Journal Entries
Teeth
Posted Mar 28, 2003
Had two teeth taken out today 
I've been ordered to keep a couple of gauze pads in my mouth for six hours, meaning I'll be mute until 8pm. Then I have to rinse my mouth with a salt solution. Which will probably hurt 
Fortunately, it wasn't painful. The dentist emptied two huge syringes of local anasthetic into my gums, which numbed not only my gums but my lower lip as well. So when I try to speak, it sounds like I'm mumbling. Hmm, maybe the salt water won't hurt after all. I hope not.
The dentist gave me a leaflet on how to cope ("So you're having a tooth out"... just kidding! 
it's just an A5 sheet) which says "Try not to disturb the socket by eating food on that side"... a bit hard, since I've had a tooth out on both sides 
What now? Well, about a month and a week from now (to let the sockets heal) the brace proper is fitted. The two teeth were removed to make room for the front teeth to move back - the front of my jaw is overcrowded, causing some teeth to be useless and, more importantly, look ugly. (Yes, more importantly. I have no trouble eating.) In the meantime, the bridge I already have will keep the back teeth from sliding forward.
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Latest reply: Mar 28, 2003
Money
Posted Mar 19, 2003
Signed on at the Job Centre today, so I'll once again be claiming Jobseeker's Allowance. 
(pacifying my parents, who are moaning at me for freeloading - don't suppose I can blame them really).
Hopefully not for long... I found a "pin monkey" vacancy ("Full-Time Technician") at the local bowling alley in the job paper, so I phoned up for an application form. Should be fun 
I made a cup of 
with a percolator today. It's a thing made of metal that you put on the stove. You put water in the bottom part, put a basket on top of it that contains the coffee, and screw the actual coffee jug onto the top. There's a tube leading up into the jug - when the water boils, it passes through the coffee and bubbles up the tube, then flows down the outside to collect in the pot. It's great for making small amounts of coffee because you don't need to change the filter every time.
Yesterday I downloaded SETI@home. I have it running continuously. Just wanted to do my bit in the search for ET 
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Latest reply: Mar 19, 2003
UO
Posted Mar 13, 2003
Now that PayPal accepts Solo, I can finally play UO!
I've completed the newbie quest and currently have two characters, a warrior and a mage. The warrior is making pots of money as a bowyer at the moment.
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Latest reply: Mar 13, 2003
New article
Posted Mar 10, 2003
Just did a brain dump on intellectual property (A992919). It's not finished yet, but once I've got all the sections there I'm sending it to the Writing Workshop to get opinions from people who know more than me.
For now... 
Time for bed!
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Latest reply: Mar 10, 2003
Three down, two to go
Posted Feb 27, 2003
So, that's over half of the universities visited so far: Aberystwyth, Keele and Swansea. I'm applying for Computer Science with German.
University of Wales, Aberystwyth (UWA) (Fri 21 Feb)
The day started off with a video about the "team-building" exercises all their freshers are sent on. Apparently it's a very effective way of teaching teamwork skills, which are very important in software engineering - the days of the lone coder are long past.
They only showed us Windoze machines, but they assured me there were Linux boxes too... before comforting me with a few Welsh cakes with jam and clotted cream 
There was an informal one-on-one chat (not an interview, as the offer had already been made) in which a lecturer claimed that there were "armies" of dyslexics in their CS department! 
Well, at least I won't have any trouble getting Learning Support.
While the chats were going on, we were put in a room full of Windoze machines with the Java SDK installed (on them or a server, one or the other). 
We had an example program, which was sort of a Logo-type thing, set up to draw a hollow 'L' shape in a window using a turtle, presumably as an example of what they would be teaching in the first year. I tried to modify it to draw a hollow 'P' shape instead, but there was no "penUp()" method. I spent half an hour trying to implement one, but the program's design made it rather hard. It was good fun nonetheless.
At some point (before the talks) we were taken on an accommodation tour - a few different halls, just to give a taste of the variety available. One of the halls was very big, about three dozen rooms to a floor, with a few kitchens and bathrooms. The others were pretty much par for the course. All of them had Ethernet sockets - a pig plus for a CS student.
Keele University, nr. Newcastle-under-Lyme (Sat 22 Feb)
Stayed near Stone overnight at the B&B where there used to be a farm owned by the people who established Keele Uni... just a meaningless coincidence.
I wasn't impressed by Keele at all. Their visit day was fairly freeform: four talks, for which we were issued tickets, on student life, finances, degree structure, and studying abroad. Lots of useful info, but nothing academic.
We got an accommodation tour here too. Nothing special, again. Some of the students recommended NOT having an ensuite bathroom since you get to know your hallmates better that way. Well, it was something like 2:30 and I still hadn't heard anything about the courses.
