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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Friday 31 October 2003 (Day View)

Mon 27 Oct | Tue 28 Oct | Wed 29 Oct | Thu 30 Oct |   Fri 31 Oct   Sat 1 Nov | Sun 2 Nov | Mon 3 Nov | Tue 4 Nov |

31.10.2003 – Friday 31 November – COMP2302 Prac Exam and AVR Assignment

• Having not slept last night, and having spent most of the night trying to get my AVR assignment to work, I headed into uni in a somewhat fragile state of mind, or perhaps more accurately, out of mind.

• I managed to get some time in the lab to test if my creation actually worked on the real AVR microcontroller, but it wasn’t easy. I had to wander around for a full hour, spying on other people’s efforts and helping a few friends who were having trouble. I’m surprised how much I’ve learnt – going from not knowing a word of C to being able to help others in only two nights. Fortunately for me, the tutor let a few of us keep on for half an hour after closing time, so I got to check my project, after waiting a long time until the poxy network would let me download it. Unbelievably, with the exception of one major problem, it all worked as intended – amazing really, and just goes to show what’s possible when I don’t leave things until the last night, but start them the night before!

12:55pm

• I submitted my assignment, having fought slow lab machines, which crashed every time I tried to compile it. It’s great fun hitting compile, rebooting machine, wondering why it boots up running two instances of apache (both of which refuse to die), looking at clock, hitting compile, force quitting compiler, re-trying, watching more time pass... but I got it done and submitted 5 minutes before it’s due.

2pm

• I went to my COMP2302 prac exam. It took me about 30 seconds to complete the required code changes, another 10 or so to compile, and within a minute, I had it downloaded onto the AVR – but it didn’t work. It took me about 10 minutes to figure out that my changes to the code weren’t being saved, despite the editor showing them as saved. It then took another 5 minutes of messing around to try and figure out why, after which time I got worried I’d run out of time and there were only about 3 minutes left, so I complained to the tutor and completed it in notepad, which has the capability to save files, and left. Apparently, a few others had experienced the same problem – just typical for today.

Innovation Expo

• I printed out my piece of paper and ticked the features I’d implemented in my AVR project, forgetting to mention the HyperTerminal background colour problem, and went with Clint to see the UQ Innovation Expo, where I managed to find two different flavoured lollies, along with some soccer playing robots, nice Bose speakers and a good-looking stall attendant. I left Clint at the red room where he had a BITS meeting, and headed into the city – very tired, where I wasted some time and went to Govindas for dinner.

Train

• I’m amazed I made it home. I vaguely remember getting on the train, settling down to sleep, and waking up at various points in a panic to see if I’d missed my station – and then it being before 7 o’clock when I got home despite it feeling like 3 AM, so I went to sleep and didn’t wake until after 11 tomorrow.

Comment by bob – Tuesday 4 November 2003, 11:15 PM

  you forgot to mention the fact that you got 0wned on the way out of central station... my kung fu > your kung fu