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Project Work, Page 3

Last semester was, like, totally the worst thing ever

Last semester was, like, totally the worst thing ever. I turned up to maybe less than half of the lectures, was consistency working right up the deadline, leaving revision right til the last second and, I dunno, just generally being what Mr. T would describe as a 'fool'. To ensure this never ever happens again I've made a few life changes. First and foremost (and I know this sounds unlikely) I've decided to do coursework as soon as it's set. Crazy I know. Continue reading →

Began Making Real Progress with the Prototype

Ethically sound In the immortal words of Professor Farnsworth: "Good news, everybody...": yep, Ethics approval got given for my questionnaire and it is now out in the wild. So the natural progression has been to get anyone and everyone to fill it in. If I haven't got around to ask you yet, it can be found here. Some people in the computer world appreciate getting Slashdotted. In ECS, one can get Joyced. What is Joyced? The term (coined by Samuel Weston esq. Continue reading →

And Breathe

And breathe. This semester has been an absolute test of sanity and friendships. I admit it has also been more eventful than it really needed to be, which didn't help much to be honest, however, it's a good skill to be able to focus on your work regardless if you can do it. First the sanity; the workload this year has been quite high. We had loads of coursework (eleven I think) and then you're also expected to do extra reading around the subject and have time to do paid-work. Continue reading →

Deadlines Before Christmas

The oddity of having the third year project progress report deadline before Christmas did have the advantage of pushing the project on to the back burner during the Christmas period. Not having questionnaire data to sift through was something of an issue, but hopefully there will be some movement on that front when everyone including undergraduates have had feet under desks for at least a week. Continue reading →

Third year of PhD

Third year of PhD ā€œPermanent Head Damage (PHD) is shining at full boom: I have become short sighted, lost my memory, lost some hair with white blob at root (so I have to change my hair style), grown fatter: my inchoate SIX packs have been replaced by one big integrated pack, I have less time for my friends and family (I apologise, but one day you will be proud of me..;p)ā€ Well this is the abstract of what I am doing nowadays. Continue reading →

Semester 1, Year 2

Semester 1 of Year 2 has been really hard work, hence, the lack of blog posts. I think to this date, we've had about 12 courseworks. And then there's the January exams. Still... don't panic. Also, I think it's also reasonable to expect that a degree at a world-leading institute such as ECS would be at least *slightly* difficult! One of our courseworks was for the Operating Systems module; we had to implement a memory allocator in C. Continue reading →

A story of coffee, pasties and the plan for the future*

A story of coffee, pasties and the plan for the future* It's done! The 'it' being my project progress report. Between 8:30am on Sunday and 1:30pm on Wednesday I clocked up 36 hours of work solely on the assembly of the project report. This involved being rooted to the spot in the undergraduate labs and subject to regular caffeine fixes at predetermined points of the day. For someone who likes to run long distances, there is decidedly not natural and had left me feeling unhealthy. Continue reading →

A question of ethics

My aim has been to write a blog weekly, but there is a limitation to the amount of verbal output I can achieve in one week (I accept that this may come as a shock to my parents and a fair few people I know). My primary occupation recently has been the development of a questionnaire., as I need first-hand data to draw conclusions in addition to those that I have drawn from research. Naturally this involves humans, and anything that involves humans involves a submission to the ethics committee. Continue reading →