I woke up with a headache Tuesday morning, because it was so cold in my bedroom, and the rest of the day was pretty mediocre. I didn’t have the headache problem this morning because I accidentally left my electric heater on all night. While it’s probably doing horrible things to our electricity bill, I’m just going to have to; it gets absolutely freezing in my bedroom – yet again I’ve managed to pick the coldest room in the house, by far – and I get both a crappy night’s sleep and a nice shiny headache in the morning when it’s that cold. Seriously, I’d say it’s less than 10 degrees in here when I wake up; the central heating thermostat in the lounge room says it’s about 15 degrees in there, which is as low as the dial goes, and my room’s noticeably cooler again.
Anyway, it was off to the labs at uni for once last round of ADD. Rob had gotten everything working in my absence the previous day (the key problem being a grounding issue), so it was just a matter of writing the report and doing the demonstration. Report writing was slow… I wasn’t in the mood, was being quite jovial, and thus preventing Rob & Tony from also working. Plus, I took lots of photos, which they greatly disapproved of. :D
Anyway, we did get it finished in the end, to a reasonable standard… I was too tired and achy to really put much effort in it, but I think it was sufficient. We made good use of my camera (and Rob’s camera phone) to gloss it up a bit, along with the usual diagrams and charts. Jim (our lecturer) seems to prefer demo’s over long winded reports anyway, so he’ll probably appreciate that we didn’t write a thesis on it.
The demo was extremely anti-climatic, though. Jim wasn’t in a particularly joyous mood – although he wasn’t really cranky, either – and was thoroughly underwhelmed by our demo. He accepted without much comment all the extra features built from sweat and blood – like that SRAM packet queuing and dynamic transmission rate support – but tried to pull to pieces even the most minor flaws, such as the absence of proper flow control (which wasn’t part of the requirements at all) and my simple speed control system that I implemented only to demonstrate the dynamic transmission rate support. In the end he seemed satisfied, I think, that we’d done what was needed and done it pretty well, but he certainly didn’t give any praise, which after a week of really hard work on this, we all really needed.
Still, provided the mark comes back as fourteen thousand percent, I’ll be content.
