Boiling A Frog

JobQuest

2005-11-25T09:51:00.000Z

09/08/05
Start registering with job websites. Over a two month period I received daily or weekly emails from Jobs.ac.uk, The Guardian, Jobsite, Monster, Reed, YourTopJob, TotalJobs, Jobserve, s1jobs, Milkround, CWJobs, Progressive, Castle Careers, Search, Graduate Jobs and perhaps others.

One of the most annoying aspects of "jobs by email" is that recruitment agencies seem to resubmit the same listings once or twice a week, so you're constantly sifting through what you've already seen. Another point worth making is that as a recent graduate I had little commercial experience. Most job adverts specify a minimum amount of experience (commercial or otherwise), and this was one item I would scan adverts for before reading them fully. If the job sites could add more structure to adverts so that I could restrict jobs emailed based on experience required, my inbox would have been lighter.

02/09/05
InPractice Systems
The Company: A Dundee-based company that produces software for GPs to use in medical centres.
The Job: Work on the new version of their system, which will have a thinner client than previous versions. System is uses Oracle, Java and Flex.
The Verdict: Offered the job the next day. I asked to delay making my decision for a couple of days due to the Civic Computing interview I had lined up, which I was more interested in.

12/09/05
Civic Computing
The Company: Website and content manager developers based in Edinburgh. Main clients are the Scottish Executive.
The Job: Join the development team.
The Verdict: Denied second stage of recruitment process the day after turning down INPS.

13/09/05
InPractice Systems ends
I phoned the recruitment agency responsible for the INPS job and declined the job offer. The job was quite interesting, but I was still waiting to hear from Civic. Also, it was my first interview of the year and it had gone very well. I decided that if I was offered a job based on an interview where I was trying to get experience for the coming months, I would be offered jobs at interviews I was fully commited to.

16/09/05
Wood Group
The Company: Energy services supplier based in Aberdeen.
The Job: Join a small development team building reports from large databases.
The Verdict: Turned down for job.

10/10/05
Mobiqa
The Company: Deliver bar codes and passes to mobile phones for clients. Dominate their market.
The Job: Join the development team
The Verdict: This interview was with the recruitment agency. I think I was offered a proper interview during the following week, but turned it down since I had found employment...

Company Net
The Company: Website developers, with a sub-company building E-Learning sites.
The Job: Join the E-Learning development team to update the framework that all the company's E-Learning sites are based on.
The Verdict: Offered the job that day. I am thrilled to have found a job which is appealing, and start looking into moving to the South of Edinburgh.

First NZ
The Company: Financial services company setting up new teams in the UK.
The Job: Join the development team. Early stages of job would be doing menial tasks.
The Verdict: Offered a second interview, which I turned down. I decided based on the interview that I didn't want to work in finance.

14/10/05
Company Net ends
The job falls through for reasons previously described.

18/10/05
Amazing (Phone Interview)
The Company: You should know this by now!
The Job: Join the Edinburgh-based development team adding new features to the site.
A 30 minute phone call with the recruitment agency for this job. I'm asked all the standard team role and communication questions. Compared with two phone interviews I had last year for jobs with large companies I do quite well, not leaving large pauses.
The Verdict: Offered a second interview.

02/11/05
ANMarts
The Company: Local auctioneers dealing mainly with cattle and motors.
The Job: Develop and maintain the company's website.
The Verdict: Turned down for job. During the interview it was explained that 50% of the job would be adding new content to the site. I suggested that during the job I would write a content management system to speed up this process, but apparently that would leave me with nothing to do instead. Also, the pay wasn't what I was hoping for.

03/11/05
Amazing (Recruitment Agency Interview)
I spent four hours in Linlithgow with the recruitment agency, together with 4 others in my group. We were tested for programming knowledge, verbal, numerical and logical reasoning, and given psychometric tests. We were also interviewed in an unusual way: the interviewer would ask a set list of questions, and write furiously while you stare at the top of his head and give your answer. You have to stare at his head because you are being filmed for future viewing. The interview also included choosing a topic from 5 options and giving a 5 minute presentation about it. I chose to speak about the Factory design pattern.
The Verdict: Offered a third interview.

17/11/05
Amazing
A slightly shorter interview, only three hours long this time. I was interviewed separately by 4 members of staff, each asking different styles of questions.
The Verdict: Offered a job!

My House

2005-11-24T11:05:00.000Z

Just five days after getting my new job, I went down to South Queensferry to look at flats. I viewed four properties, one of which was apparently the old Admiral's House out in the sticks. One of the flats was really nice, so I've paid for the agency to hold it for me until I get paperwork for my new job through.

