Saturday didn’t involve anything amazing, if it did then it wasn’t so amazing that I remembered it. Sunday involved a very good talk in the morning about Prayer, I’m going to see if I can get a digital copy of it somehow (though I don’t think I will be able to sadly). As per usual on Sunday we went to the Thatched. I’ve decided that to boost my confidence with strangers, I will talk to them more often. At the Thatched I noticed on a lectern type thing they have at the door with a perspex screen over a table plan they had not only marked the tables taken, but also some stickmen. I asked what the stickmen were for and was told they didn’t mean anything. To Hannah’s horror, when nobody was looking I drew an extra stickman on.
Today was a little more interesting, I had my 0900 lecture and then learnt some Ajax. Ajax allows you to load extra page content without having to load a new page, it’s used a lot by Facebook and any site that allows you to submit something without leaving the page. It seemed easy at first but then got a bit harder until I figured out I was making quite a simple mistake. There’s a £50 budget for my project and I get the idea that a book on Ajax might be allocated into said budget.
CU in the evening was good, it was several games and then a short discussion. Hannah for some reason said that her face had lost weight (though she might have said it yesterday). It’s such a random comment that I don’t think it made sense in context but was so funny that I put it here. The theme was Men vs Ladies and apparently one of the things that ladies want is a small bottom and flat stomach. Thus when I acquired all the doughnuts I ensured to respect the ladies wishes and didn’t offer them any. When they asked I said that ladies wanted small bottoms and flat stomachs.
At this point Karen then in a very deep voice asked for a Doughnut. I felt that for an effort like that she should be allowed a Doughnut (she went on about how Stu would love her regardless but we all know how shallow guys are). I submitted some coursework about ethics and quoted the Bible twice in it. I’ve also begun to do very slow pushups more often, Fi (she is a Physiotherapist) explained last Sunday that it was better for my back to do very slow pushups than doing situps and would still work my stomach. She’s right on the stomach part. You simply need to ensure your back is straight and you are stretched out. Lawrence suggested taking an arm off the ground for 30 seconds, then putting it back and taking off a leg, then putting it back and taking off the other arm etc etc. That does make it somewhat harder.
I woke with a grumpy and groggy start to my alarm and hit the snooze button. A bit later I found I’d not hit the snooze button and thus missed my first lecture. The good news is that I did not miss a LOT of stuff. Nick’s lecture was one of the best ever. I think it’s awesomeness is best encompassed in THIS link (303KB mp3). I found out where he lives and plan to email him pictures of his house. If you want to help, here is a starting point. If you find anything out, send it to me 
It’s not marked work so it’s not cheating.
After the lecture, Richard and myself went to the lunch time talk and then to Richard’s house where we found stuff out about Nick. I then went to the Grill a Christian thing. It was different to how I expected it, there was a much larger ratio of Christians there than I expected so the questions were not what I’d expected, hence I didn’t have an answer for all of them. If you want a copy of it, it’s here (7.53MB mp3). Sorry that it’s not got a consistent sound volume the whole way through, not everybody used the mic very well.
Pete has come down to visit so I went over to see him and Huw afterwards.
I got up and spent some time performing extra stuff for Tim. In the end it took me 7 hours (including yesterday) to perform all that was required. I have now learnt a very valuable lesson. When someone is paying you to do something, do not accept vague definitions of what you must do because when you are told that what you’ve done isn’t what they asked for, they’re not wrong, you are. If you do accept vague definitions, ensure that you are charging by the hour. I’ve not yet heard if they are or are not impressed with the standard of work, I do feel I’d have completed it in 4-5 hours had I known exactly what they wanted but that’s just something to learn from.
This evening was the CU Quiz night, it went really well. Tomorrow is the Grill a Christian thing and I’m 1 of 4. Prayer is appreciated.
Quite a bit has happened and most of it isn’t very interesting. Today however I got a reply from an interview I had over MSN with Mr Hurrell. He found some stuff for me to do so that he could decide if I was up to the task. The task was to create a login system, a page to display all the records relating to the user, an admin page to edit certain parts of the records, the database this’d use, Javascript that ensured data was entered before it was submitted, a form to create new records and finally a page to submit these records.
Tim reckoned that someone that coded as a job would take 3 hours to perform this set of tasks. I managed it in about 4 (I think, my timing got skewed towards the end and it took longer because I made a silly mistake). Tim hasn’t had a chance to look at the result yet because I was given the task late in the day and decided that dinner time was a valid time to code through so it’s currently sitting in his Inbox awaiting his appraisal.
