Reaper Blog

Hello, everyone!

Welcome to the final Weekly Catchup episode for this season (and maybe forever)! I’ve had a fairly relaxing week, in between my two exams. For the most part, I’ve been playing the Mass Effect series on my Xbox – just to complete them all together. It’s been really fun. Aside from that, exams have been interesting. On that note, I’ll get into what happened with those.

6/11/2012 – Mobile and Wireless Networks

My first exam, for Mobile and Wireless Networks, was on Tuesday morning. Overall, it was an average exam. For the most part, it focused more on results found in previous research papers, than having fresh ideas (the major part of the course). Because of that, I wasn’t able to complete the whole exam. I went over every question, but wasn’t able to give an answer for all of them. I didn’t really care, though. As long as I pass the course (which I’d say is very likely), I’m happy.

8/11/2012 – High Integrity Software Engineering

My last exam, High Integrity Software Engineering, was held Thursday afternoon. This exam, unlike the one for MWN above, was actually pretty good. To be honest, I kind of enjoyed it (strange, I know – it’s an exam). I wasn’t able to give an answer for every question, but I answered pretty much everything that I could do. The final question, which was on the final topic in the course (Software Process Improvement), was unexpected, but I feel I should do fairly well on the first part of that question (it was a discussion-type question). At the end of the exam (for me, half an hour before the end of the three hours), I caught up outside the exam hall with others that had the exam (plus the lecturer). During our discussion, I figured out I had gotten some parts slightly wrong. I should get partial marks, though (hopefully). I also noticed another friend (in a different course/degree) leaving their exam, so I went and had a chat with them before they ran off. It was good to chat with them for a bit.

Round Up

And that ends the final episode for this season. As I said in my introduction, I’ve been playing the Mass Effect trilogy this past week. I’ll try to get out a combined review of them sometime soon. I may also put out discussions of what I’m working on, so keep a look out for them. No doubt I’m going to be busy though, so I may not be posting too often. We’ll see what happens.

Thank you to everyone who has read at least one of the episodes in this series. It’s great to see people are interested in what I have to talk about. I realise I didn’t implement everything I was thinking of doing this season, like getting your opinions on what I should do for certain things. I don’t think that would have added much to the series, though.

Anyway, thank you all for reading this episode.
Robert

Hello, everyone!

Welcome to the final episode for this semester, series and year (not counting next week’s exam special)!! It’s been a fairly hectic few days of preparing for and actually presenting the final group project, but it’s been a lot of fun. I’ll jump straight into what I’ve been up to this past week.

Monday

This Monday started out like any other – up early to get into university for a meeting. This week, however, the meeting was only the other group members and myself. We’d organised to get together and start preparing our presentation for Wednesday. When I got in, I pretty much just chatted with one of the guys that was already there (not in my group). For the most part, we just chatted about Windows 8 (for those that don’t know, it’s the latest operating system by Microsoft released on the 26th of October). The guys in my group started turning up around 9/9:30 (about an hour before we had organised to meet), so we decided to work on our other assignments before getting onto the presentation. I completed some of the final assignment for HISE. The rest of the day was split between preparing the presentation and completing final fixes for the actual project. All of that took us through to a bit before 4. At that point, two of us decided to go home, leaving the team leader to finish up his merge of the login system into the main version.

Tuesday

We’d organised to meet up at midday on Tuesday, to finish up the presentation and have an initial practice. Unfortunately, I got up a bit later than I should have, and didn’t get into university until between half past and 1pm. Turned out I hadn’t missed too much – the others in my group had just organised who was talking about what. At that point, we ran through the presentation to figure out what we should be saying to compliment what was on the slides. That didn’t take too long, really. We were able to get pretty much the whole thing fleshed out, and knew at what point we’d be switching to a demonstration instead of the slides. By that time, it was already getting towards 3, so we all pretty much decided to just go home.

Wednesday

Presentation day! We had an early start to get prepared for the presentation, and help out the school (not that we had a choice on that part). Pretty much first thing we did was help set up the poster boards and posters. I actually found that kind of fun! Wasn’t really a fan of the dirt and oil that got transferred onto our hands while moving the boards, though. After setting up the boards, my group went up to the BESE lab to have a couple of final practices of our presentation (and time ourselves while we were at it). Turned out we were within the time limit of 15-20 minutes, which we (or, at least I) were happy with. At that point, it was just about time to go back downstairs and man our poster (and have the free pizza lunch). Aside from having to stand the whole time in my good shoes, I thought it was really fun! We didn’t really have many people come and talk to us about our poster or project, but it was still good. A bit before 1, we went back upstairs to go through final preparations for the presentation. We pretty much just had to grab my laptop then head up to level 7. Our presentation wasn’t until 2:20 (which was delayed until about 2:40, due to other groups going overtime). When we finally got up, we kicked arse! At least, that’s what it felt like. And all the feedback we got, it seemed like others enjoyed it too. From then, the quality of the presentations went downhill. I’ve got to admit, there was one good group after us. I kind of liked that presentation. The rest were pretty bad, though. After the presentations (at about 4), my group met up with our clients (who had come along). For the next two hours after the end of the presentations, we walked to a pub in the city and had a meeting about the continuation of the project into summer. That was a really good meeting, even though it went late. At the end of the meeting, we all pretty much just went home.

Round Up

That brings me to the end of this final week of university for the year! I’ve enjoyed every minute, even though it’s been really busy. In the coming few weeks I’ve got my exams as well as a couple of individual essays to complete for the group project course. They shouldn’t take too long to complete, since there’s nothing else going on after exams. For the rest of the year I’ll try to get some random posts out. I may also try to do a few more reviews and how-to’s, for those of you that like those.

Thanks for reading this week’s episode.
Robert