Niall’s virtual diary archives – Sunday 18th February 2007

Sunday 18th February 2007: 1.39pm. God, it feels like two months since my last entry - hardly one! I suppose that that's good - it does mean I've been doing plenty of living during the last month. Went to Liverpool, then Barcelona not long after the last entry - both went very well. Once back here, studies began again in earnest - a lot more coursework this semester than last, I feel like second semester in second year (ie; this time last year) where you have this mountain of work to do, and no matter how often you attend to it, you are always feeling like the mountain is growing faster than you can get through it. It's not a pleasant feeling - it's rather like being in a room filling with water.

I think this was part of the feeling of being depressed much of this past week. I was in quite a negative frame of mind, seeing how people are constantly retreading old pointless patterns of behaviour and not doing anything about it except to winge - due to this, I have ceased the coffee date system completely as people had grown complacent. Rather like myself I suppose. I also think that it's been quite some time since I have had a clear 'win' - that article I mentioned last entry for Resurgence ended up getting heavily diluted down from the many thousands to something far lighter which I've put onto my website here. While that was a form of accomplishment, it's nowhere near the original article which is easily heading towards tens of thousands of pages. The rather annoying thing is that like Tn, I know I can write it, it's just I need this coursework off my back to do it. That feeling is so reminiscent of first year - the feeling of doing pointless, worthless crap to get this bit of paper and of all the vastly more productive things I could be doing. I had thought in first year that it would have improved by third & fourth year, but now I realise I was being hopelessly optimistic. For example, in third year we are still learning exactly the same Economics as first year - almost down to the same topic each week - but now with extra "added maths". In Management, they have caught up with my contemporary knowledge so now at least they are teaching at a basic level what at least I am interested in, but it's soooo basic - I find it frustrating to read papers claiming things about the carbon cycle which last summer's research proved to be totally specious. And I won't even begin on the thermoeconomics (Buddhist Economics) papers (supposedly state-of-the-art ... what crap!) ...

My mood did improve noticeably yesterday though. In October, as part of that shit storm, my laptop suddenly died and after a great deal of testing I discovered that it was the electrical interface connecting the hard drive. I recently bought a USB enclosure, stuck the hard drive into it and after Friday and yesterday spent playing with the internals of Windows, got my existing Windows installation to boot unmodified from the USB hard drive. If I do say so myself, I am rather proud of myself as according to Microsoft this is impossible. I have written up how I did it here.

So, today is entirely coursework. Most of next week looks like entirely coursework. Nothing other than coursework. Hmm, now I'm feeling depressed again. Time to make a start I guess ... be happy!