Simon Willison’s Weblog

All Courseworked Out

15th May 2003

I’m all courseworked out. After 4 hours sleep on Saturday night, I got up at 8am, headed in to Uni and spent the next consecutive 57 hours in the Library doing coursework (grabbing a total of about two hours sleep during that time). It was, with hindsight, a very stupid thing to do but I take heart in the fact that I was not alone: At least 20 other people from my course were there for almost the same amount of time I was (see Richard and Andy).

It would be easy to write this off as critical lazyness, but I’ve actually been working extremely hard on coursework for the past four weeks. The main problem was that one of our two grou courseworks involved implementing a personal organiser (calendar / todo list / notebook / address book) in PHP—just the kind of project that can take as long as you let it if your requirements are overly ambitious. As it was we didn’t quite implement everything we wanted to, but the resulting system is good enough for me to have already started using it to organise myself a bit better. Ironically the first thing I used it for was co-ordinating the rest of my coursework.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last 2 days catching up on sleep. I also took delivery of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for PC this morning, a day before the official release date (thanks to Gameplay.co.uk). Unfortunately it refuses point blank to install on my aging PC, complaining of a CRC error. It works fine on my house mate Paul’s though. Considering I still have a couple of small courseworks to go (not to mention exams) it’s probably a good thing that I haven’t got it working.