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
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 playstation, or local news. Lovely. I love google too.
Labels: Life
