Well, it’s taken me a while to blog it, but I’ve completed the very last part of my fourth year project, which was a simple 20-25 minute presentation with questions at the end. All in all, it went pretty well. Alan kindly stayed on after he completed his own talk and listened to the ones given in my group. They were quite interesting: the first was on some kind of 2D projection technique to model 3D Navier-Stokes equations, and the other on the spread of disease throughout a tree-like structure.

Most surprising was that I didn’t feel nervous at all; having spent so long typing up the project and fiddling around with code, I knew the algorithms pretty well and I think that I did a good job of summarizing the key aspects. The reaction seemed positive enough, and the questions at the end were reasonably managable.

For anybody who’s going to do this sort of presentation, I’ve collated some handy tips that I found useful.

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Continue reading “Project Completed!”…

1:51 pm | Posted in Exams, Maths, Project | No Comments »

If you read this you’ve probably heard already, but for the record I’ve now been offered funding for my PhD at the maths institute next year! (I think this is ultimately ace.)

Now, back to the revision I guess…

11:42 pm | Posted in Academia, Maths, University | 3 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Well, revision is going as well as can be expected (read: not so well) and it’s essentially keeping me off the interwebs at the moment – although CS:Source is also a reason for that. However, I’m hopeful that at least some of the exams will be good.

Within the next few days, I’ll hopefully have the time to post another entry that some people will hopefully find useful. I’ve got a project presentation on May 9th and I have slides that I’ve created using Beamer and LaTeX. So I’ve managed to set everything up so that I can use my phone as a bluetooth remote. It was ace.

Tonight I’m shooting at my aunt’s school production. Hopefully, I’ll get some good photos and also a bit of video recorded. But it’s more of a run-through for the final night more than anything else at the moment.

Also had my first supervision of the final term today, and as it transpires, my new group has not received 6 of their 9 assignments from last term and only had 3 supervision – I’m a little unsure as to precisely why this is the case. However I’ll try to pick up the pieces and help them along for their final exams this year.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Photos may be uploaded tonight, assuming that any of them are decent enough to put on here.

11:23 am | Posted in Exams, Maths, Photography | No Comments »

Logged on to the online module registration today, and am really, really glad I did. Had I not done, I would be taking an unexpected exam in the summer. Almost a complete disaster, but not quite.

11:11 pm | Posted in Exams, University | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Well after much blood, sweat and tears, I finally finished my project. In total, it was 33 pages long (including references), so not an unsubstantial amount of work! After it’s all gone through the system, been marked and I’ve got my marks back, I plan on posting a copy on here. But I want to ensure it goes without a hitch first.

Anyway, that was finished about 2 weeks ago. I took a week off which was quite nice, in which I’ve bought many things, most of which are yet to be delivered.

They include a 160gb laptop hard-drive (for the bargin price of £75 with free shipping, thanks to eBuyer); 512MB of SODIMM RAM for my laptop; an excellent 2gb SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash card; the Canon RC-1 Remote (from eBay, only £11); a 10/100 ethernet switch and a CompactFlash reader.

Unfortunately this spending spree was started by me looking at the Canon 100-400mm f/4-5.6L which, at ~£1000 is a little out of my budget at the moment. However, something had to fill the void, so…

Anyway, revision’s started now. First up is Asymptotic Methods, and it’s going reasonably well at the moment. My plan is to start early and finish early, leaving time for TV and other assorted good things.  Hurrah.

7:13 pm | Posted in Academia, Exams, Hardware, Maths, Personal, Photography, Project | No Comments »

This week has been a really good week. I was extremely worried on Saturday that I might not be able to implement the flatPERM method that I needed for my project, but on Sunday something clicked and I managed to fix my code. Ever since then, things have been pretty much slotting into place and I’m getting very consistent results between all four of the methods I’ve implemented.

I’ve been marred somewhat in that computing resources at the CSC have been under quite a lot of use, but just before the holidays this is somewhat understandable. With a bit of luck, I’ll get added to another queue which isn’t quite as busy, enabling me to do some really long runs with large amounts of fun. When it’s completed, I’m certainly going to try to post a copy on here for everyone to see (as some people have asked), but that will have to wait until it’s been marked.

In other far more exciting news, I got a lovely e-mail offering me a PhD position in the maths department. Now, this doesn’t guarantee funding so I’m certainly not counting my chickens yet (in fact, not by a very long way). However, I’m one step closer so all is good.

Finally, I finished my marking today, so I have nothing more to do on that front until possibly October (if I’m back). Also, after having attended and helped out at every single open day since my first year, I finished up yesterday. So that was a bit sad.

Anyway, enough rambling. I’m going to press on whilst my luck is still moderately good! (I’m touching wood constantly these days).

10:31 pm | Posted in Project | No Comments »

My apologies for the lack of either photographs or similar word entries. It’s an exceptionally busy time of year; end of term is creeping up extremely quickly, and there are a number of things to get done before Friday of week 10. So, expect a similarly large lack of time before the next couple of posts.

Mainly my apathy has been because of the immense amount of research that I’m doing for the project, which is turning into quite a large beast very quickly. However, it gives me a good idea of what research might be like at the graduate level, and it’s generally interesting. With a bit of luck, when everything is finished off I will post the project report on the blog and people can tear into my code.

Anyway, hopefully you’ll enjoy the snow photo that just got posted. Hopefully I will be back around here soon, and maybe after my project is finished I’ll even have time to finish the site off!

6:00 pm | Posted in Project, Site Development | No Comments »

It’s been a reasonably productive day; I completed the majority of the things I set out to do and handed in my latest Fourier Analysis assignment. Also managed to complete the Fractal Geometry assignment so I’m happy. Additionally, I got the latest build of emacs working with XFT. Ho ho ho, that’s very sad.

Tomorrow is project day – the day in which I attempt to catch up for a reasonable amount of neglect on my part. Hopefully I’m going to overcome some of the nastier problems found along the way, and start on the writeup.

I just can’t wait.

On the upside, I have a new photo that I’ll be posting tomorrow. Well, I say photo… maybe it’s a bit different than the usual stuff.

12:33 am | Posted in Maths, Project | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

I find that increasingly these days I’m using the phrase “I don’t quite have the time at the moment…” For those who think I’m putting it on to get away from talking to them, I assure you it’s quite genuine. Right now, I have rather a large to-do list.

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Continue reading “Time sucks”…

4:32 pm | Posted in Maths, Personal, Project, Whining | No Comments »

I don’t often appeal to the political correctness brigade, but to all of you out there who don’t believe in saying “Merry Christmas”, I hope you had a really nice holiday.

I was extremely happy to receive a lot more than was expected this year, and because so many people have now asked me what I got, inevitably lots and lots gets missed out. So if you’re interested, have a look at my present list!

To be honest, there’s an awful lot to keep me occupied and this just isn’t a good thing. I haven’t really done any work at all, but there is a plan now that some things are out of the way. Whether that plan actually succeeds or not is yet to be discovered, but we shall see!

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Continue reading “Happy Holidays!”…

8:53 pm | Posted in Maths, Personal, Photography | No Comments »