We’ve finished marking the COMS3200 exams. Results were lower than we expected. I suspect some students didn’t bother to study because it was an open book exam. But I think the extra hours I put in at Ipswich paid off. An Ipswich student (as opposed to a St Lucia student) received the highest mark on the exam, which is great! They even gave me a Thank You card this year! Some of them worked really hard, so I hope at least a few of them get very good grades. They certainly deserve it.
I finally made it to a Brisbane Strikers match on Saturday. The Strikers are doing fairly well so far this season. They beat the Melbourne Knights 1-0. That puts them in 4th place.
We now have a digital set-top box. We got the low-end TEAC model, but it suffices. So now we can watch most stuff in crystal clear wide-screen. The best part is that all the trouble we were having with reception is gone completely. The way digital television works means that even though the signal is bouncing around all over the place and being dampened by the big fig trees in front of our house, the picture we get on our TV is perfect. With the analogue signal, we would get ghosting caused by the signal bouncing off the next door neighbour’s roof, the fig trees would distort the signal, especially when it was raining. With the digital signal, the hardware just filters out any duplicate signals. It’s great! The cricket looks really good in wide-screen. :)
By the end of this week I hope to have the ant-based service discovery protocol working completely. I’ll be annoyed if I haven’t got it working soon. I haven’t progressed nearly as far as I had hoped to by this time. By now I thought I’d be collecting stats from the local-area and wide-area protocols. I haven’t even finished coding them yet! Must work faster!!!
