Exams went about as well as I’d expected, and my project was generally well received. I guess if they weren’t I’d probably not have got a first…

It’s a shame I don’t get a student discount anywhere anymore… surely my ID card should expire at the same time as my email account is deactivated… (that’s to say in a year’s time )

I’ve moved out of my house now, so I’m back home in Surrey for a bit until I’ve found somewhere new to live. I shouldn’t be away from London for too long though, after all I do have a job to start at the end of August.

Other than finding somewhere to live and a couple of programming exercises for Bloomberg, I’ve basically got nothing to do for a few weeks . I fully intend to use this time to sleep a lot and watch lots of TV, after all, what else is there to do with my time…

Thank you to everyone that’s made the last four years such a good experience. I’ve certainly gained a lot, and have made friends that I intent (and expect) to keep for life! Congratulations to everyone else who’s just graduated! I hope you all did as well as you wanted to!

PS: If you want to grab a copy of my individual project (although I’m not overly sure why you would), head over to SongHawk.net. This will give you a link to an installer for the Windows version. I probably won’t bother releasing the Windows Phone 7 version – it’s not like I have a Windows Phone to find/test fixes for any potential bugs….

No more lectures…

No more courseworks…

Of course, that’s not to say it’s all over (yet!) – I still have my exams and the rest of my project to complete, but that all seems rather minor in the grand scheme of things.

Looking at my calendar, it would appear that I just have a large amount of free time coming up, but there is unfortunately still a lot of stuff to fit in. On the other hand, I do plan to use some of that time to just relax and enjoy my remaining time as a student – after all, if time keeps going as quickly as it has, it won’t be too long until it’s all over…

With a bit of luck, the rest of my time at Imperial will go well, and I’ll have fun whilst doing it! (Although I do envisage a few late nights in Huxley as we plough through all the stuff that we’re supposed to know but don’t)

Let the revision (or should I say learning?) begin!

I’m writing this blog post when I really should be doing something useful like working on my final year individual project, but hey, sometimes you just want a break and I’ve played enough Freecell recently…

So, what is my project? I’m writing a program to extract metadata (play counts, track durations etc.) from music libraries such as iTunes and Windows Media Player, display statistics and find additional information about genres, artists and albums from the Internet. That sounds simple enough, but there are a number of different data sources being used, and figuring out how to display all this data isn’t the simplest of problems…

To do all of this, I’m using F#, a functional language that runs on the .NET Framework (part of my project is evaluating how good F# is at being used for this kind of program). I’m liking the language a lot, it’s got all the benefits of being functional as well as all the benefits of running on .NET. If you want to map a function over a list of tuples, that’s fine… if you want to create a GUI using WinForms or WPF, you can… if you want to interact with other programs over COM, that’s still ok… it’s just a shame that using non-F# libraries can’t really be done in a functional style, but that’s far from being the end of the world. As good as functional code is, sometimes it’s just helpful to be using object-oriented code instead.

Visual Studio’s support for F# isn’t as good as that for C#, but it’s sufficient for most of my needs, and it’s certainly far better support than anything had for last year’s group project (but that’s one of the issues with using a new language… no IDE support whatsoever!).

Anyway, that’s probably enough for now… I’ll probably blog about my project again (nearer to completion), but that’s what I’m spending most of my time on at the moment… particularly as lectures are taking up a reasonably small amount of my time this term.

I’ve had a few good days out since my last post… Back in July I attended the Bloomberg Summer Party which was a brilliant day out with lots of free food and drink, and lots of activities including hovercrafting! In August I went to the Notting Hill Carnival which was good fun… It certainly helped that the weather was fine

I’ve also been making good use of my evenings, seeing Dara O’Briain at the Hammersmith Apollo in September, Avenue Q and Have I Got News For You in October, Battersea Park fireworks in November, and Zane Lowe & Deadmau5 at Earl’s Court in December, all mixed in with nights out at various pubs/clubs…

I spent five days on holiday in Spain with Dave & Hugh, which was five days well spent! The weather was really hot the whole time, and I even went in the sea every day (it certainly helped with the sunburn…)! It’s also nice that the Spanish don’t really have any idea about measures… spirits seem to be served by pouring into a glass for an arbitrary amount of time, which was fine by me

The last term has gone really quickly… it feels as if it’s only just started, despite the fact that it’s actually just finished! The workload was pretty high, and it all seemed to pile up into the last week. Fortunately that’s all done now, so I can concentrate on my individual project for a bit before next term’s coursework comes round. It’ll also help that I’m only taking three options next term as opposed to the five I took this term.

Amazingly, getting home from London seemed to go without any issue whatsoever, despite the large amounts of snow across London and Surrey. There is however more forecast in the next few days, so hopefully it wont cause any problems with my plans for Christmas or New Year’s Eve (when I intend to be back in London).

