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D4 Design Exercise

Three weeks ago all the second year electronics students headed off to a special extra lecture, where we were to be set the final design challenge of the year, D4. We all knew it was going to be something pretty big due to the hefty mark allocation associated with it (75% of one module – roughly the same as one exam paper) but I don’t think anyone was quite prepared for what was to come...”you have 11 working days to build a digital oscilloscope”... *gasp*... Continue reading →

End of Term is Upon Us

End of term is upon us once again. It really has flown by- I am currently sitting in my halls room, surrounded by bags and it seems like only yesterday I was packing up for the Christmas holidays. Anyway, enough nostalgia... Coursework has really been piling up recently. We now have six courses as opposed to five (in the first semester) and with them come gratuitous amounts of out-of-classroom exercises. Continue reading →

Another Coursework Make Its Way Into the Depths

Time flies As another coursework makes its way into the inner depths of the C-BASS handin service, I notice we're almost at the end of a term! Before I go any further, I would like to point out that Helpdesk don't mind you having your own projects (and in fact, they encourage it), just try and keep resource usage to a minimum. The bouncy dot was neither resource friendly (taking up at minimum two PCs in the lab), nor helpdesk-friendly. Continue reading →

I Met Tim Berners-Lee!

I've had an exciting day going up to London to the Royal Society to attend a Web Science panel. There I saw Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web – very exciting indeed. In fact, I even spoke to him and asked, “How do you feel about the non-conformance of W3C Standards with Internet Explorer?”, to which he replied, “Well, I will be using more and more SVGs [Scalable Vector Graphics] … if you're using Internet Explorer, you won't be able to see these pretty pictures”. Continue reading →

I can’t get no sleep…

As life rolls on in Southampton and I begin to get properly settled, the issue of what I should end up doing with my life is beginning to plague me more than ever. I want to become more involved with the societies, my friends, even my course, but apathy has way too much of a hold right now for me to even consider what extensions I could introduce to my uniform life. The annoying thing is that I have no idea why. Continue reading →

The Results Are In…

The Results Are In... Last time I blogged I had just returned from my assessment day for the Undergraduate of the Year Awards, and now I know the outcome……I’M THROUGH TO THE FINAL 10!!! *breathe* Wow! These last few weeks have been becoming increasingly crazy, but in an absolutely stunning, incredible way! According to official UCAS figures, there were 456,627 students starting university courses at the same time as me, so statistically there was a 0. Continue reading →

Light, Warm, Comfort

Light, Warm, Comfort Sometimes, it seems odd to outsiders the strange dependency that we[1] have on our little slabs of silicon and metal. Sometimes it seems odd to us[1]. I recently went away, visiting family in a more isolated[2] part in this country, and when I returned, my peers greeted the concept with stunned amazement, on how I could survive in 'the wild', cut off from civilization[2]. Continue reading →

Nerdy Specialist Banter

My first day at work in ECS Helpdesk consisted of mostly nerdy specialist banter*, though I did manage to help a student who couldn't log on to a Mac for some unknown reason. Also whilst I was 'off-duty', I helped one of my friends who had just happened to pick the only faulty monitor in the room - it turns out it was a bad VGA cable, which Toby and I replaced promptly. Continue reading →