My current plan is to move down the road next Thursday and start work the Monday after (I get to choose my start dates for flat and job).

To help with my flat search I found a nice Google Maps extension called Tagzania that lets you add arbitrary items to a personal map. The system's a bit tricky to use (you need to enter latitude and longitude instead of a post code), doesn't seem to work in Internet Explorer, and has some formatting issues, but it was better than sticking pins in my Edinburgh map.

Anyway, the map I made is on Tagzania, and you can quickly find my work and new flat.

Proper Job!

2005-11-18T16:51:00.000Z

After two months of relatively hard slog, I've managed to secure a job. It's with a very well known e-commerce company. I'm sure you know them. But I don't want to stick their name up for fear of being found amid search results. Trust me, this job will be AMAZing actiON.

I'm well chuffed!

Ships That Sink

2005-10-17T15:15:00.000Z

A lot has happened since my last post. I've been spending a lot of time trying to find a job, and have also been working for my dad doing basic accounting and data entry.

The job front went quiet for a while, but when I started working for my dad things suddenly took off. I managed to get 4 interviews within a week, 3 of them in Edinburgh. Since two of these interviews were arranged by the same recruitment agency, they managed to get them on the same day and to drive me between the offices (which were about 6 miles apart). In fact, all 3 Edinburgh interviews fell on Monday of last week.

So I drove to a Park & Ride just above the Forth (Ferrytoll in case you're wondering), then bussed into the city centre. One interview in particular went really well, with the boss saying he was really impressed with me. By the time I had reached the Park & Ride car park again on the way home, I'd been offered the job, and given a day to think about the position.

Given the long day spent travelling and talking, by the time I got home I was pretty shattered, but still managed to decide that I would take the job, so I phoned the next day to accept. The position was set to start on the 31st of October, so I had just over 2 weeks to find a flat or a room in a flat.

The process of unregistering from countless job websites is not an easy one. I spent much of Tuesday doing this, helping to lighten the load on my inbox and RSS reader. I also turned down a second interview with an Aberdeen company, and cancelled registrations with local agencies.

I spent the weekend (from Thursday to Sunday) down South with Fiona, celebrating her parents' anniversary. While there, I got 2 phone calls from recruiters looking to set up phone interviews with me, which I turned down. One was with Amazon.

On Friday, my soon-to-be-boss phoned with bad news. The company had just lost 2 big contracts, and have to lay off some of their existing programmers. Bad news for the company, and bad news for me, since they can't take me on if they're making redundancies.

I was thankfully able to get some emails out swiftly to some recruiters, most notable Amazon, and get myself back into the job market, though I couldn't do much without my laptop and a decent connection. I'm now back in the market fully, and have caught up on most of what passed me by in the past week.

Another saving grace was that I hadn't had enough time to find a flat and sign a lease, as that could have been extremely costly. Also, the company was able to give me a week's salary to soften the blow.

Outside the working world, I managed to catch up briefly with some old friends in Glasgow. I managed a 30 minute meet-up with Paul and Joe in the afternoon, and met up with a large number of people from my Glasgow course and Summer jobs in the evening. Meetings were too brief, though, and I aim to make it down again soon, jobs and everything else permitting.

Cold Patootie Tango

2005-09-21T17:05:00.000Z

I've had a music-fuelled time of late. I spent the weekend getting to and from Scarborough for the Rock in the Castle festival, of sorts. And yesterday I was in Glasgow for 3 Colours Red's last tour (though I've heard that one before - I've already seen 2 of Terrorvision's "last ever gigs").

Scarborough was quite a trial to get to. I drove Fiona and I to Glasgow on Friday, and picked up my sister, who drove us to Carlisle. I'd booked us into a guest house for only £17 each. I wasn't sure if the place would be habitable at that price, but it turned out to be in pretty good condition, except for the decor which was circa 1930, with the ceiling, curtains and walls all matching, and scary ornaments on the mantlepiece. But we got that room (which was huge) and a cooked breakfast for £17, so it was easily worth the money and the unusual decor.

On Saturday we travelled to a second hotel, this one just outside Scarborough, where the owner told us that The Wildhearts were staying at the same hotel. He got us excited for a bit, then we started having doubts. I'm still not sure he was telling the truth, but I can't figure out why he'd lie about it.

