Timely mid-session break

Very timely indeed. The last two weeks or so brought back memories of thesis period i.e late-nights (or no sleep at all), feeling quite dead during the day, acting ungodly at times etc. Here are some stuff that happened.

Graduations
Mitch, James, and Simon To all had their graduations last Tuesday so had pictures with them.







Mid-sessions
I think I failed both of them...don't really wanna get the results back. At least it's a BIG wake up call for me. Pass the subjects or hang back at uni for another year.

Work
As mentioned a few posts back, I got a casual job at a coaching college about three weeks ago and the first project was to write/develop a term 4 year 8 maths program. Took much longer than I thought and with the mid-sessions/other assessments, it was a hard slog. I dind't even sleep on the last three nights, just rushing to put the whole thing together. I can anticipate the guy calling me back to ask me to fix up certain parts of the worksheets.

Mission weekend away
I'm going to mission at the end of the year to Tarcutta (a small town near Wagga Wagga) so last weekened the 'Sydney' people and 'Wagga' people got together to meet each other for the first time. I was quite brain-dead after not sleeping much the two nights beforehand (see above) so just had barely enough energy to meet the Wagga team as well as some of the local people. Talking to the latter group made me realise how well off us city folks are over the country people. For example, one lady told me she still uses dial-up internet (28.8kbps) and how things have been pretty tough with the drought and all. Funnily enough, I experienced slow internet last night. Broadband was down so I used dial up and the speed was...yup, 28.8kbps. Gmail took forever to load. We also did a bit of doorknocking to let people know about the mission and came across this Christian truckie. He said: "My truck broke down last night and I couldn't understand why. Now I know...it's so I could talk to you guys!" LOL
On the Saturday night Sam, Noddy and I slept in Noddy's Camry and it turned out to be quite good actually. Realtively comfortable and warm. But I was quite buggered anyway so didn't really mind.

What is...

BPSK, time diversity, coherence bandwidth, flat fading, fast fading, Alamouti scheme, selectivr diversity combining, shadowing, fading, trunking, GOS, Erlang C formula, CCI, ACI....?

No idea? Neither do I. And mid sessions are coming up on Monday and Wednesday *sigh*

Finally, a bit of a breather...

Time went to bed: 6am
At least I wasn't the only one staying up to work. Becky came online at 5:30 and she was pulling an all-nighter as well, a law essay of some sort. I was quite happy I got one part of my lab out. I suck at coding and MATLAB is no exception. spent all last night hacking away and debugging and even though I got it out in the end it was not the quickest way and would take ages to run (too many 'for' loops, or loops in general methinks). So spent probably half the night sitting and waiting, doing nothing...listening to the rain pelting down...

Woke up at 10 so I missed out on the first 2hr tutorial. Left halfway through the second one to put the report together and print it off. On the way to the computer labs, I think I saw one guy from Nerds FC advertising the CSE revue, The teXt files. Anyway, the report was a dodgy job, put together in the last minute but still got 3/4 in the end. Goodie! To top things off, the next lab builds on from the last one so I walked out at 6pm quite happy and less frustrated. Now I just need to get myself to work on it in the next fortnight. Don't want to leave it till last minute again >.<

Was looking forward to take out The Rainmakers at bball tonight but they forfeited so Nick and I shot around and played some 3-3 with random people because we were on duty for the 9pm game. Poy came at 9 and the two of us did duty. Speaking of basketball, I was gonna post pics up of our new jersey at the start of the season but didn't because I thought the camera was busted. Turns out it was the batteries discharging too quicky and making the camera go all funny (Think it's the batteries because I'm using normal alkaline ones and it's been working fine since) so here are pics of singlet and matching shorts of team RICE.

Bad Idea

1. Choosing Wireless Data Communication Systems over New Business Creation. At least I have a higher chance of passing the latter (about 100%) than the former (prolly 0% at this stage). If I don't get quick-smart over the next 8 weeks I'm gonna be around uni for another session.

2. Procrastinating last week BIG time. You have no idea I spent X hours playing computer game 'Y' (Wanna have a guess the value X and Y)? Now I'm paying for it this week with late nights every night. Ahhhh so ashamed of my time wasting >.<

3. Lip is healing along nicely. Scab is forming which means tempting to pick on it. Bad Idea

I go to sleep now. Hopefully I can wake up in 5 hours >.<