Third Year

It's this time of year again - time to think about packing up and leaving the hall already. I've already mentioned how quickly it's seemed to arrive, and I feel that I didn't really make the effort to get to know people this year because of some unfortunate things that happened at the beginning. So, to anyone who I met this year, who reads this journal but I don't actually talk to more than about once a week - sorry for that!

So I suppose I'll continue my own tradition of writing my achievements for this year...

I have, in no particular order:

• Got engaged!
  
• Been outside of Europe for the first time during my visits to America, and have seen San Francisco and New York.
  
• Arranged to live in a flat together with my fiancee next year, in a trial run for married life.
  
• Stopped talking to many of the people that I knew during the last two years, either because of natural drifting apart or because of my concentration on work.
  
• Survived a bizarre twisted mirror-version of my room without crashing in to the sink or trying to get water from the doorhandle.
  
• Become a pure computer scientist rather than a hybridised chemist-computer scientist.
  
• As a result, become a bit of a hermit, really.
  
• Taken notes in lectures for the first time since first year.
  
• Put up with an astonishing number of false fire alarms caused by "faults in the system".
  
• Halted the Sinner Quote Log, but continued (sporadically) with the Quotebook under cover of not telling anyone about it.
  
• Started, finished and released my second Multimedia Fusion "grand project" (as it was originally called) - the first, Another Adventure Game, remains sadly unreleased to date.
  
• Been instrumental in the development of a dubiously dancing robot.
  
• Continued to write my particular brand of Amiga-like rock music, and have become a lot more popular for it on Modplug than I imagined possible.
  

With the obvious exception of the things that relate to Whitney, many of those seem to be either rather negative or purely related to the Internet. I'm not incredibly worried about it, though - with the plan for next year in place, it seems that like Star Trek films and Final Fantasy games, the even years at University are going to be the best.

PKPAK.EXE

The trouble with beginning to pack early is the possibility of a lack of forethought. As all my cutlery is now hidden away in the bottom of somewhere, just now I'm stirring hot chocolate with a pair of broken sunglasses.

I am admittedly appalling at packing things. My approach to putting things away is to classify them in to types of object - clothes, books, electronics - bag them up and throw them at random in to large containers in the belief that the order in which they're put in won't affect their volume in any way. The problem with this rather cavalier tactic is that suitcases seem to disobey one of the fundamental laws of physics and the filling order is crucial to getting things to fit inside each other. This was last demonstrated by Whitney just before Easter, when she uncovered TARDIS-like properties in the Ford Fiesta and packed three people's possessions in to it without anyone having to make the journey sitting on the roof.

Despite having been packing things in to other things all day on and off, my room doesn't actually look any different at all apart from becoming slightly messier and dustier, with the bed cluttered by cases and bags. The amount of stuff that I have at the end of a year is always amazing. And there's so much that I didn't even know I had - I found a book at the back of the shelf called "C for Programmers", which raised the question "who else would a book on C be written for?". C for Arts students? C for Single Cell Life Forms? Actually, if it was called "C for Coders" that would have been a clever double meaning. I'm a marketing genius.

As of about five minutes ago, Whitney has graduated!