An Effin' F?

I've been given an "F" for my SE330 assignment. I'm not a happy bunny. "F" is basically the grade they give to people who have clearly made no effort and/or done nothing. I spent ages gathering information for that asignment and I can back up every single last statement with evidence from websites, books and lecture notes. I've emailed Fred Long to find out why I should get such an incredibly low mark when other people who've got the same comments should get "B"s and "C"s. Next step is to email Adrian and see what he thinks of the document.

Thing is, I don't think the document is "A"-grade material, probably not "B" and maybe not even "C" grade ... but I would have expected at the very least a pass mark. The report met all the criteria of the assignment, it covered a wide area of the field and, as I say, all statements are valid and can be backed up if necessary. The document was of the required length and meets the department's standards for essay-style etc. I've really no idea why I should fail.

Fucking stupid module. It was a complete waste of time anyway. Formal Methods are hardly used at all in the industry anyway and I certainly don't plan on ever using them again once out of this hell-hole. It's just so annoying to put a load of effort into a report and then have it thrown back at you with an "F" on it and comments criticising elements of the report that we had no real control over due to the form of the assignment.

Normal Blogging Shall Now Be Resumed

It's been an incredibly hectic two-and-a-half months. I've just not stopped really since Christmas. I've been writing assignments, desperately revising for exams, writing more assignments, driving to Newbury, driving back, writing assignments, driving to Newbury, driving back ... Last week was mental. From Thursday the 3rd until Friday the 11th I was working every waking hour of every day. My "days" were actually about 30 hours long, and my "nights" were blocks of about 4 hours of sleep.

When I finally finished the bastard assignment I went to sleep and slept like a log for 11 hours. I got up for 3 hours and was then exhausted and had to sleep for a further 4 hours. I then drove to Newbury, but by 6pm I couldn't keep my eyes open and had to go to bed again. I slept from 6pm until 7am. So I slept for about 27 hours out of 48, roughly half of each day. Plus I'm still not sleeping right. I fall asleep early evening and wake up early morning (3am today). I need to bring my body-clock forward by about 6 hours.

Gypsum

On the way to Newbury on Saturday morning I drove over a huge rock of gypsum in the middle of the road near the CO-OP on the Waunfawr stretch of road. My guess is that some drunk prick plucked it from someone's garden and deposited it in the middle of the road. By the time I saw it it was simply too late, and the front-right wheel went straight over it. The entire front of the car leapt into the air and came down with a smash. I stopped a little way down the road to survey the damage: The hubcap had come off but otherwise it looked okay, so I went back and removed the gypsum from the middle of the road, picked up the hubcap and carried on.

Coming back on Monday morning the car didn't feel right so I stopped and checked the wheel and was not at all surprised to find the wheel appeared to be a little lacking in air. It was 20 PSI instead of 30. I pumped it back up and it held for the rest of the journey, but I don't know how long it's going to stay up now: I suspect a buggered rim is going to be discovered in the near future. All thanks to some complete wanker who thought it'd be comical to leave a fucking rock in the middle of the road. For further kicks, why not try shooting at people? Or maybe throwing knives into crowds?

Anyway the point of this rambling, meandering blog is to say that now that my workload is approaching something like "normal", I should be able to start regular blogging once again.

Done, Dusted, Dead.

The CS312 project has been handed in! Last night was one mad-dash to get it all finished. I was furiously typing documentation, drawing diagrams, charts, sequence diagrams, taking screen-shots... Then with about 4 hours to go before the hand-in cut-off I realised I ought to be printing it while working on the other stuff as it was clearly going to take a while to print. It finished printing with about three quarters of an hour to spare, i.e. it took 3 hours and 15 minutes to finish printing the code, then I had to print off the documentation and start fitting it all together in the right order.

With 30 minutes or so to spare I burnt the CD while a screenshot I had forgotten to print was being churned out by the printer. The CD burnt far quicker than I expected, but I tested it and it looked fine, so into a plastic wallet it went. Then I quickly hole-punched the whole thing, which took a while as the hole-punch can't punch more than about 7 or 8 sheets at a time. I cannibalised an old folder, stuck all the paperwork in it, then legged it to the Computer Science building to hand it in with 15 minutes of the hand-in left.

