One thing that doing work experience has confirmed is my belief in 'Computer Time' (patent pending).

Many people have heard of 'Greek Time' (i.e. the uncanny ability of Greeks to be late for everything by a considerable period of time), but not many have heard of 'Computer Time'.

This is a term I have coined to describe how long it takes to do things (especially development and programming) on computers. If you think it will take X amount of of time to develop, implement, or program something, I believe you should multiply that amount by, say... around 4 or 5, and then you will have a time close to actually how long it will take.

The things that you know how to do actually don't take long at all. It is the things that at the start you think are trivial tasks that end up taking the majority of the time.

Take for example the application that I am about to roll-out at work (its a jsp based interfaced database application): I thought it would only take around two weeks for me to design and implement the database, and also do the interface pages and then publish them on the company's intranet web-servers. It actually took about 3 or so weeks to do the database and the pages, but what has taken the most time is the publishing to the web-servers, a detail that I thought trivial at the start of the project. Over a month after I started the project, it still hasn't been totally finished.

Last night me and Despina saw Meet the Fockers at Southbank Cinemas. I usually try to park in the parking underneath the cinemas rather than the Southbank parking lot because it is a much shorter walk. I drive into the start of the cinema parking a little surprised to see that the (admittedly small) lot isn't already full. There were two cars ahead of me. The first one gets the ticket, the boom gate opens and goes in. The second does the same, and as I drive up to the ticket dispenser I am greeted my multiple neon lights flashing 'CARPARK FULL'. Very, very frustrating. i had to reverse the car out of there and go and park in Southbank.