So.. the Spring term… the group project was completed and the presentation went well. Everybody seemed suitably impressed, which we weren’t entirely expecting. Coursework was rather unfairly balanced with some courses having much more than others. Apparently many weeks of work is worth the same 16% of a course as a single, quite short piece… The exams were once again crammed into a single day (apart from the business exam, which was multiple choice anyway). This time, one exam had a third of the paper on something that was only briefly mentioned as a side note on the course website and never even mentioned in the lectures. Suffice to say I couldn’t answer that one, but then that seemed to be a problem faced by most people.

Over my one week Easter holiday, I built my sister’s website. She designed it of course… Other than that I took a bit of time to just relax. Not that there was really enough time for that.

In April, I started my industrial placement at Bloomberg, where I’ll be working until September. It’s a pretty good place to work, with a fairly relaxed atmosphere and lots of fish… not to mention free snacks and coke (Coca-Cola and Pepsi… you’ve got to have a choice ). I seem to be spending my time writing C++ for the server side, and JavaScript for the client, although I’m not going to go into the details of my work, and I am really enjoying it. The money comes in handy too… If you find yourself somewhere around Moorgate station, a trip to Whitecross Street market is quite a good place for lunch with a wide variety of different things to choose from.

Aside from all the work, I’ve had a number of days out in the park enjoying the warm weather (at least the periods of it that we’ve had), as well as a weekend by the sea in Worthing and a few barbecues. That does seem to be the benefit of doing a proper job rather than being a student all the time… the weekends are completely free for me to do what I want, work stays at work.

I’ve also started reading again… It’s been far too long since I really sat down and read a book, so I’m completing my Discworld collection. I’ve just finished the Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which for some reason I’d never read before, having only seen the Sky adaptation of them, and am about the start on Moving Pictures… The ones in between are all sat on my shelf at home, so I’ll just fill in the gaps. One day I’ll read the whole series in order, but I think I’ll leave that for a while.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. There’s probably something I’ve forgotten, but that’s what happens when you don’t post anything for 5 months.. it probably wasn’t important anyway

The group project went fairly well, despite us trying to demonstrate some broken functionality in the presentation. Our game probably could have been much better if we’d only had more time, but I guess they didn’t expect anything too spectacular with only 4 weeks to write it.

I did quite enjoy the hot weather of the past couple of weeks, although I probably should have tried to get out more in it. It’s just a shame that the tube doesn’t really have any way to cool the carriages down… the Central Line was really hot in the sunshine, and I would probably have been a bit better off taking the bus instead.

I managed to watch quite a bit of Wimbledon on TV this year. It was good, although it would probably have been nice to see Murray get to the final, but there’s always next year. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to watch the final between Federer and Roddick, and from the score and the clips I have seen, I missed a good match. I suppose I can always watch the highlights on iPlayer…

I don’t think that putting two subjects into one exam is a good idea at all, particularly as we don’t get a choice of questions… There’s just too much information to remember, and if you can’t quite remember one part, that can cause a big problem as you can’t just do a different question instead.

Now that it’s all over, I’ve finally got time to catch up on all the TV I’ve been missing for the past few weeks. There’s still a few hours to watch… I also went to see the new Star Trek film yesterday, which is really good, despite there being a few discrepancies with what we already know should happen in “the future”.

I’m probably going to be rather busy again for the next few weeks as our group project starts, but that’s only three weeks, and then I’m done for the year!

In my opinion, the Easter Holidays should be a holiday. This would be just fine, were it not for the fact that I have exams as soon as we go back. This of course means that I have to spend my holidays revising instead of sitting around and doing absolutely nothing with my time.

Admittedly, sitting around doing nothing is not a particularly good use of my time, so it’s probably a good thing that I have something to do.

Getting exams over with in the first two weeks of the summer term is also good, as it means that we can just spend the rest of the term doing a project, and don’t have to sit doing exams when the weather’s hot and sunny (if it’s going to be… it is the British summer after all).

Well, that’s my rant about revision over… now on to what I’ve been up to recently.

We had a house party to mark the end of term which went quite well, although I’m not convinced that sending guests outside in the cold to cook Iceland burgers on barbeques is a great idea. People seemed to enjoy themselves though.

With the good weather in the last couple of months, I’ve been on a couple of picnics in Hyde Park. Martin made sure we had an ample supply of cake for the last one, which was much appreciated. We spent far too much time trying to estimate how far it was across the Serpentine, and none of the guesses were particularly accurate, but later investigation showed it to be 128m, more than the scientists of the group thought.

Hopefully my next blog post will not be too far away, but I can’t guarantee anything.

PS: If you really want to know what I’m up to, and can’t wait for my infrequent blog posts, you can follow me on Twitter…

Firstly, I updated my gallery a few weeks ago, with all of my pictures and videos being found in the same place. I uploaded a lot of new photos and some additional videos whilst I was at it. This can be found here.

Secondly, we've managed to find a house for next year! It's in East Acton, and all of the paperwork is being processed now, so hopefully it will be ours soon…

Finally, I've been to a couple of weddings so far this month, both family and friends. The family wedding was in Poland, which made a nice change, and that was a really good weekend. I didn't understand most of the service as only a couple of bits were in English, but it all went well and there was plenty of food and drink at the reception (both days of it…).