05.22.07
D&D Pro Tips
Thanks to Zacchaeus for the first in our series of dungeons and dragons “pro tips”.
05.04.07
Crisis
1AM, Can’t sleep…
I was lying in bed thinking, and I realised how little I really remember of the 4 years I was at university. 4 years, or about 2/13ths of my entire life. Probably the most important in terms of getting where I am today. And I don’t really remember it.
For example, here’s what I remember of first year -
Sitting with a bunch of other prospective students, meeting all the lecturers at our ‘orientation’ session. Meeting Dave, Colin and Grant for the first time, and spending lunch at the union with them a lot.
David Marwick lecturing a couple hundred of us on C++ streams in one of the halls. C++ streams… what a weird place to start. It’s mindboggling to think back on how little I knew then and how much I know now. And how much I still don’t know.
Eating lunch in the big hall with windows, looking out onto the loch. Sometimes reading the Wheel of Time on a thursday afternoon as I killed time.
Archery every Thursday, missing the target a lot of the time. Wow, I was bad at that then.
The computer labs, running Borland C++ builder (laffo), which you could barely configure to build real applications because the project file would exceed your disk quota.
Smaller lectures in room 1.54 (?) of the computer department. On the first floor, beside the drinks machine in the lounge.
Dropping the elective Accounting module and taking Study Skills instead, then being annoyed when my grades went from A’s to C’s.
Exams every semester / quarter / whatever in the sports halls.
Endless train journeys and bus rides. Walking across campus to get to the compsci department, trying to avoid the evil swans.
It all seems so easy, so trivial… and yet it felt like so much work at the time. Am I just looking through rose-tinted glasses, or was it really like that?
And that’s about it. It all seems not quite real. I have the same problem when I go back home for a couple of weeks – it doesn’t feel like “real life”, like it’s all a dream that I wake up from when I get back to California. If I forget it all, did it ever happen?
Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.