So the second assignment towards the MSc is back at 64% which was not too unexpected but a little disappointing. There were some issues with the export from Open Office to Microsoft Word not working properly, and being done in rather a rush. The loss of some easy marks means I’m counting it at 74% !

Since I’ve no idea how other students are grading I don’t know if the mark is good, bad or indifferent. It’s more than enough to be on course, and the supervisors seem to be positive and not voicing urgent concerns. So guess that’s all OK then :) I’d been a bit rushed in this assignment because it seemed to require far more effort to build into a flowing narrative than I thought. The first assignment felt more like a report on some initial reading and jotting down some ideas, the second needed more coherence and a lot more detail.

So I’ve learned to think more about a work-in-progress style… the next assignment (due 10th Aug) is already underway with portions being written or updated as work progresses. It still proving very hard to narrow the focus and avoid adding things to investigate to the dissertation. They may be interesting, may well add more proof to the hypotheses, but will they actually be doable in the timescale? It’s already looking quite tight to get everything I’ll need done, which does add a degree of pressure. Each week needs to achieve it targets or it starts getting painful.

So I’m now building the software that will actually perform the measurements I need to collect. It’s nice to take a break from academic reading and get on with some coding. And it looks like I might have to get it all working on Amazons EC2 cloud computing to obtain enough computing grunt which will be interesting and a new technology to me. Yes I do need some serious CPU and memory for what I’m planning… bwhahahaw!