Couldn’t get to sleep last night for ages, which meant when I woke up to my alarm I felt like crap. Ended up going back to sleep, because I figured I wasn’t going to be working very well feeling like crap. After I got up I did some email and general admin stuff, sorting things out. I shaved today. I’m going to have to again in a few days so I’m presentable for my final project assessment and for heading down to Florida, so I thought I’d test out exactly how much growth I get in a couple of days time now. I mean, it used to take me a good couple of weeks before “stubble” appeared, which was really just fluff. Now I actually get some stubble… yes, some stubble. Not much, and not for long before it turns to fluff, but I do get some. It might still take a couple of weeks for me to grow anything resembling something somebody that doesn’t kiss me would notice, though.

I went to a meeting with the local SIFE team today. They’re just starting up, they don’t have any projects or anything, so I’m the one that knows everything… very weird for me, considering how new the SIFE team at Canterbury is. The regional competition is in a couple of weeks, which I’m going to go to with the four or so people that are involved here so far. From there we should be able to get some good ideas for local projects and really drive forth in starting things up, promoting and recruiting, that kind of thing. SIFE is something that I enjoyed being a part of at Canterbury and is certainly something I feel is worthwhile doing, so I’m glad I can help push things along here.

While today was ok, if a bit cold, it started raining again in the evening… apparently I shouldn’t get my hopes up too high of less rain in the Spring quarter, but I think that there will be less. Once it’s nice out, I’ll go and take a bunch of pictures of the campus and surrounding area (yes the Space Needle, too).

I find it somewhat ironic that on the same day Starbucks gives away free coffee (which I didn’t end up getting, but I’m ok with that since I don’t really like their coffee), I get an email about a summer course on the exploration (and exploitation) of how coffee gets from the ground to the cup. I haven’t actually had Starbucks coffee here yet in all fairness, only in New Zealand, which I don’t believe is particularly good. Should I give it a chance? I open the floor to comments. Actually, on that note I would like to point out you don’t need to register for a user, or have your own blog (or LiveJournal for that matter) in order to comment

Turns out I didn’t need to be (nor was I expected to be) involved with the visit days. I mean, I saw them wandering around the CSE building and all, and since I’m not involved with any of the particular research groups yet I wasn’t party to any of their presentations or activities… that I have my graphics project to do.

I very stupidly decided to open a PDF file in-browser earlier today… while this isn’t usually a problem, when I’ve got a bunch of them already open using Acrobat (the editor, not the reader), if I try and open more of them inside a browser, it seems to crash the browser, which isn’t so good. Meant I lost the links to a few pages I had open, which was a bit of a pain because they were articles I was going to read that I don’t know if I’ll necessarily be able to find again. Ah well.

I picked up my next package today from New Zealand. I got the little notice in my mailbox yesterday, but I didn’t go to the desk to pick it up early enough. In it I got the next Nature’s Best CDs, which I’m just listening to. So far I think the first volume is probably slightly better, but still a lot of very cool songs on here. (Do you think Mum will buy Volume 3 as well?) In addition to the CD, I got some fabulous Cadbury chocolate, and a Maori card from Dace. Thank you both very much! Dace put in some very humorous notes with his affected Northland accent (ow). Yes Dace, I can pronounce the long Maori name on the back of the card. ^^ Also in the package were a couple of articles from The Press about the sale of Trade Me, which was pretty big news. While there are competitors out there with lower rates like Zillion, Trade Me is still really the dominant player in the online auction marketplace and it’s a hard market to break into once a dominant player is established (a la eBay).

Today was a bit frustrating in that every time I sat down to do my graphics assignment, I couldn’t work out what to do next, or something else came up that I needed to do. It’s been a day of administration, little things that need doing, emails that need writing, that kind of thing. Just not a lot of “progress” because of not a lot of visible progress on the big things: work and graphics. Disaster, really… I figured out that in order to clean up a lot of the camera work and make it more extensible, I’ll need to change the paradigm for the space ship. While this is probably a good thing, I had originally discarded the idea for complexity reasons… now it seems like I need to do it, and it’s a pain.