As I’ve said time and time again, blogging is a great way of procrastinating. What better time to blog than the part of the semester when assignment seem to pile up like … piles … of assignments ….The whole uni thing is working out pretty well. OOP is coming along nicely… my RoboRally game works, and I’m starting a user interface for it now. If all goes to plan, I’ll soon have a nice isometric view of my game, which is over 9000 times better than the command-line interface that I have at the moment.Computer Systems is good. I’m not exactly sure why I’m the only guy who really seems to like it, but meh. Assembler is fun! And rewarding! Hopefully I’ll write some more stuff, all I’ve really written so far is a low-pass filter and a program to multiply and divide numbers. This doesn’t sound like much, but then you need to consider that PIC microcontrollers don’t even have a multiply function… it’s really low-level stuff. I ordered a free sample of the PIC microcontroller we’re using from Microchip (yeah, they have free samples!), and hopefully I’ll come up with something to put it into. The only problem is before I do that, I’ll need to get or build the hardware to program it, but after briefly looking at the schematics, it looks fairly straightforward.We’re also going into the Usability testing lab this week to do our usability testing. This could be good, but it’s probably more likely going to be a disaster. Why? Not just because I’m a pessimist who assumes the worst will happen during anything of great importance (this is 10% of our mark). I don’t think it’s going to go well mainly because last time I was at the usability lab, hardly anything worked. We couldn’t log onto the antiquated machines in the lab, and our testing Tablet PC wouldn’t connect to the wireless (not too much of a surprised: SwinWifi doesn’t quite have the coverage it should). Meh, hopefully it will work. I’ve put together a prototype in Flash which looks quite nice… who knows, it might even turn out to be easy for our participants to use. In Internet systems we’re still doing pointless, easy stuff. That is all.That pretty much sums up uni … it’s all fairly good. The exam period is coming up though, so that won’t be fun. Due to some kind of brain fart, it appears that all of the Swinburne exams are going to be held at the Caufield Racecourse. They said this is because they had recently demolished the old SE building, and hence didn’t have the space to run all of the exams. However, the SE building was decommissioned at the start of the year, so they must have had enough space at the end of the first semester. Well, actually, they didn’t quite, a few of the exams were held in Camberwell. But still, it seems a bit silly.Well, that pretty much sums up how I’ve been going for the past month or so. In a bit I’m going to write another about an issue of great importance to Australian internet users, which is so important that it deserves its own post .. stay tuned. –Ben

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