Busy Week Update

‘Twas a busy week this week, which is a strange thing to say since I don’t feel like I accomplished a great deal at school. Spent far too much time troubleshooting a lab only to find out that the interference we’d been struggling to remove (by optimizing a circuit) was due to our new voltage probes reading a 60 kHz signal from ‘the air’!!

Home time has been spent playing the mighty Final Fantasy XII, which is worldofwarcraftian in it’s addictiveness. In fact, it’s so good that I hesitate to speculate whether The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess (for Wii, due next Sunday) could tear me away.

Last last weeks Doctor Who – Rise Of The Cybermen – was disappointing. I think it was the first episode of the new series I would describe as anything less than fantastic. Sadly, we were unable to see the concluding episode (Age Of Steel) due to our PVR mysteriously not taping it (while we were off seing Borat at the cinema). So I can’t say therefore whether or not the alternate Cybermen origin tale redeemed itself. As it stood though, the Madame Pompadour episode previous was such a tour-de-force of good writing most any episode would have seemed a letdown as a followup.

And yes, Borat was an amazingly funny film. I haven’t laughed that much at a movie in years (if ever).

Not much else to tell except to watch this space. There may be a seismic announcement in the next few days…

I passed!

I passed my oral exam today. As my advisor said “As if there was any doubt”. My talk went for about an hour, and happily I was able to answer every question posed to me. I had an audience of about ten, which was much less than I hoped for but much more than I expected (given notices were not put up until a couple of hours prior).

I include here 3 slides from my 38 slide presentation, without commentary:

slide 1.jpg slide 2.jpg slide 4.jpg

And since you’re well-and-truly bored by now, in commemoration of today (Halloween!), here’s some flashback photos to me in 1999:

Halloween 1999 01.jpg Halloween 1999 05.jpg

I trust you can see a change in my ‘outfit’ as the night wore on?