It’s been a while…
Well, I’m not sure what it is, but something has been stealing my motivation to blog. 
Since it’s been a whole … six weeks since the last blog post, and since I’m on holidays now I thought I might as well.
Not a whole lot has happened over the past six weeks. It’s been a potent mix of uni, internets, and sleep. Uni has been fairly good, I’m not sure if this semester is quite as exciting as last semester since the whole uni environment isn’t new anymore, but it’s still not too bad. Here’s a brief description of how I’ve been finding this semester’s subjects:
Object Oriented Programming - It’s pretty good. I’m getting my head around the OOP paradigm, and starting to think of apps as a big collection of objects. We’re about to design and build an implementation of Robo Rally, a board game. It should be quite good. The only thing that annoys me about this subject is that it looks like our lecturer must have pissed off the scheduling gods pretty badly: the lectures are at 8.30am.
Internet Technologies - This is a bludge. There I said it. We’re doing HTML and CSS, which is very straightforward. I like the idea of having bludgy subjects every now and then, but this is ridiculous. We could be doing something useful, like some maths or something, but instead we’re learning about .. CSS.
Computer Systems - I like this subject. The internals of a computer are interesting to learn, even though at times it feels like we’re going through the concepts way too fast. Now we’re learning about assembler language and programming PIC microcontrollers. It’s fun, and interesting. Our lecturer is fairly eccentric, and often goes on random tangents, but it’s good as it makes it much more interesting to listen to than just a guy droning on about how an ALU works. The thing I’m mainly looking forward to is building software for the PIC microcontroller that I can use to control actual real-world things. I’m not exactly sure what I could wire up to one of these microcontrollers, but I’ll think of something.
Usability - Ehhh. It’s a subject consisting of mostly common-sense and jargon. It’s also combined with a new “learning style”: the spike. Basically, before each tutorial we have to have already prepared a report on … well … nobody exactly knows what the report has to be on. It’s a completely vague method of assessment. From the way I’ve interpreted it, it’s a report on what we have learnt in the past week, but another tutor says the questions are related to our case study. Our lecturer says it’s purpose is to “identify a knowledge gap.” Whatever happened to normal teaching styles*? Two clearly-defined assignments and an exam? Or a portfolio where our assessment criteria are clearly defined? Instead of constant, vague assessment, where every move you make in the tutorial is assessed as a binary value (quite literally, three marks, one for our “spike outcome” report, one for our “participation” in group discussions, and some other mark which I can’t quite name right now).
Well, overall, I don’t think i’m enjoying the second semester of PSD coursework quite as much as the first. However it might get a bit better towards the end of the year as things become more challenging. Usability won’t get any more interesting though.
Anyway, enough about uni, I’m on holidays right now. For this week I’ve got planned a whole lot of nothing much. A boxset of computer forensics books arrived from Amazon the other day, I’m looking forward to getting stuck into those. I’m also going to watch some more movies … recently I realised just how awesome HD content is. I downloaded the sample of a release of Office Space in 720p, and it was excellent. However, I really need a new machine to be able to play the video comfortably. (my notebook can sorta-ish, play HD. It’d be nice to have something with a hardware H.264 decoder though.)
That’s all for now, hopefully I’ll post again by the end of the month…. maybe …
–Ben
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