On Friday I am attending an event called “Grill a Christian”, the idea being that you can ask them any question you want (not that you actually cook them). I’m attending it by being one of the Christians. I’d really appreciate prayer on it. I’ll see what I can do about recording it and putting a copy of it here so you can hear how badly (or not) I fluff up.
I’ve had some exam results back. I’ve passed AI (it was 100% exam), passed Distributed Web Systems (counts as two units) and also VHDL (Not my strong suit). I’ve still got Real Time Systems and Network Design to receive, I hope I’ve passed them too.
The lectures this semester are very very interesting and I’m recording the lectures on System Security because they are so very good. I’ve managed to compress a 2 hour (approx) recording down to 10mb so with Nick’s permission I’ll put them here later.
I had a little lie in today then got up and did various computery things. I then went to chair an SSCC meeting. It lasted only an hour and 15 minutes and we got lots done because I hurried people along in an unflinching manner. After the meeting I went home and did more computery stuff (programming and web design and some gaming). Then, Lauren screamed about a mouse. I got downstairs in time to block off one of it’s two exits out of the room.
To reveal how I “solved” the problem of the mouse, select the text in the box below.
Charlie and Lauren are happy that the mouse is dead but not so happy about the method I used (I couldn’t see a problem with it). I then left for Fi’s.
I found Fi’s alright and for some reason Becca decided that she should say a few more silly things before dinner, sadly they’ll not be very funny putting them on the blog. Fi had cooked a delicious Chicken and Leek Lasagna. Everybody went back upstairs to chat about life and then Fi asked me to help with the washing up. I did indeed help and when she slacked off to go back and talk to the others I ignored her request of “leave it, it’ll be fine” and did the job properly. Fi’s housemate was most impressed when she came in.
I got home, gamed and performed some logical reasoning before going to bed. Tomorrow I’m hoping to get a free lunch!
I figured I should explain exactly what my project is going to be.
There is a list of projects, each project has a name and a lecturer that will supervise the project. Students go through this list of projects and pick 12 or more that they like. Of these twelve, they put them as either “Really want” or “Will accept”. The end result should look something like this.
| Student | Projects |
|---|---|
| Teifion | #10, #12, #14, #16, #18, #20, #22, #24, #26, #28, #30, #32 |
| Richard | #10, #13, #16, #19, #21, #24, #27, #30, #33, #36, #39, #42 |
| Sam | #2, #6, #10, #14, #18, #22, #26, #30, #34, #38, #42, #46 |
There are I think twice as many projects as students. However, some projects are more popular than others, this means that allocating all the students to a project is quite tricky and time consuming. But wait, it gets better. Each lecturer can only accept so many projects so the work-load of the lecturer must be taken into account too!
Currently I’ve cobbled together something that doesn’t take into account lecturer loading but does a semi-decent job of allocating the students. It randomly assigns each student 12 projects (so doesn’t yet take into account that some projects are very popular). It then does it’s 2nd best to assign them to projects. I say 2nd best because I’ve already thought of a way to improve it. However, the good news is that I just ran 1000 tests on it and I got the following results.
Student Count: 100
Project Count: 110
Average number of students without a project: 1.592
Maximum number of students without a project: 5
Most common number of students without a project: 1 (372 times)
Now, that’s not too shabby is it? But it gets better, apparently there are approximately twice as many projects as there are students, I just did tests where there are only 10% more projects than students. If I run it again with 50% more projects than students I get the following.
Student Count: 100
Project Count: 150
Mean students without a project: 0.012
Max without a project: 1
Mode students without a project: 0 (988 times)
Remember though, that’s not taking into account lecturer workload or some projects being really popular. However, it’s also not doing the best initial allocation it could. In addition, it’s not performing re-allocations where it re-allocates already allocated students to try and fit in the “difficult ones”.
Overall I’m really looking forwards to this project 
Nick Savage is quite a cool guy, but I’ve never known him to be quite so cool as this.
It was 0730 in the morning, my alarm alerted me to the fact that I needed to get up. I lay in bed a bit longer, enjoying the warmth. Then I realised that if I didn’t get out of bed in time, I’d miss the first lecture I had of Semester 2!
I got out of bed, washed, ate a small bowl of muesli and then set off for my lecture. I took care to take a longer route so as not to cycle through guildhall square, that’d be illegal (and I might get fined £30). I locked my bike up and was helpfully informed by some course-mates that the entrance to the lecture theatre was round the side of the building rather than inside it. So far, not so bad!
I got into the lecture theatre and spent a few minutes enjoying air that wasn’t overly cold (always nice) and waited. A few minutes before 0900, Richard, Duncan, Gavin and Baldeep arrived, we started to chat. The lecturer was meant to be Chi, however, Nick Savage walked in. He started to speak.
