Confessions of an aspirant code borrower . . .: Week 3 - Welcoming Event . . . .went well until the shooters . .

Week 3 is over – how do I feel – well seeing as it was our welcoming function last night which started in the Livingston Building 10th floor and ended in the Counting house – that was after having visited the Union & Print Works – I would have been quite happy staying there but there are a few foreign students so we thought we’d show them a pub or two in Glasgow itself – all within a few hundred metres of each other . . . and close to the station, for me. Well it was wine to start with and guess skipped lunch – not on purpose but it just happened and when I looked at the time again it was 15h00 and our function was at 16h00 – so I thought there was not much point – something I lived to regret, later on. Wine then onto beer and of course someone introduced the inevitable shooters . . . it was the beginning of the end – I left at about 23h00 or somewhere around there – grabbed a burger on the way home – another bad idea . . . my fingers are not finding it as easy to find the correct keys today . . .

Tuesday start again as Monday is our free day – supposed to catch up and do some reading as well get up to speed on Java . . .more about that later.

Well Tuesday is Internet programming lecture then 2 lab periods – at the moment we are starting off on our development route – we will learn programming languages which allow us to design a web page with all of its bells and whistles – the fancy stuff running in the background – have the ability to get you to fill in some information online and validate that information – then create some sort of a record / database of this and I presume act on the information or use it for something – might be an e-commerce type site we’ll just have to wait and see. I like the fact that everything we do is done incrementally – first a lecture then the opportunity to put it into practice and play around with it.

Wednesday was 09h00 sharp for Java lab – proved to be a bit of a disaster – I thought I had picked up some of the basics – found myself treading water – not knowing what to do – it didn’t help that when we asked for help the person seemed a bit confused – couldn’t help but notice he gave a slightly different explanation and code to the guy sitting next to me ???? Then we asked someone else they gave us different code and then the 1st guy came back and said – what the other guy had shown us was incorrect – by this time we were reeling . . .and pretty frustrated – realised that we have to do something ourselves if we are going to get the hang of this – so I have suggested a separate study group for this – we have 2 hours in between classes on Wednesday and we are going to get together and discuss and make sure we understand. Get a battle plan worked out – just look at basics. So far only 2 people have signed up but I know 1 or 2 others who will come along. Want to approach some of the more marginalised individuals in class – A Chinese guy whom I’ve not really seen him speaking to anyone else and a couple of the Indian guys as well.

Thursday was Java lecture – I’m sorry I’m not impressed – I had sent him an email – expressing my concerns but – I am sure he had not read it before the class – some people who know Java tell me that his syntax is incorrect – at this stage of Java – I really can’t afford to pick up any bad habits. If you work with something and you go over it again and again to understand it and your examples are wrong it is just going to throw you right out and confuse you no end. So once again hope study group can address this. 2 hours a week is probably not enough. We had an Information Retrieval lab – which I enjoyed – I couldn’t really get to grips with it initially – but some of my research for our group exercise on Grid computing actually overlaps – so I found myself being drawn into this and I started to make sense of what she had been telling us in the class. Its really all about information on the Internet and how we go about 1) putting together a query 2) matching information with our query 3) Initial complexity - how do we know what to ask when we don’t know the subject 4) the ranking / presentation of information. My research took me to a new concept of the Internet – or what it is developing into - the Semantic web – and raised the issue of much much more information being generated and how we are going to cope with this from an information retrieval point of view.

Thursday afternoon 16h00 students from Library Information (49); Computer & Internet Technologies (25 – I’m in this group) and Information Management (12) – were invited to get together over a glass of wine to meet each other. We actually share some classes together – all 3 of us take Information Retrieval and we are in same class as Info. Man group for Enterprise Architecture etc., during the rest of the year I am sure there will be other classes – now strangely enough the library science class is about 80% female – we only have 2 and IM has 2 as well I think. Only 6 people from my class turned up; Russel; Andy; myself; Nicole; Duncan – actually that might have been it – and we didn’t really mingle – tended to just stick together – but then another Nicole from Florida came up and introduced herself and Christine one of her fellow students came to chat wasn’t long before the rest of the guys muscled in on our threesome – went quite well – I should have been a bit more active in circulating – but did get to meet quite few people . . .a few glasses of wine led to a thirst which had to be quenched – a few pubs later some shooters . . .you know the story.
Where we ended up - Counting House - little arrow
(Hey don't tell anyone but the arrow is actually 1 block away from where the pub is.

Made it for my 09h30, next morning – Information retrieval – had to have a coke first thing though to try and sort out the blood sugar and I had been a wee bit ill during the evening as I had somehow skipped lunch on Thursday – not a good idea. I made it, somewhat gingerly, through the morning and went to a lab later. Came home and had a nap.

Just back from the King’s theatre ‘Two’ – a 2 person show – well done – well put together.

What else happened this week:
Monday night – my computer drop-in class I run; some confusion with venue booking etc., - will need to sort out pay as well and how that is going to work as the community group are now picking up the tab.
Tuesday evening – Digital Community management board meeting
Wednesday evening – helped out with girl guide group – they are all going for their computer badge – so assisted the troop. (incidently Scotland lost 2-0 to Ukraine; but then again so did England to Croatia;)
Thursday – welcome evening
New books purchased this week: Javascript & DHTML and PHP & MySQL.

A recommendation I can make is that any of you seriously interested in web design make use of Mozilla web browser has a couple of great features –