Oh God

I can't believe what just happened. I was talking to someone on MSN about the assignment we are working on. The assignment description was sitting on the desk under a profit and loss projection, and I wanted to check something on it. So, and this is so bad I can't believe I am telling everyone, I tried to use Alt+Tab to "switch" to it. As in I pressed Alt+Tab and expected the assignment to magically appear on top of the profit and loss projection.

I'm finally losing my mind ...

Results

The results from the Semester 1 exams have been released. Didn't get ludicrously high marks, which would have been nice, but didn't do abismally either:

I was expecting Multimedia Systems to be my best mark, then Graphics, then Formal Methods. Funny how you can be completely wrong about these things. It was barely a pass on Multimedia Systems. Mind you, I was having the week from hell at the time, and when I was in the exam my mind wasn't on the paper. I just wanted the hell out of that place, and left quite early.

Formal Methods I am pleased to see I have attained a reasonable mark for. This means the awful mark I got on my assignment won't be so much of a problem, but that's not going to stop me challenging it. And then finally, Computer Graphics. What can I say? It was a nasty exam so I'm glad to have walked away with a respectable mark.

The plan now is to let my major project lift my marks up, and to score as high as possible in all of the coursework modules. The final two exams should be easy to revise for as I will have weeks in which to revise for only 2 exams. Speaking of coursework, I have to get on with my current piece as it has to be handed in on Friday. I'm all-nightering again to get it done in time. Fun fun fun.

HOT

I've just eaten the single hottest Korma I have ever tasted. I got a Patak's Korma sauce from the CO-OP because it's great to have these things when you can't be bothered to actually cook. Thing is, I was in such a rush (I was ravenous when I got in) that I followed the guidelines on the back without stopping to think. I put one fifth of the jar in and cooked it.

I'm now thinking I should have read the instructions more carefully. Having checked them, it turns out that the guidline "one fifth of the jar" is for a recipe that serves two people and that also contains cream. D'oh. Nice though!

*fire breath*

Do You Remember Knightmare?

I was on the doyouremember.co.uk website the other day, and I noticed they didn't list Knightmare in their 80s/90s TV section. I am proud to announce that I changed that :)

Gah

Managed to get sweet-fa done lately. The car is going into the garage tomorrow so the mechanic can test-drive it, as I'm 99% sure it's time for that new clutch that I've been avoiding all this time. All I needed was another 4 months from it and then it wouldn't have been a problem, but it had to die now. Mind you that's quite a pessimistic way of looking at it. I should look at the positive side: It has been on its way out for over 2 years now, and the car has done something like 20,000 miles over the past year alone.

Plus, on the bright side, it'll be nice to drive a car that doesn't go "chatatatatatatatatatata" when it's in neutral. And the whole being-able-to-change-gear thing is a bonus (at the moment I have to wrench it out of first gear). That, and stopping the "scrreeeeeeeeeee" noise when I move away... and the juddering on the gear-stick when the revs are low.

The good news is I have been doing some work for the Open Learning Unit again, so I'll have some cash to pay for the new clutch. The bad news is that I was hoping to put that money toward the ever increasing sum of rent I have not paid. The good news is, I may be able to get a bit more work with the OLU after I have done this lot.

Speaking of which, it's been great to go back to the OLU. It's been great seeing everyone again, and it's great to be doing a job too. It's becoming more and more apparent as this year progresses that I really don't enjoy being a student. I just prefer working. Sure, being in a 9-5 job has its down-sides too, but it's nice to be out of the house and it's nice to be part of a team. Plus the enforced hours mean I actually sleep properly.

Which brings me onto my final point: I really should get some sleep.

Fashion

There's some fashion feature thing on the radio at the moment. It amazes me that people swallow this crap. They have some woman saying "wear this", "wear that", "don't wear those". She is dictating to the gullible sheep, telling them what they should and should not do. A moment ago she was telling everyone which charity wrist-bands are fashionable and which are not. I kid you not. It makes me sick. Imagine going on the radio and saying "Feed the children is really hot right now, but Marie Curie isn't". That's basically what they're saying.

Maybe they should start a "Simon says" section on the radio where they tell people to punch themselves in the stomach, then poke themselves in the eye?

Exploding CO2?

There was something on the radio news a moment ago which said that a carbon dioxide tanker travelling on the M6 crashed. The Police cleared the area because the carbon dioxide began leaking and the tanker was on fire, they were scared the carbon dioxide would explode.

Errrrrrrrr.....

GCSE Chemistry, anyone?

Weird Bug

Just found a weird bug in the Gecko rendering engine. I had a comment in some HTML which looked like

<!-- reason for commenting a load of HTML

--matt

commented html -->

Yet the commented HTML still displayed. I couldn't work it out, until I did a "view source" from within the browser itself and found that everything before --matt was green (to show it is a comment) and everything after was marked as normal HTML. --matt and --> have one thing in common: the "--" bit. Sure enough, changing "--matt" to "- - matt" fixed the problem. It seems it interprets "--X" (where X represents any character) as an "end of comments" tag.

UPDATE: This isn't a bug, it's the correct behaviour. However it's fuckin' weird behaviour. See the HTML spec

Dissertation

2,300 words written so far. Only another 7,700 before I reach the minimum word-count... However, the point is I'm well ahead of schedule on it at the moment. Yay me. Now I suppose I'd better write my CS380 business plan assignment.

Little Progress

The "F" still stands. The lecturer who marked my assignment replied to my email in which I asked why I got such a low mark and described my reasons for disagreeing with the mark. The reply was pretty much exactly the same as his original email. I felt as though he didn't even bother to read or consider what I had written. I've spoken to my tutor about the matter and he said that, although he is no expert on the subject matter, he could find nothing in my material that he disagreed with and thought that the awarded mark was "at best very harsh".

So what next? Well, we could just wait and see if it gets moderated. But that's not a good idea as only 10 or so items from each module are checked and if they appear to have been marked harshly then all items from that module will be moderated. A better solution, and the one my tutor proposed, is to hand the assignment directly to the moderator and say "the student that wrote this disputes the awarded grade". Note that the grade isn't mentioned, nor is my name. All the moderator sees is what I wrote. The moderator marks it, gives it a grade, and then we simply compare that grade to the original. If they wildly differ then I have a case. If I get another "F" then I'm boned. However, I'm reasonably confident that I will get a much better grade second time around.

As for my dissertation things are going slowly, but I hope to pick up the pace this weekend. I've borrowed 2 dissertations from the department. One from last year which was about a content management system for the web, and also Surfr's. I've got a copy of Burt's dissertation which has been sitting on my hard drive waiting to be read since last year, and I also got a dissertation off someone on #llamasoft. Two of those 4 got a 1st, so they should provide some good reading.

So now I just have to write the damn thing ...