We’ll be moving into out new place in two weeks so the long process of sorting, binning and packing had begun. Today I pulled all the dusty, forgotten boxes out from under the bed. There were three boxes all full of ring-binders which contained my notes from university.

I’m not sure why I’d kept them for so long. After a moments thought I set about ripping all the paper out of them and binning it all. A very liberating experience I tell you. I did keep one binder of Maths 2Y note though, as they “might be useful”.

GameSoc had it’s AGM last week and the new committee is now in full effect. No one else wanted to be the WebMaster so I volunteered to stand again and was duly elected. This year I’m gonna try and put my stamp on the site by stripping out a lot of junk we never use. We never use the forum, the front page needs a re-design and the colour scheme is looking a little dated. On major task would be to make the whole site standards compliant. Not as easy as it sounds, as most of the pages are generated by the back end so it means lots of hacking around in php files. I should really write some kind of numpties guide to the backend aswell as I’m not going to be doing this forever.

Had a day off work today and decided to help out at the GameSoc Freshers LAN. There was an ok turnout but surprisingly most people were playing Wario-Ware on the Game Cube instead of playing Quake 3! It’s usually the other way around.

I am now officially Oliver Jackson Bsc Hons. At frickin’ last! Only took five years! Yesterday seemed like the longest day ever, stuff just kept happening. I woke up far too early as I was all excited and nervous about the day ahead. Kerry and I got all dressed up and then went to Favorit for breakfast, where I could hardly eat anything. Then we met my parents and I went and got robed-up and chatted with my buddies. At about 10:30 we decided we’d better go in to McEwan Hall and take our seats.

There was an organ recital and then they got down to the task at hand. What follows is basically an hour of clapping and shuffling along seats. Getting their degress with us was the Engineering school and they all went before us. When your name is finally read out and you’ve successfully shuffled along to the end of the row you march up to the stage (without tripping) and get hit on the head with a ceremonial hat. You then exit stage left, get your certificate and shuffle back into your seat.

After graduation there was lots of milling around outside while everyone’s Mum cried and the family took photos. We eventually managed to organise a group of us into a photo, not the easiest of tasks. Check out the gallery for the photos. After I’d handed back my hired robes (not cheap!) we went back to Favorit for lunch where they managed to annoy my parents by completely forgetting their orders, pretty dumb if you ask me. They did eventually get served, needless to say the tip was a big fat zero. We now had time to kill before the reception in the afternoon so we mooched along to the Royal Musem where I sat down and spaced-out for half an hour.

The reception in the afternoon was in Surgeons Hall which is pretty impressive on the inside, filled with interesting paintings and rooms. It was a fancy affair with canapes, champagne and little sausages. There were some prizes awarded and we were told to have a good time. At this point we were knackered so we went home for a wee rest and then got changed for dinner at the grainstore at seven. The grainstore was very, very nice. I had smoked haddock and pea risotto to start and then aubergine, courgette and something lasagne with red pepper fondue. Both were fantastic and didn’t leave me room for pudding. Kerry and I then took my parents on a mini pub tour of Deacon Brodies, Whistle Binkies and then finally Beluga. My parents then went off back to the hotel and we went to find the new-graduate gang. There were still at the pear tree where we rapidly formulated a plan to go to Why Not? on George street. After much faffing and two almost bar fights we eventually got taxis there. Quite a few of our number were too pished to get in unfortunately but they’d had enough by then anyway.

Kerry and I were still sober enough to get in (of course) and had a great time with the gang. Kept seeing more and more people from c.s. through the night. Kev and Rab were busting some legendary moves on the dance floor and Ian and Daniel was splashing out on some £50 a pop champagne. We lasted until 3am when we got a taxi back with Kev and collapsed into bed. Only for both of us to get up for work this morning. Ouchy.

graduation gallery

Today I got my degree classification. I got a:

2:2

huzzah!

This morning I had my final project presentation at the ungodly hour of 10am. I got a bit toasted by Alexander Voss but on the whole they seemed impressed. One bit didn’t work because I’m a complete muppet and was doing something wrong but I think I blagged it. Now, onto some tips:

• Self-Propose. Doing something you want to do, rather than something that some lecturer wants doing is overall much more satisifying. You also don’t end with something that you are proud of but its not quite what your supervisor wanted.
• Pick your supervisor wisely. Your supervisor has to be interested in your project and keen enough to want to help. I know lots of people whos supervisor was always away or busy and offered no help at all.
• Log your work. I should have been doing this from the start. Some kind of log is very, very useful. Written or online, it doesn’t matter just record everything you do. This is immensely useful when writing up the implementation and saying why you did something that way you did.
• Comment your code. I know we have it drummed into us from first year but it really is very useful. If you’re using something like javadoc do the comments in the correct style. It will save time later, time which you won’t have.
• Be honest. Don’t try and blag anything with smoke and mirrors. Three people who are most likely cleverer than you are going to look at your project. If you try some shenanigans they will ask you to show them X in your presentation. Then you’re boned…

It is done, my dissertation is handed in. Three shiny copies all bound up with Edinburgh uni covers. We all went and played rounders in the meadow on Wednesday afternoon which was a lot of fun. Glorious weather for it aswell. We went out that night and got rather lubricated aswell, I think the gang ended up in the Cavendish but I wussed out before then.

The final version is now with my supervisor! Hes giving it the once over tonight and then its handin-orama tomorrow. I think I’ll lie in for about a week after that. Final word count: 13,319.

It’s almost done, I’m pushing 9k words at the moment. It needs to be around 10k with a few more tweaks to the code, shouldn’t be impossible….

Sorry for the lack of updates, the current programme will return to normal when I got this silly dissertation out of the way (1st of June).