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

Once again, most of the country’s been brought to a standstill by snow… It might just be justified where I live though, with over a foot of snow falling from 5pm on Tuesday night, and for most of Wednesday. It’s more snow than I’ve ever seen in England, and caused many people to be stranded on the A3 overnight… Roads all around the town were essentially impassable causing all sorts of transport problems.

It was quite tricky to walk through it, with it being up to my knees in some places, but there were quite a few places where it had made a really nice view. After walking around for a while, we ended up at the pub for a drink before heading back home. Later in the afternoon, we helped next door build their igloo, finishing it just after it got dark.

All in all, it was a nice day, I’m just hoping it will have cleared enough for me to get back to London at the weekend…

The snow was a nice surprise for December, with it very nearly being a White Christmas for me! Unfortunately the snow had just about melted by Christmas Day. Luckily, the snow didn’t have any effect on my exams, despite it snowing the night before. It’s probably just as well that there wasn’t more snow in London that week, as the last time it snowed, TfL didn’t really seem to manage very well!

My exams for the term (because we’re not around to have them in the Summer) seemed to go quite well, although starting at 9am was a little bit tough. They were both over by lunchtime, leaving us time to have a nice lunch in Eastside before our trip around the not-so-Circle Line. We also did Secret Santa whilst we were there, and I got a giant Gummi Bear, which really is a great present!

Once again, I saw in the New Year at the Fireworks on Embankment, surrounded with food and drink down in Stockwell. The fireworks were great as normal, and just afterwards it started to snow, albeit only for a short time. It’s just a slight shame that the hot dog seller didn’t seem to have cooked the onions very well…

Have a very happy 2010!

The only problem I’ve had so far seems to be a rather strange configuration issue in Apache, but I’ve managed to work around that until I find out what’s going wrong. Everything else I’ve tried to install has worked just fine.

All of the hardware that I’ve connected so far has worked without a problem, although I did have to dig around a bit for Memory Card Reader drivers as Acer don’t seem to provide 64-bit drivers for my model.

I quite like some of the new features in 7, for example, the way you can use a slideshow for the desktop background and the new aero features when you hover over a window thumbnail or show desktop. It’s a shame Firefox doesn’t yet have support for giving thumbnails for each tab.

Jump lists are also quite useful, providing quick and easy access to recently used or favourite files. I’ve pinned a few folders that I use frequently to the Explorer jump list on my taskbar.

The new version of Virtual PC for Windows 7 is also a great improvement over the previous version. It seems to run well and allows you to run applications on the guest machines as though they were installed in the host, which is quite useful for testing web sites in IE6. Ubuntu seems to work in it as long as “i8042.noloop” is added as a boot option to make the mouse work, although I can’t seem to get the Virtual Machine Additions to work. Maybe I should try SuSE (which is actually supported with the VMAs).

Overall I’m pretty pleased with the Windows 7 experience and am glad that I've updated from Vista. I’m sure other features will come to my attention as I continue to use it…

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…

Beforehand, we had dinner at Anthony’s, which was nice, and then got on a bus to go to Embankment.

Good luck for 2009!

I’ve spent Christmas this year in Munich, where my sister was on a work placement. As such, it actually snowed on Christmas Day! We went skiing in Garmisch today, which was good. It’s been too long since I last went skiing… A few more days of skiing would have been nice though.

I hope everybody got what they wanted for Christmas!