I’ve just started my second year at university. My degree is supposed to be three years long, but I’ll stretch it out to three and a half because I failed stuff bigger is better. I’m still doing computing. This year comes one of the units I’ve eagerly anticipated: Algorithms. It’s programming in C, finally, after a year of Java. Also comes a not-so anticipated unit, ICT Project Management. It’s as dull as it sounds.

I’m not really sure why I’m at university. Mostly just because I can’t figure out anything else worth doing. I could go get a job, but having done that before, university seems much easier. I enjoy playing around with computers and programming, but I’m not quite confident that I really want a job as a programmer… I should probably figure that out soonish.

After resigning from Principal Computers again before I left to move to Berlin in July last year (which I ended up not doing, sadly enough), I’m now back there working Saturdays again. And I still jump every time the phone rings. Talk about Pavlov’s dog.

I’ve started playing around with Cisco networking gear again. This time I’ve got a 3550 switch, which strangely enough is more of a 24-port router than a switch. It can do some weird and wonderful things. I can’t wait to do the networking unit at university.

The rest of my server is a different matter though. I’ve added two 512MiB sticks of memory to my server, giving it 1GiB total. Compared to the 128MiB that was in it before, memory is bountiful. Which is a good thing, because I’ve switched to using the Apache webserver (which consumes a bucketload of RAM). I was using Lighttpd before, but setting up PHP support on that proved to be a pain in the neck. I’m sure it can be done, but I don’t have the patience to sit down and do it.

Configuration of the Cisco router was going swimmingly up until the point where I had to set up network address translation and port forwarding. I’m not confident with any of the configuration as far as those aspects go, and I’m unwilling to pull my server offline to test whether ‘it might work’. I’ve basically painted myself into a corner, but I’m confident with a bit of reading I can get it up and running.

In other news, I’ve left my job at Principal Computers. I’m in the middle of a week and a half doing nothing, and next Monday (the 2nd of February) I fly to Berlin (via Melbourne, Hong Kong and London) for 19 days of sightseeing and wintery goodness. When I come back it will be straight into a science degree at the University of Tas. The units I’ve chosen for first semester are Discrete Mathematics with Applications 1, Calculus and Applications 1A, Economics for Business and Programming and Problem Solving. Sounds like fun…