So after that day Dar­win was adop­ted into Sam, Chuck and Pete’s Family, they all lived together and were really happy, Dar­win Espe­cially, cause now he had a real family, and he wasn’t alone anymore.

Tonight we dance! Or so says the pos­ter I got prin­ted at the laser­disc super-small prin­ter store. I felt this little place nee­ded an update. So I am giving it one, in a form of another jour­nal entry.

Been wor­king too hard. Too much work. Wri­ting up lec­ture notes is fun. Buying expen­sive text books and doing the pain­ful ques­tions within them is also fun. Excel spreadsheet exer­ci­ses are much fun. Safety mul­ti­ple choice ques­tio­nai­res are the epi­tome of bri­lliance. I feel like my mind is being raped by all this manufacturing-supply-provider-engineering-profitability-scheme-effective-time-management bullshit I have to do in my “Pro­fes­sio­nal Stu­dies” module — it’s inva­ding my head… ger-ARGH. I feel that it is com­ple­tely point­less to spend an hour lear­ning about the supply chains of Honda and how they bring in parts from mul­ti­ple manu­fac­tu­rers, each one adding a per­cen­tage of value to the ove­rall pro­duct; and then being able to know how to reduce the pro­blems with such com­plex rela­tionships bet­ween busi­nes­ses. IM DOING ENGINEERING NOT BUSINESS STUDIES FFS! Hmmm, yes, eas­tern busi­ness phi­lo­sophy is very dif­fe­rent to that of wes­tern com­pa­nies, although things are chan­ging. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.

Today I strug­gle with com­plex pro­ba­bi­lity and vec­tor alge­bra pro­blems… two things I hate and will never fully unders­tand. When these are sor­ted I also have to get the Eng Mech notes and ques­tions done, Mod + Sys exam­ples sheet, E&E lec­ture 7 notes and MORE. Oh and to start work on my oral pre­sen­ta­tion explai­ning the com­pe­ti­tors to the Jaguar XJ98JhKJ and where you can find infor­ma­tion on the net about “how to find infor­ma­tion about the Jaguar busi­ness and mar­ke­ting plan”. Im thin­king a Power Point pre­sen­ta­tion. 3 weeks to go til that must be com­ple­ted. Death to all fluids and ther­mody­na­mics, I am currently trying to change the modu­les I am stud­ying this year; in an attempt to make things more inte­res­ting for me.

Angel sea­son 5 is pro­gres­sing nicely although they seem to be hea­ding down the direc­tion where they make every epi­sode a gore-filled 18 minus the swea­ring. Plus Spike is a very bad actor. But still enter­tai­ning. Buil­ding steam with a grain of salt.

FRUSTRATION REIGNS ON HIGH.

Im out. Screwballs.

Time for my not so daily blog that I currently feel the need to write. Right now. Thirty minu­tes before a lec­ture begins. In the recent week I have been trying to come to terms with the con­cept of work, how it should be done, when it should be done and how often I should be doing it. Then there is the ques­tion of “volume” — how much of it am I getting.

In my first year I am doing either six or eight modu­les, I think. It all seems very unc­lear. Like a hazy mist of unc­lea­ri­ness. They each have their own won­der­ful tit­les, such as: “Maths for Engi­neers”, “Engi­nee­ring Mecha­nics”, “Fluids and Energy” and “Elec­tri­cal and Elec­tro­nic Sys­tems”. I have upto eight lec­tu­res a week and then addi­tio­nal lab work and a field trip to a Jaguar manu­fac­tu­ring plant for a “Pro­fes­sio­nal Stu­dies” case study which will count to final cre­dit. Since tues­day I haven’t really done much, my busy lec­ture days being mon­day and fri­day and the lab work not star­ting til thurs­day of next week. Thus I have been con­tem­pla­ting doing the work I have been set.

Sun­day; I wor­ked four or five hours doing mathe­ma­tics func­tion revi­sion. Easy basic stuff like the inverse of a func­tion, dra­wing func­tions, one to one and map­pings etc… . I also spent some time doing nine­teen Eng Mech SQ ques­tions as more revi­sion. This stuff was ok, the gene­ric question-answer for­mula works fine with me. 

After lec­tu­res on mon­day — a Maths one whe­rein the lec­tu­rer got mixed up in his own words far too often and ended up not cove­ring everything he had plan­ned to — mea­ning more work in my own time; an Elec­tro­nics one — where I revi­sed basic elec­tro­nic com­po­nents and sys­tem wor­kings (i.e. resis­tors in para­llel) and a fluids and energy one — where the pro­fes­sor jum­ped straight into some nitty gritty boring stuff without explai­ning some of the fun­da­men­tal con­cepts… it was also highly boring and boring and boring and boring. 

