Delta Mk II

I seem to make a habit of being busy on Wednesdays and yesterday was no exception.

We’ve had persistent, heavy rain for the last couple of days and as a result the drive in has been a slow, tedious drag. Every year, around this time, it seems that people forget how to drive over the summer months and so the dark and poor weather leads to a rash of accidents as inattentive drivers merrily smash into queuing vehicles in front.

Work is improving after the stress of getting the release out of the door, and hopefully we should be getting a new developer recruited shortly to cover the shortfall in the team. I managed to clear off a couple of nigglesome problems and emailed off fixes, only to find that the person I was sending them to was out of the office. Oh well.

Home, and then straight onto Sports Active for my workout with lots of tough stride jumps and mountain climbers that left me well out of puff. A quick shower and some stir fried mushrooms and noodles, and then online for my last M366 tutorial session. One of the negative aspects of the course has been poor quality control on some of the materials, and I spotted a mistake in one of the formulas on the specimen exam paper that we were looking at with a ‘d’ being substituted for a ‘delta’ which would be completely wrong if you took it literally and didn’t know that that figure was supposed to be the error signal on the output and not the desired value vector. The formula was actually correct in the 2009 paper, so it just looks like shoddy typesetting and poor proof reading. Apart from that, it was another good session, if only for my summary of Searle’s Chinese room argument against symbolic AI as ‘Woooo – I’ve got a mind and machines can’t think – yah, boo, sucks’. Don’t think I’ll put that on the exam … J

Barely time to play any games after, and all I was really fit for was falling asleep in front of the telly.