TAG | Durham
This evening has just reminded my why I love this month so much. Yes it’s getting colder and the nights are longer and there is less time to do stuff during the day but there are Fireworks!!!!!
For the last three years I have watched the Grey Firework display in Durham which have been a brilliant display and well worth the trek up the hill to go and see them. This year however I was back at home and got to see, for free, the Leatherhead Firework Spectacular. For 20 minutes I sat and watched the display from the warmth and comfort of my house and must say that I enjoyed every single explosion.
The only negative thing is that I have sat here on my own and not enjoyed it with anyone but to be honest that doesn’t bother me too much as I need to go and pick up my parents from the airport in the early hours of tomorrow!
It’s a bit of a busy time at the moment with the job hunt in full swing and Old Boys weekend in the near future I have lots to be thinking about.
Having spent the weekend on the Reed recruitment and monster websites I managed to apply for 75 different jobs. Most of these I don’t expect to get further than clicking the “Apply” button but I am hoping that a few will get back to me and ask me to come and be interviewed.
I also applied to a job at the Denman Group in Reigate which I had seen in the local paper and I went for an interview there on Monday of this week. The location was superb – a farm in rural surrey – and the job was doing what I find most interesting – supporting users.
A few weeks ago I completed an online test for a company called Wavex who are based in Holborn in London. Wavex came across as a very impressive company from their website and when I completed the test I felt I had not done well enough to get any further. A week or so later I received an email saying that I had done well at the test and they would like to have me back for a phone interview. I spoke with their Helpdesk manager at the end of last week and was told they would like me to come in for a face-face interview to further assess my suitability. Unfortunately they have currently scheduled a date for when I am unavailable so I am trying to get this rearranged.
Old Boys is looking like it’s going to be a good weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing all the current HB students who I haven’t seen for a while and the graduates who have left and are coming back to Durham again. It’s also going to be a good chance for me to come to terms with the situation between me and Kate. Since we split up in May I don’t think we have had a proper chance to spend time together. I think I need to use this weekend to fully sort my feelings and just get used to the fact we are just friends now.
I am slightly annoyed that the £1.50 pints that used to be a good “two-coiner” at the bar have gone up to £1.55 and as such I am going to have to buy a pint and pack of McCoy’s to spend a nice £2.00 at the Vernon.
Hopefully I will have a job by the start of November and will be able to start paying off my student loan and will have got my life back in order as well.
The other day the parchment from the UoD came through and it is possibly the most budget certificate I have ever been awarded. It has all the information on but it honestly looks like the university have got hold of a lot of coloured card, run it through the laser printer with a mail merge to get them mass produced and then stuck a little sticker on the top of it.
For everyone who has received their A-Level or GCSE certificates these look much more professional than the Durham degree ones do. I’m worried that If i take it into the bank I will be given a dodgy look as if to say “this isn’t really a real document is it?”
Degree · Durham · graduation
Well, I am no longer a student. I graduated on Wednesday and shook Bill Bryson’s hand. The ceremony was interesting and there are a number of photos available on facebook (click here to view). There will be more appearing there and on my photo gallery when I get round to uploading them.
The day wasn’t without issue however. Things kept going wrong:
- I upset Kate – I’m very sorry
- I lost both graduation tickets for my parents
- I forgot my pink slip to collect my robes with
- I upset Kate again – see above
None of the hurt was meant to be there but it has now happened and there is nothing more I can do about it. After much chat with the University secretariat I managed to get 3 nave seats for the ceremony (you are only supposed to have 2 – tee hee heee) and I talked to Kate and we are still friends.
I am now back home and very much unsure what to do. Job hunting doesn’t start until post Kenya and I will hopefully get myself a job in IT support at some point.
Right… off to fit my new heatsink to my computer.
Degree · Durham · graduation · student
Tomorrow is my last day as a student of the University of Durham before I graduate. The Comp Sci party starts at 11:00am before the actual ceremony of Congregation, which starts at 4:00pm. After that I will be a graduate of the University with a 2:2 (Hons), making my full title Matthew White BSc. Hons (Dunelm). In the evening there is the Hild Bede graduation meal which I am going to with my parents, Kate, Nick, his parents and Hannah.
I am not looking forward to leaving Durham and I don’t think that it will fully sink in until I leave college for the final time.
Durham · graduation · Hild Bede · student
Well after 3 years and lots of boring modules and work my degree programme is completed. ASAM exam officially ends in 5 minutes but I left early as I had done all i could do.
Now all I need to do is wait for the AUT stuff to be resolved so I can get a mark for the year!
Overall i am HAPPY!!! that the degree is over and bring on 3 weeks of pissed drunkenness
Having spent all of about 2 days revising for ASE I think i now know enough to answer 65-75% of the paper.
I know quite a bit about:
- Software Testing
- Agile Methods
- Software Maintenance
I dont know much about:
- Program Slicing
This could prove to be problematic in the exam!
Degree · Durham · exams · Uncategorized
Having paid the ITS £66.16 I am now +929 printer credits which seems a lot but.. I need to print off my lecture notes for the past term/year so that i can revise and pass my exams.
I had a meeting with the director of undergraduate studies in the department and he told me that at todays Senate there may be the possibility that I am allowed to graduate with honours. The system will definately be in place for next year and it is currently undecided as to whether or not to bring it in a year early – lets hope they do!
Now I have that printing has finished (and I still have 671 printer credits) the task of actually doing some work before exams start in 9 days is on!
