I've had a lot on recently. Mainly a never-ending stream of coursework followed by the inevitable dissertation panic. This is all over now, however: all that remains to be done are 3 exams starting in 8 days (better get revising!). The last lecture of my degree has been and gone in the biggest anticlimax ever. Talk about going out with a whimper instead of a bang! I don't know how I feel about finishing my course. To some extent it's not so bad as I'm staying on to do a PhD here (that was another thing which occupied my time and I neglected to post about) starting in October, but this will still be a very different experience. The last three years seem to have flown by, but then when I think back to the sheer amount of things I've done, and the stuff I've learned then perhaps it wasn't so quick after all.
I managed to sort myself out a job for the Summer which will allow me to stay in Nottingham, which I really want to do. It's weird how for half of my University life I considered home to be back in Alconbury, but then something changed and now I feel more at home here than back there. Perhaps it's because most of my friends have moved on, or maybe I've simply become more used to life here. I'm definitely not going to complain. Notts may have its problems, but it feels like it's on the up to me, and is definitely somewhere I'm happy to stay. That's not to say that the choice between York and Nottingham for my PhD wasn't one of the hardest I've had to make. It really tore me up for a number of weeks, but for a few reasons which I won't go into here I plumped for Nottingham in the end. I'll probably keep wondering how different it would have been had I chosen York though.
Anyway, enough about life. What about nerdy stuff?
The Hardy Heron was released not long ago, and I'm very proud to be able to say that I played a tiny role in its development. My goal is to up my participation levels for the Intrepid Ibex. After my exams are over in a few weeks, I'll find myself with a lot more free time which I'll be able to spend working on the distro. My beady eye is already on a few merges to get the ball rolling, and then who knows? I'd say my goal for this cycle is to get to "Contributing Developer" status, once I've learned enough.
Overall Hardy seems like an incremental improvement over Gutsy. I upgraded (using update-manger) to the beta during development, so the major changes aren't that visible to me sadly. Perhaps a fresh install is in order to see the major changes stand out. It's good to have newer versions of most software too, even if there are some regressions that I've found thus far. Such is life. My linux-fu has definitely increased since I started using it 100% of the time. Prior to using Ubuntu, I'd been using Linux on-and-off every few months but always returning to Windows after some annoying problem forced me to give up. Not so this time; my new PC was (almost) fully compatible from the get-go, and I'd decided to have the resolve to see any problems through. It's been a blast so far.
(which seems to be stupidly long for some reason, but hey…)
alexdb on 
