Ahoy!

Time for a m-m-m-m-monster update.

Friday was the dealine for the aformentioned System Design Project. I would say this last week has been one of the most stressfull and emotional of my life. Late nights, junk food, my insane team, JCMB basement, lego, robots, the cs3 possee, making friends/enemies, team-working and alcohol make for an ‘interesting’ time.
I feel like I’m awakening from a dream, this morning I bolted awake in bed, my mind screaming:

Then the ThursdayFridaySaturday blur washed over me and I realised it must be Sunday. Not sleeping on Thursday night didn’t really help either. The project revolves around builidng a robot that can perform shopping for a web site user (stupid, I know). So we had built a large-ish model of a supermarket complete with toy packets of food for the robot to navigate around. At 1am Friday morning we realised the model was fundamentaly flawed and our genius conveyor belt idea would not work, unless we pullled everything apart and rebuilt it. Which we did. I don’t know where the time went but it was suddenly Friday 7am, demonstration in 2 hours. Somehow we managed to pull everything together, go home and get dressed up, and come back and do the demo, without falling asleep. The ‘board’ were very impressed and actually ran over they’re alloted time quizzing us about a certain ninja feature we had worked 😀 After sitting through hours of sales presentations in the afternoon we were all dropping off so we decided to go the pub, what a great idea. This turned into a marathon session which ends in my head at about 10pm but actually continued in real life until 3am (I’m told).
Anyway, today is Sunday, that means work.This helped to ground me a bit more in the ‘real world’.

I’m still not comfortable with pouring my every whim and fantasy onto my blog (I ain’t some livejournal user) so I’ll just say that I seem to have reached a point where I really think I need a girlfriend, a real one.

Speaking of points, I was thinking that there were two points where I felt I’d reached another stage in life, both can be connected to books. The first was reading a dog-eared hard back copy of Neuromancer (William Gibson), borrowed form the council library, whilst on the train to Edinburgh. I think I must have been still 18 and was visiting Edinburgh University for the first time and seeing Edinburgh as a city for the second time. I finished the book in the journey. Ending up going to Edinburgh uni and have lived in this fantastic city for almost four years.

The second point was reading Generation X (Douglas Coupland), again on the train, but going home for xmas this time. I think ‘being 21’ was finally sinking into me, and the character in the book was visiting his parents for xmas aswell. It just fell nicely into place. I think I felt it was time to ‘grow up’, don’t know how successfully I managed it though…

(Do not fear brave readers, monkeys have not taken control of my mind)