Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

The Course So Far

So, ten days in and I’ve found the time and inclin­a­tion to write.

Some obser­va­tions from the past week:

• Course timetables are com­plic­ated. Take ten weeks, eight mod­ules, ten daily slots, three dif­fer­ent types of appoint­ment, and appoint­ments that aren’t con­sist­ent through the whole term, and con­dense them on to an A4 grid and what do you get? A mess. It was for this reason that I got up at 8am on Monday for a prac­tical I didn’t have, and sat through a 2-hour Foundations for Accounting and Finance lec­ture on Friday after­noon that I didn’t need to be in, due to not tak­ing the mod­ule. Despite the con­fu­sion, I have Wednesdays free, and Fridays free after 10am.
• Energetic and amus­ing lec­tur­ers are a rar­ity. So far I’ve had lec­tures for CS118 Programming for Computer Scientists, CS133 Professional Skills, and IB107 Computing and Information Systems. The CS118 guy is solid gold. His course notes read like a com­edy, his lec­tures are enga­ging and funny. With him we’re learn­ing Java, and while the lec­tures aren’t par­tic­u­larly fast-paced, his course guide is pretty thor­ough, so I’m going through that — no major issues so far. The same can’t be said for the other two mod­ules though — espe­cially Professional Skills. This mod­ule is half UNIX and Linux use, and half learn­ing skills like how to make a present­a­tion, sum­mar­ise a doc­u­ment, etc. Yesterday’s lec­ture was an intro­duc­tion to UNIX and Linux, and it was pain­ful. I’ve only been using Linux 18 months or so, but I could have taught someone the entire lec­ture in about 3 minutes. The stuff was basic, like what a shell and ker­nel are; their rela­tion­ship; how there are many dif­fer­ent dis­tri­bu­tions of Linux etc, but it was pain­fully, *pain­fully* slow. The guy seemed to get a little pre­oc­cu­pied with the wrong parts — per­haps a fea­ture of IT-centric teach­ing :-P. Anyway. IB107 this morn­ing wasn’t exactly excit­ing, but at least it didn’t make me want to stab myself in the eyes.

• Uni is cool. Everyone I’ve met so far has been pretty cool. Cool people on my course, cool people in my flat, cool people in my build­ing. Me and Josh have found the per­fect com­bin­a­tion of free food, drink and DVD view­ings to snare their interest.
• Having a big TFT and elite speak­ers is cool. Just about every night since last Sunday there’s been a crowd of at least 2 in here, watch­ing a pleth­ora of films, and 24 Series 3 :-D. We’re about 7 hours in to the lat­ter, going to do a mara­thon ses­sion tonight, as none of us have any­thing on tomorrow.
• Cooking is good. Junk food con­sump­tion has been fairly min­imal so far. Most nights we mix it up and end up with a bunch of dif­fer­ent things — piz­zas being fairly pop­u­lar :-). I’ve made pizza twice, and a load of pasta stuff; last night was Sin Chicken with rice (chicken breasts, hoi sin, soy, ginger, gar­lic, stock, magic) which went down a treat. It’s still fun and it’s still sat­is­fy­ing, even clear­ing up after­wards :-P.
• Residential net­works are unre­li­able. The speeds I can get here vary a lot — prob­ably due to the fact that all the halls appear to be on hubs for some unknown reason — I’ve had 1MB/sec from Sun’s FTP, and 2KB/sec from other places. Internal speeds are good though — *cough* FTP trans­fers hit­ting 10MB/sec and up. No port-blocking hor­ror stor­ies — I can SSH freely, access any­thing I choose to at home — only thing that I haven’t been able to get here so far is BitTorrent — can con­nect to the tracker but no peers. That’s to be expec­ted I guess; haven’t tried any P2P apps yet. Tor works fine on my laptop, so if I came to it I could ham­mer some­thing through that. My wire­less AP is here but not on most of the time, as I found a reg­u­la­tion in the IT Services hand­book declar­ing that “extend­ing the net­work using wire­less equip­ment” is a ser­i­ous offence. Hasn’t been an incon­veni­ence so far — there are hot­spots all over the main campus.

All in all, an excel­lent few days :-D. Tonight’s plan is to get fuck­faced and hit the intro­duc­tion party for our halls block in the SU. Should be a blast!