I am currently very bored on campus waiting for an email from
my tutor. You see, I have come in today for a Digital Design lecture, but the
lecturer didn’t turn up. That lecture was at 1pm. I also have a tutorial
that will last about 10 minutes at 4pm. This ends up being a 3 hour wait for a
10 minute talk, being very bored, hot and hungry in a computer room. Not really
my idea of fun or good time management.
So, while I am waiting I guess I will write another journal
entry for my blog. You know,
my life at the moment and everything. Well, it’s the last week of term
and I shall soon be homeward bound for Easter and the holidays. Hoorah! This
term has been a little infuriating, while the work loads have been manageable
and the modules have kept me ticking, the actual content of them has bored me
beyond belief. Systems and Control and Signal Processing, two modules run by
the computer engineering department are equivalent to trying to sleep while
propped up in an old uncomfortable wooden chair with a crazy old man rambling
in your ear about something you don’t understand or care for. However,
nothing compares to the atrocity that was “design of measurement systems”
– not only was this boring and taught by a hard to understand (but
lovely) foreigner, it was also utterly pointless. Luckily there is no exam,
just lots of Easter coursework. The other modules this term have been “Electromechanical
Power”, an optional module concerning induction motors and transformers –
it was dull and I dropped it seven weeks in; “Digital design”, a
basic surmise of how to program microcontrollers and microprocessors,
background knowledge of VLSI and applications of C. It was fairly interesting to
begin with, but looking back, the course only taught the basics and really
could have been a 1st year module. Most of the subject areas could
have been expanded upon and the basics that we know will require further
learning and teaching before we can even hope to successfully apply them in
real life engineering. Yes, the basics are needed, but a little project letting
us use our skills wouldn’t go amiss; the extent of the course was the
ability to program a functioning vending machine or burglar alarm,
theoretically. Design elements were minimal. If I want to go intro the world of
REAL electronics; future technology processors, etc…, I have to learn
about the ‘basics’ for such a system before I can start enjoying
how to realise and improve concepts such as Hyper threading. Comparing modern
computer processors and a vending machine is akin to black and white
photography versus HDTV digital film.
The one redeeming module I have had this term, a module that
has kept me going and prevented me from losing all faith in the degree I am
reading, was “ULSI”. This stands for, ‘ultra large scale
integration’ and was a module on the science and engineering behind micro
fabrication and nanotechnology. It gave insight into business relations between
research groups, Intel, IBM and the other large chip manufacturers, it told us
how they make such small devices (transistors), how much it costs to make them,
how they are scaling them and making them smaller, how they are consistently improving
upon previous designs and all the problems they face in the process. It is
without a doubt the most interesting module so far and it is one run by the
PHYSICS department. The whole module was cutting edge, the lecturer was head of
a research team fronting development for the technologies of 2018 and the
intricacies, subtleties and ingenuity behind the whole process was astounding. Some
of the areas covered include Short Channel Effects (transistor channel lengths
sub micrometer), Source/Drain extensions and problems in fabrication, Quantum
Mechanical Tunneling, oxide thicknesses, material
alternatives and research, raised source drains, silicon futures, silicon
lasers, interconnects, epitaxy, high k dielectrics,
chemical vapour deposition, chemical mechanical polishing and more. I
positively loved it, despite the impossibly hard assignment questions. The
level of knowledge was far greater than any of the engineering modules and
rather than just being told things, we were told why things happened. Although
I guess that is the difference between engineering and science, one tries to
understand the other tries to apply.
In other, non course related news: My mum is getting married
soon and the date is approaching. I have been and bought my suit for the
occasion and I have designed and printed all the invites (after much
deliberation and constant editing due to dissatisfaction of the customer, I
jest). I am also going to France soon, a nice little medieval town north of
forever purchasing our flight tickets simply because the cheapest were from
from. In the end we just went via British Airways from Heathrow as, although it
was slightly more expensive than Easyjet, it gave us
good departure/arrival times and was less hassle. I’ve got some other
news concerning backyard police antics but that can form another post.
Im still sitting here bored in the
computer room, I forgot to charge my iPod so I can’t
even listen to music. ARGH! I might just skip the tutorial and go home. Maybe I’ll
buy a can of lilt. This room is unnaturally hot, when
I did a temperature sensor experiment in here it said it was 30C. Not really the
optimum working temperature.
I’m still spending my time playing Halo 2 on Xbox
live, despite all the assholes that swear and curse when they win or lose at
the end of a match. I’m getting a little bored with all the maps now and
fresh downloadable content is required soon! That and the patch to stop all the
cheating, it’s a little ridiculous. American mid terms and exams have
made it less fun as no one in my Something Awful clan is ever online, especially
at the British times that I play. So instead I leave it on and wait for people
while surfing the net in my ever so lethargic manner. It was in doing this that
I noticed my firefox had stopped working correctly; several
pages including the BBC football page and the Bungie.net stats page were
loading wrong. I narrowed the problem down to a faulty greasemonkey
extension script but the only way of removing such an error was to reinstall
and rebuild my profile from scratch. Luckily I had backed up all my bookmarks,
saved data, form data and the like. However it did take me into the early hours
of the morning to have things back up and running so smoothly (i.e. extension
installs, logging into everything again, etc… ).
I still love firefox though!
Not much more I can think of to tell you. Samantha has
finally finished her crazy biological essays that I had to proof read. She’s
been worrying about them all term and been getting very
stressed over their completion. So now she has a short gap before she can start
worrying about her exams.
One final thing to note, google
news has added the ability to make the front page customisable – i.e. I
can include news alerts on xbox and
I love google too.
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