A Grading Update
Feb0
I thought you might be interested in a brief update in how I’m doing at University this year. So, here goes.
Out of the 5 assessments I have submitted this year, I have received 4 grades. They are 45%, 62%, 74% and 80%. For the old-skool amongst you that’s a third, a 2:1 and two firsts. Elementary maths tells me that thus far my average is 65.25%, or a solid 2:1. I also think that some of my better work is yet to be submitted or graded so I reckon this is going to go up.
Obviously this is still pending the decision of the examining board and they aren’t necessarily my final marks, but it’s a good indicator.
Too Many Graduates
Jan0
Apparently there are so many graduates leaving university that the government has had to work out a plan to deal with them all.
Now, I may not understand the intricacies of the world and how it all balances but it strikes me that this wouldn’t be a problem if the current government didn’t try to get every man and his dog who happened to take media studies at AS level through university.
Just a thought.
Going Down
Dec0
As part of my BSc Computing and Cybernetics, one of my elective units is Games Design (because it’s something I’m interested in, not because it’s recommended). As part of this I have to design and make a mod for Half-Life 2, so I’d like to share with you a pretty screenshot from in-game of part of an underground complex. This is a WIP and will probably change in the details, but the basic premise is there.
Level 4 Access Corridor
For the Love of PDF
Dec0
Today I received an email from the SU. Nothing unusual there, it was telling me about interesting things I could do as a Student Rep.
This email had two attachments. Again, nothing too special – attachments are good and explained more details about a couple of the opportunities.
The attachments were a .docx and a .doc – bad.
The assumption is clearly that everybody has a piece of software which can read those file formats. A .doc isn’t too bad, since it’s a standard for Word, but very few people have upgraded to the Word 2007 needed to read the .docx format. Even worse, both formats kinda assume you are either using Windows and have a copy of Office, or have bothered to download something like OpenOffice (which can read both formats).
LaTeX, BibTeX and RefWorks – The Magical Trio
Oct0
As you may know, I’ve been using LaTeX for a while now. For those who don’t know, LaTeX is an obscenely powerful typesetting tool which lets me concentrate entirely on writing up my content rather than making sure it looks good on paper (or PDF, since we now do electronic submissions). It is the standard used in pretty much every university, especially for technical papers (I’m trying to get it installed as part of the corporate desktop at Lincoln) and it’s made my life so much nicer since I discovered it.
However, referencing using LaTeX can get a bit complicated if you’ve got huge bibliographies, especially when it comes to working out how they’re meant to be formatted. So I went out and got on with learning how BibTeX works – it turns out it’s easier than I expected but not as easy as it could be. Still, with some Google-fu I managed to get hold of a working Harvard style for my bibliography. I can now write all my bibliography data in a flat file without any semblance of formatting, alphabetical ordering, worrying about italics and brackets; and then rely on BibTeX to turn it into a perfectly formatted, perfectly consistent bibliography which can be pulled straight into my LaTeX document.
For the third part – RefWorks. This is an online tool (with a terrible user interface, such is the curse of all academic web applications) which lets you keep a database of all your sources with all the details in a format-neutral manner and export it as a BibTeX database, ready for importing straight into your report, paper or assignment.
With these three tools I am a referencing god.
Life
Oct0
It’s been a while since I last wrote just about what was going on in my life, mostly because it’s not very interesting. However, I’m currently stuck on a train so I may as well write something. I’m also feeling slightly disrupted due to some retards stealing signal cable at Newark, meaning my travel itinerary now includes a huge variety of contingency options. Thanks to the station staff at Lincoln for doing the route planning!