Minecraft Day

Today I built almost 4 iron golem towers, though some basic infrastructure and work was done yesterday. It is really a heavey work.Now I am waiting and testing if they work.

I traced a little FANN code. I should trace more. But I got headache in the way to Waitrose, let it be.

Miss P Met Dr. M

Yesterday Miss P met Dr. M and we were surprised that Dr. M didn't ask much and just told Miss P that she is willing to be the supervisor. Dr. M acted so quickly that we got e-mails from admission team when we got home.They mentioned that Miss P's application lacked references, and Miss P sent reminders to her referees.

Luckily, all her references are received by the admission team. Now we are waiting for the official letter.

Start Again

From now, I will try to write a few sentences about what's going in my life.

I refined my skeleton tower by adding 1 block under the spawner block.
I also let Chihmou know that I've done the 3rd level iron golem tower. He seemed to be surprised and wanted to kept up.

Finally, I tried to build FANN in EC2 server. No luck.
This command should work:
gcc -Isrc/include src/*.c examples/xor_test.c -lm
But some functions are not properly resolved. I will trace the source code tomorrow.

BTW, I had implemented several features for the stock website this week.

Read Between Lines

In our previous writing works, we are taught that we cannot have our own thoughts as we don't have our own studies. Then, we are taught how to express our opinion in very cautious language. Now, we start to learn how to express our own idea between lines.

First of all, the articles we selected express somehow which side we stand. Then, the selection of words also express how much we believe in that. For example, 'indicate' is stronger than 'suggest'. The most important part is how to conclude others' ideas. There is very subtle difference and I still cannot understand. I need to read more papers and see how people do this.

Academic Writing Skill

As a graduated student with a master's degree in Computer Science, I am supposed to have good academic writing skill especially my thesis was in English. However, I found that the presessional course taught me a lot of things which I should know when I was doing my previous master's degree and I might save a lot of time. Although I already knew some of them via trying by myself and reading a lot of articles, I still benefited a lot from the systematic way.

As my IELTS score meet the requirement of 6 week pre-sessional course, I was not so happy when they asked me to take 10 week pre-sessional course because my speaking score was only 5.0. Now, it's good that I took the 10 week course since I will not know most things told here even I got IELTS 7.0, and they are certainly very critical while I will be doing my next Master's degree in Accounting.

New furniture - Sofa

This flat we are living in was unfurturtured. We had to buy our own bed, table and chairs. We considered to buy a sofa but we only got cash and my bank account still had problems at that time. This week, I got my bank account working and my debit card also worked well. We decided to buy a two-seat sofa in IKEA, since sitting in a sofa is much more comfortable than sitting on a hard chair and we ere very tired after class everyday.

I believe that the main reason of my tireness is long walking time. Everyday I spent at least 1 hour to walk between the university and home. Every 2 or 3 days we may go shopping for food and we walk more.

IKEA told me that the sofa will be delivered on Sunday. It's good that they can deliver on weekend as I canot stay home to wait them on weekday.

2011/7/31

Review of Engliash Learning Program

In the Language Resource Center, I tried a funny program: President For A Day. Actually, it's a game, in which I play a role as a president in a virtual African country. There are several stages and I have 3 special advisers who will give their opinions in each stage. After listening to their suggestions, I have to make a decision on each stage. If I make a good decision, I can go on to the next stage, or my people may start an uprising and may kill me. The stages are related to the political and economics situations in the real world. The player need to choose between developing modern industries and keeping simple agriculture, or make a decision to cut off public expense in health and education to lower down the debt risk. While listening to the advisers, I not only can practice listening but also can learn political and economics phrases. In addition, the advisers have quite different accents which helps me be familiar with more accents. As there are only 10 stages, I think it's worth to take 1 hour to play this game.

2011/7/31