Assignments, Masters Project and Social Media cold turkey

I'm currently going mad trying to finish up my assignments for my 1st semester of the 2nd year of my Masters. I've had five to complete, I finally finished the first on Monday night. It was an assignment on the evolutionary product stages for Hybrid Cars and Hard Disks. My other assignments are a solution to the water distribution problem using innovating problem solving techniques. The other two assignments are based on research techniques using nVivo and SPSS. The final assignment, the killer one, which is soaking up all my time, is the implementation and optimization of a microprocessor and an SRAM on a BASYS 2 board. This last one is proving a serious challenge as my first real application in an FPGA. On the other hand, I've been secretly enjoying it.

On a very positive note, I've finally decided on what I want to do for my final year project. I found a great article in last month's IEEE Spectrum on the implementation of Crypto-Accelerators. The article provides plenty of research material and the topic seems really interesting to me. I'll post more on this once I finish my assignments and I can actually put some time on it.

On another note, I've decided to go cold turkey on social media in work. At first it started off checking Facebook during lunch, then the odd tweet every now and again. I got addicted though and it got worse, my productivity went down and it was horrible. So I've been two months clean, I edited the hosts file (computer file used in an operating system to map hostnames to IP addresses) in the Windows directory to block myself from drifting back. Since then I've been more productive, I've started to manage my time better and organise myself.

I can't wait until I'm finally finished these assignments. I'm off snowboarding with my friends to Avoriaz on the 4th February for a week. I really can't wait.

Now back to my laptop and the Xilinx ISE to create my testbench, simulate and script my verilog microprocessor.