Now I have more Maths to do — pri­ma­rily com­ple­ting the square and work with hyper­bo­las, ellip­ses and circ­les — two con­cepts I never fully got my head around during school days. Won­der­ful. I also wish to unders­tand what the fluids man was tal­king about, so I must write out notes for that — boring “what is a sys­tem”, “what is work”, “work is gay” things. This is hard because the han­dout pro­vi­ded is pretty much typed all in capi­tals with poor use of for­mat­ting, bold and under­li­ned text (- or lack of) and no real struc­ture. At least the text is rele­vant, the elec­tro­nics pro­fes­sor, who has con­cise to the point lec­tu­res, has made us buy his £40 text book — a book that likes to WAFFLE — i.e. it will tell us, after rea­ding the intro­duc­tion, on the second page, what it said in the intro­duc­tion and how that will apply to something he is dela­ying telling us in a huge para­graph that takes me fore­ver to read. Little struc­ture here too, key words are in bold but key con­cepts and sen­ten­ces are not in out­li­ned boxes or anything and ove­rall it all looks like one large box of text — making fin­ding things anno­ying. No struc­ture and waf­fles = annoyance. 

Ques­tions I am yet to do are mainly Eng Mech ones which are of the wishy-washy type that asks you to use rele­vant sour­ces to esti­mate (NOT GUESS) the weight of a typi­cal car and the mass of an ave­rage domes­tic cat. The ques­tions are pro­vi­ded to make you think in the correct man­ner or something. But I have spent school kno­wing that an esti­mate is not a guess. I have long known methods of going about making an esti­mate, so it seems point­less to me, spen­ding my time researching a really mun­dane ques­tion that I could just guess at — where gues­sing would be much more con­ve­nient and help­ful to me. This seems iro­nic (word of the week). 

Well, the lec­ture calls and I must also spend another £70 on books! Because books are nee­ded and EXPENSIVE. Ther­mody­na­mics books, Eng Mech books and something about Meriam and Maths. All £30 each or more.

Fun comes from card games with corri­dor friends. Devi­sa­tion of new games and words.

Well, Uni­ver­sity life has not pro­vi­ded me with the time to spend upda­ting any of my sites. It is now a week since I arri­ved and it is only now that I have suf­fi­cient time to catch up on things not caught up on.

To sum­ma­rise:

On satur­day I arri­ved. I car­ted, along with family, five very large and heavy boxes con­tai­ning com­pu­ter, tins, clothes, books, pots, pans and cut­lery up four flights of stairs to my apart­ment at the top of the Roots resi­den­tial buil­ding. The next few minu­tes were spent res­ting, and were swiftly follo­wed by a much nee­ded drink of squash. Here is where I meet the “first por­tion” of my new com­pa­dres. They say hi. I say hi. We say stuff. Ta da! Then it’s back to unpac­king, set­ting up the com­pu­ter, desig­na­ting fridge and free­zer and cup­board and dra­wer space. In the eve­ning, we, as a group of five, inves­ti­ga­ted the delec­ta­ble offe­rings of the Stu­dent Union — before stop­ping for a drink at the Gra­duate Bar and having a long ran­dom chat about things I no lon­ger remem­ber, although one of them was about self defense.

Sun­day was more of the unpac­king. The pre­pa­ra­tion of my own break­fast and then the eating of it and drin­king of cof­fee. We met and gree­ted the sun­day arri­vals, another six or so. Hello. Hello. What’s your name? Where are you from? Who are you? WHY? WHY? WHY? Is that true? What’s that on your face? And simi­lar ques­tions. Explo­red the cam­pus and the art cen­tre today. In the eve­ning we visi­ted the SU again for more drinks and get­ting to know people.

