I did not end up going scuba diving. I was still thinking about it even on the day they were to depart, but i decided that honors was more important so i went and called in to tell them I'm not going. That way I would not considering it.

So having done that I was planning to get work done. However that didn't happen on the Thursday. Instead I went to the unibar and listened to the bands played and later did some star gazing in my backyard. Good friday wasn't productive either as I decided to get back into the bad/un-healthy/time-wasting activity of playing computer games. It's been almost two years since I played so I figured a reunion was in order. Then came saturday and I was still feeling so unmotivated, having decided that it was such a nice day outside; I configured my wireless router for extended range and then went and worked from the table in the backyard. It was great and the change in environment (the extra greenery) allowed me to accomplish quite some work. Then there was today where I finally finished the work which I had started at the beginning of the week.

It then suddenly dawned upon me as to the reason for my procastination/un-motivation for this entire week. It's because of the work I was doing. Tada! (Ain't I brillent? I thought about this on my own, with the help of some episodes of House).

I had been spending the week working on my powerpoint slides for a one hour presentation which I have to give on the Monday when the session resumes. The topic of my presentation is on "Genome Sequencing, Bioinformatics", something which I am clueless about and which I feel is pointless (with regards to my research). So it was something which I had to do, instead of something which I wanted to do. I couldn't see the value in it and hence my psychological defense mechanism kicked in and I took every opportunity to avoid it. I'm so glad that I have had the powerpoint slides finished though. I haven't even done a rehearsal as to what I want to say at each slide, but I'm going to put that off ;) until the day before the presentation or I might just even wing it on the day itself.

All I know is that I'm now looking at the journal articles which I have to read for the literature review of my thesis (28 articles in total) and I'm feeling a whole lot more motivated about it! Maybe that's the whole purpose of these mandatory seminar presentations that I have to make, may be they're there to remind me that there are things far worse than doing background study for your thesis. Happy Easter!

So how much do you expect to earn in your first job upon graduation?

I had heard so many different answers to this and from both sides of the spectrum. Having spoken to friends, reading articles, graduation guide books, et al. I realized that my starting pay expectation seems to fluctuate, depending on who it was I had last spoken to. I’ve heard many stories of unemployement, people who just can’t get jobs for over 2 to 3 years, also heard stories of people working at rates of about $21K a year. So naturally I was feeling low, thinking that I will have to maintain the measy lifestyle I am sustaining right now even after graduation. I’ve heard stories of job insecurities where people are not offered careers, but instead contracts which only last for 2 - 3 years. So I guess life is tough eh?

Then I read the graduation guide book and it says that a person working in Australia with a computer science degree on averages earns about $38K a year… Wait a minute? Did I read that correctly… That’s a huge difference to what I’ve been hearing (actually those figures I heard are from my friends in Singapore). So I got a little morale boost, maybe life after college will be good afterall. Maybe my expectations were too low because of what I’ve heard from others. Maybe my self evaluation of how much companies deem I’m worth has been skewed… Then today I spoke to a fellow Honours Colleague about this topic and he told me that he’s expecting a starting salary of $55k because of the three years he spent in college and especially because he’s doing honours… “Hold on a minute…” Something wasn’t right here. I want to find out which company he’s working for, because I want to work there too. After speaking to him, it turns out as expected that it depends a lot on the work that you’re doing for a company. My friends who spot $22K were probably doing some sort of IT support work and that was probably the going rate for that. However if you’re working in a job whereby Computer programming or related work is the primary focus, then the wages would be a lot higher. That made a lot of sense too. So I quickly took out a calculator and ran some numbers. If the computer programming job which I was doing now was a full time job and I was paid for 40 hours a week, 4 weeks a month, then I would actually be paid around $54k a year. And that’s only with me having a normal bachelor degree, not an honours degree.

Hopefully the future is as good as my math prediction. I will have to re-visit this a few months from now and see just how I’m doing. :)

After resisting DVD for so many years and being left behind when everyone is enjoying DVD movies, I finally gave in and bought myself a LG DVD Burner. it's one of those dual layer DVD burners with LightScribe technology! That's going to help me lots with reducing the number of backup CDs I need as one dual layer DVD-R can store up to 8.5GB!!! That's just fantastic.... of course having waited all these while before jumping into the DVD bandwagon, I now risk having the DVD-RW being made obselete earlier with the the two new emerging DVD formats.

I've also finally found a really quiet system fan for my server, and it only set me back $10. The best ten bucks I've spent so far, I'm going to sleep so much better now. No more noisy fan, no more fans with led lights, all replaced with a peaceful quietness. Well the machine still makes noise, but it's so remarkable slient, that if it weren't for the two led lights(red and green) in the front of the server you'll be guessing whether the machine's turned on.