“Chi lives in London and has to drive down each day, at the moment he’s stuck in traffic in Guildford. Sadly I am unable to take this lecture but if I could I would”
Baldeep lives in Southampton. It was 9 in the morning. The lecture was cancelled. We had no more lectures today. Suffice to say Baldeep wasn’t overly impressed. I of course went home and enjoyed myself. Best lecture ever.
At the Pub after CU, Becca came up with some inane idea of stairlifts powered by old people. I can appreciate that it would create jobs but I just don’t think it’s very practical. I just nodded, smiled and jotted down her ramblings.
Hannah, Luke and Becca left at the same time, right at the end. I was still in the pub. I’d purposefully locked my bike to theirs. This caused myself and Mark to laugh very hard when they came back into the pub asking me to unlock my bike.
I should have posted earlier in the week but alas I have had a lot on my mind, I’ll write about what it is at a later date when it’s all sorted in about a week’s time.
My exam on Wednesday went well, I scored 54 or 58 in it. I got a similar mark for the 20% coursework and 74% or so for the 40% coursework. This gives me something just over 60%, not bad
Friday was the guys night. It started well as there was what seemed to be a power cut, then we found that some of the lines into the building had some serious problems. Long story short the guys night carried on but due to a limited number of people arriving. I went home slightly earlier than everybody else.
Saturday involved a nice lie in, some gaming, quite a bit of programming. I’ve been getting involved in some more Database stuff and even had a go at terminal scripting. Some more people want to make a WoA-inspired game and I’ve set them up a forum and some very basic web-pages (I offered more advanced ones) and needed a way to automatically back their stuff up. I managed to write a script that automatically creates a directory based on the date and downloads a list of files to it.
Today, Sunday, was good. I got to church and the service was about unity. Relevant to the thing that’s on my mind which was helpful. To make matters better, Pauline Mitchell invited me and a lot of other students back to her house for one of the lovely roast dinners. I was polite and for the most part very refined in my table manners. Actually, I was polite and refined for just about all of it.
The evening service was on Daniel and sort of summarised what Jon had been talking on the last few weeks in the evenings. After the service I cycled home with Hannah. She has a new bike now and is a lot faster, all her excuses about her being “unfit” are quite clearly lies.
Tomorrow I start my lectures for Semester 2!
I got up, did some stuff, went over to Lorna’s to return some borrowed DVDs then went back home. At some point here, Richard said he had a friend from Church that was looking to employ someone to code PHP. I got the contact details of said person (Tim) and emailed him my CV.
I was expecting a reply saying to come into the office at such and such a time. Instead, Tim added me to his MSN contact list and performed a very informal interview there. One of the things I was asked to do was to find 5 flaws or things to improve in his current website code before he returned from a phone call. I just about managed to get 6
I’ll keep the blog updated with information about this.
Not a lot of bloggable stuff has happened the last few days, I fixed a computer for someone and tried to kill a mouse with my bare hands (Fi correctly pointed out that actually I have human hands, not bear hands). On Saturday I went to a Puppet Seminar hosted by Steve and Kay that I met at Cheltenham, they somehow remembered me, I’ll tell the story.
All the youth workers were in a room along with all the stewards for the festival. To my left were a pair of young ladies also doing youth work, I was busy talking to them and to my right were Grace and Gill from Eastney Church. The chief organiser of the event stood at the front and asked us “Who is ready to work for the Lord?” or something to that end. Normally when I cheer it pains those just next to me, however, the ladies to my left were still happy to talk to me so I decided to very calmly cheer like everybody else.
We were flatly told that was not eager enough. I took a deep breath and resisted the urge to prove him wrong, instead I very calmly cheered only a little louder. However, this was also apparently too quiet so I just cheered very loudly the next time. Loudly enough that the entire room looked at me, Steve and Kay who were there remembered me. Grace and Gill pretended they didn’t know me and the ladies to my left went out of their way to not talk to me again.
Anyway, on with today! I went to leave my house at 10:20, 10 minutes is quite enough to get to church on a bike. However, I had a flat tyre. Que a very fast tyre fixing and I got to church a little late, but it was okay. Steve and Kay were performing for the service and they were amazing, what they used was easy to acquire and it was all down to their presentation which simply astounded me. All the children loved it and most of the adults also found it very good.
After the service I was invited to Gill’s for lunch along with Lorna, Fi and Elli. It was a very nice lunch and the company was also nice. I had a form passed to me from Colin about a youth camp in Dorset I’m thinking of going to help at. Upon seeing it Fi suddenly lit up and said that I had to go to a youth camp she was involved in. It was confusing because she was not normally so loud and excited when talking to me.
Not a lot happened this evening.