Mon­day. Day one of pro­per uni­ver­sity life. Big mee­ting of all freshers in the big thea­tre hall in the big art cen­tre where we were intro­du­ced for­merly. Shortly follo­wed by a 2 hour depart­ment intro­duc­tion. All very boring and tiring and stuff. Filled in some forms, found my pigeon hole, explo­red the engi­nee­ring depart­ment. Recei­ved week one time­ta­ble… loo­ked mode­ra­tely ok. The lec­ture thea­tre I have a large num­ber of my lec­tu­res in does not accom­mo­date for left han­ded peo­ple… I mean… WHAT!? WHY NOT? Scream: disc­ri­mi­na­tion. (The bit that you lean on to write, that comes out of the right hand side of the chair, is not suf­fi­cient for a left han­ded user. This is poor engi­nee­ring.) Tonight we all visi­ted the union event aptly named “Top Banana”, i.e. cheese night, night full of cheese, cheese-fest, be chee­sed, cheesey-cheese, no cheese leave cheese, cheese ched­dar mix-athon. It was free and very crow­ded and the queue to get in was very dis­tres­sing, espe­cially with some drunk asshole of a latino bloke pushing you in the back trying to get for­ward, resul­ting in my face being con­ti­nually sho­ved into some poor girl’s pony tail. Jived to the uber music of Spice Girls, Run DMC and all the wed­ding music you could pos­sibly hear in one night. 

The dance floor is set out in an anno­ying for­mat; it is slightly lower than everything else, and you need to go down some steps to get into it. This cou­pled with the flow of peo­ple always trying to get in, peo­ple trying to get out, peo­ple hol­ding beers over their head while they stum­ble drunk over peo­ple, make for pos­si­ble bad expi­rien­ces. Howe­ver if you get a good spot it is great.

Tues­day. Day two. Today I had a lec­ture in L3… a HUGE lec­ture thea­tre that was HUGE. One in which ever­yone who is lec­tu­ring fidd­les with the ligh­ting sys­tem before they start. It was another basic intro­duc­tion lec­ture. Loo­ked around the local shops on cam­pus, the pos­ter sale that was taking place, the free con­doms, the free news­pa­pers, O2 sim card, sweets, mars bars, food, pot nood­les, mini ched­dars, nokia pho­tos, and the like. My lunch was sor­ted. I also regis­te­red with the health cen­tre and other admin stuff. Now my mind has gone blank and I can’t remem­ber what we did on Tues­day night. Oh well, no biggety.

Wed­nes­day. Today I met my tutor and tutor group, in my group of seven are a nige­rian, a china-man and a cyprian — the tutor him­self being chi­nese made for a very awk­ward hour filled with stumble-like english speech. Today a plant was bought for our kitchen and we got some new soft comfy chairs. Hoo­rah. This eve­ning I went to a chris­tian union event entit­led, “Jesus and the Matrix”. It was actually very enter­tai­ning, and the preacher poin­ted out lots of links I did not know about; i.e. the on screen time Neo is dead for is 72 seconds, a link to the 72 hours in which Jesus is dead — and the they both come back to life. Neo was also named “Tho­mas Anders­son” — Anders­son being swe­dish for “Son of Man”. There were others plus the obvious ones that I already knew about (Zion, Neo ana­gram, Tri­nity, Nebuchad­nez­zar). Follo­wing this I atten­ded a pro­duc­tion by the totally awe­some REDUCED SHAKESPEARE COMPANY who were doing “All the grea­test books”. This was the nadir of hila­rity and I recom­mend ever­yone. Easily on a par with Boom Chi­cago in Amsterdam. 

Thurs­day. Full 10 week time­ta­ble recei­ved. Fri­days EEEKEKE! Too many lec­tu­res. Tonight was the Freshers Ball. But first I endu­red a half hour library intro­duc­tion (bore) and then a Maths for Engi­neers revi­sion class on func­tions given by a ger­man man with bouncy red hair and the ten­dancy to get mixed up in his own words. On to the ball now, ever­yone dres­sed up and there was a red-black corri­dor colour scheme, or so it was named, along with all the other “corri­dor” events peo­ple have devi­sed. Tonight I was to watch the per­for­mance of Whea­tus, follo­wed by the Scratch Per­verts, follo­wed by the Boot­leg Beat­les. Whea­tus were not great, nor were they in fact good, but the peo­ple endor­sed them as best they could and it was worth being in the dance floor during that time. Scratch per­verts were very loud but came out with some high and migh­tily exce­llent mixes in their drum n bass for­mat — which I heard while eating chips that the chip woman had suf­fo­ca­ted in salt. The music before and during the B.Beatles was of course of the highest stan­dard — well known clas­sics are the way to go — and in a way of avoi­ding the well known over­pla­yed wed­ding clas­sics as well. Got to sleep at 3.

Fri­day. Eugh. Lec­tu­res. Strug­gled to stay awake — all boring intro­duc­to­ries — I had three straight hour long lec­tu­res on fri­day after­noon — all in the same place. Had crummy food for din­ner from Cost­cut­ter. Had a nice chat in the eve­ning about movies and stuff while drin­king cof­fee at the art centre. 

Satur­day: RECUPERATION.

This took too long.