The concert/festival/day on a cliff itself was quite good, though the festival site was quite barren. In total there was the main stage (a mini stage compared to T in the Park) and the second stage opposite. When a band finished on one stage, another would start playing on the other. This was quite a good setup as you were sure to see everyone that played, but did mean that delays were costly, causing The Wildhearts to play for less time than they wanted to. Aside from the stage, there was a single beer tent (with a queue that never died, and was an hour long for a lot of the day), a couple of burger vans, and a bouncy castle. That was about it.

The 3 bands I'd gone to see (Plan A, Terrorvision and The Wildhearts) were all really good, and worth the stupid distance travelled, and the bitter cold we had to endure. I wasn't impressed enough with any other acts to consider buying their songs.

The defining moment of the day was when Ginger was on stage, alone with his banjo, and got the crowd to sing "Geordie In Wonderland" without any help from him. As Chris said afterwards, not even Robbie Williams can get a crowd to sing for him without helping out near the end.

QuoteEngine Mark 2

2005-09-15T11:00:00.000Z

I've done more work on the QuoteEngine. I've made it so that you can register a set of movies with the system, then a quote will be selected at random from that list. The idea is that people with personal websites could include a small piece of script (which I'll write next) that requests a quote and adds it to their site. I've also to look into making a stylesheet for the XML created so you can see the quote given. I'm quite happy with it anyway.

QuoteEngine

2005-09-12T14:41:00.000Z

Another addition to my website: the QuoteEngine. It's a simpler version to what I did as part of the Masters group project this year, and is in PHP instead of Java.

I'll hopefully add to this soon to allow people to register a set of films to select a quote from, so that a URL of the form QuoteEngine/user/me/ gives a quote in XML that can be planted in someone's website with ease. I'll also add the code required by Amazon to delay requests so that they only happen at most once per second (so please don't flood it before then!).

Masters Of Reality

2005-09-09T11:55:00.000Z

Wednesday was the last day of my Masters course at Aberdeen. All that remains is the mark for my project, and graduation in November.

The hand-in time for the dissertation was 12pm, so the fun started soon after. Lunch at the Bobbin, crazy night-time bowling at the beach, dinner at TGI Fridays, nightcap at Slains. Not much to report on from that night, just a last chance to have fun with the guys from the course.

I've really enjoyed my year at Aberdeen. The social side of the course was brilliant, and I'll miss that lab and all that went on there.

Familiar Realm

2005-09-04T20:30:00.000Z

Since I've pretty much finished my project (the hand in date for the dissertation is Wednesday, and I'm just waiting for my supervisor to finish his final proof-read) I decided to spend a bit of time on my website, just in case I need to give the address out in interviews.

So I updated the style, making it actually display reasonably well in Firefox. I also added my first assessment from the masters course - SilverStream. I thought setting up an account on MyJavaServer would be simple, but their architecture doesn't seem to meet any standards at all, so there was a lot of fickering about involved. I've not tested it fully yet, so there's bound to be a few links not pointing in the right direction.

Last.fm Hoffed

2005-08-09T21:18:00.000Z

I've been waiting for the new Audioscrobbler site to appear since Saturday, when they took the old version down. All of today the home page has said that today would be the launch day, but I didn't see anything change until just a few minutes ago.

I'm not that keen on the new pink style, and the charts are harder to read now, but I can live with that. I've still to investigate all the new features, but feel that it's important to point out that they've been hoffed! The page might have been fixed since I saw it, so here it is:

I'll no doubt get even more hoff-related traffic on this blog now!

Sporadic Movement

2005-08-07T22:09:00.000Z

I've just changed domain names for my website. I decided to do this a while back. I don't like the "rebootmenow" moniker much anymore, and thought it a bit childish to take into the more professional world I'll hopefully reach soon.

So, once the DNS servers catch up, my site will be at sgmorrison.com. I don't have time just now to redo the content, but it should improve over time. I hope to redesign what already exists, and add a working copy of the system I used in many assessments this year. I'll put it up in Java then in PHP assuming I find time to rewrite it.

Idea: Collaborative Jukebox

2005-07-19T13:53:00.000Z

I owe this idea to Emma, who mentioned last night having listened to a lot of Stereophonics recently, and had then heard it in 3 consecutive pubs she'd been to in the last week. I think I might've also heard the idea somewhere else before, though I'm not sure.

The idea is for everyone to store on their mobile phone a list of their favourite bands or songs. Obviously space is an issue but there's far too many obstacles to this idea at the moment for it to work yet. Give it a few years!

So, everyone in a pub has their favourite songs listed on their phone, and the pub's jukebox is able to discover devices (eg. through bluetooth) and retrieve these lists. It then builds a profile of the audience from this, and uses this information and some general genre info supplied by the bar (ie. the type of music they normally play) to choose what songs to play.

