One thing after another

Been busy recently, seems like whenever I finish something there's something else on the immediate horizon, I've not had more than an afternoon off in weeks. Of course this is university, so some people would argue that it's all holiday until just before the exams, but the uni's actually organised things very well, the tutorial "quiz" tests and assignments seem to have improved 'fundamental' understanding through the year, so I'm actually pretty confident about the finals (which are in a week btw).

The News: has to include my new laptop, all shiny and new and sleek and full of potential, etc. [this section might be a bit technically heavy for some people]. It's a Toshiba Satellite A500 if you're interested (not that you would be, it's a laptop, it does computery stuff). It has an aerial input which is weird, not had a chance to test that yet, or the sim card slot behind the battery (probably requires some sort of subscription), and it picks up fingerprints as if everybody in the world has sticky children's hands. It also appears to be possessed by the vengeful spirit of Shodan (system shock), in that the sound drivers occasionally slow down music/podcasts for a couple of seconds, elongating the vowels in a spookily familiar manner. I also get a few (I'm assuming) driver related blue-screens and some "your display driver has crashed and has recovered" messages, despite my drivers being fully up to date. It actually happened halfway through writing this, and I've had to re-write it. I blame windows 7 (64bit), I'm using ubuntu to write the rest of this, and I'll continue using it for a while, just to make sure it's not a hardware fault.

Anyway it's nice to be able to do two things at once. Oh and the processor's strong enough to do fancy motion interpolation, which I've been itching to try out. Basically that means videos have their frame-rate doubled, the extra frames a composite of their surroundings. At first it looked strange and sped up, but after a while I got used to it, and occasionally I seem to see things in a whole new light. Back watching Firefly (I know, I know, AGAIN), the sudden sweeps of the camera feel a lot more like you're there actually turning your head to watch things, and action sequences are oh so shiny.

OTHER than the laptop, it's been rainy, and cold at night/hot in the day. I have to bring a hoody to uni with me, but keep taking it off during the day, only needing it at night. It's definitely autumn, I've taken autumnal pictures of red and gold trees and piles of crisp brown leaves. I was going to set my camera on a timer to catch myself throwing leaves about, but people really started staring at me, so I had to abandon it.

The trains have stopped, so I have to take the bus to Uni each day, which takes ages, and shakes so it's difficult to read, and my laptop keeps going into 'hard drive protection mode' thinking it's being dropped constantly. Oh and at night there's only one every hour, and I usually miss it, so sometimes it takes me almost 3 hours to get home, which is a pain.

University is tough at the moment. There was a Systems assignment due last Monday, then the big dynamics project was due Friday, and that was so hard! (dynamic modelling of a separately excited d.c. motor). My group spent days, many days (and full days at that, 10am-9pm) working on it, working really hard and not producing anything. You can imagine how frustrating it feels to have worked all day and got nowhere, each day we tried, we needn't have bothered. We weren't alone either, some of the 'smart' guys from the class just gave up on what we were supposed to do and made a  model of a much simpler motor. We couldn't even manage to copy them, try as we might. At one point I took all the equations we had, and just wrote them into a box in LabVIEW, as if it would know what to do with them (it didn't). Thursday evening we were still searching Google and trawling through help files. I went home and sat in bed staring at LabVIEW. Apparently the other guys lost sleep over what we could possibly manage in one day, to get us even a basic pass mark.

I don't remember falling asleep, but when I woke up my laptop was on my desk (I don't remember putting it there), and had powered down on its own. When I powered it back up, it had a working model on the screen. I must admit to dancing around the room at that point. I have no idea what happened, I suppose I had probably been messing about with LabVIEW and couldn't see that I had a working model when it was staring me in my sleep-deprived face, but I think that magical software pixies came in the night and did it for me. The rest of the day was spent in glorious triumph, playing with the model, and lauding over the so called 'smart' guys with their pitiful half-model (which we had been desperately trying to copy only the day before). It was kinda surreal, felt brilliant. I think we'll get a good mark.

Anyway that's finished with now, and I've just completed my final Engineering Research Project Assignment due in a couple of hours. It looks good. Now I've just got a final VIP project due in a week (along with the exams), that I'm yet to start... 

It'll be fine...

I'm going to have to work HARD, but it'll all be fine.