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lost some hair with white blob at root (so I have to change my hair style), grown fatter: my inchoate SIX packs have been replaced by one big integrated pack, I have less time for my friends and family (I apologise, but one day you will be proud of me..;p)” Well this is the abstract of what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

I’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 – it’s been a very good week to say the least! After a successful but hectic year it’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 →

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 →

Snow, ethics and the ability to blag

Snow, ethics and the ability to blag It has been an interesting week which was initially dominated by the snowfall and the disruption that it caused. There was never any question of putting my feet up and using the abject weather conditions as an excuse - a simple case of far too work to do. As I'd be holding back on a day off from work, I had no problem with getting involved in the snowman construction - Man with shovel, will travel - on the Thursday. 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 →