North Carolina BBQ

Hmm. The taste of vinegar. Actually quite nice after you get over the initial shock.

Today’s presentation was quite bizarre. My partner suggested, with about five minutes to go, that I should do the presentation. His reasoning was fairly sound; his native language is Chinese, while mine is supposedly English. Still, I was working under the assumption that he was going to do it, so I hadn’t committed his slides to memory. I ended up giving a talk that felt (to me, anyway) that each slide was as new to me as it was to the professor.

Just to make things worse, we discovered a fatal flaw in our program about thirty minutes before the presentation was about to start. As it was highly likely to show up in the demonstration, I admitted our problems right at the start. We stumbled through showing the professor a few success cases and some failure cases. At any minute I was expecting him to fail us on the spot. But he didn’t. In fact, he seemed reasonably happy with everything. Quite strange.

After the hour was up, I bumped into him again as I was leaving the building. He said that he’d heard that I was thinking about dropping out of the course, and wanted to assure me I was making good progress on his course. Which was a very nice thing for him to say.

My replacement hard drive finally arrived this morning. Firewire goodness! Although I do feel a bit cheated; the website said that the drive could be powered through the Firewire bus, but the manual doesn’t mention anything about that (and the text on the box that says that Firewire power can be used has been marked out with a black pen). Which is a bit annoying, as I intended to use it on the plane to watch a few Cowboy Bebop episodes (I’ve almost finished the series). On the other hand, it has meant that I’ve been able to get my Linux partition up and running again. I’m currently copying all 15Gb of my music collection onto the new drive (as most of it is currently on the bad drive), so I’ll be able to have access to everything no matter whether I’m in Linux, Windows 2000, or using my iBook. Bwahahahahahahaha!

currently playing: The Pogues - Fairytale of New York