the corner office

First, a big thanks to all of you for your congratulations on my degree and for your comments regarding that Other Thing - I sincerely appreciate it. I've spent the weekend should-I-shouldn't-I-ing about whether to say more about my side of the "two sides to every story" bit - but every time I come to the same conclusion I drew before: it's just not worth it. The saga won't make a difference to the lives of most people reading this anyway, and while I'm not happy that it's been damaging to me, I'm quite comfortable about being able to set the record straight with people to whom it might matter in future.

With that said, myself and the missus (who's been more supportive and understanding than I could ever have asked for) are itching to get on with our lives, and in real "hey, let's get on our with our lives" fashion, we went through to UNISA today and got ourselves registered for our 2005 courses. It's the first time we've been to register in December (we've always gone through in January), and jeez, what a difference. Usually the Pretoria campus is a madhouse at registration time, but a week before Christmas, it was a breeze.

I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but here, a full-time degree takes 3 years, you normally take another year to convert that to an Honours degree, (and thence to Masters and PhD's, like the rest of the world). A part-time Honours course is expected to take 2 years or more, but I don't want to drag it out any longer than necessary. I had a chat with one of the Com Sci professors this morning, and he suggested that trying to balance work (which is a looming reality) and Honours in one year might be "psychologically trying." I thought that was an interesting way of putting it. Well, if I'm a crackhead or a tramp on the Durban beachfront in a year's time, you'll know why.

Anyway, one year it is for me. I've signed up for a full 10 modules in 2005. If I don't cope, I can always cancel a few subjects and stretch it out over two years. I've got an interesting spread of subjects - apart from a compulsory Research in Computing credit (I'll skip the inevitable Google joke), I'm carrying on with Formal Logic, and AI (because I'm a sucker for punishment), I'm doing a few obscurities like Theory of Program Languages and Formal Program Verification, and then cool stuff like Operating Systems, Advanced Database Theory, Networking, Information Security, and Data Structures and Algorithms.

I'm pretty stoked. It looks like a lot of interesting work. "A lot" being the operative words. Because it's postgrad, exams will only be in January 2006, so I've got a full year to put into it. Thankfully!