Saturday, May 29, 2004

Live Journal

Finished my AOO exam, finished my entire degree, happy :) The AOO saga was memorable, I feel like I was screwed over by the lecturer for his personal gain. Ah well, if capitalism has taught me anything, its that the solution is to screw someone else over to make yourself feel better.

Got very drunk last night, did the extended campus bar crawl, all the bars on campus + those near campus with 6 beers before hand. An 11 hour drinking session.

My friends are all trying to persuade me to use Live Journal, but I have to say that blogger seems really nice. I'm trying to set up live journal to look nice, but they want me to pay to get any sensible features. I can have it close to how I want, but if I want a border that isn't huge then I can pay. Because of that, blogger looks more attractive. The only thing I would like to do with Blogger is to move the adverts (text Adverts aren't a problem, I can deal with that, just down the side would look nicer) Anyway, with all the power of CSS, HTML and Javascript I'm sure its possible to kill the adverts totally (although I'm not going to, TOS and all that).

Friday, May 28, 2004

Cancel

I'm using Word, and because of the brilliant install only some things and install the rest on demand, I keep clicking on buttons which bring up the install thing. While this may be a great feature on networks, I never have the Word CD in the drive (the CD Drive is a place for storing Red Alert 2). Because of this, and knowing how much it annoys me, I set every possible feature to Do Not Install, rather than Install On First Run. Yet it appears with every release, more and more features lack this Do Not Install setting, and everything ends up being Install On First Run.

That annoys me, but what really annoys me is the Windows Install logic behind the Install On First Run. When I click somewhere that is not available, Word brings up a little progress bar with a cancel button and the progress bar flys along. When I click the cancel button the progress bar then flys back in reverse (yes, this isn't exactly logical, have I managed to turn back time?) and the box goes away. But instantly another box takes its place, doing the same thing over again. By repeatedly pressing Cancel I can get this little dialog appearing and disappearing, flying progress bars in both directions, but never actually cancelling. Rather unintuatively, it appears that the only way to cancel this process is to not press cancel!

Ah well, back to the open assessment. To be fair on Word, the new formatting sidebar answers so many issues I would be quite happy to accept Word 2002 even if they removed lowercase.

XAOO

I'm just working on my final piece of Uni course work, a 20 page piece of crap on AOO. Its due in just under 12 hours, and then I get to start celebrating the end of an era.

The entire course was about meta-modeling, and now in a flash of inspiration I understand the assessment. The assessment is badly written, and contradictory in places, with huge amounts of detail missing. Maybe we are being marked on the questions we come up with, sort of a meta-exam where you have to set your own exam.

Here is the meta-mark scheme I have come up with:
* The candidate has lost the will to live
* Many references are made to cool sounding words which ultimately have no meaning
* A minimum of 2 pages of uncommented, unworking, needlessly verbose code is included

Thursday, May 27, 2004

blogspot.com

Just figured out how to get my blog actually appearing. I had opted for neil_mitchell.blogspot.com as the URL. That doesn't work behind my proxy server (squid) as apparently that makes it an invalid URL.

Whether its valid or not, either blogger or squid are breaking the rules, so I have sent an "bug report" to blogger. Now I can see my blog, I might make it appear nice. Might...

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Open Assessment

So, I have 2 days left on the open assessment (submission Friday midday), and have got 48 emails about it in the last day and a half. That sucks. Basically the entire programming language I have to do it in has been rewritten.

Its nice to know that the week long course I did on "Standardised Object Modelling - UML" was actually on a proprietory programming language, which hasn't been finished, and is out of date before I even hand in the assessment!

Ah well, it was only a week, and I can always lie on my CV and pretend I did something useful.

Fujitsu - The Aftermath

Got back from Manchester, met up with some friends, slept on a very comfy couch, met some nice people.

The interview was a lot easier than the previous pre-assessment day. Before they were vicious and gave you a few seconds to answer questions - like they wanted to kill you. This time the guy was nice, and we basically chatted comfortably.

Anyway, thats over, just a few weeks until they email me at the wrong address to tell me whether I got it or not.

Monday, May 24, 2004

Fujitsu

I have a job interview with Fujitsu tomorrow, leaving today after neighbours to get the train to Manchester, and then stay overnight with a friend. Then hit the interview early in the morning, for a full day of assessment day crap.

Sounds like fun, my goals for this day are:

1) Be offered a job so I can refuse it in a humerous manner.
2) Play tricks on the other candidates minds, in order to break at least one of them to tears
3) Run up the maximum level of travel expenses I can

Lets see how it goes.

First Post

Welcome to my blog, if I ever choose to put anything on it...

My name is Neil Mitchell, my website is at www.nmitchell.co.uk and I thought I really should record what I do in life - just so I don't get to 60 and wonder what I did with my life.

Other than that, I'm quite dull. Honest.

I really should change the style to match my home page, thats another task to do.