.. is currently in progress around my flat.

In the vet department, it involves the gradual osmosis from paper to brain.

In my department, it involves the throwing around of dusty trees, in an attempt to get them in a moveable state. It is hoped that they will all be emigrated in the near future.

How exactly they will obtain their travelling visas is still a matter of consideration.

There are various options under consideration; however reconciling those options, and the various pro’s and con’s of each is the main puzzlement-area at the moment. Maybe I should try constraint programming after all – use the unification algorithm to ensure that all constraints are considered with suitable applications within the context of all other constraints.

Acutally, that is starting to sound rather too geeky for my current de-examination phase of existence.

Iced tea is the answer! Iced tea is the answer to everything. Iced tea is even the answer to “Forte tu, Brute?”

That’s the last exam over….

Me’s happy!!

I’ve just been at the public meeting of synod.

Omorandia was there – he is the new moderator. It is the first time I’ve seen him since that fateful Tuesday one and a half years ago when we arrived in Nairobi shattered after a gruelling all-night journey.

Mr Calum Gunn was there too. I didn’t see him at first, until Aunty Alice nudged me on the arm and pointed in his direction. He smiled, waved and gave me a thumbs-up! So cool to see him again, albeit at a distance.

There was the Kenya mission report – given by Omorandia of course! He mentioned they have just printed yet another batch of psalmbooks, now with a total of around 50 psalms. I’m so glad they’re still persevering with that, painstaking work that it is.

All in all, brought back lots of memories… I nearly laughed when Omorandia gave a brief explanation as to why he could not get last years accounts back from the auditors in time.

There was just that slight sarcastic edge to his voice. That tone of voice he always uses when referring to Kenyan buerocracy Lol.. I can just imagine that his “We tried to get the reports from the auditor in time” was far more than the (albeit annoying) repeated phonecalls to get something done that would occur over here. No doubt there was some of that: phonecalls of expressably polite pigeon English, or somesuch. However, it probably involved stress-filled days of uselessly standing around some random office somewhere in Nairobi or Kisumu, all the time wondering if you really had the foggiest clue why you were there in the first place.

Ah the joys! Enough to make anyone fall in love with Kenya

So that’s DAS out the way…

All in all, the exam itself was very fair, I thought. I let myself down on exam technique though – was so busy trying to not-get-zero for the questions I didn’t have the foggiest about, that I kinda didn’t answer the questions I did know as fully as I could have done.

Anyway, its done, and I’m hoping by a reasonable estimate, I haven’t failed so badly as I was envisioning beforehand.

Peter turned up beforehand, just to ‘reassure us’, and said “Good Luck” to me Not that I’m a ‘luck’ kind of person, but it was nice of him all the same.

And I had that greek-or-something envigilator again. I don’t even know who he is, but I seem to be running into him *all* the time these days… he was envigilating S&C as well, or something.

Ah well, tea is almost ready (microwave just said ‘ping’ so I guess I should go have a wee peek.

PI will be fun… the first time I’ll ever go to an exam without doing any actual studying

Ps: Google’s down…! I spent the last ten minutes thinking my internet connection was a bit dodgy, only to realise it was just the home page. Anyways… off to that stew.

The above is a quote from one of my favourite lecturers, pd. Last year dear old pd gave us an exam question that was based on one measly little line in the lecture notes.

Ok it was only worth around 3 marks, if I remember… around 6-8% of the entire paper, but I needed those 3 marks!! ’twas a hard enough exam as it was, without asking us stuff any reasonable individual would fall over backwards to give us bonus marks for.

