Still Hurting

I was hoping I would have recovered from Friday night by now but unfortunately my body disagrees with me. As such, I have spent most of the day in bed achieving very little. I'm looking forward to the next week though (for some bizarre reason) and although it is once again quite busy - something that seems to be becoming a trend recently - it means that I certainly won't have very many bored moments and will most likely be asking for extra hours in the day.

Ouch

After not nearly enough sleep, I managed to crawl out of bed at about 14:00. Pretty much every muscle in my body - including some I didn't know existed is aching and event the simplest of tasks that involves moving hurts. More proof if it were needed that I am terribly unfit. The most painful thing I have done today is sneeze which it turns out uses rather a lot of muscles - coupled with the fact that I am normally incapable of sneezing only once, generally three times, so that was quite a prolonged period of pain.

Behind the Scenes at Space

For those of you reading this that are not familiar with the events of the University of Sheffield's Student's Union then I should probably make this clear first otherwise the rest of this post is unlikely to make sense to you. Space is the name of one of the events that occurs regularly on a Friday night (during term time). With that cleared up, I shall continue. Tonight is the first event that I have worked as part of the TSC. My initial thoughts were that perhaps I was being a little too ambitious starting with such a large event and that I should probably have gone for something smaller as a break in. I have since changed my mind and I am now very grateful that I did choose this event as my first. Apparently this is one of two events where you learn the most and I certainly feel like my brain has had its share of new knowledge for the week, let alone one evening.

Effective Presenting Skills

Another slightly empty day today although I found out about my friend's first night working with the TSC and he seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself so I am felling slightly better about it all now. With a bit of luck being stuck with not much to do for the period whilst the event is on might actually encourage me to get some real work done. My tutor is expecting my third prototype on Monday and so far I haven't even decided what it should be.

Jobs Fair

Yesterday evening I set myself a list of things to do today. Wednesdays are my day off so I should in theory be able to get quite a lot done. What normally happens however, is anything but that but somehow today seemed more productive.

Where's the Off Switch?

After yesterday's random burst of energy, alas, it did have a downside. No sleep for me last night was the downside, I simply couldn't switch off and my mind was skitting about all over the place, jumping from one thing to another. During the day I manage to keep it all under control but as soon as I let my guard down trying to get to sleep, all of the deadlines and tasks and other bits and bobs that I have to do come flooding back and I have to make sense of them and put them in some order.

The Longest Day Gets Longer

I thought that last Monday's long day was just about the longest day I would have this year but alas, today came and surprised me again. I did get some respite thanks to a re-arranged tutor meeting this morning but I'd already done the hauling myself out of bed bit so the only consolation was that I saw the email before I had trekked down to university.

Losing Touch with the Film World

It was the BAFTAs tonight (the film ones) and I decided to watch the ceremony. Often these events have some comedy moments in them and who knows, if I actually take any information in from them then it might be useful in a quiz someday. This year however, I was shocked to discover that I hadn't even heard of many of the films, let alone know which of the nominations I would want to win them. Normally there would be the exception of the 'not in the English language' films that would be a bit obscure and unheard of but even the big winners like the Hurt Locker, I haven't seen anything about that... anywhere!

Homo Interneticus

Whilst I'm not sure that scientifically we are actually classed as a new species, it was interesting to see just how much of an affect the internet has had on our lives since its inception twenty years ago. I hadn't really given it much thought until I watched the final episode in the BBC's Virtual Revolution series this evening but when it is having an effect so great that it actually changes how our brains work then perhaps we are trending towards becoming a new species with a totally different brain layout to the old 'us'. The other scary thing is the time scale that this has all happened in. Whereas normally evolutionary changes and adaptations would take place over thousands and millions of years, we are talking about just two decades in which we are seeing noticeable changes to out physiology.

Bubble Training

A busy day again today in some ways. I say in some ways because this morning's seminar - which wasn't really a seminar in any sense of the word that I have ever heard, had about forty minutes of actual content (from a two hour time slot). The first thirty - forty five minutes were spent faffing around with the projector. After spending half an hour trying (and failing) to get his laptop to connect to the projector, they resigned to using the provided computer - which worked straight away. Then we found that there would only be two presentations instead of a possible four (because of module swapping) and so we got to leave fifteen minutes early. Unfortunately, both of the presentations were really good, delivered confidentially and coherently which now makes me even more nervous about mine. I was hoping that at least one of them would be really nervous or really boring so that I would feel slightly more optimistic about mine but it wasn't to be. I will just have to hope that someone is really bad in the lead up to mine - preferably some on the day of mine as well so that I can look good in comparison. I may also have to step up my game a bit and spend some more time making mine quite good. Just in case.

