me want to straight away do my PhD but that isn’t the only motivation I got. I also obtained few other useful information that I have already unconsciously used myself.

One of the things that I can remember is about Discipline. Mike, like myself, has had that realisation that with discipline, you can actually do a lot more and accomplish a lot more. Being a person with principle, one might think that I’m fairly disciplined but I’m imperfect so the tendency to procrastinate for me is always 60% of my time. Then the other remaining 40% would be wasted on looking for stuff. So, in the end, the actual making of something would be of bad quality or short of something, if not many. So this year I promised myself that I get disciplined IF I want to achieve a lot and actually bring success to my aims and objectives. Sure, with the short amount of time between me waking up and going to back to sleep, I don’t really have the time to mingle, rest, relax and have fun but at least I would feel accomplished. This is also part of the reason why I pack my weekdays with work, research and writing, so that I could do whatever I want during the weekend. I don’t actually have that much time to “have fun” during the weekend either so I wake up early. It’s true, when you wake up early you actually can get a lot of things done. Sometimes I find myself just sitting at my desk, looking at my calendar and see if there are things that I’ve overlooked and forget to do but it’s actually because I’ve started early and done most of what I should be doing for that day. I don’t assure quality but like Adrian said, ticking off things from the to-do list really does make a person feel good about themselves.

Mike also talked about his drafting style where he habitually writes stuff in his book in dot points, make connections between those dot points, writing up sentences from the connections and then building paragraphs from the sentences. I think that is quite a rad skill for somebody to have. I have a different approach to drafting my work.

Lit Review #1 Drafting

I usually just keep writing until my brain juices run dry. Then, I know Stephanie feels guilty about this, I print out what I’ve typed out and do corrections on the draft. I normally list out what needs to be done to the paper. Maybe the first task is to check out if the sentences are correct and if there are things that I’ve forgotten to mention, if there are then I’d write reminders on the paper for the next time I start on it again on my laptop. Then, I’ll re-read the whole thing again to check for grammatical errors. I know I should not rely on myself to do this because I tend to make a lot of grammatical errors but I see it as practicing my English skills.

The paragraph that I highlighted on the draft would be the things that I think wouldn’t be relevant to the whole content and narrative of the paper. But while editing I will not be deleting that paragraph, instead I’ll open up a new document and paste it there because who knows I might need it later for something else. It is still useful, although not for this content. So if I am to list out my drafting style it would be like this: Write, Print, Edit, Add/Delete, rewrite, reprint…etc. The cycle continues until I’m totally satisfied with the end product and get it ready for submission.

I think after this I’d look for other styles of drafting and try them out, maybe I’d stumble upon something that would help enhance my productivity but at this moment I find that this one suits my writing habits very well.

Styles

These are aggressive rollerblading videos that are worth watching. I chose them specifically because one, admittedly I’m too lazy to browse through older ones and two, because they both have their own styles.

Videos taken from Rollernews.

Xsjado Team Mix
Nothing fancy here. However, the reason why I’m keeping this video here is to make a point about these rollerbladers’ “fashion” sense. This is something that was discussed last week during the tute and this video would prove it amazingly. I don’t really like the first 20 seconds of the edit but the rest of it I enjoyed.

Metabolysm
This one has a really good first few seconds. I like it because it’s different than the first one and it’s more artsy. It does not immediately show viewers the rollerblading scene, instead it shows random landscapes but at the peak of the music’s tempo a rollerblader comes in and skates around. This is something that most of the skate videos do – tempo working together with the footage – but this one in particular stands out from the rest for being different. It has that mellow feel but I like it!

Post Supervision Meeting

I’m feeling a bit off today.

I seriously need the RTB Charter, like ASAP! Without it I’m kind of building a straight-backed human being without a spine. It’s taking people from the other end such a long time to get back to me with this thing that I really need because they’re having their exams at the moment. I feel that if I rush them then it’ll make me feel guilty about making them sacrifice their time for me but if I don’t then my thesis’s going to look really bare. Unattractive.

Anyway, what’s good is that Philip’s helping me get a clear conscience on the things that I really need to discuss in my thesis. I’m about there, I know the things that I need to do and research for but the very one thing that’s very important right now is far from reach.

New Abstract

After my meet with Philip, I realised that I need to put a narrower focus on my thesis, and I found that focus! So here goes:

The Radio Television Brunei (RTB) broadcasting network saw a decrease in its status as a public commodity since the arrival of satellite television from its neighbouring countries. An attempt has been made by the network to win back its audience with the creation of a satellite channel, one which could be retrieved by Bruneians with satellite dishes. However, with the long missed reputation of the network that has been affected by satellite television, this attempt has failed.

This thesis is an examination of the Radio Television Brunei Carnival that is implemented to help promote RTB to audiences in Brunei Darussalam. This thesis provides an account of the history of RTB and then how it has been invaded by satellite television, especially Astro of the Astro All Asia Networks PLC, Malaysia. With the settlement of Astro, RTB has tried to counter this by establishing new channels; RTB 1, RTB 2, RTB 3, RTB 4 and RTB 5 which are segmented to show programs that are almost similar to Astro’s.

The fierce competition between public television and satellite television means that RTB has to try harder to win back its reputation as a household commodity as it was 30 years ago. The RTB Carnival is RTB’s strategy as a platform to establish itself in the hearts of the Bruneian community. So, what next?

The main aim of this thesis is to discover what should be done after RTB reaches its audience in the course of the Carnival. What should be done next will be suggested in this thesis through the study of other forms of promotion that could be used to pull audiences in, as used by other broadcast networks in the West. The outcome of this thesis will recommend other types of television marketing strategies that could be adopted by RTB, whilst also adhering to Brunei’s philosophy of Malay Islamic Monarchy or Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB).