For no reason, other than procrastination

Procrastination again =) So, with all that work I've got to do, I've done some of it, but I'm putting a lot of it off, and I'm blogging now, on a Sunday night, with a heap of work to do =P

I've managed to play Halo 3 a little bit. Someone brought their Xbox360 into college, so that's been fun. I'm still not a fan of the Xbox controller, and I still don't think Halo is that good a game, but it's still fun I guess.

So, I was going to talk about the Teaching Assistants here. They're generally post grad students, kinda like the people who take tutorials back home. However, compared to home, they play a much larger role. Each one is employed for 5-15 hours a week, and they do all the marking, run the tutorials, in fact, I think the only thing the lecturers do is do the lectures and write the exams.

Unfortunately, I think some of the TAs don't really care. During one of my labs, he just sat in the corner reading a novel, and didn't approach people to check if what they were doing was right, or ask if they had any questions.

I last posted Wednesday night... and not a lot has happened since then. Thursday and Friday I had group meetings with people over a specification we have to write for Intro to Software Engineering (which is 310 =P). I also managed to get a little bit of my Computer Graphics assignment in, which is actually kinda cool. I have to model a spider, and animate it. I'll definitely post the completed thing here (we have to submit it as a mpeg anyway), and yeah, it's kinda simple (we haven't done any textures yet, so my spider is just black =(), but I quite like how it's turning out. Still deciding on an animation though, think I'll just make it walk/jump around a bit and attack a teapot (because that's one of the default shapes in glut).

Yeah, they have sphere, cone, cube, dodecahedron. So my spider will either attempt to attack a teapot, or get squashed by one. =)

Friday night I made an effort to stay in, so that I could listen to the AFL Grand Final. Eh.... =(

Yesterday I went down to Day of the Longboat, and it was raining, and absolutely freezing. My floor's team (know as "MackLovin'" - because we're from Mack(enzie) House), apparently did ok. I only saw them come in at the end, and they looked kinda dejected, but apparently not.

The conditions really got the better of the event towards the end of the day (and this morning). While I was there, 3 boats capsized in the one race (there are 7-10 boats per race), one of which simply just sunk. Didn't flip over or anything, just went straight down.


It seemed like fun though, although absolutely freezing. I was cold wearing jeans, a t-shirt, a jumper and a jacket. Wouldn't have been all too pleasant coming out of the water.

Um.. yeah, looked like fun. They had to row out from the beach, around a couple of buoys to another beach, pick up a baton, then around another two buoys back to the beach, and one person had to race up the shore, and hit the baton against a gong like thing (which unfortunately didn't make a very satisfying sound).

There was one race where two teams were head to head. Both landed at about the same time, and the two racers jumped out of their boats and ran up the beach, neck-and-neck, until the one that was in the lead fell over just before the gong. If he had taken another step before he had tripped he would've won it. As it turned out, he ended up with his body underneath the gong, and losing.

But yeah, the weather made the event a little crappy this year.

Last night I went for a wander around the houses. There's someone who has moved here (well, to another house) from Totem Park (the other residence on campus), which he was apparently kicked out from. Totem Park has the reputation for being the more 'wild' of the two residences, and he was (formerly) the House President of one of the houses over there.

The House President oversees the Residence Advisers (I think), who basically keep things in order around the place and run a bunch of the events. Apparently what had happened is that he was going around to all the floors during the floor meetings, introducing himself and trying to sell tickets, which happened to be in his pocket. Unfortunately, his pocket also happened to contain some drugs. Hence the scene went something like:

"You should all come out to [insert some event here]. You can buy tickets from me for [insert some price here]."
*Reach into pocket, pull out ticket, drugs drop out*

... bugger.

So he somehow managed not to get expelled from all residences (although they apparently did try to), and made it over to Vanier. I'm guessing he's fairly rich (given that he had a rather large - I'm guessing 24" - Mac on his table, and a couple of large bottles of spirits on him), and he's very, very popular (given that a whole lot more people were at his house than normal).

It'll be interesting to see what happens =P

And that's about it. Went to church again today, had Japanese for lunch, and then came back and studied and played Halo a bit. Now I have to study before a (hopefully) early night tonight.

Shall post again later. Hopefully either Tuesday night or Thursday night. =)

And here's a photo which is the reverse angle of where I took that backwards shadow picture the other day.