For the first time in my time at uni (almost four whole years), I spent almost the entire day, and also some of the night, in the computer labs at uni.

This might seem strange to some people considering i'm doing an IT degree, but i've never had the need to spend all day in front of the uni computers. I've always tried (and succeeded mostly) to do all my computer related work at home on my (mostly) reliable computer, compared to the sometimes faulty air-conditioning and nearly always faulty computers that are the labs. I dunno, it always seems that I have to go through about three or four computers there before i find one without a faulty keyboard, faulty mouse, or dodgy or non-functional monitor.

Today I arrived in the labs at around 10:30ish after discovering a 3-story green (ie. cheap) zone parking lot close to the IT building. I've never really driven over that side of uni in a long time, so they must have built it sometime after i started four years ago. Now that I know about it, it's going to save me some time walking around uni (probably not entirely a good thing: i do need the exercise) when all I have to do is go to the IT building.

Anyway, i digress. I had to go into the uni labs mainly because I am doing the tutorials for the COMP3804 project program manual. Of course part of any good tutorial are good screenshots of the application in use. But this was a problem on my laptop because of the really high wide-screen resolution, and thus the program does not look as it should on my computer (the requirements state it is for a resolution of 1024 x 768). Why didn't I use the home computer to do it?: because i would rather not go through the sometimes painful installation of Oracle, and use up 3 gigs of memory that computer really doesn't have spare.

So really the only alternative was to go to uni and do the screenshots there. I also thought the programmers would be integrating their parts of the program but that didn't eventuate. Anywho, there was a lot of screenshots to be done.

As mentioned earlier, I started at 10:30 and wasted some time trying to configure my laptop to connect to the wireless network, did a few shots took about 45mins having lunch, and then continued writing the tutorials and doing the screenshots till about 8:15 when i had enough of them.

Some of my friends say that time does not really exist in the labs, and you can lose hours before you know what happened. That certainly was the case today.

I plan on taking a day off tomorrow. I'm also getting a very muchly needed haircut.