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Back Into The Light
Apr. 21st, 2006 10:06 amThe project was handed in at 2:45pm yesterday. It's rather difficult to believe that it's over.
I woke up at about 8am that morning, and had a nagging thought that I needed to change something before I declared it finished. Suddenly I realised that a part of my search method was probably causing the program to fail to solve a few games, and hurriedly changed that section of the code so the user had the option of whether to discard future states or not. Then I realised that I hadn't written a significant amount of JavaDoc (the section of code that makes the rest of it vaguely understandable) and blitzed through that as well.
When I arrived in St Andrews, there was a minor miracle in that my supervisor had actually opened up the file that I had sent him. Admittedly his feedback amounted to "Go and print it", but it was very relieving nonetheless. And off to Reprographics I went. My fascination with this department was documented last year, and the mood was pretty much the same. They have now moved to a convenient dark basement somewhere in a building in the middle of the town, though, and I had to park miles away at the harbour and walk through the pouring rain worrying about the state of my black and white pages.
"Hello," soothed the Reprographics man as I came in, gliding smoothly over to the desk and instantly melting all my stress away. "What can I do for you?" (I hadn't considered that he had a name before, but I found out on this visit that he's called Duncan. I'd always just thought of him as Diazepam in human form.) I explained the need to print two copies of a project report and he took me into the computer room. I walked behind him, surreptitiously looking down to see if his feet actually touched the ground.
I needed somewhere to put the report in order after printing the colour pages, and decided to make it a bit special and visit the Library for the first time in my life. It was a unique occasion, after all. I didn't actually see much of the building, staying in the first floor reading area and putting pages into various piles. It was actually more reminiscent of a game of cards than I would have cared to admit. And after that, I walked back and dropped it off for binding with Captain Valium, then went back to the lab to radiate some smug for a while before picking it up again.
Finally it was brought back to the lab, signed, shown round proudly for a while, and handed into the office. Then I drove home, blasting the triumphant chords of Weballergy from the car speakers while stuck hopelessly behind a tractor for ten miles.
Now that I have my receipts in front of me, I notice that they say I purchased "Misc Stationary" [sic]. I find this fairly appalling from a department that dispenses stationery as its primary purpose, especially as they're anything but stationary. It was so much more convenient when they were in the Purdie building, next door to computer science.
Do you want to see it? I put it up here. And today I think I'll go in again and watch the Junior Honours people demonstrate their stock market software. And calmly wade through the final rush to get the report in by 4pm.
I woke up at about 8am that morning, and had a nagging thought that I needed to change something before I declared it finished. Suddenly I realised that a part of my search method was probably causing the program to fail to solve a few games, and hurriedly changed that section of the code so the user had the option of whether to discard future states or not. Then I realised that I hadn't written a significant amount of JavaDoc (the section of code that makes the rest of it vaguely understandable) and blitzed through that as well.
When I arrived in St Andrews, there was a minor miracle in that my supervisor had actually opened up the file that I had sent him. Admittedly his feedback amounted to "Go and print it", but it was very relieving nonetheless. And off to Reprographics I went. My fascination with this department was documented last year, and the mood was pretty much the same. They have now moved to a convenient dark basement somewhere in a building in the middle of the town, though, and I had to park miles away at the harbour and walk through the pouring rain worrying about the state of my black and white pages.
"Hello," soothed the Reprographics man as I came in, gliding smoothly over to the desk and instantly melting all my stress away. "What can I do for you?" (I hadn't considered that he had a name before, but I found out on this visit that he's called Duncan. I'd always just thought of him as Diazepam in human form.) I explained the need to print two copies of a project report and he took me into the computer room. I walked behind him, surreptitiously looking down to see if his feet actually touched the ground.
I needed somewhere to put the report in order after printing the colour pages, and decided to make it a bit special and visit the Library for the first time in my life. It was a unique occasion, after all. I didn't actually see much of the building, staying in the first floor reading area and putting pages into various piles. It was actually more reminiscent of a game of cards than I would have cared to admit. And after that, I walked back and dropped it off for binding with Captain Valium, then went back to the lab to radiate some smug for a while before picking it up again.
Finally it was brought back to the lab, signed, shown round proudly for a while, and handed into the office. Then I drove home, blasting the triumphant chords of Weballergy from the car speakers while stuck hopelessly behind a tractor for ten miles.
Now that I have my receipts in front of me, I notice that they say I purchased "Misc Stationary" [sic]. I find this fairly appalling from a department that dispenses stationery as its primary purpose, especially as they're anything but stationary. It was so much more convenient when they were in the Purdie building, next door to computer science.
Do you want to see it? I put it up here. And today I think I'll go in again and watch the Junior Honours people demonstrate their stock market software. And calmly wade through the final rush to get the report in by 4pm.
