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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Thursday 27 October 2005 (Day View)

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27.10.2005 – Thursday 27 October – Scaffolding & Robots

• Once again, I had to be up early—needing to be at uni by eight o’clock. I’m not going to get any sleep tonight either, with work not finishing until late, and having to again be at uni early. Once at uni, I set up and helped run another COMP1800 demonstration, which Ken from CSSE3004 attended. Fortunately, things went smoothly, and the students invited me to Grinder’s for lunch after. I’m not entirely sure of the ethics of this, right before I mark their work, but it’s nice that they like me—not something that happens too often in IT, as far as I can tell. We then went for a bit of a look around the “Innovation” displays, showcasing the mostly terribly boring things post-grad students have spent inordinate amounts of their time creating—although the robots are always interesting. I even dropped into Mark’s ivory tower, but he wasn’t there.

Evening

• I began marking COMP1800 implementations, which is going to take a long time. I also popped up to see Ken to try to get him to concede that losing a fifth of our presentation marks for going thirty two seconds over the ten minute limit is ridiculous and makes a mockery of the term “academic merit”, but unsurprisingly he didn’t agree. Maz, Kieran and I then drove to the Ville where we ate dinner, after which I headed off to work and spent the evening erecting scaffolding.

Night

• There’s some lightning landing very close, but fortunately, the power is still on. In fact, this building is, in theory, probably the one place on campus that’s fully lightning protected and connected to backup power. I had an interesting conversation with a bloke from work, about the time I was knocked out by lightning. I had always assumed that an immense discharge somehow “shut down” my brain in such a way that I continued walking for some time without any memory, then fell over and became conscious shortly after. But apparently, I would have been hit by “spray” (as anything else leaves exit burns), and it would have caused my brain to knock itself out by violently jerking and hitting itself against the inside of my skull, and my other muscles quite possibly would have done similar things and thrown me some distance.