On top of things

The first week back to uni is always the best. You haven't got started into the heavy stuff yet, and (hopefully) you already have the background knowledge, so there's a sense of being on top of things that just doesn't come back until the first week of the next semester.

My classes this semester look mostly project based, so my exams'll be a breeze, but I might actually get quite stressed towards the end. The class I'd been looking forward to most (mechatronics) is entirely project based, as I had expected, but I hadn't anticipated the size of the teams. There are 11 guys on my team right now, making group meetings and organisation difficult. To make things worse, they made me project leader, they still seem to think I'm one of the 'smart' guys, I really don't know why. I've got some of the (actual) smart guys who're going to lend a hand in the micro-managing, and some strong characters I can trust to work hard, which should make up for those who aren't going to pull their weight. Overall I'm optimistic (though when am I not?).

The project is your average autonomous navigation, object sorting robot, representing some sort of automated warehouse system presumably. I appealed against a project this boring, trying to convince the class to do flying robots instead, but was proven, by a show of hands, to be in the (albeit enthusiastic) minority. Hey, at least it's not line following.

The other classes have many smaller groups and projects, so they'll get tougher as time goes by, and aren't something to worry about now. It's still the first week after all, I'm on top of things, remember?

Not quite, as the case turns out... one thing that I have been kicking myself about has been my laptop. Last Sunday I was so sick of it crashing I decided it needed to be professionally fixed. Amazingly, the toshiba repair shop for the whole of South Australia is on my street, so I handed it in Monday morning. They seemed to think, by my description, that it was probably a hardware problem, so it should be covered under warranty. The reason I'm kicking myself is that I sat playing computer games through the whole holiday period on the laptop I bought for university purposes, then handed it in for repairs the day uni started, when I might actually need it. It's been a week now, and I'm not sure they've even had it turned on long enough for it to crash on them, as they keep phoning me up (when I'm in lectures) and asking if I could be more specific about the problem.

The loss of my fancy laptop didn't stop me playing games though, I spent my entire weekend playing Chrono Trigger on a SNEZ emulator on my old laptop. Note to self: get out more. Ach it was rainy anyway, in fact there was thunder that shook the windows (well I am in a 'land down under'), I guess the wet season's not over yet.