Going on two months since I last blogged, which is a crime really. It's not like I haven't had shit to blog about. One of the ways I kept up with my blogging was always having my Blogger Dashboard open in one of my myriad active Firefox tabs, but at some point I must have lost a Firefox session (TabMixPlus's crash recovery is woeful; it always restores me to a point about a week before) and that sent time skewing off. What I need to do is figure out what happened here, at the X, that caused time to skew off into this alternate reality where Obama is the Democratic nominee for the presidential race, England aren't in EURO 2008, and for some reason Doc Brown lives in my basement.
Before that, here's what's been happening back on Planet Dru.
Exams are over! Woo-hoo, what say what-what? My last one was Data Integration and Analysis, on June 2nd, and I have to say that I've never been shitting myself so much before an exam, and come out of it so relieved. Shiiiiiit that exam was easy. It was the usual 'here are five questions, pick three and answer them' malarkey that we get on exams. Question 5 was an absolute gift. It was about 'clustering': the practice of grouping points of data, which have been numerical value and plotted in a potentially many-dimensional space (but usually just the two or three dimenstions). It involves calculating distances between data point using either Euclidean (as-the-crow-flies), Manhattan (as-the-cab-driver-drives), or maximum (useless) methods, and then grouping points into the specified number of clusters. It can be a very tedious and repetitive task, depending on the data points, number of clusters required, and the starting points for said clusters. This question, however, was entirely two-dimensional, required no recalculation after the first clusters had been computed, and was doable in fifteen minutes flat. I sealed my paper, handed it in, grinned for a couple of minutes, and left.
The 4th saw a mate have his last exam, so we all went for a Chinese buffet and then off to a couple of pubs. We sat in the beer garden drinking beer and having our victory dances (see: Independence Day) as the Fat Lady had most definitely sung.
The exam board meets on the 20th June to finalise marks, and then it's just a matter of what class of degree I end up with and then off to graduation on the 17th July. Got my gown ordered already so it's all about the waiting.
I got a bit of a surprise the day after our wee celebration, though. Got a phone from my mate Kev who said "guess what happened on my way home yesterday?" Shit, I thought, he's only gone and got mugged or something. Turns out he'd actually sustained a bad injury while running to get to the shop before it closed. He went arse over tit, cut his head, and broke his left arm. The hospital couldn't put a cast on it as he's broken the bone about an inch below the shoulder ball. They gave him a funny sling that he has to take of and try to move his arm once a day. I don't about you, but I don't care if it's a doctor or Janet Street Porter who's giving that instruction; I'm not taking the damn sling off and I certainly wouldn't be trying to move the fucking arm. Hopefully they'll be able to operate on it soon enough and stick some pins in it.
EVE-Online next. I'm CEO of my corp now. This might actually be the first time I've mentioned the game, in fact. At any rate, I've been with my corp, Aristotle Enterprises, since a month after I started playing the game, in the Summer of 2006. By Christmas 2006 I was Combat Director, and as of a month or so ago I've taken over as CEO of the corp. It wasn't a forceful take-over, by any means. Our former CEO, Michus Danether, stood down, having been inactive for a while and content to let the Triforce of Directors, composed of me as Triforce of Power, Carbis as Triforce of Courage, and our elder Arria Periclee as Triforce of Wisdom, run the corp in his stead. In the end he decided it wasn't fair of him to cling on to the top seat. He'll be sorely missed and I hope he returns to the game sooner rather than later.
EVE has been tumultuous, as always. The battle of lofty goals vs. our members being routinely busy with work and schooling is an age-old battle of epic proportions. We declared war on a corp last week (Morning Star Operations) and have been running skirmishes with them. So far we've killed one Griffin frigate, and two Onyx heavy interdictors (both on the same day, both flown by their CEO). We've got further plans for this war. Hopefully we can eek out sufficient remunerations (read: bribery/tribute/etc) from our victims that we can move on to hitting someone else or taking part in Faction Warfare, the patch for which is currently being deployed to Tranquility server.
Now what has all this got to do with Cat Piss? Nothing. I just started rambling before I got to talking about what the fuck just went down in my house. I've been sleeping off-cycle lately, going to bed at about 4am and waking up between 1pm and 3pm. So I decided to all-nighter tonight and correct my sleep cycle. So at about 4am, this almight ruckus erupts on the landing in my house. Cats fighting. I have one cat, a tabby female called Maggie (as in Maggie the Moggie... you can tell I didn't name her as she isn't called Leia or Pink Ranger or whatever) and she's always getting attacked by cats around here. She puts up a good fight, as she's shown me on occasion by scratching the fuck out of my hands and arms when I play-fight with her, so these fights with other cats usually end in a stand-off and the other cat retreating.
