Friday, March 18, 2005

Big Day Today

I am going to be sitting through a full day (10am to 4pm) of lectures and then choosing which of the lectures that I sat through, do I want to do the units for in year 4 of my course.

Looking at the units right now Component Based Development (introduction unit) and Information Security Management (my thing) look OK, but uni has failed to mention how many I need to pick. There is something about 120 points of level 3 modules that I need for honers, but they haven't explained it so I have no idea.
I just hope they don't expect me to choose my units today.

I know the guys will all choose the worst possible courses because they always do. When I see computer Ethics I run a mile because I know that entails writing one very large document on the social and cultural responsibilities of some of the stupidest things like an Insurance Companies Database or System Admins. I can write a good leaflet, but a fully referenced document with UML diagrams and crap is just pedantic. I have no idea what makes the guys look at something like that and go, "that could be interesting", as they have done a few times before.

My find and delete has been set to the words "Ethics" and "JAVA". Everything else is fair game. I don't do ethics because it is just common sence and I don't do JAVA because it is the devil's code. It is cases sensative, has a stupid debugger, no actual debugging tools and a garentee of eight errors when you try and compile the thing for the first time, not to mention the cryptic syntax and I still can't remember wither it is string or String, whitch is the basic veriable.

Incidentally we join the guys in Computer Science and Business Information Systems for our choices (we can all choose each others units). The CS guys seem to do a LOT of programming and computer architecture which frankly is pointless because very few people actually need to know a system in that kind of intimate detail. And the BIS guys just read about cases studies and network installation all day (sounds ok). Where as Computing (my course) covers it all from programming, networking, databases, innovation, usability, ethics and quality assurance. It is a course on the whole of Computing.