Whatever gets played is almost guaranteed to please someone in the bar, and it could be a great ice-breaker: when Britney Spears starts playing in the local biker bar, the secret pop fans can be singled out and chucked out. Everyone wins!

Nine Miles High

2005-07-16T18:05:00.000Z

I spent the last two days taking yet another break from work to watch Nine Inch Nails play their last UK date on the current tour. I'm quite glad I took two full days off for this because travelling from Heathrow to my friend's house in Greenwich took 3 hours, then another hour to get to Brixton from there for the gig, with similar times needed for return journeys.

Notable highlights: getting to see Julie again, although very briefly and after making her wait for an hour on her own in Brixton because I had her ticket. Sorry once again!

Tavelling across a large portion of London City without seeing any of it, by using the tubes. I did get to see some of the docklands area but not much, and it was far too hot to do any real tourism.

The concert itself. Some choice song selections like Hurt and Dead Souls. I was half-expecting Trent to be a bit introvert, and not really willing to interact with the audience, but he was very energetic and open.

A lady in the queue in front of us using a self check-in machine at Heathrow on the way home. I'd love to be able to slate the poor user interface design, but it was reasonably usable. Some points:

A screen appears asking if I'm travelling alone or in a party. Select "party". A list of all people I've paid for tickets for then appears, each with a tick icon beside it to allow you to checki the person in. On my first use of the machine I tried to hit 2 ticks, but the second press wasn't registered - I had to check in one person before doing the rest. That wasn't obvious, especially since the name list remained on screen long enough for me to hit two ticks.

The woman at Heathrow mentioned above was asked to enter her destination or flight number. On the given touch-screen keyboard she carefully typed "Edinburgh", but the last two characters were dropped (a rather arbitrary choice of a 7 letter limit on destination names). When "Edinbur" wasn't found, the woman checked her flights itenary for what I assumed would be her flight number, then typed "Glasgow". Keith and I struggled to keep straight faces. Perhaps the system knows that all of its desinations have 7 or less letters, but it might be nice to let the user know when the limit is reached and what's wrong with what they're doing.

The same woman's next job was to pick her seat on the plan. The screen displays a floor plan of the plane, with taken seats shaded red, free seats in green. The woman tried to select a couple of red seats, gave a two finger salute to the machine, then chose a green seat. A wee message saying "Red means you can't sit there" might have helped her out.

Idea: Music Listening History

2005-07-16T15:28:00.000Z

I am still addicted to Audioscrobbler, or as addicted as someone can be to a page of statistics. Just about every time I listen to music on my laptop I go there to see my recent listening habits. I was chuffed when I hit 2000 song plays, and when all 50 of my Top Artists had been played at least 10 times. I visit the page so much I actually donated to it. All very sad, I know!

Anyway, you can download the data for everyone's past listening stats from the site, and I'm toying with the idea of yet another graphics-related project. This one would use SVG (a nice graphics format) to display the relative popularity of an artist for a given user over time. It would show, for example, how I listened to Nine Inch Nails a lot more when their new album came out, and again in the days around the concert in London on Thursday (I'll write up about that soon, I'm sure).

You could select 10 artists from your history and get a comparative line graph of when you listened to them. And since everyone's data is open to the public, you could combine this with a comparison against general trends. Using SVG would allow you to update the graphs really quickly.

Just to clarify, I'm still working on my Masters (honest). These ideas are just floating around my brain, so I may as well write them down in case I forget them.

Idea: Open Source Image Suite

2005-07-16T14:32:00.000Z

I've been thinking over an idea in my mind for a few days now for a project that is probably beyond what I could do, due to having done very little work with graphics before, but which I still think would be a great benefit to the world of computing. I'll go slowly so that non-geeks can hopefully follow this.

Consider two software packages: Firefox and Eclipse. Firefox is an open source web browser that if you have not tried, you really should. It's far ahead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer with security, and allows for adding extensions written by anyone to give you far more power and more features than you can imagine. Seriously, you need to go and try it out. It's really lightweight (it doesn't use lots of memory) and is just so nice.

Eclipse may be less familiar, especially if you're not a coder. It's an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which means it lets you write code, run it, debug it, and lots more from within a single program. Eclipse is quite special because it's open source too and so is free to download, and it's designed to allow anyone to write plug-ins for it, similar to Firefox's extensions.

Open source software is becoming more and more common in IT, and there's good reason for this beyond penny-pinching. If more people can see the code behind the scenes, there's more chance of bugs being spotted and fixed. This makes the software more robust and secure. This is all very good, and there's far more to be said for OS software that I won't go into, but it fails to address the financial side of things: how do the people who wrote and maintain Eclipse get paid?