Afterwards I joined the ranks of exhausted comrades outside the Llandinam concourse (easy access to the coffee machine, you see) and decided to treat myself to a coffee. Stuck 40p in it, pressed the button which I thought was for Moccocino and was presented with an empty cup. Fucking thieving machines. If you're not paying attention (as is often the case if you've been up for a week coding the assignment from hell) and press the very bottom button instead of the one above it, then it gives you an empty cup. Just an empty cup. Who the hell would want to pay 40p for a CUP?! I've demanded my money back, those cunts aren't taking my money off me.

Anyway, after the coffee and chat I crawled up the hill and into my bed where I slept until my alarm went off about five. Then I woke up at about 7, I must have fallen asleep again. I texted Liz to explain the situation and we decided it'd be best if I drove down on Saturday morning instead, so I shall be driving down at about 6am. After talking to Liz I went back to bed and slept until 11: A total of 11 hours deep sleep, and my god I needed it.

Black People Love Us

If you've never seen this site before, Black People Love Us, then get over there straight away. Excellently produced, incredibly funny and with a very serious message. Typically, as with all these kinds of websites that don't dish up their message to their audience in big flashing letters but instead require the tiniest bit of thought, the letters page features a number of morons screaming "OMG OMG OMG U RASIST BASTARDS!!!1! iM GUNNA FUK U UP SHIT HED".

Interestingly a number of the people who wrote in appear to have actually used some of the phrases on the website that indirectly imply discrimination. Whoops. But definitely a very clever website, there should be more sites like this :) Humerous approach to serious issues.

Backwards

You see what J2EE has reduced me to?

This Just In:

Lex is massively successful and has money pouring out of her ears.

Update:

Late last year She imported a russian dressage horse for her own personal use and She owns a big house in the country. She also has a team of minions and can speak four languages.

Just thought you'd all like to know.

Death or Insanity

The insanity has begun. I just implemented a class called "DepotLocal.java". I went to redeploy my bean and found that I'd already implemented another class known as "LocalDepot.java" which contained more or less the same contents.

Dying

I am currently of the opinion that I will be dead or insane by the end of this week. Death from poor nutrition, or possibly caffeine overdose, and insanity caused by J2EE/deploytool/PointBase.

Honestly, how can Sun expect anyone to take this technology seriously? It's slow; a memory hole; buggy; finickity; provides unhelpful error messages when it explodes in your face; it takes 11 steps just to recompile and redeploy changed code in order to test it (as opposed to, say, 2 steps in Perl); it's not possible to build and test each individual part of the system: building one part of the system requires building EVERYTHING in the system (or near enough at least); deploytool has the worst user interface of any application I have ever used, hiding things in tabs, drop-down menus, buttons which open new dialogues with yet more tabs and drop-downs, all contained in a tree structure which changes the appearance of the UI at each level; you'd need a farm of machines running the app-server if you wanted to use it for a low-traffic website. You'd need to conquer the entire world to use it for a high-traffic website.

The good news is that I finally got the car taxed this morning.

Time For a Complaint

I've been to the Post Office twice now, and also visited the Waunfawr post office. I've rang the DVLA more times than I can remember, I've even got to the stage where I can remember the options for their crap voice-menu system. I've rang the Post Office enquiry line, as well as the local Post Office phone number repeatedly... And I've finally found the information I need:

I have every last piece of documentation that I need in order to register my car, but the Post Office wrongly told me I could not register with them. Tomorrow morning I shall be taking my documents down there again, as well as a carefully written and somewhat angry letter of complaint. I'm going to have a huge phone bill thanks to those fuckwits. I've lost most of a day which should have been spent working on my CS312 assignment. They've made me SO angry.

Dear DVLA and The Post Office,

I would like to tax my vehicle please. I have a cheque for £110, as requested. I have a signed document that says that I own the car. I have my insurance details and I have a valid MOT certificate. Last year I forgot to send off one little bit of one form, but you tell me it's not a problem, so why the fuck won't you let me tax my fucking car?

Why is it when I ring you, you force me to listen to hundreds of automated menu messages? Then when I ask you where my local branch is, why do you put me through to a voice-recognition system which can not recognise a thing I say to it?

Why should I have to spend all of my fucking day ringing you? If you want my money so bad, why do you refuse to let me make the payment and be done with the whole thing? Is it just that you want to issue an automatic fine? Why won't you just let me talk to a human being? Why won't the Post Office accept my documents?

For god's sakes, please just give me a tax disc.

Matthew Lowe