the corner office

Hrmph. UNISA rolled out a new service called 'MyLife' which is advertised as a student email address for life, but is in effect just a front-end for Microsoft Live. Adding insult to injury, UNISA no longer allows you to use any other email address for correspondence.

If it were voluntary then I'd understand that MS are providing a service that UNISA needs, no doubt with all sorts of cushy terms and incentives, but hey, that's the way things go and good luck to those who want to use it. But forcing students to use this address is a different story. I can't think of any way in which this is in students' best interests. I can jump through hoops to redirect or forward the email, but I shouldn't have to. I should be able to have my UNISA correspondence mailed to me at an address of my choosing.

Shame on you, UNISA.

Speaking of holidays being over, I've started studying again. This week also saw UNISA finally approve and process my registration for a BCom Honours in Financial Modelling. Phew.

When I finished my BSc Honours last year, I decided to take a break from studying and said 'maybe next year'. After some thinking and digging around, and having formulated a vague plan of where I'd like to be in a few years' time careerwise, I decided that studying financial modelling would press a few more buttons than a vanilla computer science Masters would.

Anyhow... UNISA took over a month to sort out my registration, so I'm now a few weeks away from the first assignment dates, and I'm just getting the textbooks and starting up. Combine that with my rusty maths and statistics and I am, to use a colloquialism, nipping myself. It's going to be a heavy year.

Got my letter in the post this week, and when the University gets around to dishing out the little certificates, I'll be the proud holder of a BSc Honours degree in Computer Science, with distinction. Jolly good of them!

Part of me would love to study further, but UNISA's suggested Masters topics and research specialties weren't too interesting to me, and and studying through a UK university would just be too damned expensive. That, and with this being only the fourth year since I left high school in 1990 that I haven't been studying something or the other, I'm enjoying the freedom too much. Maybe next year ;-)

London again, bright lights, big city. I really do like the place. The throng of people is incredible, but my mind always wanders back to how hectic the sewerage systems must be to support that many people in one place.

I feel like a country bumpkin walking around, I'm sure people can tell I'm not a local. It's probably because I'm constantly staring up at buildings and gawking at interesting things. What really piqued my interest this time were the basement flats in Bayswater and Kensington. They must have a really awesome urban jungle vibe, and a little more affordable than the 5-storey terrace houses above them, but living below street level in a city with a real risk of flooding is perhaps a little too adventurous for me. Even out here in the country, the Thames Valley becomes more of a Thames Marsh every time there's a heavy stretch of rain. I'm all for living on high ground, myself.

At least exams are over, for this year. Given the chaos of moving last year I decided to cancel two subjects, so I have another year of studying ahead, but with only two subjects it shouldn't be too much of a stretch. The only frustrating thing is that a postgrad 'Honours' degree by SA standards doesn't exactly map to the UK concept of 'Honours' so I'm working towards a qualification that doesn't seem to mean much to anyone here. I'm so close to finishing though, that I'd be crazy not to see it through.

What I do know is that I'm guilt-free and unburdened for the next month or two. Yippee!

Phew. No more late nights for a while... my Honours Project module is DONE. It's late, so I hope they still accept it. It started out being quite exciting and ended up being more character-building than anything else. I chose to do a Linear Programming project, which was meant to be 25% theory and 75% programming - just up my alley. The theory bit turned out to be a bloomin' nightmare, especially for someone who hadn't done any real maths for over 5 years. Then, late in December, as I was putting the final bits together, I realised that my proposed solution, which had been through a draft review, the lot, had some flawed logic. So I had to ditch a chunk of diligently tested 'engine' and re-do things using a different algorithm. As I said, character building.

On the plus side, the programming was fun. I started out building the back-end stuff using Eclipse's CDT on Linux. I'd hoped to write the app in Linux, but left it too late to get the OK from my lecturer, so decided to just do it on Windows. At first I thought wrapping my head around MFC would be fun, even though MS seems intent on shoo-shooing VC++ developers to Windows Forms, but soon came to the realisation that MFC ain't just some Swing without the garbage collection. When I couldn't find a decent built-in grid component, I knew it was time to re-evaluate my GUI toolkit choice, stat. I settled on wxWidgets, which I've grown rather partial to. It's small, simple, and well-documented. Lots of open-source apps don't play nice with VC++, but it worked like a charm.

Now, sleep.

Academic season back in full swing, and the first round of assignments almost done. I just have one project bulls^Wwaffle^Wproposal left to write, and then I can breathe freely for a bit.

The project I'm doing is maths-related, which might come back to bite me in the butt, but it involves lots of programming, which is why I chose it. The only problem is that I don't know too much about what I'm 'sposed to be doing yet... after a looong stretch of radio silence and a series of unanswered emails I finally got hold of my project leader on the phone, to find out what was going on. "Hey! Wassup!" says I (diplomatically, of course). "Oh," says the lecturer, "I've been away at workshops, I'm sorry. I'm a bit behind, I have 1,200 unread emails in my Inbox."

I don't know what the appropriate response is to that. I'm not renowned for staying on top of my correspondence, but someone who's let 1,200 emails pile up and just blithely admits to it... that's a bit untidy. Kinda shakes the foundations of modern society, if you know what I mean.

Oh, what a joy it is to be prepared for an exam, and to get an exam set for those who're prepared. Went pretty well. If the curve is kind to me, it'll be a decent mark.

Next paper is in over 2 weeks' time, so I'm temporarily free.

Research for Computer Science today, and pfff yawn. Wish I could say that about the rest of the exams coming up!

I'm glad the subject is out of the way, although it did serve its purpose, I guess. It's left me doing some thinking about whether I'd like to study beyond this Honours degree one day... still not sure what the answer to that is. The idea of studying further really appeals to me, but there's another part of me that really just wants to not have studies weighing over my head all the time.

Wrote Distributed Operating Systems today. Not the best, not the worst. To say that there was a mountain of work to cover was an understatement. "Tanenbaum textbook," - "ah", says the peanut gallery, "say no more."

Fascinating stuff, but a lot of work to get through. My study notes for the subject weighed in pretty close to 100 pages, and they are a model of terseness. The purpose of study notes is to get the facts and concepts into one's head, and on a purely utilitarian level, that's all they're there for. Nonetheless, I feel myself weighed down with a sense of waste, of futility. It's silly, but it's thoroughly soul-destroying seeing that much effort and paper being banged into a file, never to be touched or read again (unless I have to repeat the subject, which hopefully won't be the case.) Sure, the notes will sit on my bookshelf for a while, and then one day I'll have to face up to the fact that they're just taking up space and throw them away.

I still have some study notes from my BComm degree, and they're pushing 15 years old, now.

Advanced Networking. Not a bad paper, but looong. It was an open-book exam, which as always, was a blessing and a curse. It was nice not having to memorise the minutae of various network protocols, but the flipside was that the paper was just that much tougher and longer to compensate.

I have to say that our textbook, Douglas E. Comer's Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol I was an excellent textbook. Concise and clear, but meaty enough to not feel like yet another kiddie's introduction to the subject. Unfortunately, after one of 2004's most famous Bushisms, Comer's continuous reference to the heretofore perfectly-valid term 'internets' is perhaps going to suffer rather severely from Gresham's Law in the years to come.