If you were to tell me four years ago that I'd be moving to Edinburgh, I'd probably have punched you in the face.

Things change, however, and a series of lifestyle choices, double-bluffs and drunken bets has led to me take up a place on the MSc. in High-Performance Computing course at EPCC in Edinburgh University. So that's at least twelve more months of being a student… except this time I get paid for it!

I've known about this for some time, but was waiting until the ink was dry on my unconditional offer before telling the world. As you probably can't tell from my garrulous tone, I'm extremely excited about moving through, and can't wait to get started there. And of course, we'll be accepting visitors, so if you find yourself in Edinburgh at some time from September onwards, drop me an e-mail or give me a phone and we can meet up. I might even sign you into the Union!

Cheers,

Derek.

Tomorrow's the big day. To most of you reading, this will come as no surprise, as its your big day too. Come 4pm tomorrow afternoon, we will be singing an apparently-quite-ribald Latin hymn (sample translated lyric: Long live all maidens/ Easy and beautiful) as we welcome the academic procession into the ceremony that marks the culmination of four years' hard toil—in other words, we're graduating.

I've gone on before about the end of University, but this really is it. After tomorrow, most of us cease to be students, and many of us will disappear into the world, whether to work, travel, or even study further. For some of us, we'll carry on seeing each other every day as if graduation had changed nothing; but in many cases it will be several months until we next see each other; and in others it might be years or a lifetime until our paths cross again.

But whilst tomorrow will be tinged with the sadness of departure, it's also a time to celebrate our achievements over the last few years, to be surrounded by the close friends that we have made, and to look forward to whatever the future might bring. So to all of my fellow graduands, good luck—not just in mounting the dais without falling over, but in all of your endeavours.

Cheers,

Derek.

This certainly won't come as news to anybody who subscribes to Flickr's map tag, but Google Maps has added more-detailed satellite photography for much of the world, including the UK. Unfortunately, the images for Glasgow are still fairly low-resolution, but if, like Gary and Stu, you hail from Paisley, you can probably make out your house.

One slight issue with this photography appears to arise from the projection that Google is using… the images seem to be vertically squashed. (I'm no expert in map projection, but the political/street map uses Mercator, whilst the photography is far more compact towards to poles: since Scotland is much further north than the examples we've hitherto seen in North America, presumably this has an effect.) And they still haven't righted some of the more egregious street misnames.

Cheers,

Derek.

I used to think that the time taken to write something was proportional to the number of people who might read it. When I wrote e-mails to 400 potential CompSoc members, I would agonise over the hundred words that invited them to whatever soirée we were hosting: at worst it could take an hour before I was happy to send them (heaven knows where I found time to get a degree). Now this little piece will probably be read by all of five people, but I started writing it seven days ago. (And, perhaps continuing the trend, I've still got a Draft e-mail that I started in November. If you think it doesn't begin with a self-deprecating rant about procrastination….)

To those five people (and let us call them Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave and Gary), it will come as little news that we have finished fourth year. I wanted to wait until after it was all over before writing this (Christ! What is it? A suicide note? Get on with you!), but the staggered finish of the exams, coupled with a dull, alcohol-induced haze that began on the 24th of May and perhaps still hasn't ended rather put paid to the idea. I thought about leaving it until Graduation, but by that time we'd have been finished for two months, and almost everyone will have buggered off into the real world.

So it was that other occasion on which one dresses up in a kilt against the advice of his mother—the Grad Ball—that started me off on this eulogy. And what a perfect night it was! In the glorious Sherbrooke Castle Hotel, we ate, drank, and… um… danced. I think everybody present would agree that Jules, Julie, Lynsey, David and Spoonie did an absolutely fantastic job of organising it—thanks guys!

It befits the tone of this post to remark that it's taken three paragraphs of spraff to reach the point: looking back on four years of University. Last year I got all soppy over the fact that I was going to be away from the place for four months, and all of that still applies, except we never did and probably never will hit the Ikon & Diva in Crawley. I made even more friends this year, and it was my friends in the class who made it so enjoyable. No matter whether it was first thing in the morning, last thing at night, or on a dull Saturday in the middle of the Easter vacation, I could be sure of finding a friendly face in the lab, and I'm going to miss that the most when I leave Glasgow. That and the many, many hours spent in Jim's on Pub Fridays. Gary sums up some of the best moments from his university life, and I am proud to have been party to many of them.

It would be remiss of me to forget that there was also the small matter of lectures, labs, coursework and exams. From the preceding, you might expect that these played a relatively small part in my uni experience. This could not be further from the truth. I came to university with high expectations—the final exam results came in last Thursday, and I think I fulfilled them. But it wouldn't have been possible, or half as enjoyable, without the excellent company!

I used to think that good and bad years alternated. Tracing back from third year uni (a good year), this worked all the way back to nursery school (a bad year; teacher told my parents I was mentally defective). Well, fourth year has not only been my favourite year at university, but also one of the best years of my life. Goes to show what I know….

Cheers,

Derek.

I love the randoms who speak to me on the night bus. By "love", I do of course mean, "feel incredibly awkward in the presence of". These things come in threes. Take the other night, for example:

My first conversation partner had the temerity to ask me to shift along the bench so she could sit down. When she asked if I had a lighter, I mumbled something negative, and she huffed and moved onto the person on my other side.* Once she was suitably ignited, she refocussed her attention on me and asked, "Why are you sad?" Though the fact that she was dropping fag ash on me and my bus didn't come for another fifteen minutes would have served as a reasonable approximation, her phone had started ringing before I could even scratch the surface of my melancholy.

Almost immediately, a boy on my opposite side made an overture on one of my favourite topics: the arcana of the night bus. After I informed him that it did indeed cost £2 to get home, I decided that he might prove more fruitful for conversation. I was proven right when he implied—in fact, he downright explicitly said—that he didn't think I was a serial-killer weirdo stalker. That's the single nicest thing a stranger has said to me since the time I met Heather the Weather.

The bus itself was a gauntlet of drunks, people I didn't like from school, and both. Fortunately, I didn't fall asleep, since I had to stand up (though that doesn't always stop me). When I alighted, I happened across my final friend of the evening, an apparently-sober, middle-aged man, who was wandering up the middle of Clarkston Road. Seemingly oblivious to the three-metre-tall road signs, a natural sense of place, or the fact that a packed night bus had just overtaken him, he asked me if he was walking in the right direction to town. I suggested a quick about-turn, and started outlining directions for the city centre. He seemed crestfallen when I confirmed that, yes, it would take an awful long time to walk. But perhaps by "town" he meant East Kilbride. In which case, no amount of directions could save him….

Cheers,

Derek.

* This is almost as good a reaction as the one Stu elicited from a random on Sauchiehall Street earlier that night. Him: "Have you got a lighter?" Stu: "Sorry, I don't smoke." Him: "Aw, come on."

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