Posts Tagged ‘University’

I’m at DEC-10 at the moment. It’s 2pm and I’ve been here for over an hour. And it’s been dead. There are like a dozen people here at most. Other than when a lab session is on, this seems to be fairly normal these days. Kind of removes any come back we have for them cutting down on labs and computers when nobody actually uses them.

I’m quite glad to be back in union politics (for lack of a better term). We had the first CompSoc committee meeting today at The Library, nicely arranged to coincide with lunch which I was quite impressed with. It’s standard pub food but then I love standard pub food so it’s all good.

Most of today was just coming up with ideas and working out the plan of who is going to do what, who is going to contact what, etc but it’s good to get the ball rolling. We have an idea of what needs doing before September and what events we want to throw together next year. Hopefully tommorrow’s A-Soc meeting will prove to be productive too.

Ah the joys of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

But bad grammer aside, Owen has anounced that in fact our group, Parrot, achieved the highest mark in SE24. Factoring in every part of the group project we proved our ability to work as the best team, functioning as one unit working to maximum efficency.

Of course it didn’t work like that in the real world. Safa did way more coding than anyone else having the most commits (followed by George, Raby, myself and Sumara) and the largest commits (followed by myself, Raby, George and Sumara). We were never really working together on the code – I started it off before Easter then had Rationalist Week to deal with at which point Safa and George started coding while Raby need the UML and Sumara just did nothing. Go team.

Still, I’ll take it as a victory in a time of year that is causing an insane amount of stress, Plus it shows it may actually be giving News a read once in a while.

Damn.

While most blogs contained this post like a week ago I unfortunately did not have that luxury. I finished my final exam yesterday, Principles of Corporate Strategy. I was annoyed by the exam, I got everything except one question which was really basic stuff that I should have known. Unfortunately I was missing a lecture or two worth of slides (I don’t know why I was missing the week 3 one was I turned up to that, the Rationalist Week one I genuinely missed) but even so, I’ve done SWOT analysis before, prior to my arrival at uni.

I’m a bit disappointed I don’t really feel any relief though, it’s not a “oh it feels so good for them to be over and done with.” I just feel like I always do. I suppose it’s because I know it’s not going to get any better. I am working in labs next week then at The D with double the amount of shifts (probably) the week after, then after that it’s back to full time so I’m not really having a break between exams finishing and working. Indeed, having finished my exams yesterday I am going to work later today),

Overall it’s been an alright exam period I guess. I’ve done well on 5 out of 6 exams but I’ve almost certainly failed one of them. While I scored highly on the coursework I need to mass the module because I need it for my third year program and also I got a 38 and a 44 last semester so I really can’t get any bad module marks as they need to drag everything up.

It’s been a while since I used to walk into a lab and it would be totally empty. The last time I can really remember it happening (though it’s probably happened since) was last summer when I would walk into Eniac in like the middle of July. While summer has once again returned it’s still June, term time June in fact. Having just walked into DEC-10 though I find I’m the only person here. These freshers are just rubbish :p.

It’s been a long week. I had IS23 on Tuesday morning which went quite well, followed by GI21 yesterday which I probably failed (ha, probably, I almost certainly failed the exam which is worth 60% of the module so I’m screwed) then I had SE24 today which was a breeze. I found it slightly harder than expected but I think most people found it harder than expected (probably more so than I did) which is probably a positive sign. Just one more exam to go now!

Bah.

Two down, four to go. SY23 went really well on Tuesday until we got to The Old Bar afterwards and I realised I had missed a question. 8 marks. Out of 60. That’s over 10% of the paper! I had left it to go back to it later and somehow missed it when I went through everything again.

Then this morning (yesterday morning by now) I had SY22 which went fairly well given everyone else seemed to think it was a bit of a strange paper so I’m not too worried about dropping a few marks here and there. That exam was one of the hard ones along with GI so it’s good to have it out of the way.

8 days since I blogged last. That has to be some kind of record. I had a post lined up last Friday but after clearing my head with a walk through town I lost the motivation to finish it.

For weeks now, all I’ve been able to think about is sound systems. It sounds like a joke but it’s driving me insane. I can’t think about anything else. As far as I can make out it’s just my subconscience trying to avoid the subject of revision and Rich assures me that such obsessions are quite normal, explaining how they painted their entire house to avoid revision.

Yesterday I managed to briefly take my mind of it by updating the spec for my server. They seemed to have stopped doing the case I was going to get and the new one is missing a drive bay (it only has 11!) so I had to pick a better one. It also occured to me I was missing a heatsink which wouldn’t have been the best situation. Today I actually managed to get my ass out of bed with a promise of a breakfast and got some revision done. Attempts to sustain such work seem to be once again failing though.

Spending a string of continuous nights in front of my computer screen has unfortunatly acted as some what of a eye opener though. I’ve realised that I am exactly where I was 5 years ago. Sat in the dark, in front of a computer screen, promising myself I wouldn’t still be here in 5 years.

Having met Joanna who works at the chaplaincy during Rationalist Week I decided to take her up on her invite to come down to Skeptics Anonymous on Friday. It basically consists of having lunch and sitting round chatting about religiously biased philosophical topics. There was quite an interesting range of people there, indeed there were quite a few Christians. As seems to be the way with these events, the audience generally seems to be slightly eccentric postgrads rather than undergrads.

The conversation mostly followed the lines of going round the circle with each person saying where they stand. As points came up we would then drift off and discuss a point more in depth. All in all it was a slightly strange but never the less fairly interesting event and I think I will probably drop by again.