I got my final degree results this week from the Open University.

They were good enough for Warwick University, so I’ll be starting a research PhD in Computer Science next year.

I played the front nine at a very wet Brailsford Golf Course on Wednesday.

The picture is from behind the right bunker on the first hole.

I got my first par score on hole 4 which is a par 3 so I was quite pleased with myself.

Golf is one of those sports where even if you are playing pretty awfully (which I am most of the time) it is still great fun.

I’ve finally come up with a revision plan for my exams in October. I’ve taken the specimen exam this week and as there aren’t any past papers I’m re-reading the 12 textbooks and then taking the specimen again.

Hopefully this will show up the areas which I’ll be needing to work hard on in the last week leading up to the exams.

As I finished another OU assignment yesterday, I only have two more assignments and two more exams until I’ve finished my OU degree.

As I’ve been doing a lot of python programming recently it’s been wierd trying to get back into Java programming for the assignments. Using Netbeans does make the transisition a little easier as it always reminds me when I’ve left out a semi-colon here and a “}” there.

I had to get an extension for this assignment because of the exam revision for M366 taking up a lot of time, however it’s finished now and I can concentrate on finishing off the two remaining courses.

I’ve just go back from taking my final exam for M366 Artificial intelligence. It was a tough exam but I think I’ve done ok.

Just two courses left before my final final exams in September and then I’ve completed the honours degree!

I think I’ll go watch Italy and France play football and relax now…

Finally finished reading through Block 4 of M366 on Neural Networks.

Fascinating stuff, I particularly enjoyed the way you can train a simple network to sort complicated input patterns into the right categories etc.

Elman’s word clustering in his semantic experiments is amazing, especially the way that the network clusters related words into lexical groups while it is being trained to guess the next letter in a sequence!

Anyway, now that I am ahead of schedule with this course, I can now finish off reading the other courses’ books before continuing with the assignments.

I finally finished off my M366 assignment today and submitted it via the OU’s ever helpful eTMA. Boy did I miss the online submissions when I was doing my math courses last year.

This means that I have a tiny bit more free time to spend on other stuff, like pimping this blog with a shiny new Ubuntu badge that you can see to your right (courtesy of crunchbang.org)

Also I can start reading the course books for my two new courses starting February, M362 and M257.

Luckily both course make use of Java and Netbeans, which I have used before, so the learning curve will be smoother than with M366 (for which I had to learn NetLogo in about 2 days to finish off an assignment)

Hope you all had a great Christmas!

Got my third year results from the Open University and they were good enough to keep me on target for my first class overall, so I’m very pleased with them.

Have a great New Year

LIPS Paintball Shop provide a fantastic service. I sent off my air bottle on Monday, they fixed it on Tuesday and sent it courier back to me today (Wednesday). I’d broken the fill valve O-ring but it’s all fixed and ready to go when I next play paintball.

When I next play paintball depends on how fast I finish off my first M366 (Artificial Intelligence) assignment. It’s due on the 11th December and I’m hoping to paintball for the final time this year on the 8th.

I got round to studying today and have got 1/4 done so far so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

I could have done with avoiding rugby and picking up a pair of kneepads prior to playing paintball this weekend …

Started off playing paintball at a Delta Force site and managed to smash my knee in the second from last game. It wasn’t too serious (so I played the last game ) however it reeaally hurt to kneel down on it. My team won, which was good, and I got a decent kill/death ratio, so at the end of the day I hobbled home feeling quite pleased with myself.

I have now bought a pair of second hand kneepads from a guy over at www.p8ntballer-forums.com so I should now be fairly safe from knee related paintball injuries!

My knee was feeling much better on Monday so I went out with family and friends up to Dovedale and did the up Thorpe Cloud and over the stepping stones round trip from the Dovedale car park.

We then went on to Ilam where we decided to play a game of rugby, and to cut a short story even shorter, I managed to get a knee smack in the middle of my cheekbone whilst making a diving tackle within the first two minutes of play.

I have never come across concussion before, but … according to my very worried Mum, my Dad, and a nurse that Mum found (that is a long story…) I definitely had it.

Hence I wasn’t allowed to do much on Tuesday except read the course books for my next OU course (Fortunately I am allowed to go back to normal work in Leicester tomorrow).

My latest course in my epic journey towards a degree is M366 Natural and Artificial Intelligence which has it’s first tutorial this Saturday.

Block 1 is quite interesting and I’m looking forward to meeting my new tutor at the tutorial.

Anyway must go, I apparently can’t stay up til my usual 1am as it’s bad for the concussion… bye!

I took the MT365 exam this morning.

Nice exam, I think I’ve done well, the four mock exams I did over the last 2 days paid off nicely as some really similar stuff came up in the exam and it helped to have the examples fresh in my mind.

My right hand and shoulder are still aching from the three hour exam, it’s an awful lot of writing.

That concludes my third year with the open university, but I don’t really get a break as the first course of my fourth year started last week. It’s what you get when you try to spread the workload and stagger course start times

Anyway, I have the afternoon off, then it’s study time tonight and back to work tomorrow…