education – Page 4

Typically Busy

[this post was lost during a server failure on 11 July 2004; it was partially-recovered on 13 October 2018]

Another couple of weeks of academic nightmare coming up, followed by the Easter Break (during which I’ll be working, ho hum). I’ve got to do my second “poster session” presentation for my dissertation a week on Wednesday; next week I have all my pracs *and* I’m helping out backstage with the Student Skills competition. Oh; and I managed to get myself persuaded to go into the office at the weekend, forgetting that my mum’s visiting. D’oh.

Oh yeh; my mum’s visiting this weekend. She’s bringing Andy (the BF¹) and Puddles (the KCS²) along for Troma Night. Which is nice.

And, in other shiny happy news, I sold my old copy of The Sims: Party Pack for about the same value as it can be bought in shops. Yay, and, indeed, hey.

And, while I’m on the ball – other shiny happy news – I’ve managed to grovel to the bank and secure myself a dramatically increased overdraft, interest free, until September. Which means I can afford to pay for my ADSL subscription. Oh; and the …

Christmas Is Coming, The Exams Are Getting Written

[this post was lost during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004; it was partially recovered on 21st March 2012]

I haven’t done any yet.

I’ll start tommorow. Better call my mum and get some tips on what my sisters are into this year. Becky’s typically quite easy – she usually just wants the most violent computer game released in the last three months – but Sarah, who’s desires are driven by the fluctuations of what is and what is-not fashionable at any particular time (“That is so last week! Nobody listens to clip-hop any more!”)

Claire and I are going to be spending Christmas (and a couple of days before) with Claire’s dad. Then we’ll travel all the way up the country – with her dad in tow – on Boxing Day to spend the weekend with my family. We’ll be back in Aberystwyth in time for New Year. And then I suppose I’d better start revising.

For the benefit mostly of myself (this is a convenient look-up point), but also just to show you all, my exam timetable for this semester appears at the bottom of this post…

Only three exams! Woo. I feel moderately confident enough about them – although I’ll need to knuckle down and read up a lot of formal notation stuff for the SE33010 exam. I’ve also got an assignment to do for my Professional … [the rest of this post, and one comment, are lost]

First Aid

Yesterday was a long day. After nine hours at work, had two and a half hours of First Aid refresher training at Aberystwyth ambulance station.

On the upside, I’d forgotten how subtly dark paramedics’ sense of humour can be… when one particularly overmoral woman expressed concern at a particular element of the training: “But they could die!”, one of the ‘medics responded, deadpan, with: “No; they’re already a corpse. They’re dead. They’re just lying there, being completely useless.” I like paramedics.

I have a lot of work to do this week – my final week full-time before starting again as a part-timer while I put some work towards graduating – and I’m getting bogged down in other people’s bureaucracy. I can’t get my client’s clients’ computers to connect to my client’s computer because my client’s network administrator has put a particularly secure firewall in the way, and he needs a list of IP addresses (unique identifiers for computers on TCP/IP networks, like the Internet) of all the servers on my client’s clients’ networks, but everybody’s got meetings at stupid times and I can never get hold of the people I need when I need them and… aarrgghh!!!

It’ll all be fine.

Science Graduates Earn More, Live Longer, Smoke Less

This report by the BBC, published yesterday, gives evidence that we science/engineering graduates live longer than our artsy opposite numbers. Made my day.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #50:

Sit up ’til 5:00am coding for a project that doesn’t have to be in until a week on Friday. On the up side, discover the root cause of the bug that was holding back the progress of the Group Project, and, by redeveloping some source code, cut down estimated production time by two days. Get lots of praise for this. Be happy.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #40:

Fail to get elected as one of the two student representatives of module CS12320 (Concepts In Programming). What else could I expect? I was nominated against my will, gave an awe-inspiring speech, that declared that “if I get this position, I’ll slaughter every last one of you with a pick-axe” brought up the issue that “hell – I’m not even representative of myself; why do you want me to represent you lot?”, and made clear “I want this role as little as you want me to have it!”. I think they got the idea. I recieved a grand total of 0 votes, and that includes the ones from the people who nominated me (who, after hearing my speech, voted for somebody else). Victory

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #36:

(1) Recieve an e-mail from your Personal Tutor, asking to see you in his office in ten minutes. He knows I check my e-mail 1440 times a day, but dragging me to this level of nerdity is ridiculous…
(2) …make it to his office, cross campus, within eight minutes of him sending the e-mail… Okay – so I *live* in my anorak. I don’t care. =o( I’m going to go and sit in the corner and sulk now.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #31:

Pass your first exam… with a worldsmashing score of 90%. Your lecturer, apparantly, during a pre-test, scored 95%. The pass level was 36%. Happy bunny? You bet!

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #29:

Stay in and do some work.
Scary but true – this theoretically means that I haven’t done this until now. Eek.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #27:

(1) What with being excessivley busy, and a network failure last weekend, fail to get out a “Cool Things”. Feel the need to apologise to everybody (SORRY!), and give them three “Cool Things” to help make up for it.
(2) Be elected Communications Officer for a confidential telephone listening and advice service.
(3) Take your first exam. Gulp. Still – 20 questions, and only 36% required to pass. From the results of people in my class who’ve done it earlier this week, marks range from 30% –> 80%. Remain confident. My result is out on Monday.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #26:

Go out and get pissed with the second years from your floor. Bloody hell, those guys can drink about (originally read “drinkabout”) four times their weight in lager. As a result I’m probably going to have to (originally read “tpo”) proofread this several times before sending it. I’m having difficulty sitting up straight in my chair. Bloody hell

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #24:

Take a pillow to a lecture. =o)

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Content Warning

This archived blog post has been flagged as containing content that treats or depicts people negatively based on their appearance or identity. This wasn't okay at the time and it isn't okay now.

I don't believe it's acceptable to pretend I didn't write them by removing them from the Internet - insofar as such a thing is even possible. However, I also don't want to give them any more visibility than they already have.

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #18:

Play drinking games and ‘dare’ in a pub on an Outward Bound weekend… with your lecturer. Laugh as he has to ask the bar staff if they’re virgins, announce he’s gay, and go into the ladies toilets with his trousers around his ankles. Laugh slightly less when you have to shout “the Welsh are all sheep shaggers” at the top of your voice, and subsequently get lynched. Ah well: you win some, you lose some.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #17:

Attend a lecture in a shirt and tie, and carrying a bag full of clothes, and leave 20 minutes before the end, to catch a coach to Aberdyfi, and sit on it and sing! (actually, this hasn’t happened yet – but this afternoon, it will!)

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #15:

Find a quaint little shop in the middle of nowhere, in a quaint little town in the middle of nowhere, and buy a really awful tie. Truly awful. Plan to wear it to a (course-compulsary) team-building weekend to take the piss out of a lecturer who’ll be going who wears really awful ties. Odds are, this occassion will be the first time we’ll ever see him without one!

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.