Recently, a new cat has shown up. We call it the Mirror Maggie, as it just looks like an older, wiser, possibly male version of Maggie, without the luminous collar and bell. This cat is a bastard. It's tough, immune to fire and frost, and rolls natural 20s at an astounding rate. It's getting bolder and bolder, so I figure it must have been this cat that was so far inside my house fighting with Maggie.
So this fight erupts, waking up my dad and my younger sister, and we go downstairs to find this mischievous cat. On walking downstairs I notice the bannister is wet on the top, like there's been a leak. It didn't smell like anything so I concluded it was water from a splashed drink. We couldn't find any hostile cats downstairs, but there was a small poo there. That's right, a poo. My sister disposed of it swifly (fortunately it was very solid) and we found the Bastard Cat outside on the wall.
An hour or so later I go downstairs to get a drink and there's a definite musty smell about. Fuck. That bastard cat pissed in the house. It fucking pissed in my house. Marking its territory I presume. Fuck that shit. The next time I see that cat I'm gonna mark my territory all over its backside, either with a boot or with several two-gramme, six millimetre, 320 feet-per-second plastic ball bullets. Nigga better learn not to come inside this house again or it's gonna get a good seeing too. Cracker-ass cracker.
Cats are awesome, but this cat must have the spirit of a dog inside it. Or possibly Stinkmeaner. Yeah, probably Stinkmeaner.
Peace out my niggas.
-Dru
Showing posts with label university. Show all posts
Showing posts with label university. Show all posts
Tuesday, 10 June 2008
Monday, 10 March 2008
Procrastination is a Bitch
I created this blog a couple of nights ago when perusing widgets for my Dashboard. I think that was it. I ran into a Wordpress widget for updating a blog from the Dashboard, and thought, "I forgot about my last two blogs... third time lucky?" Wordpress didn't seem to be what I wanted, though, so I headed over to Blogger and whacked this blog up. Filling it with content has been something of an afterthought.
I'm a bit disappointed to see that Blogger hasn't updated the themes, or added any level of variability -- at least this seems to be the case at first glance -- though I do recall seeing something about being able to significantly modify the theme, so I'll have a go at that once the pressing workload of leaving everything to the last minute is lifted from my shoulder by either rousing success or disappointing failure.
And that's what this post is about. The dangers of procrastination. I'm a third-year Software Engineering student at Manchester University, these past two weeks have been devoted to demonstrating the fruits of our labours: working project applications. I'll not go into the details of my project, but suffice to say that I spent far too much time thinking about the project and not enough time actually doing it. So when T-minus-Two Weeks rolled around and the only coding I'd actually done was a prototype that didn't work, a bowel-shaking thought struck me: Shit, I'd better fucking do something.
See, failing these demonstrations means failing not just the year, but the degree. There's no do-over like in the first two years. Failure here costs three years of tuition fees, and puts you in a dire position: either quit and get a job and get those fees paid off, or start the degree again, more-than tripling the fees (in the U.K. we now have 'top-up' fees which means Universities charge ~£3k/year rather than the £1225/year I'm paying for my degree) to try and get into a very good position afterwards for paying those fees off.
It's difficult to complete a project you don't give a shit about. It's even harder when the guy they've assigned you as your supervisor doesn't give a shit about you. He moved my weekly appointment with him so he could see somebody else in that time, and then didn't show up for the rescheduled appointment. He told me he "doesn't do e-mail", and that his inbox is full of spam due to having the address for so long, only to then tell his other, more Computer Sciencey students that he got their e-mails and so on and so forth.
Manchester University is a mess, administratively and politically. I spent the first two years of my degree at the School of Informatics; a perfect school for my heavily human degree. Software Engineering is not about Computer Science. It's a brilliant hybrid of technological competence, business skills, and the ability to not just straddle the line between the two, but to make them work together. So when, last year, we found out that the administrators of the University had decided to sell the land the School of Informatics was on, and to move all those students over to the Business School and the School of Computer Science, I was appalled. Having a friend in the student representatives body, I asked him what was going on. "It's all a political mess", he told me.
