Firstly, 10 points to whoever can pick what song the title of this post is referencing.

Anyway, it’s been quite a while since my last post. Actually, quite is quite an understatement. It’s been about six weeks since the last post. This is primarily because of general laziness: I haven’t been arsed sitting down and writing a big long piece about how my life is going. Until now!

The past six weeks have been pretty good. I’m on holidays from uni. Why we have such long holidays, I’m still not sure, but it’s definitely been fun. Quite uneventful, but good nonetheless. Especially since I’m home, with access to a wood-fired heater and WiFi. It’s also great to be back on my home DSL connection again, considering the cost of internet access at the Swinburne Residences.

I got my results for the first semester a few weeks into my holidays. It was all good, all High Distinctions, so I can’t really complain. I’m surprised that I got a HD for Enterprise Technologies and Architectures though, considering how much crap there was on the exam. For instance, there was a question about UML which I think was a bit out of the scope (we weren’t told that we should be able to draw UML diagrams), but I managed to do it nonetheless. All of the other exams were quite good… I especially liked the bit on the Computer Logic Essentials where it was nearly an exact copy of the practice exam we were given (though with the numbers changed).

Since then, I’ve been quietly relaxing at home, chilling out, maxing, relaxing, all cool… very cool actually. It’s definitely one of the coldest winters I’ve experienced. Brrrrgh. There is so much talk about global warming and how the world is heating up, but all that has been completely contradicted this winter. I’ve been spending the time trying out C# (since we need to use C# or Java for our Object Oriented Programming class), working on a few pet projects (for example: I’ve now acquired most of the hardware to build a totally sweet jukebox, the problem is finding decent software is difficult), and tending to my British Comedy collection. I recently acquired Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and Snuff Box on DVD. Both are excellently funny comedies. I’m also going to try and get Look Around You, because Peter Serafinowicz is a really funny guy. Unfortunately The Peter Serafinowicz Show isn’t on DVD, because it is a pretty funny show. He is a master of impersonation and hilarious spoof advertisments. There are copies of his shows on torrent sites, but you have to hunt around a bit to find them. A hint for finding the right torrent: most people can’t spell his last name, so they just use the initial. And on an unrelated note, there’s a good site for hunting ISOs somewhere on the internet.

Interesting sidenote: There are actually two completely different copies of the Snuff Box DVD circulating. The Region 2 UK release (white cover) has the special features: commentaries on three episodes, a behind the scenes documentary, the soundtrack.. and also all of the episodes are presented in anamorphic widescreen for maximum viewing pleasure. It is one disc. The Region 4 Australian release (blue cover, by Force Entertainment) is a crappily-thrown-together DVD with all of the episodes as letterboxed 4:3, with no special features at all. It is two discs, because the people at Force Entertainment obviously don’t know how to put a DVD together properly, and stored two copies of each episode to make the “Play All” feature work, hence wasting precious space. I don’t know how Force Entertainment could have fudged up a DVD release like this, but they have. I don’t like being screwed over when I actually do decide to purchase DVDs. If you’ve ordered the Region 4 release, send it back and go to Amazon UK and get the Region 2 release. It’s so much better.

Anyway, uni resumes in two weeks time. In the second semester of PSD we have Object Oriented Programming (with Andrew Cain, who we had for APS last semester), Computer Systems, Internet Technologies and Usability. OOP and Computer Systems should be really interesting (apparently there’s assembler in Computer Systems, hence I’m looking forward to it :D). Usability should be good as well, because it’s good to know how to develop good interfaces. There’s nothing more frustrating than a great product with a terrible UI… Hopefully I should be able to learn a bit about how to design straight-forward interfaces for the Everyman. It should be fun.

–Ben

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 12:52 am 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.