Year View| Tuesday 14 October 2003 (Day View)

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14.10.2003 – Tuesday 14 October

• Today’s uni was the same as most other day’s uni. We have a new COMP2500 lecturer. He is, to put it simply, brilliant. He managed to explain almost two lectures worth of material, interspersed with about half a lecture worth of wit, in such a way that not only did I understand, but I did not get bored, uncomfortable or wish that I was elsewhere. On top of that sizeable achievement, he also managed to get more class participation in a single lecture than we’ve had in any of the previous lectures. Managing to explain, clearly, binary and n-ary trees, recursion down and along such trees and the use of a binary tree to reference nodes in an n-ary tree all in less than an hour, without boring me, and in such a way that not only did I understand, but I actually enjoyed learning, is very impressive. He embodies what I had, prior to last semester, though of as a “proper” lecturer. What really clinched it however; he stated several times that Java and QUT suck.

Evening

• I went to Kieran’s room for a while, and then on to Clint’s. Clint and I were sent on an official BITS mission to discover the source of all input in the lab they’re planning to show a movie in tonight. We had fun with the touch-screen control panel, turning the lights and projector on and off. After a while, we heard people outside and tried to turn everything off before we were arrested, but in a Microsoft sort of way, it was too intelligent to turn off. Obviously, no normal user would want to turn anything off after they’d turned it on. After our narrow escape and the subsequent trip to the labs to report our findings on IRC, we walked up to the main refectory, where I bought some leftover pizza topping with rice and Clint had tomato sauce with some vinegar and chips in it. Our health satiated, we went exploring and discovered some new buildings, including one with a door. I also managed to skilfully and semi-accidentally find the cutaway jet engine again, and show Clint. It has lots of moving parts that require moving to make sure they move, so we had to move them.

6:30pm

• Clint, Raymond, Simon and I, having sat at a table and discussed train timetables, newspapers, movies, Raymond and wine – amongst other similarly important things, went and joined the eager throng at the BITS Movie Night. We, along with a meagre scattering of others, watched “Minority Report”. Amusingly, the Linux machine showing the DVD died shortly after someone made a Linux versus Windows joke, and was replaced by a Microsoft Xbox, which worked well. Halfway through the movie pizza arrived. Two cans of soft drink and a vegetarian pizza later I left to find the ferry before it stopped running. It was freezing outside, and my cold can of Coke didn’t help. I had to wait about half an hour for the CityCat, listening to two girls comparing their marked assignments on some obscure English-type subject. I then had to wait almost an hour at South Brisbane Station for the train, which made it a late night, although I did get to snooze on one of the station’s un-ergonomically designed, flat and very hard wooden seats.

Comment by keight – Wednesday 15 October 2003, 4:14 PM

  OMG Ned, NO! Our new 2500 lecturer is... CRAP. his lectures are some of the most TEDIOUS I have ever sat through.. If you find them 'interesting', I'd hate to think what you find boring.

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