One source of revenue for the Eclipse team comes from the plug-ins written for the system. If someone wants to charge people to use their plug-in, Eclipse get a cut of whatever they charge. Using this model, everyone can use Eclipse for free, and if you want extra functionality, you can get that too, and you might have to pay for it, but you only pay for the plug-ins you want.

As a counter example, consider Microsoft Word. Around the 2000 version Microsoft added Auto-complete (suggesting how to finish a half-typed word) to Word. The cost of coding and testing that feature would be included in the price of every copy of Word 2000 sold. Auto-complete was probably a feature requested by some of Word's previous users, but not all of them. A lot of people would be happy to pay a little less for Word if it came without Auto-complete, but that isn't an option. So with Eclipse's model, users pay for exactly the features they want, and plug-ins are only made for features there is a demand for, not for pointless additions like a talking paperclip that no-one would pay money for (unless you have a passion for living stationery and want to let others share your passion, in which case you'd make the "Talking Staple" plug-in open source too).

So where is all this going? Well I've always wanted a fairly powerful Image/Photo editing suite, but don't want to pay hundreds of pounds for it. I'm not asking for much functionality: something above MS Paint (which I don't think has changed significantly since Windows 95), but not with all the fancy filters and effects available with Photoshop.

I started looking for an open source image suite but only found Gimp (for Linux). I've used Gimp before and found it to be a very different style of interaction to most other image editors, and with a steep learning curve. What the world needs is an open source image editor that has a base level similar to Paint, and with the option to add plug-ins/extensions that give you all the extra flair that the likes of Photoshop offer.

As I stated earlier, I doubt I could create such a system, or even the architecture behind it, without some serious research into plug-in frameworks and the inner workings of image editors. Until then, it will simply be an idea. Still, I think it would be quite fun to try to get a business loan for this project: I can imagine giving a bank manager a guided tour of Firefox, then Paint and Photoshop, and letting him join the dots.

Park Life

2005-07-12T15:48:00.000Z

Work on my project has been put on pause for the last few days while I took in the sights and sounds at T In The Park. Getting back into my work is proving difficult, not least because I'm still quite tired from the weekend.

Here's a list of things to remember if you go to a festival. I personally would do well to remember these:

1. If you pitch your tent beside a perimeter fence, you might benefit from a quieter neighbourhood, but expect every guy within a mile to use the fence as a urinal. Also expect little sleep due to what seems like hundreds of people either jumping the fence or breaking through it, and the fence being replaced on an hourly basis.

2. Expect anything: on Sunday night, after watching Green Day, Fiona and I went back to our tent to find the front door's zip slightly open.

Me: "We didn't leave the tent like that."

I'd been really paranoid for most of last week about thieving, but had calmed down by Friday night, so this was a bit of a surprise. We opened the door fully, to find the inner door fully open.

Me: "We definitely didn't leave it like that."
Fiona: "That's because there's someone in our tent."

Some random guy was passed out in the tent. A shout of "Oi!" didn't get any response, so I started prodding his back. He stirred, looked around a bit, but still didn't seem to have all his wheels turning. I was pretty angry, shouting at him to get out of the tent, while still unsure if he would sooner attack us than give up his new-found bed, though the longer he took to move, the less likely a beating seemed.

Eventually he emerged, wearing only shorts and socks, with one trainer lying nearby and the other missing. By this time we were starting to feel sorry for the guy, since he hadn't touched anything in the tent (except my sleeping bag which he was lying under), and he was so wasted he's probably still today in that campsite, yet to be discovered by his "friends". So I try to work out where his friends might be:

Me: "Where do you stay?"
Random: "Coatbridge"
Me: "No, I mean where is your tent pitched?"

3. When you park your car, try to remember where you've parked it. Look for obvious cars parked nearby, or count rows, or something. We spent 30 minutes walking around a field of cars on Sunday morning. It's just as well we packed up that morning rather than at night, or we'd never have found the car.

Now for a quick review of the bands I saw:

Death From Above 1979: I missed their first song due to the huge queues from getting into the festival area. I could just make out the tunes I know from within what they played - the bass was too loud for and not really geared for an open stage, especially for a band whose sound relies so heavily on bass riffs. Not impressed was I.

Joss Stone: As expected, fairly entertaining, though she did swear a fair bit - I didn't think that was a good idea for someone I'd expect to have a lot of very young fans in the audience.