Finally we decided to do the academic thing and visit the CS and German departments. What an anticlimax. The staff seemed completely unenthusiastic. The German guy just talked at us four half an hour, after showing us a German-language history TV programme (which itself was actually quite interesting). The CS people were even worse. They had a little table in front of one of their labs (not even *in* it!), with a very small display about some postgrad's distributed-computing research project. Not a running computer in sight! It was like a school's open day, not one of a quality institution of higher education pushing to increase its intake.
Oh, and there was no food 
University of Wales, Swansea (UWS) (Wed 26 Feb)
Very convenient location, just up the A34 and along the M4, and follow the coast... or direct by rail, with no changes. UWA would have been about as convenient by rail, were it not for Dr Beeching 
We left home at 8:50 am, and arrived about 12:50 pm - 35 mins late. The first talk was about computer graphics research, apparently designed to be interesting but unimportant, so that latecomers wouldn't miss anything. We arrived just as the second talk (about the department and the course) was starting 
Lunch followed - a delicious finger buffet. Probably the first I've ever been to where there were NO sausage rolls! A good thing, as they would have spoiled the chicken and mayo sandwiches, ham and cheese baguettes, samosas, spring rolls, onion bhajis, mini pizzas etc.
At the table with us was a third year student wearing a T-shirt: "iMachiavellian. Think dissident." Strange, I thought it was Billg who was Machiavellian And someone else had: "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't." 
Evidently a healthy culture here.
Next, yet another talk... about IT Network Wales, an organisation that tries to combat the brain drain of Welsh IT folks to England. They were running out of time so they had to rush the talk, meaning I don't remember much else about it.
At last, they took us on a campus tour, in several groups. The various buildings had about the same look: painted concrete. Not too attractive, but functional. We went up to the media centre (where they run the university radio station) and met a man who kept saying "Clearing is wonderful. Clearing is how you have a life after f**king up your A-levels. Oops, have I got the right group?"
There was a café, which was choking in cigarette smoke, and a bar, which wasn't. Being a non-smoker I was put off the café somewhat. (Why do students smoke? It's a stupid waste of money. 20 fags a day costs almost a grand a year.) The bar was good though. A pint there reportedly costs just £1 during happy hour 
No real 
though
The halls were... basic. The room we were shown was empty, but being on the end of the hall, and having an ensuite bathroom, it had very little space. The desk was only about half a metre deep. My monitor (a 19" CRT) would take up its whole depth, with no room for the keyboard 
One of the guides said he'd bought a thin screen monitor halfway though the course for that reason. There were also no network sockets, though the student with the iMachiavellian T-shirt said that a campus-wide IEEE 802.11b network (aka Wi-Fi, wireless LAN) was being worked on and should be available by September (unfortunately such adapters are rather expensive - £45 for the cheapest at Novatech). And the kitchen, bizarrely, had no oven. I think they just picked a bad hall to show us... well, the others were off campus. They say there's another hall being built on campus... maybe I'll try to get a place there.
The departmental tour was much more uplifting. They have some slightly odd hardware. CRTs were being phased out in favour of thin-screen monitors because they can be made bigger without sacrificing desk space 
There was a room full of what seemed to be thin clients, until I noticed they were running Windoze. They were HP boxes, apparently designed to be disposable (if it fails, don't fix it, just throw it away). There was another room with a few G4 Macs for those that prefer them, and some cubical machines - not Qubes, but x86 Linux boxes. Very nice-looking cases.
During the tour I asked a few questions regarding their syllabus. They have AI, but only in the last year, and modules in logical and functional programming (Prolog and Haskell, respectively). The course takes a long-term approach - teaching programming in the first year, using Delphi, then moving on to "more industrially significant languages" such as Java and C. The idea is to teach you concepts that are common to all languages so you can learn new ones yourself, rather than getting stunted by learning languages that are on the way out, like VB 
Looks to me like a very good way to do a CS degree course.
After that, there was a talk about accommodation, but I was dragged off to the German department (since they hadn't noticed I was doing German too). They have a similarly flexible approach; whereas much of the course (especially in the first year) concentrates on language, there are several optional modules on German history, politics, literature etc. There's also a computer science language module, which seems to suggest that this course is exactly what I was looking for
The third year is spend abroad. All the courses I applied for have this in common. I want to become fluent in German, so this is essential. There's a choice of studying in a German uni, teaching English (as an assistant) in a German school, or working for pay. I'll probably take the last.
Summary: So far, UWS is top academically; UWA is better for accommodation, and I like the city more. I still have Aston (Birmingham) to visit, and I haven't heard from Oxford Brookes yet.
TTFN, and watch this space for further reports.
}:=8
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Latest reply: Feb 27, 2003
Pete, never to have a time-specific nick again (Keeper of Disambiguating Semicolons) - Born in the Year of the Lab Rat
Researcher U151654
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