Saturday 29 November 2008

Module feedback, dinner and a Wii

They closed the M1 on Thursday, and instead of one hour it took nearly 3 hours to get to university. I leave very early, so I only missed about 20 minutes of my first lecture, but it was one I was actually looking forward to, about the immunology of reproduction, delivered by a 'good' lecturer. I got there for the bit about Rhesus blood groups though. Then we had an hour and a half on equine viruses from a very entertaining man who demonstrated the principle of a decision tree with the following:

Do you have chills? Yes/No
Are they multiplying? Yes/No
Are you losing control? Yes/No
The power I'm supplying, is it electrifying? Yes/No
If Yes: you're the one that I want
If No: you're not the one that I want.

Despite the humorous nature of the lecture, and although equine viruses are quite nasty and have parallels with human viruses, I didn't feel that I learned very much about immunology.

At the end of each module, we get to fill in a feedback form where we can leave comments. This was the module I was most dissatisfied with this semester, so I had a lot to say, and was still writing when the 'bad' lecturer came back to collect all the forms, and asked me how things had gone. Having had such a terrible journey and having just finished writing a huge (yet constructive) rant about his teaching, I wasn't in the best of moods, so I just said the last lecture was quite entertaining, but perhaps not terribly relevant. He started to try and argue with me, so I told him about my morning. Poor chap.

Yesterday was much better, and ended with dinner with some friends, where I got to try out a Wii. This is a computer game system with a handset that detects motion, and I had a go at the Wii Fit as well, which has a platform for you to stand on. We had a game of tenpin bowling - I was pretty bad at that, but then I'm pretty bad at the real thing too. I got hit with a lot of virtual football boots and missed most of the virtual footballs, fell off a virtual tightrope, managed one virtual ski jump out of four tries and slalomed quite successfully down a virtual hill. My Wii Fit age is 8 years less than my real age, so that was nice. It was great fun, and quite amazing what can be achieved with technology nowadays.

I should mention the amazing food that Sal cooked up, because she has been known to pay a visit to my blog. Full Indian dinner complete with illustrated menu card, and it tasted amazing. Even the naan bread and the ice cream was home made. I may never need to eat again.

4 comments:

Uncle Dick Madeley said...

My own personal addiction on the Wii is, quite sadly, to something called 'Carnival Games' and the coin rolling... In truth, I'm a real hard core gamer and find the Wii a bit too family friendly, but I just love that game...

travelling, but not in love said...

Love that decision tree. very classy.

Anonymous said...

....but you didn't eat the illustrated menu card, so how would you know what it tastes like?

And should we add coconut to the list of disliked foods of Mr Lola?

Lola said...

Yes, unfortunately coconut is another of the many food dislikes of this impossible man. Although peas, most green veg and pulses are the most annoying ones. Followed closely by blue cheese, mushrooms, squash and pumpkin.