Home Time

Presentation day today and it didn't actually go as badly as I had been expecting and preparing for. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst is one of the mottos I live by and it seems to have worked fairly well so far. Either I bamboozled the audience or managed to cover all of the questioning points because other than the usual "What did you think of the paper?" from the lecturer and a simple question about advertising from one of the class, there were no others. I had been dreading fielding questions form the two or three frequent question askers who often pick you up on the slightest thing you may have said wrong and then spend the next twenty minutes arguing or trying to rephrase their question so that it actually makes sense. I don;t know how some of the speakers have managed to answer some of the questions thrown at them because I didn't recognise the words they spoke as English, let alone a question.

The final presentation of the session was one of the shortest and most to the point presentations we have seen so far. It consisted of no more than about five slides with the conclusion that the paper was the worst thing that had ever been written, full of spelling and grammar mistakes and with references to Wikipedia which in the academic world is a big faux pas. I would be very interested to see what the report (which should be between six and twelve pages long) said if that was all she managed for a supposed fifteen minute presentation.

The afternoon was spent in the lab working on the spider again and somehow we actually got the blasted thing to work. It still needs a few tweaks to the robots.txt parser which doesn't work with folders at the moment - quite a large omission - and it still needs a gui but other than that it works. I managed to find enough time for an hours kip before tea and then driving home.

I'm still not overly familiar with the route that I took and ended up taking a couple of wrong turns but nothing too drastic. It probably wasn't the best idea driving without the SatNav in the dark on unfamiliar roads but I am trying to reduce my dependence on it, especially for regular journeys and places I really should know how to get to without it. It is even more important if the reports about the suns increase in activity will mean that we get GPS blackouts so if I can at least remember how to get home that that's a good start.