all things me

Well, not really but I sure feel like it.

Nevertheless. Yes, I finally did it: I went to the university and turned in my papers to enroll in the last graduation ceremony of the school year. In about 2 weeks I’ll get my bachelor’s degree (Bachelor of Arts). Hurray.

I’m not planning on any sort of pomp and circumstance but I promise I’ll celebrate a little — on the inside at least.

(I got the congratulations after I’d filled in the papers with the help of the clerk. How great would it be if I now got a call that there’s something wrong… After I’ve already told everyone. )

I’m on summer vacation today and trying to advance my course work. I’m taking a course on writing and I’m finding it very difficult to write about something I’m not the least bit interested in. We don’t have much material nor instructions, these are supposed to be “free compositions.” But what if I can’t think of anything to write about “image” and “profile”. Or “surprising situation in language usage.”

For quite a while now my university email has been hit by numerous spam emails every day. I don’t quite understand how spammers have got my email address because it hasn’t been on any open websites (only unlinked assignment pages).

Maybe this is a new way of smoking out the old students! Along with load of Bologna, the study time has been restricted. However, us old students can study for a while longer — uncontrollably (I suppose there are 10-year checks or something). So now they’ve decided to spam us, hoping we would get fed up with it and hurry up with our degrees.

Ha, I’m onto you!

– – –

But of course, there are several mailing lists at the university so most likely one or more of them have been compromised.

I hate all students in University of Helsinki! Well, no, I actually hate the people who plan language studies. I’ll never graduate because I’ll never get to pass Swedish course because I never get in! Enrolment started 38 minutes ago, and I’ve been phoning the expensive phone service for 38 minutes. Toot-toot-toot. No luck. At least it doesn’t charge for the toot-toot-toot.

And now, after 40 minutes the phone number is not working at all.

1 hour later: The course is full. I’ll try enrolling via Internet on May 2nd if I’d get in a queue. Guess I won’t be getting my bachelor’s degree this year. *whimper*

Luckily I’ve got good music. Thank you, S! You saved my day!

I was writing an email to enrol to a course and needed to check the course site to see what info I needed to give. While I was there I decided to see what sort of topics there are. And that’s when I realised the topics were a little too familiar. Off I went to see my list of finished courses and there it was, under a different code and slightly different name.

Damn Bologna.

Good thing is, now I have my Tuesday mornings free — for work.

I had a pretty broken night, after going to sleep around 12 am and still looking at the clock at 12:40 I got up at 5 and 6 and then eventually 7.

Why the fidgetiness? I had an exam today Well, I studied all day yesterday and before that — not enough in my own view but the best I could do (read: bother) as usual. It was Finnish grammar. Phonology, morphology, syntax, clause structure… I think I did alright. There were a few things I wasn’t sure of so I had to leave them only partially solved. The result will come around July 20th, so I’ll just have to wait and see.

Now, shopping!

I’ve been doing that database application for 101,5 hours and that’s most likely an underestimate cause I didn’t dare mark all the hours I’ve spent on it. The course gives 2 credits which equals 80 work hours. We had to print out a work hour list with letters assigned to different parts of the process and I wrote a note at the bottom that there should be a letter code for pedantry (or pernicketiness or perfectionism, they’d all go under P!)…

Sigh. It’s done. It’s actually done! “Tomorrow” we have to demonstrate our applications (I’m sure something goes wrong even though I think I’ve checked everything) and then this whole burden of a c(o)urse is finished. Next I have to start dreading and waiting for the grade. I want a 3 [i.e. the maximum]. I so want a 3.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s been a lot of fun, but trying to cram 1333 lines of PHP code, 13 PHP/XHTML pages, a JavaScript file and a stylesheet into a documentation… not fun. Oh yeah, it ended up being 105 pages. I printed it as 2 pages per paper on a PDF which I’ll be printing today at the department. They make the crazy documentation instructions, they lose the stack of paper.

For the first time in my life my shoulder, elbow, and wrist ache from typing and it’s on my left arm only. Weird. Now I’m going to not-document yay!

Whoever wrote “include source code in the document” in the documentation instructions must’ve been insane!

• Login
• Form checks with JS
• Confirm before delete
• Checks for no rows in query results
• Prevent default category from being deleted (change default to ‘1’)

After this time consumer (20+ hours during the weekend, ok, that’s not really a lot is it, but I didn’t do much else!) is over and done with I’m going to play Bloodlines until I turn into a vampire! … when I’m not working or studying for my summer exams, that is…

Don’t know if I’ve mentioned, but I’m making a blog application in the database application project course. Today (Sat-Sun) I’ve been doing coding for about 11 hours. First I fought — for 6-ish hours — with Oracle trying to get things out of other tables than the users table. No luck. Then it took a while to get the MySQL base up and running (we have to install it to our home directory and start the server when we need it) with the correct socket specified somewhere.

Then, I got properly into business, aka The Fun Stuff: First I coded pages on the public side, that is, archive pages and things. Then I ventured into updating the database (ahhh, hazard zone — not really) and I got as far as finishing the code for articles. I made the form ready for adding topics, but I’m too tired to keep going. I’m going to continue “tomorrow”, happy knowing that I don’t have to fight for 6-ish hours with the stupid Oracle database.

I’m very proud of the “portability” of it. I’m making an effort to do all the database stuff in one file so I can define the settings (user, password, etc.) in one place. I’m sure there’d be lots of cool things to “rip” from WP, but I’m going to dabble this on my own. Of course, I’ve been influenced by the way WP works, a little.