I am NOT SWISS and I DON'T SOUND SWISS either!

oh dear, i mean tastes of coffee of course. it seems the revolting stuff hasn't even worked!

not having slept a wink last night (seriously, i was up all night, made it to my desk at the ETH at 6.45am (!!!) this morning after finally giving up hope of getting any shut-eye), i felt the need for desperate measures. i forced myself to down a cup of that revolting brew that is really just coal dissolved in water with a fancy name.

it must have been the fourth or fifth cup of coffee since i started my course five and a half years ago now. lets see...

1. in my first semester i had my first cup of coffee after falling asleep during the first hour of a C++ lecture. the problem was, being unused to coffee, it worked too well and i was so jittery i couldn't sit still for the second hour and left after about ten minutes dragging my friend andrea with me. we probably went shopping :-)
   
   
2. in my fourth semester i had a practical introductory course in VLSI (very large scale integration/integrated circuits). it was four hours every thursday afternoon, where the first hour or two were just listening to some guuy giving a talk. i was knackered for some reason and felt that since there were only ten students on the course it'd be very obvious and seriously embarrassing if i fell asleep during the talk. so i forced down another cup of coffee.
   
   it worked perfectly. no jitters this time. but it still had a stronger effect than i'd been expecting: it woke me up so completely that when mcdonald's called to ask me to go to work that eveing i forgot that i'd originally been planning to go home and collapse into bed and went off to work where i stayed wide awake and perky until midnight, when i was sent home and finally remembered that my aim for the day had been 'survive until 5pm when i can crawl home to bed'...
   
   
3. i survived until the seventh semester without having to resort to coffee again. then i got stuck second semester project. after pulling an all-nighter i had my third cup of coffee to survive the important meeting the next morning (which was the main reason i'd stayed up all night in the first place)
   

so i guess that makes today's brew cup number 4. couldn't sleep last night thanks to my brain being on overdrive after having disovered a fatal flaw in the quotient digit conversion algorithm. it's a fundamental flaw, so i'm just screwed. meh.

on the bright side, algorithm number three (radix 4 SRT) is pretending to function. if only i hadn't realised about the fatal flaw i could just carry on happily none the wiser... :-(

Labels: arrgghh, coffee, uni

posted by Vickster at 14:25.