Well, I’m in Swinburne now. I moved into my dorm room yesterday. It’s bigger than I expected, though it’s still humbly small. The desk is a nice size, with the back of it being a corkboard for pinning stuff. The pins were provided! Also there’s a bookshelf, but it didn’t quite seem big enough so I went to IKEA and bought a BILLY shelving unit, nearly exactly the same one I have in my room at home.

The bed is alright, not great but alright. Since it’s so bloody hot here in Melbourne right now I haven’t had a chance to try out the heating. However it’s apparently pretty good since it’s a radiator, so it supposedly heats the room quite well.

Internet access: here’s where I’m majorly pissed off. I heard rumours that it was 7c/MB, an outrageously high price especially for someone like me, the YouTube Enthusiast. Upon getting here, my local Residential Advisor told me that it went down to 5c/MB. This is still pretty bad. You get 2GB of credit (basically $100 worth) by default. The internet cost balance system is the StarNet Data Accounting System. To log onto the system, you either go to 192.168.1.1 and type in your username and PIN, or you download their flaky connector software which does that for you.

Extreme Tangent: The reason why this software sucks is because it’s not very efficient at using what is available to it. Firstly, if I log onto the shared connection via the web interface, and then launch the SDALogon.exe app, it doesn’t pick up on the fact that I’ve already logged in. If I put in my credentials, it crashes saying "user already logged in." This software should be smart enough to maybe realise I’m already connected. It would probably be only a few lines of code to do this. The other WTF is the fact that the tray icon is this: . What the hell is that? It’s two computers joined to another bigger computer. This icon is obviously designed for display at a much larger size, as it scales horribly. It looks like the coder just went through the VB sample icon set and picked one. It’s useless. Plus, that icon is on the screen all most of the time. If the coder had thought this through, he would have made it dynamically generate a bitmap which showed how much credit was remaining, in a similar fashion to the Internode usage meter: . Note how much more useful that is than , as it actually shows you some information. The only remote kudos I can give to the developer of this shitty program is the fact that he managed to port it to both Win32 and Linux. But not the Mac. You’d think if you were porting something you would probably port to the Mac before you would Linux, considering more people use Macs than Linux.

There is also a wireless network available. I happen to be on the side of the building that will pick up the SwinNet network. It’s basically the same wireless that is on campus. I can connect to that, and get free internet. However, this freedom comes at a cost: no MSN, no torrents, no Skype. Basically it makes it useless except for Google Reader, blogging, Wikipedia, and YouTube. Therefore it’s actually pretty good.

Anyhow, the condition of my room was … not all that good. The carpet was quite dirty, and there’s a big mark where somebody has obviously dropped an iron. But about 10 minutes after we started moving stuff in, the carpet cleaner guy came in and dry-cleaned it. The end result was that a lot of the marks were gone, but the burn mark is still there.

We get breakfast every day, in the form of a buffet with toast and cereal. Nothing too fancy, but at least there’s free orange juice. This is a good thing.

There’s a rear-projection TV with Foxtel on some levels, not mine. D’oh. Oh well, I’ve got a … meeting room.

With everything being considered, on a scale of 1/5, I’ll give Swinburne Residences a Meh.5. But it will do me for this year. All I need to get for it is some posters and stuff, and it should be all good. I also need to get a digital piano. Otherwise my 10 years of piano training will go to waste. I don’t really want that to happen.

Anyhow, as soon as this post is done, I’m going to write up about today’s events: today quite a few people from the Professional Software Development course got together for The Ama-SWIN Race, basically an overly-elaborate-yet-fun orientation activity. More on that in the next post.

–Ben

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 11:43 pm and is filed under School. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.