So this year, sensible risk-management analyser that I am, I picked pd’s course. Well, he is an amazingly good lecture – I heard one of the other lecturers label him “Arguably the best lecturer in the department” in at least a semi-official departmental capacity (i.e. to a group of potential new second year ‘victims’ ) So yeah, that’s why I’m stuck doing yet another pd exam sometime in the far-too-close future…

Aaanyway, about DAS (Distributed Algorithms and Systems):

• We have 4 slides to a page, and usually 4 pages per lecture. At maybe 8 lines per slide, that comes out at about 128 lines per lecture.
• There’s 19 lectures,one additional research paper (six pages, roughly), six sides of additional algorithms(=lots of lines)
• And then there’s all the 3 textbooks that I don’t have, but I think we won’t go into how many lines a textbook contains…

Overall – taking into account my rather dodgy approximability results – that’ll be around 3050 lines.

I have to know 3050 lines of ’stuff’ on Monday. How fun. Oh, and then there’s the problem -solving aspect… *starts to feel slightly sick*

So, in case you haven’t guessed, I’m amazingly confident about the exam I have the pleasure of sitting at 9:30 next Monday morning, all being well.

Today (after something awful like a Compilers exam… but we won’t go into that) I was off to a Software Engineering group meeting, where they invite speakers on topics of interest and cutting-edge (or firing-line, whichever way you see it ) SE issues. We had a lovely man from Dundee telling us about his research. ‘Twas interesting…

1. Apparently far too much of SE nowadays is: Too much time coding and not enough time getting requirements. Coding nowadays is trivial, as evidenced by the miriad of stuff we get that we neither need nor want, but is all coded up very prettily, and usually works. It’s finding out about the ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ thats the actual problem.

2. Usability vs accessibility: There is a vast difference. Something can be completely accessible (passing all the w3c standards, etc) and yet be completely unusable. And yeah, that’s tremendously helpful to an older person (or any person for that matter). There is not any legislation that demands something be ‘usable’! (Long may that continue, in my opinion! ‘To be usable’ is far too vague a requirement to be fairly legislated for. However, I do see what he is getting at: the functionality is pointless if we cannot use it.)

3. ‘Theatre’s’ are good: role-playing through example scenario’s can be extremely helpful in getting older people to engage and tell us what we need to know in order to make their lives easier in a way they are happy with. If you just ask them straight out, everything is “very good” and they “like” it. It’s getting the engagement, and getting them to realise what information we need them to give us that is crucial.

4. Outlook allows you to do about 280 things from the front page alone.

For someone not technologically literate, they “start reading from the top left”. To be truthful, this was how I started out myself. It takes forever to actually figure out how to do what you wanted to do, and proly by that time you’re so confused by everything you’re ready to give up in despair. So, even though I’m not old – yet – I must say I was very tempted by their little email client, that um… allowed you to send emails. There was only around 8 different things you could do.

I’ve got a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the whole bells-and-whistles functionality myself. I *just hate* having 20 functions visible when I only want 1. I would rather the extra free screen space (especially on my pda) rather than having so much room taken up, just for the odd 1 in 1,000,000 time that I actually do want to change the language to Mongolian. Ok, by all means have the functionality around, so that if I really want it, I can invest 3 minutes googling to find out how to get it, rather than planting it under my nose every single time I *don’t* want to use it. It’s my screen-space; why can’t I choose how I use it?

Anyways, *really* back to studying now… Security and Cryptography exam on Monday.

Ps: On the way up to the meeting I ran into Muffy. She stopped me to ask how the exams were going. Dunno why, but I never feel entirely comfortable talking to Muffy. She’s really friendly and all, and she really makes an effort to show she’s interested, but I don’t have the foggiest clue why she (or anyone) should be interested in some measley wee student.

I always get the impression that she has rather high expectations. When I showed her the exam I’d just sat, she read each question going “Oh, that’s easy” and “You’ll have done fine”. I’m like, “Um, yeah, that’s why I’m shaking in my boots about having failed it right now”. And I remembered just a split second too late about the stupid reminder-comment I’d written next to one of the questions. I could have sunk through the floor when she started laughing at my “do not do the loop as much as possible”. As Julie would describe it, it was a very ‘Scottish’ exam: I did a lot of havering in it

I also told her about the Agilent job. She seemed favourable to the idea, though expressing great surprise that GT had not bothered to offer me a job. Was nice to chat though.

