It’s been a good weekend. I went out with Terry and his friend on Friday night. I ran into some old friends from Nudgee College: Cameron Caldwell and John Jackson. It was great to see them again. On Saturday I visited Andry in hospital who has undergone a knee reconstruction after being involved in a rather nasty bicycle accident. So ugly, in fact, that the car which hit him had to be towed away from the scene of the accident! He seems to be doing alright. He has a button he can press which delivers a measured dose of morphine via the IV line going into his arm. Apparently he’s been pressing that button quite a bit. On Saturday evening Nigel and I had dinner with some old friends whom we’ve known since we lived in Glen Innes. A whole bunch of other young ex-Glen Innes folk came along too, but I didn’t know any of them. I didn’t realise there were so many people from Glen living in Brisbane! After dinner some of us went to an Irish pub at Garden City and watched England beat South Africa in the rugby. Then we came home and I watched Arsenal vs Chelsea in the Premier League. It was an absolute cracker of a match. Arsenal won 2-1. It’s just a shame the winning goal came through a comical goalkeeping error. Today’s been a typical Sunday: house cleaning, ironing etc etc.
On the way to Ipswich on Thursday morning I finished reading He Died With a Felafel in His Hand. This book is extremely amusing, and would probably put any sane person off share-housing forever. The book is basically a succession of anecdotes relating the author’s share-housing experiences. Lots of drugs, lots of sex, lots of complete and utter madness. Since Nigel still hasn’t finished reading The Count of Monte Cristo, though he is making good progress, I’ve picked The Penguin Book of Etiquette out of my bookshelf and started reading it cover to cover. I’ve probably read the whole thing in bits and pieces, but thought I’d read it straight through anyway. I think it might be time to invest in a few more Penguin Classics. There’s a whole bunch of Thomas Hardy I have to buy, some Jane Austin and Cervantes among other works. Oh, and Shakespeare. Lots of Shakespeare. Macbeth is the only Shakespearean play I own at the moment, so this sorry state of affairs must be remedied immediately.
On Thursday night Nigel and I watched two episodes of Black Adder II on my computer. I will never tire of that show. I can’t think of another comedy that can compete with the witty sarcasm that is sprinkled throughout the show. The actors deliver the lines perfectly.
Friday was the most productive day I’ve had in ages in terms of getting Ph.D work done. I coded the ant-routing layer for my service discovery protocol. That leaves the hashtable-routing layer and the discovery layer itself (which is really just query matching and description construction). Then I need to implement the automated gateway prototype that will allow a Superstring client to discover services advertised under a different service discovery protocol. However, I still have a lot of design work to do on this first. In order to stay productive, I’m switching between thesis writing and coding. I think next I’m going to get a big chunk of my literature survey out of the way. I can lift a good deal of this from my confirmation report and from papers I have written since then.
In order to get my thesis submitted as soon possible, I’ve decided I won’t be tutoring next semester. That will give me a lot of extra time to work on my Ph.D, especially considering the last time I tutored COMP4301 I ended up writing the assignments and doing all the marking myself, as well as supervising the pracs.
