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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Monday 27 October 2003 (Day View)

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27.10.2003 – Monday 27 October – Losing the plot...

Uni

• I attended university, as per usual. We had our last INFS1200 lectures today. I went down the labs and did my COMP1800 “Web Page Peer Assessment”, where I review and assess three other student’s web site projects. I then watched some more lectures and went home.

Evening

• I began my COMP2302 project. I am “required to modify a program in order to implement additional features. The program is a terminal IO based version of Tetris – i.e. the AVR device (Atmel AVR AT90S8515 – small 8-bit microcontroller) runs the program and provides its graphical user interface via the connected terminal (terminal emulator on the PC) and receives input (keypresses) from the terminal.” If I knew C, it would definitely help. In fact, if I had any idea what I was doing or how to do it, it would help.

Agony

• I spent several hours going around in circles. Our lecturer has written an AVR simulator in TCL, which while impressive, is too slow to be of much use. The only way I have to code is by trial and error, I don’t know what I’m doing well enough to do it any other way, and the error part is taking half an hour for each error to work through it in the simulator and find out what’s going on. Half the time I don’t know if my code is at error or if the simulator is too slow and has missed my keystroke or something.

Anguish

• This is terrible. I need to pass this project or I fail the entire course, but I have no chance of doing that now. It’s 5 AM and I’ve managed to achieve a grand total of absolutely totally nothing all night. I feel terrible. I am quite sure it took everyone else about five minutes. I feel moronic and useless. The stress isn’t worth it – I’ll die.

6am

• I give up. I am going to fail; there is nothing I can do about it. I’m considering all my options – ranging from quitting uni to razing uni to the ground and everything in-between. I feel simply terrible, and depressed, stressed and sleepy. Now that I’ve failed this, I have another project, assignment and a prac exam to fail this week – assuming I don’t die first, which at my current stress levels, is quite likely. This has, I think, been the worst night at uni so far – or at least this semester.