I'm back from my placement at Accenture and I'm doing a research project over the summer in G40, based on parallel algorithms for constructing the tree of life. I'll also be available in SCR for the next 3 weeks thursdays 2pm to help 2nd year algorithms students doing resits. 

More, later.

 *honestly.

Me likey.

I spend the majority of my time programming, thinking about programming, drinking or sleeping - standard things really. I love being technical, it's very much become who I am as well as what I do, and I'm proud of my abilities. I'm also fond of good grammar and cake. My degree course is Applied Computer Science, at which I have every intention of trying to get a 1st.

I get very competitive at times and generally work pretty hard (interspersed with some bouts of laziness I do admit) - I'm great at partying hard too however, and am good fun to go out with - or so I'm told! Although I'm away from the Uni this year I like to keep my presence felt, it's a great place to be and I like to have my say. I may even visit!

I think it's actually for the better, read the full rules here - http://imaginecup.com/Competition/mycompetitionportal.aspx?competitionId=10

What's interesting though is that "approximately" 50 teams now go to France, teams of "up to 4" and there's actually some grading criteria - about damn time. You also seem to have to submit a working application again, rather than a badly knocked together mash of ideas, fulled by coffee and pizza...

I'll need to fully read the rules to check if I can enter this year, but hey, why not eh?

Mid-morning I tend to check my uni email, saw one from Mark Johnston telling me I'd won a 360 for voting for Imagine Cup entrants last year. Yay! :D

Another way of promoting it for the competition this year - compete/register and you actually DO win stuff!

I think I still need to do an intro post, will do that soon. I promise.

As soon as my boss realised we were in for a rush of Trackers he asked me to deal with all of them. On top of my normal work. On top of delivering two sets of enviroment files/source to the live system.

I didn't have lunch today.

Go-live for a branch is this weekend too, so almost the entire room left at 4pm to go up north to the client's site apart from a handful of us - fortunately I managed to escape the 72 hour installation frenzy: I shall have a peaceful weekend involving alcohol, gaming and quite possibly a haircut.

It seems a bit pointless? The former bars look a lot nicer too.

Also, Blogs redirects me to my blog. Kind of silly no? I know what's on my blog, I posted it! Surely a fast link to everyone's blogs would be better?

Feel entirely free to ignore my comments, just wondering if anyone else agreed really :p

The open bar is totally not the reason why.

...

Maybe a little bit.

Went out clubbing in Camden last weekend, it was great - ended up in this club which was a converted theatre - a band playing on stage, and all the other staff rooms/boxes etc had their own little DJs with different music playing. Fairly pricey, but super cool.

Well I'm still at work. It's not an unusal thing at the moment, but it's fine because the majority of my job is super cool.

For those of you who don't know, I'm on a Placement year away from the University (hurrah! No exams!) till July 2008 working at Accenture in London as an Associate Software Engineer.

Whilst the title might be a slight lie for some of the other placement students here, who have landed a role more in supporting systems than writing them, I've managed to get myself one of the most development heavy and challenging roles possible, which is awesome. I'm working in a team called Development Architecture under the heading Capability Development - which basically means we write tools to help other people do their jobs better and more efficiently. A sort of 'automation for the nation' type thing.

So far I've written some C# for a notification program which tells you when you have more work to do (everyone loves me for that one I tell you), some SQL reporting graphs for management to look at (to see if the lines are going up or down), some Perl to automate a recovery procedure (so idiots will stop pestering us when they can't follow the step by step method), and an app which takes all the graphs out of an Excel document and sticks them in a PowerPoint presentation (so some poor sod doesn't have to sit and copy and paste). Variety is fun.

It's not all fun and games because there's always some form of tedious admin to do, but there's a certain degree to which it can be ignored while interesting things are written.

Fun and games continue outside of work with copious numbers of company drinks with an all night open bar - one of which was at the Gherkin, which was awful posh. What-what.

I was very surprised to find out a few weeks ago I have a training budget of $2000 to spend on... some course(s) which I can justify as useful and relevant. $200 of that is for books, which I've just spent because the budget resets on Sept 1st - it wasn't even mentioned when I applied for the placement, but I have about 7 books (£97.99 in total) on the way so I'm really not complaining.

That's enough for now, I've got a delivery to do. Perhaps more soon ( depending on how persuasive Shirley is feeling :D )

I might call Southern Electricity/Gas now that I found their 0800 number just for the pure joy of Jack Johnson.