Curry and Boredom

The highlight of today was the curry I made this afternoon which turned out a little hotter than I would perhaps have liked, mainly die to an adaptation of the original recipe due to a lack of chillies - something I find it quite hard to come by in supermarkets in Sheffield. They occasionally have them at the big Tesco but apart from that I haven't seen them around. Anyway, that was sidetracking a little. The recipe was courtesy of one of the Hairy Bikers' Mums Know Best mum's and other than being a little on the hot side (because of the chilli substitute) it was very nice and I hope to be able to try it again some time. It did take a while and my clothes all now smell of cumin but I think it was worth the effort.

The Brits

Tragedy struck this evening, my PVR totally died. I had set it to record the Brits and Survivors but when I came to watch them I found it had totally frozen, none of the button worked and it refused to do anything. It's not the most reliable of machines by any means and often has the occasional hissy fit but usually it only extends to refusing to change volume and hasn't gone much further than that. Even then it normally sorts itself out after a reboot but apparently not this time. It doesn't help that the box itself makes so much noise that I have to unplug it every night and without a proper shutdown, I'm pretty sure pulling the plug on a machine with a hard disk in it isn't good. The upside is that if it does totally break then I have an excuse to buy a canvas enabled one when they are released later in the year.

Sleeeep

Yesterday has officially worn me out. My batteries are empty and 6 hours isn't nearly enough time to recharge them. For some reason whenever I come back from a night out, I manage to get to sleep very easily but always wake up at about 8am. Any sensible brain would know that late nights are the perfect excuse for a lie-in, especially when my sole Tuesday lecture isn't until 1pm. So I've spent most of today sleepwalking through the day, trying to get by as best I can.

A Very Busy Day

Today has been one of the busiest days of my university life and it seems to be setting the trend for the rest of this semester. I don't know whether I am just being too ambitious, trying to fit two and a half years worth of missed opportunities and activities into one semester or whether things will all work out okay and although I will have to put a lot of effort in, the rewards will more than make up for it. I certainly hope that is the case.

Virtual Revolution pt2

Continuing on from yesterday, I will now talk about recommendation engines. People seem to have a somewhat Marmite relationship with these things but I can't really see how you can take such offence to something, can't you simply ignore it? My person experience is that on the whole they are helpful. Sometimes Amazon comes up with a few odd suggestions but usually they make sense i.e. a previous album by the same artist or another book in a series. I don't often use them when shopping and I find the Tesco software for highlighting cheaper products to be truly awful, most of the time it offers you a smaller packet of a more expensive brand so when you have found a bumper pack of something for the cheapest price per unit and it offers you a pack half the size with a much greater price per unit it is useless.

Virtual Revolution - pt1

Not a hugely productive day today unfortunately, despite the initial intentions being there, I never really got round to doing any real work. I had hoped to make a decent start to my presentation today so that I could have 40% of that module done and dusted and out of the way within the next two weeks, leaving me more time for the other modules and my dissertation. Sadly, I only got as far as reading the first three pages of the paper I am presenting and I didn't really understand 70% of it. At least that is something to write about in the report, I just hope that it is badly written and not that I am stupid.

Toy Story 3

Exciting news today, the trailer for Toy Story 3 has been released and it looks amazing. It might take a bit of getting used to though because Andy is all grown up and about to go to college but I'm sure I'll get over it quick enough. I searched high and low for a trailer to embed but they all have embedding disabled. There are three trailers in total which can be seen on YouTube here for the teaser trailer, here for a first look trailer and below for the real trailer.

Give me a Buzz

The big news of today/yesterday is that of Google's new product in the social networking world, Buzz. I seemed to be one of the last people to have the feature activated so I have been holding out until I had the chance to use it before I decided what to make of it. First of all, at the moment, it stands very little chance of taking a chunk out of twitters market. There have already been privacy concerns about the default sharing settings and I think Google have bitten of a bit more than they can chew. Quite simply, there have set out to copy - which is usually a bad start because as with most things, the originals are the best. Twitter is good not because of what it set out to be, but what it has become. A sort of emergent behaviour that has taken the world by storm and in the past couple of years it has been transformed from something no one needed to something that people would now be lost without.

The Beginning of the End

The first item on this morning's agenda was the Ultimate Fair. Disappointingly, it wasn't all that ultimate really, although I did manage to get a few things sorted out. First port of call was joining the CSS (Computer Science Society) which has been properly active now for about three months maybe. I don't spend very much time in the lab - in fact I don't think I've been in there for more than about five minutes this year, mainly because I find it extremely difficult to work in public spaces, even the library. Contrary to popular opinion, I find that there are actually fewer distractions in my own room than there are in the library or the lab and after trying several times to make these spaces work for me, I am resigned to the fact that I am just an oddity in that department. The outcome of which, is that I had not yet got round to signing up to the CSS which has been based in the lab. I now have and am looking forward to the forthcoming social events that the guys in charge have organised, something everybody has failed to do for the past two years.

