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Jun. 28th, 2001 09:26 amWell, I have two days to write up here, neither of which are the current one.
The only thing that is really writeable about that happened on Tuesday was the rather amusing, if moderately annoying, Electronics exam. Firstly, most of it was about hats. Yes, hats. Two questions in this section were especially... interesting. The first dealt with the 'radio hat', maybe the most sensible idea, with a radio in the hat. It gave solar cells and 'button cells' (calculator batteries, basically) as potential power sources for it, which was fine, then asked for two more and to state their advantages over these... now, there were no sensible power sources left, so the most popular choice appeared to be 'wind power' or 'a dynamo', which made me think of a hat with this little windmill/propeller thing stuck on the top of it, *grin*. Next up was the 'Ambient Hat'. Apparently this amazing hat keeps the user's head cool in warm weather and warm in cold weather using an electronic control system... and then, for 16 marks, we had to design it. Answers ranged from my elaborate water-driven system (with impossibly tiny 'refrigeration units') to fans - *inside* the hat...
Then yesterday was a bit frustrating really. We finally got the password for installing the new version of the software, and loaded it up... to notice that the SystemID had changed, because we'd installed NT on that computer... so after a couple of emails and a phone call, we got another password... which was when we realised we'd just installed the software on the wrong computer. It refused to work nicely (horrendously slow and display corruption at high magnifications) so we took the computer to pieces and basically swapped most of its innards with the computer we were meant to be running this software on. We booted it back up and it played nicely while loading this time but there was still the display corruption. After poking both this computer and the computer quite happily running the older version, we suspect it's a software fault, but we can't test this because getting another password would probably make the people suspicious. We also don't want to break the old version which we have working, although it's only going to work for ten days... ah well, I'll be long gone by then. I also entirely failed to work out how to use another piece of software - well, I worked out how to use it for the moderately simple shapes it's designed for (it's meant for designing machinery), and then completely failed to model the really nasty complex shape we wanted on it, although I managed to make some rather interesting twisted and messy shapes while attempting this. Due to being bored before work I had two sets of lunch, so I threw away the nothing sandwiches from home.
Hmm, boringness. And I have RE this afternoon, and I really can't be bothered to revise.
The only thing that is really writeable about that happened on Tuesday was the rather amusing, if moderately annoying, Electronics exam. Firstly, most of it was about hats. Yes, hats. Two questions in this section were especially... interesting. The first dealt with the 'radio hat', maybe the most sensible idea, with a radio in the hat. It gave solar cells and 'button cells' (calculator batteries, basically) as potential power sources for it, which was fine, then asked for two more and to state their advantages over these... now, there were no sensible power sources left, so the most popular choice appeared to be 'wind power' or 'a dynamo', which made me think of a hat with this little windmill/propeller thing stuck on the top of it, *grin*. Next up was the 'Ambient Hat'. Apparently this amazing hat keeps the user's head cool in warm weather and warm in cold weather using an electronic control system... and then, for 16 marks, we had to design it. Answers ranged from my elaborate water-driven system (with impossibly tiny 'refrigeration units') to fans - *inside* the hat...
Then yesterday was a bit frustrating really. We finally got the password for installing the new version of the software, and loaded it up... to notice that the SystemID had changed, because we'd installed NT on that computer... so after a couple of emails and a phone call, we got another password... which was when we realised we'd just installed the software on the wrong computer. It refused to work nicely (horrendously slow and display corruption at high magnifications) so we took the computer to pieces and basically swapped most of its innards with the computer we were meant to be running this software on. We booted it back up and it played nicely while loading this time but there was still the display corruption. After poking both this computer and the computer quite happily running the older version, we suspect it's a software fault, but we can't test this because getting another password would probably make the people suspicious. We also don't want to break the old version which we have working, although it's only going to work for ten days... ah well, I'll be long gone by then. I also entirely failed to work out how to use another piece of software - well, I worked out how to use it for the moderately simple shapes it's designed for (it's meant for designing machinery), and then completely failed to model the really nasty complex shape we wanted on it, although I managed to make some rather interesting twisted and messy shapes while attempting this. Due to being bored before work I had two sets of lunch, so I threw away the nothing sandwiches from home.
Hmm, boringness. And I have RE this afternoon, and I really can't be bothered to revise.
