I’m back to school this week, after approximately 2 months worth of holidays. Sad to say, I haven’t accomplished much and this holiday has been a let down. But lets not dwindle on it for too long.

Timetable for Monday blows. I’ve this gapping 5 hour break between my last 2 lessons. I’d love to stab the person that came up with the timetable, but that’s not possible. Timetables in my school are computer generated. For this particular Monday, I did find some nice chairs to take a nap on the 4th floor of the school library however. Otherwise, the overall duration of lessons per week seem to be 2-3 hours shorter than previously.

Project assignments were handed out rather hastily on the first week, which came as a surprise. It also seems that a fair bit of self learning is require for certain subjects as the course coverage seems to be rather minimal, such as Visual Basics, which would be essential for certain projects that require the use of the .NET framework.

Problem based learning (PBL) seems to be the new buzzword these days. I enrolled in the course to be taught, not to be told to rely entirely on figuring out everything myself. PBL sounds all good on paper, find out information by yourself, teaching and learning from your peers, so on and so forth. In reality, it is a time sink, whereby people who get their information from questionable sources, sharing whatever they think they know and ultimately acquiring knowledge of somewhere close to zilch. Whats more is I probably could pick up whatever at home and not wasting my time in class.

Selecting networking over Java for my subject selection for this semester, you would think the focal point would be it, but no. I get like a 2h lab and 2h lecture each week. Are you kidding me? I expect my subjects to be modeled around it, not for it to be shafted in a shy corner.

Advanced mobile computing is taught by a bloke named David Yeo, and is a rather awesome bloke too. First impressions, or first 2 rather, has shown him to be one that is current and well informed about recently developments in the industry. He also consistently relates whatever that was being taught to the real world. These traits are pretty uncommon among lecturers, who most of the time just read out slides and cite examples from something like the early 90s.

Also, there is an inversely proportional relation to how many years a lecturer has taught for in a particular institution and his/her knowledge on how to operate the projection device.

Outside of school, this week has also sported two major releases, Firefox 2.0 and Fedora Core 6.

Firefox 2.0, I am currently using on all my systems now. There isn’t any really major ground breaking difference compared to 1.5. The additions are small, but help improve accessibility quite a bit, with individual close buttons for each tab and the build in spellcheck, which is unfortunately sports a rather limited dictionary. The ability to load seaches in a new background tab also seems to have disappeared. It still is able to load up in a new tab, but not in the background, even with Tabbrowser Preferences plugin.

I’m still unsure to use Fedora Core 6 or not on my storage server over Windows, mainly due to my Linux knowledge being very limited. I recently installed FC5 on my laptop to play around with, and might upgrade the installation to FC6 to experiment with it.

Gaming wise, a number of upcoming releases that I’m keen to experience are Splinter Cell: Double Agent, FEAR Extraction, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Gothic 3. All of which is to be released sometime between now and mid next month. I hate it how school here and gaming releases are always in conflict with one another. A few years back, now is when I’ll be sitting for annual final exams, and most of the time totally screwing up because it coincides with a game release. I’m unsure to how much I’d actually be able to play with this semester looking pretty hectic atm. Already considering taking a break from EQ2.

Weekends are here, but rest ain’t. One thing true about life is, no matter how bad it is, it could always get much worst.