Groupwork

"Welcome to the Multimedia Lab! Good luck... you'll need it"
Someone has written that on the board in the new Multimedia Lab next door. I feel rather bad for the Computer Science department, because every time they buy something new it seems to be rubbish. There's certainly a lot of stuff in there, but most of the problem lies in Adobe Premiere, of which one of the fatal flaws is that it seems to export videos that are very different from what you see when you're working in the program. We spent four hours in there yesterday trying to capture scenes from the Muppet Christmas Carol to turn it into a horror-type stream of conciousness garble, and it starts off well but you can see where our interest wanes in the middle.

In another example of why I dislike groupwork so much, more immediately terrifying is the presentation for PSAC. We're due to give it in 58 minutes and most of the slides are still being written - so no time to rehearse, we'll just go next door and present it all on the fly, trying to make it vaguely coherent while we make it up as we go along.

Then a design for a new Instruction Set Architecture is due in on the 12th, and a rewrite of Microsoft Powerpoint for the 16th. A bit of good luck might come in useful.

End of the Presentations

All things considered, the presentation didn't really go that badly. For something that was still being cobbled together when we were at the front of the class, anyway. The group member who had attended exactly none of our meetings and hadn't replied to any emails did us a great disservice by actually turning up, meaning that we had to tack some extra slides on to the end of the file. Webmailing them didn't work, so a couple of the group members rushed through to the other lab to redo the presentation while I juggled swivelly chair wheels badly at the front to provide a distraction. Eventually it was decided to just switch awkwardly between the two files when the time came, and talk was then presented to the audience of the course organiser, half of Senior Honours and a box of Bran Flakes. Some of them may have even found it mildly entertaining. And "Fury of the Furries" was mentioned, a game of which I thought only I had heard.

So finally, that's all the presentations for this semester done. The other class where presentations are given, Architecture, is beginning to become a bit of a joke - "Afternoon. Who's ready to talk? No one? Oh well, see you tomorrow."

Whitney has another temporary job! Whitney has a job! Hat, underscore, hat.