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University of Southampton Life, Page 7

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 →

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lost some hair with white blob at root (so I have to change my hair style), grown fatter: my inchoate SIX packs have been replaced by one big integrated pack, I have less time for my friends and family (I apologise, but one day you will be proud of me..;p)ā€ Well this is the abstract of what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 →

Paradox of Choice

I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but there's this thing called the Paradox of Choice, which is where so many choices to make can cause anxiety and possibly result in no choice being made. What I'm getting at is this: there are so many fields us ECS-graduates can go into afterwards, I have no idea where/what I will be doing when I graduate. This occurred to me as I was round a friend's house for dinner the other night and they said they were graduating in about half a year or so. Continue reading →

Christmas Holidays 2010

Iā€™m typing this at home, on a new Samsung netbook, surrounded by great food and family and just watched a great English team retain The Ashes in Australia ā€“ itā€™s been a very good week to say the least! After a successful but hectic year itā€™s been really nice to have a little break from it all and recharge my batteries before it all starts again in 2011. Before I sign off for 2010 though, I first must tell you about my exciting December. 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 →

ECS Early Christmas Party

Christmas is coming which means holidays are around the corner. The heavy snow that fell a few days ago has triggered even more anticipation for this coming winter break. Nevertheless, the deadline for assignments is approaching as we are counting down for the holidays. This is definitely a very odd mixture of feelings. When I woke up on Thursday morning and looked out of the window, instead of seeing the gloomy sky, the whole world outside was covered with thick white snow. Continue reading →

Snow! Deadlines! Poverty!

Snow! Deadlines! Poverty! That pretty much sums up everything that has happened since my last blog. The weather, as of writing, is snowy leaning towards icy, which has had the rather lovely knock-on effect of a four-day weekend! Took long enough for the snow to make its way down the country to us, heh. Deadlines are horrible, but I donā€™t have any left now, so my weekend is truly free. Aside from all the regular work. Bah. Continue reading →

Requirement Evolution

Requirement Evolution My flow of blogs was delayed by another management essay - this time on consultancy and entrepreneurs - but the third-year project still moves on. Having settled more firmly on the intended outcome of my project, I decided it was time to revisit the purpose of the project. Two reasons: 1) In all third-year projects, a second examiner is appointed. Continue reading →