A lot has happened in this time, I’ve finished my exams. Most of which went relatively well, barring of course the Grid Computing exam which was always going to be a wildcard. I’m now officially finished University as well after handing in my research dissertation last Monday. All-in-all it went well, however running out of time towards the end, my personal calling card, did mean that the report tends to tapper off in quality towards the final sections – but at least it’s finished.

Since finishing I’ve been looking after the pub at home as my parents were on holiday and returned yesterday. Other than that I’ve been sitting here at my computer playing World of Warcraft a hell of a lot, watching the majority of the Friends seasons on DVD and over the past two days watching Supernatural season one on DVD as well.

After only a week and a half of freedom from University I’m starting to feel lost as there’s no paticular direction to my life just now. I’m hoping to start a PhD next year but that all depends upon a funding grant from the EPSRC, so I’m currently caught in limbo between either finding a real job or a filler one until I hear for sure about the funding.

Procrastinating isn’t half as fun as it is when you’re meant to be doing something else. Sitting playing WoW doesn’t appeal as much now as it did when I had work which I was supposed to be doing at the time. Doing things you do to “take a break” from something doesn’t appeal when the thing you’re doing is actually the thing you’re taking a break from [some punctuation was harmed in the making of this sentance].

Other than playing world of warcraft and starting to keep a World of Warcraft blog to track your progress in the game (killer of a good few hours that could’ve been used for work), watching DVDs and playing cards I’ve not done anything. It sounds great but not doing anything when there’s nothing to do is pretty damn boring.

Other than doing nothing I’ve also managed to break my new XDA Exec which is currently en-route to O2 who will be replacing it with a new unit. Somehow whilst trying to flash the new WM5 version onto the device it seems to have deleted the original version, as expected, but not written the new version, not as expected. This means that when I did a hard reset on the device to update the OS there was nothing there to install and the device would just hang at an O2 splash screen. After some searching on the web and trying some wierd fixes nothing worked so it was on to O2 who asked me to send the device to them.

There’s nothing much left to add really, suppose I’d best start looking for a job to fill in the time between watching DVDs, playing World of Warcraft and sleeping; but I’ll get around to that later as it’s Friday night and I can hear a game of cards a-calling me from the pub…
- Chris

I am currently running a questionnaire into how people organise and browse their music collections in order to investigate browsing techniques for browsing large collections (in this case of music) from a sonified and gesture controlled interface. The study will look at the applicability of this type of interface for browsing large collections and attempt to find a suitable browsing method for doing so.

I would kindly ask anyone reading this to fill in a relatively short music questionnaire about how you browse and organise your music collections. It doesn’t matter if your collection is large or small, digital or CDs, all input is welcomed.

If you would take the time to fill in the questionnaire I would be very grateful.
- Chris

I’ve just had nothing worth saying… until now!

It’s that time of the year for an obligitory exams-are-coming post, here it is.

I have in total, 8 exams this year, 1 less than the grand total last year although starting 9 days earlier.

Before that starts I’ve got to hand in my proposal for my project, it’s nearly done and has to be handed in on Tuesday 2nd May. Once that’s out of the way it’s onto exams, the line up is as follows:

• Wed 3rd May: Enterprise Computing (M) – Business / Computing type course
• Mon 8th May: Information Retrieval (M) – Search engines, retrieval functions
• Tue 9th May: Professoinal Skills (M) – PI for dummies
• Wed 10th May: Grid Computing (M) – DAS and some
• Fri 12th May: Compilers 4 – Writing machine code
• Thur 18th May: Network Communication Technology 4 – Cables and RFCs
• Tue 23rd May: Advanced Research Readings in Computing Science (Software Engineering) – Readings in the area of Web Engineering
• Thur 25th May: Types and Programming Languages (M) – Functional language implementations

So it looks like a fun month ahead for me then!
- Chris