It seems I have somewhat neglec­ted my blog, my last full non-image post of any real value was back in Octo­ber – my lovely racism article, if you’re lucky you might catch a copy of it by scro­lling down this page a little. It seems my time has been spent elsewhere, pri­ma­rily taken up by my degree; VLSI designs here, Ana­lo­gue sys­tem designs there – an ill fated elec­tro­nic nose to tout my CV with and a mul­ti­tude of late nights in the com­pu­ter room attemp­ting to com­plete cour­se­work to the best of my abi­li­ties. This trend con­ti­nued right up until last Tues­day when I com­ple­ted the last exam of my third and penul­ti­mate uni­ver­sity year.  I don’t really know what to do with myself and this crazy amount of free time, I am sure it won’t last and a bit of sunshine wouldn’t go amiss. You see for the last 5 or 6 weeks, follo­wing the nerve wrac­king pro­ject pre­sen­ta­tion to the ever supe­rior dean of engi­nee­ring and the 16,000 word report asso­cia­ted with it, I have spent each and every day revising—from 9am until 9pm at night, some­ti­mes later, without break or rest. I wrote so much I had RSI before going into the exam hall. Well now those days are over and I am well trai­ned in the arts of digi­tal sig­nal pro­ces­sing, digi­tal and ana­lo­gue sys­tems design, robo­tics, finance and accoun­ting, VLSI and digi­tal and ana­lo­gue com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems (most of which will be defunct in a few years as the switch to digi­tal is made); or at least I hope the results of the 7 exams will say so. They didn’t go as well as I had hoped, you may argue so what, but gene­rally I have been pretty plea­sed with my exam per­for­mance in the past. Maybe it was the change in exam struc­ture that baf­fled me, this year there’s an exter­nal exa­mi­ning body coming to check that everything is going well – much like Ofs­ted but for further edu­ca­tion; it is for this rea­son many lec­tu­rers broke out of their well defi­ned mould of pre­dic­ta­ble exam ques­tions to pre­sent con­fu­sing and unpo­lished alter­na­ti­ves in attempts to look good in the eyes of the offi­cials. I shouldn’t com­plain too much, at least the engi­neers weren’t sub­ject to the appa­lling lec­tu­rer stri­kes that have smit­ten my friends degrees and gra­dua­tion – refu­sing to set exams, mark work or do anything admin rela­ted. It’s a grave injus­tice to the hard wor­king stu­dent body – the university’s cus­to­mers if you will; months of dis­ser­ta­tion strug­gles tra­ded for an unacc­re­di­ted degree and cove­ring let­ter of expla­na­tion. It’s dis­gra­ce­ful and the uni­ver­sity and lec­tu­rers ought to settle their batt­les without invol­ving, dis­gra­cing or overly stres­sing inno­cent third par­ties during exa­mi­na­tion periods. 

In other news I have a fai­led ARM inter­view and a cou­ple of rejec­tion let­ters under my belt and still no sum­mer employ­ment, hoo­rah. Most of my time not spent in edu­ca­tion has been devo­ted to the ongoing and stea­dily impro­ving indie​cult​.com web­site, also men­tio­ned a few posts below and I am off to Venn Fes­ti­val in Bris­tol next week in light of that; Vashti Bun­yan being a par­ti­cu­lar high­light for me.

While at home over Eas­ter I made a cou­ple of great dis­co­ve­ries in the attic con­cer­ning record pla­yers, vinyl, old edi­tion comics and some ori­gi­nal D&D. Such beau­ties inc­lude a great electro-jazz 70s piece from Bob Dow­nes and a Morro­can Magh­reb at Marra­kesh disc, all truly stun­ning. I’ll write a more com­prehen­sive list in the near future but now I must dash to mea­sure my girlfriend’s head size and watch X-men 3 at the Apollo.