Over the weekend my internet went down, which really isn’t much fun; however, it does help you get revision done! Really starting to crank up on my revision, so the site will get a bit of neglect. I did say I wont be posting every day any more, so I hope you got that.

I am having soo much fun drawing up little revision cards, really it’s almost as good as actually having fun…

I just happened to flick over to ‘Working Lunch’ — no I didn’t watch the entire programme — and this guy came up with some strange waste figures from the Government. Supposibly, in the UK we throw away a third of the apples we buy (as in uneaten apples!) In addition to this, we threw away 1.6 million bananas and 1.2 million oranges last year.

I am currently suffering from a nasty caffeine head-ache. I went home (after guzzling tons of tea, coffee, and coke to live through the evil last weeks of the term,) to find all the tea and coffee was caffeine free. Now I normally would have no problem with this, but after a ‘caffeine binge’ not touching the stuff will cause a nasty headache.

Trying to do an assessment with a banging head is not fun. Neither are the pains of three hours of football

WooOOOO! I now get to escape from Tesco! They even decided to pay me correctly for a change, just as I leave.

On the other hand, this means I have to get cracking down with revision, and two assignments… which won’t be fun. Aleast I’ll be able to watch Grand Slam Sunday at on the huge TV at Opal with no-one around, as everyone has gone home from University.

What I want to happen:

Arsenal to beat Chelsea

Liverpool to draw with Manchester United

Why? As a neutral it keeps the title race open and I’d rather have the flowing football of Arsenal get rewarded over Chelsea’s dire stuff. Especially when they have numptys like Ashley Cole in their squad. Secondly, a Liverpool draw gives Everton some hope in snatching 4th spot and disrupting the so called ‘big four’. With the money every side gets these days the extra money from the Champions League is not as huge a factor as it has been in the past (that money basically gave us a big 2, then a big 3, and finally a big 4.) Sides like Everton, Aston Villa, Manchester City, Tottenham and even Newcastle have a much greater potential to break into the Champions League, and break up the ‘big four’. I’ll be glad to see a much more open league, as long as the standards stay high.

However, what I expect to happen:

Chelsea to draw with Arsenal

Manchester United to beat Liverpool
This would all but end the league race, but weaken Liverpools grasp on the 4th spot. Shame as this year looked to have the most open title race in years.

The group project is nearing the deadline and the coding side of the work seems to be complete (bar the guaranteed major bug.) I’ll be pulling another all-nighter tomorrow to help finish off the testing and written work.

After numerous last minute revisions to the protocol and the server everything back working again! Loving it when someone recodes the server, client, or protocol then comes up to you and says: “By the way, your Gui is broke.” Really? It was working when I updated and went to bed >:( Perhaps that has happened too many times in the last 5 days for me to care anymore…

Since I am knacked, heres a lovely (Java ish related) comic from xkcd to keep you entertained:

Remember this blog does have a lighter side!

This is what the Spar on the University of Birmingham’s campus think a ‘large croissant’ is, and would like to charge us poor students 45p ($1) for:

Maybe for an insect that’s a large croissant… another example of rip-off Britain, or just rip-off campus. Everywhere on campus is really expensive; for example, a cruddy (pretty much stale) sandwich costs around £2 ($4) when you could go to subway for just £3 (or £1.99 for the sub of the day.) Sometimes I wonder why my credit card isn’t maxed out yet.

For reference, the milk carton next to the croissants is a 500ml carton (just under a pint,) for you Americans it’s just a tiny bit bigger than your ordinary can of Pepsi.

I’ve just found that my old AOL email account, from when I used AOL for dial-up internet, still works! Don’t point and laugh at the fact I had AOL internet, they were the first in the UK to offer a fixed monthly rate dial-up browsing, so I didn’t have to pay every minute for laggy Quake and hours to download a demo. Although, I did still block the phone line!

Anyway, my AOL email account states I have 806 new email, and a glorious 6 spam! My gmail account (my junk mail box that I use for all forums, sites, and anything that wants an email address,) is now up to 651 unread messages and 264 spam messages! So that’s around 1600 unread email that I’ve managed to collect. I am pretty sure you don’t want to see any titles though, you know what spams like!

I randomly found this picture yesterday and it really describes how things are going in the group project I am involved in.

You leave the discussions from the last day thinking “Everything is all sorted, and I know how we are going to implement things.” The next day the discussion revolves around the same task after someone suggests an alternate method, yet there was nothing wrong with the first method, in fact both methods are of equal merit. However the group discusses the same thing again and again, and I just want to get round to coding the damn thing.

I’ve ended up just writing the code myself, based on one of the numerous choices, screw discussing it further we have a deadline to meet! All that matters to me now is getting the input and the output working as they should; once the program is up and running then — and only then — should we worry about refining it with more efficient methods of doing components. For example in multi threading we could use manual locks, shifting synchronized methods into their own classes, volatile methods, and so on; they all do the same thing in different ways, lets just use one, or even go for a Taguchi methodology and try two, in a prototype and see how things go. I’d rather spend my time working on a few simple prototypes (that can be utilised for the final build) that highlight the problems than spending the same time (or even longer) discussing which is best…

This post is going on for too long, rant over…

Sometimes google just isn’t enough, sometimes we need to get a map out.

Click the picture for a full size… picture of course!

Or I’ll give you an asbo.

I’ve just installed some (supposedly) nasty anti-spam plugins, so I hope they work! Otherwise I’ll get a bunch of keyboard hoodies and script kiddies spamming me, oh noes!