IMPORTANT: The following journal is intended for the use and viewing of approved persons only and may contain information that is confidential, privileged or unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low self-esteem, no sense of humour or irrational religious beliefs. Any dissemination, distribution or copying of this work is not authorised (either explicitly or implicitly) and constitutes an irritating social faux pas. Unless the word ‘absquatulation’ has been used in its correct context somewhere other than in this warning, it does not have any legal or grammatical use and may be ignored. No animals were harmed in the creation of this journal and a minimum of Microsoft software was used. Those of you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to learn that there is no hidden message revealed by reading this warning backwards.

Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Friday 10 October 2003 (Day View)

Mon 6 Oct | Tue 7 Oct | Wed 8 Oct | Thu 9 Oct |   Fri 10 Oct   Sat 11 Oct | Sun 12 Oct | Mon 13 Oct | Tue 14 Oct |

10.10.2003 – Friday 10 October

• Despite not needing to be at uni until my tutorial at one o’clock, I decided the best way to get my assignment done was to head in at the same time as usual – arriving around 8:30. After my usual breakfast of iced coffee and a bucket of chips with lots of tomato sauce and vinegar, I went and saw Soon and dropped off the marking book and headed down to the labs to do my assignment. Much procrastinating later, I began to do it, and managed to get most of it finished.

AGM

• Clint came and we took our COMP1800 English assignments across to the English department and dropped them in the magic box to be turned into marks. We then walked back to GPS and the BITS AGM. It was an utter shambles. Anyone who wished to become a member of the exec could, and did, simply making up a new title was quite acceptable. Raymond nearly became the health and safety officer, until someone pointed out he’d probably have a few legal commitments and need a first aid certificate, so he changed to “checker of sec”, before finally becoming the new “events advisor”. There are also two treasurers and a vice-treasurer, not to mention a technical development manager who didn’t even show at the AGM – overall, very dodgy and unprofessional.

1pm

• I had to leave the AGM early to tutor. I quite enjoyed it, although we had several silly problems with PHP sessions. The configuration of the lab machines has caused a few headaches, with limited disk space, modifying things to work with NT style pathnames, and plain stupid stuff such as PHP refusing to work if there’s a blank line at the start of the document.

.NET

• The BITS AGM was followed by a Microsoft Industry Conference, essentially a talk on how great everything .NET is, and why the world must embrace .NET now. It was quite interesting, although one moron decided to try to turn it into a Slashdot style Open-Source World versus Microsoft security argument and succeeded in making a complete fool of himself and annoying everyone, or at least me. The guy giving the conference happened to know what he was talking about, having been a software engineer for several years, and unlike the usual hysterical Linux freaks at uni, he also understood the concept of profit and how the real world works. I learnt a few new things about web services and .NET, which sounded good although I’m sure biased. This is, after all, Microsoft. It amuses me how they tend to not acknowledge the existence of or ever mention Linux or Java.

Assignment

• I had to leave the .NET thing early in order to submit my assignment on time. Each of the 64 questions had to be individually entered into a web form, which was taking around two minutes to submit each question. By four o’clock, this was more like five minutes, and by half past four, the database was unreachable. Shortly after, something died totally and all our roaming profiles and home drive became inaccessible, which not only prevented me from accessing the data I needed to submit, but also from saving the document I currently had open. As the assignment was due at five, I wasn’t overly impressed and decided to go hunt down the lecturer. Half the lab came with me, so we traipsed up to the office, which told us to be nice to the lecturer as he was probably stressed. He wasn’t in his office, but as luck would have it (not that I believe in luck, of course), we found him hiding in a room strategically located near an exit with his laptop and on the phone to the sysadmins. He did look rather stressed, but that’s how he normally looks. We got an extension until 5 PM tomorrow.

POD

• I have an exam on Monday. It is an open book exam, and I do not have all the notes for it. I have to print them out from UQ’s POD (print on demand). The POD shuts at 5 PM, so I went up there straight after we’d found the lecturer. It was about a quarter to five when I got there, but that didn’t help much, as they shut at four o’clock on Friday. This is not good. This leaves me with an open book exam without the book to open. I can probably study the online PDF versions, although it will be harder.

Choir

• I caught a train into the city and went to Govindas for dinner. It was very nice and as I was hungry, I really enjoyed it. I had planned to go see the King’s College and Women’s College Choirs perform, but I couldn’t remember where they were performing so went to Indooroopilly to see a movie instead. There weren’t any movies worth seeing, so I went online instead, found Clint on IRC and he told me the choir would be at St Stephen’s Cathedral, so I headed back into the city and went there. The choir performance quite impressed me, because I was expecting it to be much worse and it was quite good. I met Frizz, who I haven’t met before, and Raymond, who is a section leader (whatever that is) in the King’s College Choir and who I have met before. I’m quite glad I went.