Miriam Parkinson

I’m in a good mood with myself. As predicted, I all but finished my programming assignment tonight. All I have left is final commenting, UML diagram and cleanup etc. I also finished my cam design assignment which I find amusing even if no one else does. Particularly the bit where we have to constrain the jerk… actually that bit had the entire lecture in hysterics.

Lecturer: (and you have to imagine this with a really thick Indian accent)”…and then we have infinite jerking and that is unacceptable” puzzled look as everyone in the lecture theatre snorts their red-bull out their nose
Smartarse: “when is jerking a problem”
Lecturer: “on the next page”
Class: erupts in hysterics again. Eventually recovers until…
Lecturer: “what is so funny?”

On a completely different note I think my caffeine addiction has come to an ugly head. The other day I actually woke up with a caffeine withdrawal headache… at 7am… is that bad?

On Sunday night I was in a fairly bad mood. I’d just spent the entire weekend thinking about my programming assignment, reading the textbook and desperately trying to figure out what to do and I still didn’t have a clue. But then on Monday, everything went click and suddenly it all made a whole lot of sense. So, last night I worked through all the hairy stuff and now all I need to do is finalize the user interface and it should all be more or less done by the time I go to bed. Isn’t life great when you know what’s going on?

Anyway the semester is drawing to a close. By this time next week I’ll have finished my first exam and things are looking pretty good at the moment. I feel more prepared for exams than I’ve ever been and I’m hoping to clean up with straight distinctions. Can’t guarantee it but it’s certainly looking like a possibility. Still no word from IBL but Peter got a message last night which he needs to chase up. Hopefully I’ll hear something this week. Otherwise I’ll start to get worried.

The second programming assignment of the year has rolled around and this time inheritance is the name of the game. Inheritance is one of those things that’s lovely in theory but really hard to implement properly particularly when you get a 2 hr lecture and you’re then expected to write a program involving inheritance, polymorphism and singleton classes without any satisfactory explanation of what it is in the first place. In any case I’m finally starting to get my head around it and once I confer with Peter the resident programming genius at uni I’ll get stuck into it and start doing some proper coding.

In other news I reinstalled windows yesterday so now my computer is lovely and fast and ready for Office 2007 Ultimate, which I purchased for the very reasonable price of $25 for a 1 year subscription. The idea there is that if I have the same puter a year from now I’ll spend the $50 to upgrade to perpetual and if I haven’t I’m $50 better off. I know there has been some Office 2007 bashing going on recently but I have a really very slow computer and I haven’t really noticed any major problems. So, to all of you geeks with your newfandangled 1GB RAM, STOP WHINEGING!!! I’m stuck with 512MB and you don’t hear me complaining about the amount of time things take to load. Besides it’s pretty… Surely you can forgive a little bit of lag for the prettiness?!?

Exams will be rolling by in just over a week; but fortunately I seem to be getting more, rather then less confidant about the exams as they approach. Every time I do tute questions these days I realize that I know way more about the subjects than I thought I did. I guess that whilst the exams are a lot closer to the semester this year than normal due to Swinburne abolishing SWOT VAC, I am also far more prepared than I might normally be at this stage. I’ve made a huge effort to try and force myself to pay attention this semester and clearly my new rather antisocial habit of sitting right up the front of the lectures away from my friends is starting to pay off.

I still haven’t had word about IBL, but neither has anyone else so I’m not worried yet.

The end of semester is approaching and it’s been a busy one let me tell you! My first freak-out cry was in week two of semester and the workload hasn’t really lightened up since. Now there’s a week and a bit left before exams start and after that a short break and then… I actually have no idea what’s happening after that, and its kinda exciting.

IBL (Industry Based Learning) is a program which gives students an opportunity to get a year of full time work experience halfway through their course. Officially I’m doing my IBL year starting July; however, I’ve only applied for one job. So, either I get the job of my dreams next semester and off to work I go, or I get 8 weeks holiday and then I’m back at uni for another semester. The way I figure it if I don’t get the placement I want this year I can always do IBL starting January instead and cast a wider net then.

I’ve been totally uninspired with my writing recently. I guess its a combination of stress, tiredness and the constant feeling in the back of my mind that I have something more important to do. So I apologize for the drop in writing frequency and hopefully I’ll think of something witty, imaginative or insightful to say soon.