The lat 48h has, for varying reasons, sucked and sucked hard... I'll spare you the majority of the reasons however I will say it is VERY annoying when you have a group task which would take you at most say, 15mins to code on your own, take a group of people around an hour and a half todo and even then not do well [depressed].. however this is all part of my new take on the programming lesson being 'I'm not answering anything, me pulling you guys through this module doesn't do you any good' and as noble as that sentiment is... it's annoying.. more so because I forgot my iPod [sad]... the way they did it was the most annoying... well, I say 'they', two of them basically sat and changed stuff 'until it worked', one sat and stared at his screen doing other stuff and the final two kinda watched, not really knowing what was going on I guess... when retelling this story I likened them to monkeys bashing away at a typewriter... 3rd year students and they can't even logically solve a problem without random guess work and me pointing out trivial mistakes.. [depressed]
Today however brought a small beacon of light to the precedings of my week (which from this point onwards will probably only get worse, but never mind); I was talking with the lecturer for the aformentioned programming module about which languages we could use to impliment the algorithms (hence forth refered to as Al-Gore-ithms because it makes me [smile]) in, I figure I might as well take this as a chance to learn/brush up on a few more languages instead of just doing it all in Java (right now I'm looking at C++, C#, Lua and O'Caml as the four extra I might toy with).
During this convo I made an off hand comment about 'learning extra languages for something todo' which earned me the reply of 'something todo? have you finished the project yet?', to which I started to reply with 'no, but I like to do many things at once' however I got as far as 'no, but I li..' before he said 'well, hurry up I've got some programming which needs doing for my research', to which I quipped back, thinking he was ofcourse joking that I'd have to work out how much I had to charge him, to which he replied along the lines of 'you should, I've already asked for the money' [wow]
Now, I'll be first to admit I wasn't completely paying attention, as I said the last 48h was sucking pretty damned hard and I wasn't in the best of moods, so I'm not 100% sure if he was serious or not... if he wasn't, well I'm not that bothered, if he was however... mmmmm income and some form of credits on a research paper... tasty [grin]
All of which meshes nicely with the whole 'do year of training and do lecturing' idea I've been kicking around, having a foot slightly in the door with a lecturer might be handy in that regard.
Thinking about it if he does want someone to help him out then I can see why I'd look like a likely candidate, while I can't speak for any of the other years which have gone before (and maybe he did the same then, who knows), given the current crop of people coming through I'm by FAR the most experiance and able programmer there (see earlier comment about monkeys)...
We'll see how it pans out, I've got a bit of time to kill so I should probably brush up on my O'Caml some more and get reading the ATI "CTM" pdf so I can hit the ground running with that..