Audioslave: The best act of the weekend, by quite a distance. They played their own tracks with a lot of enthusiasum, and the covers were well done too. I would never have expected to hear "Spoonman" played, since it wasn't one Soundgarden's biggest hits, but it sounded really good with the Rage backing. They also played "Black Hole Sun" (Chris on his own with an acoustic guitar), a short instrumental version of "Bulls on Parade" followed by "Sleep Now In The Fire" in full, and "Killing In The Name".

The Killers: Seen from a distance but still within a really packed crowd. Basically, the annoying idiots around us made The Killers difficult to enjoy. All main stage acts watched after that were seen from further back to avoid the same happening again.

Foo Fighters: Still on form, thankfully. Dave was on fire for the first two songs especially, and played far more from the first two albums than expected.

Nine Black Alps: Added to the list of those I wanted to see late on, after pointed me in their direction. Their album "Everything Is" is really good, and they can pull off their material on stage with ease.

Eagles Of Death Metal: Just plain fun. They got the whole crowd going with "Stuck In The Metal (Middle) With You". And they had Dave Catching on guitar, though I doubt anyone else cares about that.

QOTSA: A very good show, but not quite of the quality I've seen them produce before. Perhaps suffering from Nick Oliveri's absence onstage, or from Josh singing songs originally recorded with Mark Lanegan on vocals, though Natasha Shneider did a good job on backing vocals and keyboard.

Green Day: Very much a stadium-style show - lots of crowd participation. They only managed about 10 songs in two hours onstage. Still very entertaining, and made some of their recent songs seem less annoying.

Also seen: Jimmy Eat World, The Streets (briefly), The Bravery

Tonight the BMI Shines

2005-07-04T17:37:00.000Z

I'm just off the phone with BMI, who have surprised me by having decent customer care.

I booked flights for to and from London for the Nine Inch Nails concert at the end of next week. Iain Wood's been kind enough to give my 3 friends and me some floor space for the night of the concert, and I gave him details of the flights so he could help us get around. He pointed out that our return flight was far too early (8:55am), and we'd be hard pushed to make it.

Very true - I'd obviously forgotten about 1 hour advanced check in at airports, the sheer size of London, and that I might like some sleep after the concert. So I went about changing the return flight time.

BMI's website: select a new time, get a bit shocked by their hidden costs at every turn, enter credit card details, get confirm... No, technical difficulties, come back later or tech support

BMI's tech support: "We can make the booking for you." Great, but the price quoted is more than what's on the website. "You should call the booking line."

BMI's booking line: "Tech support gave you the right price. If you want the website price, use the website(!). Wait a day or two then try again."

BMI's website: select the same time, get a bit shocked by the jump in price by over £100. Panic a bit.

BMI's customer care: I phoned to explain the situation and sweet-talk a discount from them, but the phone's battery died while on hold!

Email customer care: "All the above has happened, can I still get the original price? I have screenshots as evidence(!)"

And after all that, a phone call to say that they will only charge me the standard change of flight charge, so I'm quite well off for that. Commendable practice by BMI.

Head Like A Hole

2005-06-17T12:52:00.000Z

There is a certain lecturer, who also holds a position of power, at Aberdeen Uni that seems to have a real problem with the concept of time. When lecturing he would arrive late for every lecture, then started giving us grief about us turning up late.

Our course has a rule that all assessments are given back to the students with marks and comments attached within 3 weeks. Most of the time lecturers missed this mark by a week or two, but our friend was 10 weeks late, returning marks one day before the module's exam (so if my understanding of some basic part of the course was wrong, and he told me so in his assessment comments, I'd have one day to re-learn it).

His latest dive into temporal obscurity was an email sent today to inform us that we must attend a seminar on Monday morning. Normally you could expect our class to be around on a Monday, but only during taught modules. I'd imagine a few people on the course are taking a break this weekend and don't plan on being in the country on Monday. I'm actually heading to Glasgow for the weekend and had considered staying until Monday. Others might have arranged meetings with people for their individual projects at the time of the seminar. One working day is not enough time to set a compulsory seminar for.

Of course the seminar's speaker has probably known for weeks if not months when they are going to be talking to us, so there's no reason we couldn't have been given more warning.

In Radiohead's Honour

2005-06-16T19:43:00.000Z

I picked up a copy of the new Foo Fighter's album earlier this week, but am only now getting around to my third listen. It's been pushed aside by my need to listen to a lot of The Wildhearts before this weekend's Ginger show in Glasgow.

Anyway, I'd heard part of the In Your Honour a couple of weeks ago at Gaz's house, and as soon as it came on I thought I knew the first song. The starting riff was definitely stolen from somewhere, but I couldn't place it. The song was played again a bit later on and I tried really hard to focus on what my mind told me should follow it, but failed.

