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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Thursday 29 July 2004 (Day View)

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29.07.2004 – Thursday 29 July – The Chronicles of Riddick

• Another eight o’clock start, necessitating a six o’clock wake up – not good. We managed not to miss the train, although we nearly froze on the way there, and made it to our lecture on time. Kevin Gates, from “Internet Interface Design” fame, is our lecturer for COMP2502. This is probably not a good thing. He spent the entire hour explaining the course profile, asking rhetorical questions and waiting for someone to answer them. Usually, no one does, so he has to answer them himself. Still, it’s only the first COMP2502 lecture we’ve been to, so we’ll have to reserve our judgement.

• We had to print out our airfare confirmations, from our email, so headed down to the labs to do this. Once in the labs, we found that they weren’t running optimally, which gave rise to our first newsgroup complaint of the semester:
  “Welcome to my first complaint for the semester.
  While I wait in the labs for my 170K PDF file to re-download and wish I had a connection as fast and reliable as the Dodo dialup I used during the holidays, I thought I’d whinge about the lack of PDF opening software. Adobe Acrobat Reader isn’t installed on these machines (GPS-110), making it difficult to view PDF files. This seems somewhat foolish, given that the majority of ITEE course material is given in PDF format. Of course, if it’s a bandwidth saving measure and we’re no longer expected to download and view PDF files from the labs, I’ll understand – the network was obviously not designed to cope with such bandwidth intensive tasks. If not, it might be a good idea to install it in the default image, as downloading the 8 to 23 MB file every time I want to view a 200K PDF seems a tad silly.”
  This engendered a reply:
  “Somehow I imagine that could have been posted with marginally less acid.”
  This, in turn, prompted me to reply:
  “Probably.
  Did I mention it then took me nearly half an hour to locate and view two emails, due to it taking up to five minutes to view each email page? Performance like this doesn’t lead to a happy me, and is inexcusable from a university that used to proclaim it was “World Class”, although I see they’ve removed this now – perhaps scared they’d be done for false advertising?”
  This led to another reply:
  “Funny they have removed “World Class”. Maybe they have started to listen to costumers like Ned Martin!
  Ned, maybe you should start adding disclaimers to your postings? Last semester someone apparently read one too many of them.”
  That about sums up my thrilling newsgroup experience for the day. I hope “costumers” is an unintentional typo.

• Clint and we went to Toowong, by omnibus. He had to hand in a rent form or something, and we had to claim fares allowance. We then ate a donut and milkshake for lunch as part of our new healthy diet, before heading back to uni where we waited around in the labs killing time and talking to “Dogmatix Man”. Yes, it does look a little odd when written out like that. Clint and “Dogmatix Man” then headed off to a BITS meeting, and we caught another omnibus into the city and went to Office Works, where we bought a file carrier thing, and then went to Govindas for dinner before heading back to uni again. We got a bit bored then, and Maz did too, so we went and saw “The Chronicles of Riddick” at Indooroopilly. We got there a bit late and the theatre was mostly full, so we ended up down the front. The movie was average – nothing particularly special, but fun to watch anyway.