Palfrey's life

Did thesis presentation today. That I would pass this was kinda a forgone conclusion (given that the front 2/3rds got accepted to a decent conference last year), but managed to get a 9! Dutch marks are sort of 1-10, but they tend to scale weirdly. It's hard to get a 9, and this is in fact my first. I'm a happy bunny :-) Ok, this makes jack squat difference to the classification of my MSc (which here is just "pass" or "distinction" - which given my level of other commitments is impossible).

I have bad hayfever this year. It's been getting worse year by year, and this year I've been trying my best not to scratch my eyeballs out due to the level of itchyness, plus runny nose. Located decent anti-histamines, which have damped this to down to "occasionally annoying" as opposed to "removing my ability to view a screen for more than 5 seconds at a time". I'm blaming the potato field as this all started when I went out there.

Still dealing with c/w for MSc. Got a couple of pages on static branch prediction to write, and some more work with VHDL this weekend. I've had to fight for my time being used by this vs. used for debugging small computers, as the entire potato field (80 nodes) has died. Post-mortem says the batteries ran down completely, which is very annoying. Expected life time was ~4 weeks, not 4-5 days. However, given the last time they can go out is probably end of next week, that someone else can do enough work to get things probably working, and my input wouldn't be able to get them from "probably working" to "definately working" in the available timeframe, I've managed to reduce my level of work on that to "may occasionally get asked questions" as opposed to full-time development on it right now.

Life is busy, I'm looking forwards to some serious downtime soon.