Factoid
——-
Lethal Brew
Kenya has a long tradition of producing its own bootleg liquor, but you should steer well clear of chang’a or kumi-kumi. Tales about this demon drink abound: in November 2000, a batch of the brew laced with methanol killed more than 130 people and hospitalised 500 others. The drink Sorghum Baridi, from Central Province, is said to contain so much methyl alcohol that the bottles are actually cold to the touch! Perhaps the most dangerous chang’a comes from Kisii, and is made from substances as diverse as marijuana twigs, cactus mash, battery alkaline and formalin. Needless to say, these brews can have lethal health effects, including permanent blindness, mental illness and even death.

(From: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/worldguide/destinations/africa/kenya)

Kisii… that’s about an hour’s drive from Sengera, the place where I spent three weeks when I was in Kenya a year-and-a-half ago. While I was there a poor wee 12-year old guy came in rather under-the-influence. They told me then that this ‘changa’ stuff was bad, I didn’t quite appreciate how bad! Poor wee guy, I think he recovered ok, but he was sure ill-looking when he turned up at our place, and it did seem rather touch-and-go-ish at the time too.

Maybe it’ll have taught him a lesson to stay away from the stuff , but more than likely he won’t due to peer pressure, etc.

Ah well, back to studying for me.

I have my second exam tomorrow.. I mean today :-$ Scary, as you can imagine! Any final degree exam is not to be taken lightly, and yet when you have nine of them to study for, you feel as if you’re spreading yourself very thin on the ground as far as any particular subject is concerned. Especially when its a subject you’re less confused about than most, and therefore thought your time would be better spent pulling up those that are more likely to fail.

It’s rather nostalgic in a way too. The lecturer teaching this subject is easily one of my favourites. He it is that is partly responsible for giving me enough of an insight into this subject to inspire me to realise that it is in this area that my main talents lie. His subject – and related areas – I find immensely interesting, and it has been an honour to have him as my project supervisor this past year.

He has pointed me in the direction of investigating a worthwhile area of research, and has constantly encouraged me to explore the problem area in any way that I found productive and informative, sparking many varied discussions on such issues as ‘fairness’ when dealing with groups of people; ‘correctness’ when considering how programs run; ‘optimality’ when considering problems that there is no known optimal solution to, and we do not even know how to recognise an optimal solution if it stared us in the face; ‘good practice’ when considering different ways of programming, and the different generations of programming languages and what we were each accustomed to; whether it is better to run a brilliant program just once, but that may take a while, or a not-so-good program lots of times, but that is much quicker and may still produce a nearly-as-good result by combining all the results obtained; how thoroughly it is beneficial to test a program, and conversely how much should be proven by logical reasoning about the semantic meaning of the program.

I even feel he can read my thoughts, in some kind of geeky way. When I talk about some detailed little intricacy that occurs in my project algorithm – right down the left-hand side in the middle – I just know he knows *exactly* what I’m talking about, without me even having to explain it, just by giving a brief point in the right direction. And so, as far as this conceptual – and unexplainable – idea is concerned, he always knew exactly what I was thinking. Ok, maybe not a true ‘mindreader’ in the traditional sense, but a very believably real form of mind-reading.

Having the ‘last ever’ lecture from him, and now sitting the final exam for his subject (and, incidentally, my favourite subject – not that that qualifies me for a direct pass, but at least it gives me motivation to try) it feels like the closing of another chapter of my life. To be truthful, I will miss his friendly advice that has proved so beneficial and appreciated over this past year. And I would always wish to remember the kindness he has shown me, and the patience he has had with me.

However, I don’t want to let myself think of the closing bit too much right now… I’ll still have another seven exams to sit after this, so I can’t quite afford to slip out of harness yet. Speaking on a more personal level though, I feel as if it really is the final end of something I’ve loved and enjoyed.

Anyway, I shouldn’t still be here though, so tigara buya. xx