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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Tuesday 16 September 2003 (Day View)

Fri 12 Sep | Sat 13 Sep | Sun 14 Sep | Mon 15 Sep |   Tue 16 Sep   Wed 17 Sep | Thu 18 Sep | Fri 19 Sep | Sat 20 Sep |

16.09.2003 – Tuesday 16 September

• I slept in and had to catch the later train, which means I have to run to uni to get there in time. I even made a special effort of running harder so I wouldn’t be late and let my group down – how naïve.

Group Assignment

• Our group assignment is due at five o’clock this evening. I have a full day with no spare time and feel that I’ve already done over half this assignment, so I planned last night to meet Nick at this morning’s lecture, and would hope that Tim turned up, so I could get him to finish off the assignment as he’s not done as much as Nick and I. I figured, if Tim didn’t show up, Nick could phone him, and if Nick didn’t turn up, I could phone him, although Nick had assured me he’d be at this morning’s lecture. In fact, I actually made a point of asking him if I could get Tim’s phone number just in case, for some reason, he didn’t turn up to the lecture. Of course, when I got there, not only did Tim not turn up, neither did Nick, and I didn’t manage to catch up with Matt either. This left me with no way to contact them, apart from their student email, which they don’t seem to check very often. I wasn’t overly impressed. This left me with only two options – I could attempt to complete the assignment on my own or try to get some sort of recognition of my individual work. I decided the best course of action was to try both options, so I emailed a complaint to Shazia, which she noted. I then managed to find Tim on IRC (where he was looking for me) and get him to come in and we went through Nick’s attempt at normalisation, which seemed to be mostly correct although neither of us had the time, skill, or inclination to go through it from scratch. We added a few things, fixed a few other things, rewrote the original mapping based on Nick’s, and then left Tim drawing arrows using Word drawing tools while I went to my lecture – poor guy. I met up with Nick, Matt and Tim in my tutorial and did the final changes to our assignment while they did their tutorial. I then walked back to the GPS labs, as Visio isn’t installed in our tutorial lab, and tried to submit our assignment. Even this didn’t go well. I got the unusual but sadly common problem where things just go very weird. Text stops displaying, dialogs are blank and strangely sized, text boxes and pull down menus don’t work... making it remarkably hard to do anything, and meaning I don’t have any proof of submission. However, I also emailed my submission to Sham and Shazia, as Shazia suggested, just to be on the safe side. I do disagree with my being mark being based on someone else’s work – it seems so wrong.

Train

• I met a man at the railway station, who must have driven to the station, caught a train somewhere, imbibed, and returned somewhat the worse for the experience. He had wisely chosen not to drive – but this left him stuck at the station with his car, so I drove him home. Unfortunately, he doesn’t live where I do, so I had to walk, with my pack digging into my back, a lot longer than I normally would and I’m so tired by the time I get off the train. Somehow, dozing on the train on the way home makes me so tired, and I’m always zombie like getting from the station to here, although I usually perk up after I’ve relaxed for a bit.

Reply-All

• Shazia, our INFS1200 lecturer, sent the entire course an email, listing all the course members in the TO field. Someone replied to everyone with “I just had to do it”, which seemed a little silly, so I replied with “If I send you all our assignment, does that invalidate all your assignments under the collusion rules? ;–)”, which seems even sillier – typical of me. If it had stopped there, I don’t think anyone would have minded, but unfortunately, a pile of other people decided they’d begin using this email like a mailing list, and a few sour-lipped geeks were ridiculously upset about it and complained. I got a misconduct warning, followed, somewhat confusingly, by a pleasant email thanking me for contributing to the newsgroup and, in reply to my apology, hoping others would follow my thoughts regarding email privacy (which contrasts nicely against the rabid Linux users and their panophobic attitudes in the #BITS channel) – so I don’t think I’m expelled yet. Speaking of the #BITS channel, they banned me for a week, which is slightly annoying, as I’ve been using that channel to meet my assignment group. It’s also slightly unfair considering my little reply-all escapade isn’t related to BITS, #BITS, or IRC.

Comment by DK – Wednesday 17 September 2003, 6:56 AM

  Good on you to put yourself out to help a stranger! Hope you get good marks for your assignment :)