Royal Mail

Day two of lectures was somehow worse than day one - in a purely educational sense that is, from a goodness point of view, it was at worst a waste of time and at best a day off. When I arrived in the lab - which was where I was supposed to be this time - I managed to grab a computer and get logged in, more than a lot of people managed. The lecturer was expecting about 40 fewer students and so the room she had booked was no where near sufficient in terms of numbers of computers to accommodate the whole group. When I eventually found out what the task was to be, I was hugely disappointed to find that the first part was a Matlab tutorial and the second part was plotting a graph. The tutorial was written by my former dissertation tutor who have it to me about three months ago to help me re-familiarise myself with the program. Since then I have gone past the basics and am now writing far more complicated code which meant the simple plotting task was a bit beneath me.

First Day Back

All in all, it wasn't as bad as I had perhaps been expecting it to be. There was a slight hitch with my timetable which meant that I went to the wrong room at first, admittedly not the best start to the new term, but I could have sworn they have changed the room since I last looked at the timetable. I did arrive in time however and managed to stay awake throughout the whole lecture / introductory talk which ran about as smoothly for the lecturer as the beginning of my day. It turns out I am now studying a module which is a cross between biology, economics, mathematics and computer science which wasn't what I had been expecting but could make it a bit more interesting.

Getting Things Organised

Today has been an organisational day, tidying up and getting things ready for starting back tomorrow. I have emailed my dissertation tutor to arrange our first meeting of the year - and the first one-to-one meeting with my new tutor as well. I am hoping that he won't be asking too many questions about my plans for the year because as yet I don't actually have any. Maybe I should start working on that before the meeting...

Shaking Hands With Death

I fear I may be writing this post whilst in the grip of emotion but it somehow seems right that that should indeed be the case. I have just finished watching this years Richard Dimbleby lecture, something I was no previously aware of - and had it not been for my recent trend of listening to the Discworld dramatisations on BBC7, I doubt I would have come across it. The title of the lecture is Shaking Hands With Death, written by Sir Terry Pratchett and whilst I can't exactly say it is a subject close to my heart, I do feel I have a stronger connection than many others with the central topic of the debate and, however controversial it may be, I am a supporter of his proposals.

Exams Are Over!

And about time too! It seems like they have been going on forever now, I've started getting used to having such a lot of time off and lectures on Monday will come as a rather large shock I suspect. On the plus side, there will be far less boredom to contend with, I can start getting back into some sort of organised schedule again and life in general should start running a bit more smoothly.

Exam 1

The big day and I surprised myself by felling strangely awake and happy at 8am - a time I haven't seen in a very long time and after tomorrow, plan not to see for a very long time again. Overall, the exam seemed to go quite well and given my assignment marks, I'm hoping for a decent mark from this module, something I thought highly unlikely when sitting in the lecture theatre last year. Maybe it is because I made the effort to actually turn up to the lectures this year that made the difference because - for this module at least - whilst I didn't understand much of the theory at the time, looking at the past exam paper questions and the notes during revision made it all come together somehow and click into place. There seems to be a great deal of abstraction needed for me to comprehend certain topics and I think my internal representation of the content is very different to what is written on the page. I could quite easily stare at the notes for hours and not learn anything and yet a few practical exercises converting those strange symbols into actions gives it all meaning.

LOST

LOST returns at last for the sixth and final series and despite the impending exam, I decided to give myself a couple of hours off to watch the first two episodes and episode 0, a sort of catch up episode to refresh my memory about what happened. Its just as well I did watch that as well because it made a couple of the themes click into place that had totally eluded me before. Despite the promise that there would be no more time travelling nonsense and that this series would be simple and linear, I can only assume that was some sort of inside joke or that I am missing something rather vital to the understanding of this whole series. From where I was sitting, there was a LOT of messing around - which is as far as I will go for those of you who may not have seen it yet.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

If I'd have been studying geography or something then perhaps I could have made the excuse that this distraction was somehow related to my work but alas I fear that apart from giving myself more time off revision, it accomplished very little. Unless you count providing some content to write here of course in which case it did a pretty good job!

A Hopefully Sucessful Day

At last! Something has transformed me today that has enabled me to retain information. Whilst I don't want to peak too soon and now have to concentrate on learning all of the other stuff, I am somewhat impressed that I have achieved what I initially thought to be impossible. Now all I have to do is keep that information tucked up inside my head - somewhere readily accessible - whilst cramming a little bit more in without dislodging what is already there. In fact before I even get the chance to do that, I have to get through the night without forgetting it all. Sometimes I swear the information in my brain that there is not enough room for gets shoved out of my ear and absorbed by my pillow - like some sort of really bad archiving system whereby anything archived can never be retrieved.