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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Friday 27 August 2004 (Day View)

Mon 23 Aug | Tue 24 Aug | Wed 25 Aug | Thu 26 Aug |   Fri 27 Aug   Sat 28 Aug | Sun 29 Aug | Mon 30 Aug | Tue 31 Aug |

27.08.2004 – Friday 27 August – Woe Again

• Back down the labs again, working on this crud assignment again.

3pm

• The deadline for my COMS3200 assignment is four o’clock, but as I’m tutoring from three to four it’s essentially three o’clock for me, and I’m not finished. It’s disheartening to spend two whole nights working on something and then not manage to get it submitted on time. I lose ten percent per day late, but the weekend is taken as one day, so if I can submit it before Monday I’ll only lose ten percent. I am not overly happy – but this is what I get for starting late, coding asleep, not taking anything seriously, and wasting phenomenal amounts of time. I just wish it wasn’t worth twenty percent of its course – which I don’t agree with either as only a portion of the assignment deals with networking and I have all that part working just fine. Most of the problem comes from being burnt out. I’d been weeks without sleeping enough, surviving by sleeping all day once or twice a week and bugger all the rest of the week, and then stayed up all night working on my COMP3502 assignment – and now this. Oh well. An annoying thing about the COMP3502 assignment – the assignments weren’t collected until fifty-two hours after the deadline, so I didn’t need to rush.

Night

• To celebrate not handing in my assignment on time, I went and saw “Around the world in eighty days”, which is quite funny, although quite stupid too.

Comment by Mum – Sunday 29 August 2004, 10:13 PM

  Just go to bed earlier and do not be tempted by chat or whatever it is that you get up to on internet. Simple. It is your own fault.

Comment by moi – Wednesday 1 September 2004, 10:01 PM

  Ned, quit whinging. I work a full time job, about 55-60 hours a week, and do comp3502, coms3200 and comp3402, and I'd coded in Java once (infs3202 last semester) before this. And I got it finished by the deadline and working perfectly, but yes, it was a lot of work. Oh, and did I mention I live interstate and thus I have almost zero access to tutors, lecturers, etc apart from the netnews. But hey, that's my problem.
  
  So, no offence but you can do it. Be pragmatic - most of the coms3200 assignment _was_ involved in the RPC calls and so on, and the rest of it was handling a datastructure with merely a treemap (doors) and a hashmap (or whatever, for your cards). Oh, and some java.util.regexp parsing. Perfection is the enemy of done.

Comment by Ned – Thursday 2 September 2004, 11:18 AM

  Very little of the COMS3200 assignment actually involved networking, and the parts that did I had finished and working within hours, basically by copying and pasting his example code. I then spent days parsing text, figuring out what to output where, ironing out ambiguities in the specifications, learning about Array Lists, Sorted Tree Maps, and various other non-networking things.