1st October to 2nd May was the official timeframe for my dissertation and project… The actual amount of time really spent on it was probably 20 march – 2 may!!!
Its done though and there is nothing that i can do to change that any more! i am now -850 printer credits with the ITS so I need to get that paid back before i graduate otherwise i wont graduate!
If you want to read the dissertation then its at http://www.matthewjwhite.co.uk/dissertation_copy1.pdf
Degree · Dissertation · Durham
It seems that all I am currently doing is writing up my dissertation and nothing else. I have spent the last week in the Techno Cafe in the Engineering Building. It’s a nice room to work in with little booths, laptops, tablets, smartboards and lots of spare network sockets and power to plug into. It has been my home from 9am – 5pm each day and has allowed me to actually get some work done.
I have now (i think) finished coding the system. Any further implementation just wont happen because I don’t have the time to finish the writeup as well as implement more stuff before 4:00pm tomorrow!
I have written chapter 1, most of chapter 3 and chapter 4. This does leave me with a Literature Survey which I am finding it increasingly hard to find anything useful for; a results/testing report and then conclusion and further work.
Once those are all written I still need to compile the whole report and hope that Microsoft Word doesnt want to fuck me about because that would possisbly be the most irritating thing possible.
For anyone who is interested in trying out the code feel free to download http://www.matthewjwhite.co.uk/dissertation/Dissertation.exe by default it extracts to c:\Program Files\dissertation and then it runs Javaw -jar Dissertation.jar but feel free to do this however you feel. Don’t try to run it on a PDA because at the moment it is just raping memory and I have had errors throughout testing but it does run fine on my desktop machine.
Right – back to writing up the project – I will however post a pdf with all the writeup in it for you to read
Degree · Dissertation · Durham
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Dissertation is now more cheery but still poo
Comments off · Posted by wibble in Uncategorized
OK… after a load of help from the Java legend that is Dave i have managed to get my dissertation back on track.
After last nights rage and almost complete destruction of all things electrical I have discovered that my JVM will not run JDOM as there are some bits and pieces in the SAXBuilder that are not supported on JRE 1.4.2 so I will have to find the older version and see if i can get this to work. However this is currently not a major issue as I can demonstrate working code on the tablet PC’s in the new Techno Cafe.
Over the course of the last 24 hrs I have managed to get not only the initial category displayed but also got the system to change between categories and start to display words. Tomorrow will hopefully see the system start to play different sounds to the user.
Degree · Dissertation · Durham
Right,
I think its finally time to admit that my dissertation is royally fucked. After spending this evening getting the first few bits of GUI working properly I have found that it is simply not running on the pda properly. It will run happily in eclipse but i receive lots of runtime errors on the PDA. I’m fairly sure its the VM and not the code but at the moment i may have to demo the software on the tablet pc’s in the techno cafe.
If someone can help me now is the time i need it most!
Degree · Dissertation · Durham
Well, I’m back in Durham and back on the 10mbit connection that makes the internet nearly useful!
There is however a slight problem in that I am currently unable to connect to my domain via ftp or ssh. This is (i think) due to some form of access restriction with the durham university ITS and their firewall. I must go and see them tomorrow as I currently have no way of uploading new data to the site or updating my old site ( http://www.matthewjwhite.co.uk/old/ ). If I can get access to it then I will hopefully post some more useful bits and pieces online for you all. If not I will have to find some other way to get the information available… 
Anyways… for now I am going to just relax knowing that my computer is back online even though it doesnt have McAffee installed, nor does it have Spybot or Ad-Aware up to date and it doesn’t even run an OS that is “supported” by the system… oh well – I must just be lucky!!!
Tomorrow is back to the grindstone to get more dissertation work sorted. Hopefully I can get enough done so that I can go to the bar in the evening as tonight was so much fun. 4 pints drunk – total cost £6.00 – not that bad at all.
BYE!
Why, oh why do gui’s have to be so difficult to write… or more to the point why can I not find the motivation to either do it properly or get a gui builder to create exactly what I want it to???
I wouldnt mind so much but my PDA’s JVM wont accept swing which seems to make making the GUI harder.
I may have just found a plugin for eclipse that does it for me…. Let’s see what happens!
Degree · Dissertation · Durham · Work
Well here is something else that I can successfully say is nothing to do with my dissertation. I have not long left until I have to submit my final report and at the moment I am really not feeling motivated enough to get on with it and complete it. Who would have thought that a small java application for a pda would be soo boring.
It has however made me realise that under no circumstances do i *EVER* want to become a software developer – hats off to those guys who enjoy it but it really isnt what I am looking for. I have decided that I would much rather work in IT support to begin with, get my MCSE and other qualifications and go from there to become a Network Admin or something similar.
I am still contemplating however the option of trying to get into theatre and doing something there. However going to my local theatre to see a comedy night made me realise just how little was going on there and that it really didnt seem a challenge to work in a nasty concrete building with lanterns and equipment that has been there since the building was constructed. We’ll see what happens – whether or not I decide to do that as a career is still under consideration. I will definately be doing some form of am-dram as that is brilliant fun and having done all the different shows in Durham I wouldnt want to stop. If anyone from Durham wants to see the shows I have been in then look here (you must be a DST member thought) http://www.dur.ac.uk/DST/document.php?DocumentID=271&id=926 At the time of writing I appear 21 times which isnt bad over 3 years!
Anyways.. I should probably be geting back to work as I have lots of writing to do and this has served as a welcome distraction from all my dissertation madness!
Degree · Dissertation · Durham
