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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Monday 22 March 2004 (Day View)

Thu 18 Mar | Fri 19 Mar | Sat 20 Mar | Sun 21 Mar |   Mon 22 Mar   Tue 23 Mar | Wed 24 Mar | Thu 25 Mar | Fri 26 Mar |

22.03.2004 – Monday 22 March – A normal day at uni

• I woke up at ten o’clock, arrived at uni in time for my midday lecture, attended same and two following tutorials, went and visited Kieran and saw his new, expensive, and rather pointless dual Xeon server, helped a guy in the labs, and caught the train home. It was nearly dark by the time I got home. Joe wasn’t here, but arrived not long after with Liz.

• ITEE runs a news server, which we can connect to via an SSL connection, and participate in the university newsgroups. It’s been buggy ever since I came to uni, but recently got a lot worse, requesting authorisation at random times and denying it as often as not. I sent an email off to the student helpdesk, and received a reply, “[the ITEE news server] is not a currently supported service”. The problems are the result of “bugs in the (unsupported by the vendor for over two years) news cache server code” and are beyond their control, given their resources, they say. The officially recommended way to view the newsgroups is via a web interface, which is so bad that it’s only barely useable. I think this sucks – surely, it can’t be that hard or expensive to upgrade a news server to something that works, but there isn’t that much I can do about it.

Comment by Yuri Johnson – Tuesday 23 March 2004, 9:47 AM

  you go on endless rants about your everday life (and that's cool) yet you have consistently failed to mention that Philip Machanick is the funniest man on campus. I trust you will fix this soon

Comment by Ned – Tuesday 23 March 2004, 11:03 AM

  Who is Philip Machanick?

Comment by Redbeard – Tuesday 23 March 2004, 2:20 PM

  hmmm Yuri, your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Comment by Yuri Johnson – Friday 26 March 2004, 8:56 AM

  Philip Machanick is your Comp3300 Lecturer. If you listen very closely to any one of his lectures (particularly the ones in 24-s304) you will disover that he is the funniest man you've ever seen. Extremely subtle, though. I often find myself getting his jokes about 4 hours after they are said, usually resulting in me looking stupid and having people look at me in the labs. Now I have made you understand the brilliance of Machanick, i trust the same burden will be put on you, my son. Courage Ned, this could be your final hour....

Comment by Ned – Friday 26 March 2004, 12:13 PM

  Yes, I was being sarcastic. I’m aware of at least some of my lecturers’ names and I notice all his “subtle” humour – which is often blatant and sometimes amusing, sometimes awful. I’ve had at least two “funnier” lecturers so far, although Philip is perhaps the second closest I’ve yet had to a genuine BOFH style “traditional” lecturer – or perhaps a BOFH wannabe considering he uses a Macintosh. The second lecturer for COMP2500, whose name currently escapes me, was by far the wittiest, funniest, and I’d hazard to say, most insightful, lecturer I’ve had. He managed to describe, in a way I could understand, some complex concepts very efficiently while still managing to be amusing – and let’s face it, anyone who starts a lecture on recursion in Java by stating that both Java and recursion, and specifically recursion in Java, are awful – rocks.

Comment by Yuri Johnson – Friday 26 March 2004, 5:08 PM

  do you mean Anthony MacDonald (in reference to the comp2500 lecturer)? If so, i have him this semester, and i agree he is very exciting. But there's something inherintly funny and crazy with Machanick, almost as if he is trying to amuse himself rather than the audience. I hopr you one day come over to my point of view. But if we're talking crazy Java lecturers, you can't go any further than Roger Duke for pure insanity. Now thats good eatin!

Comment by bv – Sunday 28 March 2004, 4:03 AM

  ahahah Roger > *

Comment by Ned – Monday 29 March 2004, 9:36 AM

  No, I don’t mean Anthony, and yes – Roger would have to be the best lecturer I’ve had so far, I actually enjoyed going to his lectures and learnt lots – not something I’m sure I could say about anyone else so far.