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Hmm, long time, no update.
Anyway. Tomorrow, I am invigilating an exam in Mandela Hall. To the best of my knowledge, there are several different exams going on at once, and there's a good chance one or two of my friends will be in this particular hall (the Uni spreads its exams amongst several halls and facilities, due to the number of students taking them). Good luck to those of you taking an exam tomorrow, if there's any in the audience.
Fact is, I'm almost as nervous as they are, I suspect. I've never done this before, and I want to get it right. Invigilators are the right hand of God in the exam room, if you believe in such things: we bring you supplies, regulate your activities, deal with all the administration and, if you contravene the rules, can prevent you from taking the exam. This fairly extreme level of power implies a great responsibility, and the consequences of one of us messing up can be pretty dire for other people. Thus, I want to get it right.
So, off I go in a minute to revise the Invigilators' Handbook I was given a couple of weeks back. I'll read it again a few times tomorrow morning, too. Then, I'm getting coffee and lunch in town and coming back to host a barbecue. It's not all bad tomorrow, despite starting under high pressure.
Now. I must sleep... That's not so easy, in this hot, humid weather...
Well, my last entry left off in a pretty crappy state, sitting in a motel room which has no key, and which smells of smoke, waiting to go back down to the foyer to get food.
Things got a little better after that. Granted, the taxi got lost on it's way to us, so we spent half an hour standing about in the cold (doesn't bother me so much, but the greeks and mexican with whom I was travelling were amusing to watch). Eventually we got to the restaurant, and then after that to a couple of bars, which weren't as bad as I'd been afraid they would be. Either I remember the group being worse than they actually are, or something was restraining them that night (or the bottle of Chardonnay I had to myself earlier had more of an effect than I'll admit). A fairly enjoyable night, even if I am (as one of the group noted) "not a natural pisshead": maybe there'll be more in the future.
Anyway, fast-forward to the next morning, when I awoke with the grand total of five minutes to get into a suit, pack everything up and get down to the lobby. We made it to Abbey Wood just barely before registration closed, where our lovely young mexican doctor was mistaken for a man and I gained an extra 'n' in my name - I know they're dealing with a large number of people, but it's not that hard to get the badges right, is it? Anyway, we stole a box of biscuits and a coffee from the delegate's coffee-table, to make up for the lack of breakfast, and wandered around the other exhibits while we waited for the doors to open.
The exhibition itself was a little manic, but interesting enough. A few very intense researchers, some business-types and some gents in camouflage with no clearance tags at all (eek), and a guy who wanted to talk about cable for thirty minutes. In and around teaching one of my co-workers how Ethernet switches work (!) and discovering I'm not the only person mildly annoyed by the lack of testing and formal specification around here, it was a good experience.
Breaking down the stand took a little less time than setting it up, of course, but when we were done, it was squarely in the middle of rush hour. Instead of braving the M25, we went to get something to eat in Bristol (Nando's, yay) and sat for an hour and a bit before making the drive home. Idle calculation during the trip valued the contents of the van's payload-bay at something approaching £50'000. Ian's driving became more cautious once this was discovered.
We got back late that night, and unloaded the van the following day, porting two big metal packing cases and a load of heavy equipment up two storeys of slippery fire escape (since the bloody freight elevator still isn't finished, over two months past the original completion date, on a six week project). No disasters, although I've some final sorting out and installation to do on Monday.
What I did on my holidays. Maybe not interesting, but informative.
Addendum: Nick now has a PS3. Much though I malign Sony, they got the design of that one right, even if the price is kinda wrong. I've only seen two games on it so far, but they both look frakking REAL.
Further addendum: at some point in the next few days, I have to have two unpleasant (private) discussions. Moral support appreciated.
I've come to a conclusion, in follow up to this article on the Discovery Channel website. Humans never really mature, as far as I can see, they just become jaded and insensitive to the world around them. I say this because to my detriment, it finally appears to be happening to me.
The Helldesk was moderately manic this morning, with a load of summer school students coming in to get set up on our wireless network. To their credit, most of them had got at least part way through the published instructions before giving up and asking for help, and I've yet to see one that didn't have an antivirus installed and updated (unlike the clueless n00bs I have to deal with during term-time). On the down side... there were an awful lot of them. So that was the morning, from 0900 to 1300.
After the usual forty-five minute lunchbreak, I headed on up to the lab for a meeting. The meeting finally started, after a lot of fiddling about, at 1530, and ran till 1815, part of which I was chairing (with a small-to-moderate amount of ept). The upshot was that my workload has risen again: in addition to the MilCAN bridge, the new configuration / monitoring gui, the website and the paper, I am now doing hardware and operating-software design for a modular distributed-sensing platform and writing a customised version of the aforementioned gui for use in vehicle glass-cockpits. The depressing part is that none of this even remotely surprises me any more.
Jaded? Perhaps. Despairing is likely more accurate. At this point I give up: I'm going to discharge my current responsibilities and, until at least two of them are squared away, written up, finished, anyone who tries to give me any more work is going to be very surprised and, hopefully, more than a little perturbed by the response they get.