After being pained by this for two weeks, the answer finally revealed itself, and I'm annoyed I'm not the first to spot it. The riff is stolen from Sulk by Radiohead (from The Bends). Go away and think about it. Stick your dusty Bends CD/MP3 (if they can get dusty) on if you must, then realise I am right. Warning: this totally taints the quality of the first song on the Foos' new album.

I was expecting something different from the Foo Fighters this time: "One loud, one not so loud" is what the CD case proclaims. Having heard the first Foos album, and Dave's recent Probot adventures in metal, I was expecting the first CD to be really heavy, rough-edged thrashy songs, and the second to be at the same pitch as One By One or The Colour And The Shape. Instead, the first CD reflects the old style and the second CD is even quieter than that. Not so good.

It's not all bad though - the second CD actually works quite well, and Taylor seems to be able to handle singing fairly well. Will be interesting to see if he switches places with Dave at T In The Park for a song or two.

I Take Out His Weapons, Both Of Them

2005-06-08T23:47:00.000Z

Just seen Sin City with KG and Pete. They didn't seem fully convinced by it, but I thought it was supreme. Absolutely oosing with comic book style and something on the edge of stupid but still conceivably ludicrous. Or something.

Go See It! (Assuming you can stomach it - it is quite gory)

Recommended Dose

2005-06-07T19:22:00.000Z

It's just over a week until I will be in a very large field enjoying T In The Park 2005. I saw the near-complete line-up advertised the other day, so I've sketched out who I'm planning to see from the three main stages. The style on this blog is extremely annoying (I planned to change it ages ago but never managed it), so the simple act of making a table had to be put in a separate file: Chosen Acts.

Feel free to belittle my choices!

Maroon Shark Gives You Wings

2005-06-02T22:28:00.000Z

I bought my first game in months a few days ago: Metal Gear Solid 3. I've not really had time for anything beyond 24 recently, but the end of exams is the perfect excuse to spend £30.

I'd played MGS2 to death a couple of years ago, so thought I'd jump straight into the third instalment and get straight into strafing, but not so: it's all change. All the high-tech equipment I was used to, like the companion of a motion sensor overlaid on a map which was pretty much invaluable, has been shed since the game is set during the Cold War.

So I've had to get used to when to use the Motion Sensor, Sonar and Thermogoggles to detect enemies. It makes the game much more enveloping if you let it.

It was probably quite ironic that I'd read the Gamers' Manifesto just before buying MGS3, but I did get quite frustrated with my first couple of plays. For one thing, most of the locations so far have been jungle, with gentle slopes you can run across, near-vertical slopes you can climb over, and anything in between that totally confuses Snake. And I can remember being able to climb trees without the aid of vines, so why should these guys need it?

The other main annoyance was that I had to watch 20 minutes of storyline before getting to do anything more than kill alligators. I watch this stuff so that I don't miss out on the important things, like what I actually have to do in the game. I'm just about to be told where to head next and who I've got to speak to for 10 minutes about the rain in Moscow, when the phone rings or the doorbell goes. Quick, hit pause. Oh no, pause for the rest of the game (the Start button) means skip the rest of the dialogue scene and dump me in front of some nasty guy covered in bees (how does he like his coffee!?) while I tell Random Telecoms I'm still not interested in being given gold bullion to leave BT.

Speaking of ingenious marketing techniques(!), a lady came to my door today doing marketing research on soft drinks. She seemed to have a single sheet of questions to ask, so I agreed to it. She then pulled out a 10 page pack of questions. And not simple True/False, but Likert scales (scale of 1-5 for your answers - ah, memories of my fourth year project). The "soft drinks" intro soon became quite obviously "energy drinks", or more accurately, Red Bull versus Lucozade. Some sample questions:

Do you think Red Bull are on the way up and doing well, keeping steady, or going downhill?

If you see someone drinking Red Bull, do you think that person goes against the norms of society and does what he/she wants? (It's just a drink!)

How often do you drink Red Bull when at home relaxing? (NB. As far as I know, caffeine does not relax you)

Which of these drinks do you drink while at work?
Optons include Red Bull, Lucozade Energy, Coke, Bottle Water, Fruit Juice, and Beer / Wine.

Did you know that Red Bull gives you wings and do you agree with this?

Did you know that Red Bull increases your energy, and do you agree with this? (I completely disagree since Red Bull are banned from saying so in adverts, which must make it a false claim)

Having investigated RB just now, I almost wish she'd asked me "Did you know Red Bull is banned in France and Norway because of deaths relating to its consumption?"