See, Manchester University has been under new administration for a number of years. This administration has tasked itself with the lofty goal of being one of the top five universities in the world, and they want to achieve this by 2015. Selling off the old UMIST campus was, apparently, a good way to move forward in that direction. Moving hundreds of Software Engineering students to a school that had neither the capacity nor empathy to handle them was, apparently, a good way to move forward in that direction. And this is why we're having such trouble at the School of Computer Science. Computer Scientists don't give a shit about our degree. They consider it a soft degree, said with the same tone that a Briton of the 1940s might refer to the Germans. Maybe it's that most of my fellow Software Engineers don't know how to recompile a *nix kernel. Maybe it's that most of my fellow Software Engineers don't know where to start solving a complex differential equation. I don't know. All I know is, if there's a red-headed stepchild at Manchester University, the Software Engineers are that stepchild.
The good news is, it's not looking too bad for my project. I just need to make my project report hella-convincing. So remember, people, don't leave things 'til the last minute. That wall of text I just posted, while true, is me rationalising my position, when my position is mostly my fault for spending many months working on my own projects instead of the one that mattered. You can't always expect a do-over, so never take it as a given.
-Dru
"I'm a programmer and it's okay, I work all night and I sleep all day."
I'm a bit disappointed to see that Blogger hasn't updated the themes, or added any level of variability -- at least this seems to be the case at first glance -- though I do recall seeing something about being able to significantly modify the theme, so I'll have a go at that once the pressing workload of leaving everything to the last minute is lifted from my shoulder by either rousing success or disappointing failure.
And that's what this post is about. The dangers of procrastination. I'm a third-year Software Engineering student at Manchester University, these past two weeks have been devoted to demonstrating the fruits of our labours: working project applications. I'll not go into the details of my project, but suffice to say that I spent far too much time thinking about the project and not enough time actually doing it. So when T-minus-Two Weeks rolled around and the only coding I'd actually done was a prototype that didn't work, a bowel-shaking thought struck me: Shit, I'd better fucking do something.
See, failing these demonstrations means failing not just the year, but the degree. There's no do-over like in the first two years. Failure here costs three years of tuition fees, and puts you in a dire position: either quit and get a job and get those fees paid off, or start the degree again, more-than tripling the fees (in the U.K. we now have 'top-up' fees which means Universities charge ~£3k/year rather than the £1225/year I'm paying for my degree) to try and get into a very good position afterwards for paying those fees off.
It's difficult to complete a project you don't give a shit about. It's even harder when the guy they've assigned you as your supervisor doesn't give a shit about you. He moved my weekly appointment with him so he could see somebody else in that time, and then didn't show up for the rescheduled appointment. He told me he "doesn't do e-mail", and that his inbox is full of spam due to having the address for so long, only to then tell his other, more Computer Sciencey students that he got their e-mails and so on and so forth.
Manchester University is a mess, administratively and politically. I spent the first two years of my degree at the School of Informatics; a perfect school for my heavily human degree. Software Engineering is not about Computer Science. It's a brilliant hybrid of technological competence, business skills, and the ability to not just straddle the line between the two, but to make them work together. So when, last year, we found out that the administrators of the University had decided to sell the land the School of Informatics was on, and to move all those students over to the Business School and the School of Computer Science, I was appalled. Having a friend in the student representatives body, I asked him what was going on. "It's all a political mess", he told me.
See, Manchester University has been under new administration for a number of years. This administration has tasked itself with the lofty goal of being one of the top five universities in the world, and they want to achieve this by 2015. Selling off the old UMIST campus was, apparently, a good way to move forward in that direction. Moving hundreds of Software Engineering students to a school that had neither the capacity nor empathy to handle them was, apparently, a good way to move forward in that direction. And this is why we're having such trouble at the School of Computer Science. Computer Scientists don't give a shit about our degree. They consider it a soft degree, said with the same tone that a Briton of the 1940s might refer to the Germans. Maybe it's that most of my fellow Software Engineers don't know how to recompile a *nix kernel. Maybe it's that most of my fellow Software Engineers don't know where to start solving a complex differential equation. I don't know. All I know is, if there's a red-headed stepchild at Manchester University, the Software Engineers are that stepchild.
The good news is, it's not looking too bad for my project. I just need to make my project report hella-convincing. So remember, people, don't leave things 'til the last minute. That wall of text I just posted, while true, is me rationalising my position, when my position is mostly my fault for spending many months working on my own projects instead of the one that mattered. You can't always expect a do-over, so never take it as a given.
-Dru
"I'm a programmer and it's okay, I work all night and I sleep all day."
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