Anti-Hoff Device

2005-05-28T18:43:00.000Z

Tired of being hoffed all the time at work or uni? Or do you have a family member / friend / Gaz that is always getting hoffed? Then you need the USB Wireless Security Lock to lock your machine automatically when you move 2 metres away from it.

I can see this being a really useful thing to have, and to be left in your bag / jacket beside your laptop all day so it's actually just wasting cycles and interfering with Northsound Two.

Close Yet Far

2005-05-28T12:32:00.000Z

As if the stress of the group project wasn't enough, my exams started 11 days later. Eleven Days. I remember having 6 weeks to revise for my fourth year exams, and feeling like it was only just enough time to do everything I wanted to.

This is another way (there are many, far to many to get into) in which my course gets it wrong. The people taking the masters are all studying the same modules, and we can't study anything else (to my knowledge), so there's no chance of exam timetable conflicts with other modules. They could put our exams in September and no other department would be concerned. Instead, we get exams on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday of the same week, and get only 11 days (10 days when you count the hangover that has to come with the end of a module) to revise for them.

So I've had little time to get up to much other than work for the last month. I did get a chance to say goodbye to Claire last week though, as she's leaving for Canada for a year.

Yesterday was the last exam, and it finished at 11:30. 20 minutes later around 13 people from my course were all crammed into the Bobbin. A lot of us got food, and Gaz brought to the table a stupid amount of sauce packets, which were then used as ammo for aiming at pints for about 30 minutes. The loud "Oh"s and "Aww"s must have been confusing the people downstairs, but it's all fun and games until someone sabotages a brown sauce packet, causing it to burst open over Paul S.

Not much else to tell really. Went bowling at the beach, played pool and table football (I didn't do all that well at any of them), after which our group had dwindled to 5, so those that remained went to Chi for some quite expensive but very good chinese cuisine.

The group began to grow again afterwards at Slains, with Westhill kids joining in. After Slains came the Bassment and Moshulu. Stayed awake for 22 hours and had a drink in my hand for 14 of them. Slept for 5. I'm very tired! Just as well I have a week off to recover.

Much more to come I hope, including my new individual project idea (it's good, honest).

Hate Kill Destroy

2005-05-28T12:01:00.000Z

It has been a long long time since my last post (as some will not let me forget). I've been exceptionally busy for the last month, more so than I should have been.

The last module of my masters course was a group project - no exam, just build a system with 4 other people and try to market it to people invited to a Trade Fair. This should've been one of the better modules - no need to try to listen to lectures (the amount of my Agents course I didn't get the first time around became clear when revising, but I'll get to that later), just code all day.

The problem is that you don't get to choose your team - it is allocated based on giving each team the same average CAS marks for the first term, and making sure that there was a good mix of nationals and internationals in each team. Having said that I didn't originally mind my team allocation, but that was before the module began.

Paul Ritchie and I got a head start with the project, brainstorming and putting together a database and framework for the system over Easter. When the project started properly, we were already jogging if not running with the system, and the others did a poor job of getting up to pace.

We just got no commitment from the rest of the team. One guy was alright - you could give him work to do (I was the team leader) and it would get done well - but the other two did very little that could actually be included in the final submission.

"Do this part of the system for 2 days time." Wait a week. Get back a partial implementation borrowed heavily from a rival business' site.

"Prepare the outline of our marketing brochure so we can all write a section and we know exactly what needs to be said and with how many words/pages." Wait 10 days. Get back sketchy notes, written once and never read, borrowed heavily from the course website, adding very little to what we already know and not actually helping to divide the writing task.

I think my favourite let down can be summed up with a quote from my individual report:

The day before the Trade Fair I asked X to follow the Roadmap document to see if it was missing anything. He instead had to leave to buy a shed.

As you can see I didn't let them get away with it. I was more than civil until the project was over - the Trade Fair would've failed if I was to busy with my Spanner! I'm even being nice now by preserving some anonymity.

It's hard to get across just how difficult it was to work with these guys. After about half of the module had passed Paul and I had to basically carry the whole thing to completion - coding the vast majority of the system, making a huge poster, editing the brochure, demonstrating the system, all of it.

This is where a course can fall over: I've been getting really good marks for almost everything I've submitted apart from assessments where I'm in a team. And it's not because I'm poor in a team, it's because team's are allocated based on averaging grades, and that means the team's overall mark is bound to be near that average. (Yes that sounds selfish and all the rest but I've been working damn hard on this course.)