Over the last few months I had seen the signs of my university trying to die. Last year it was the loss of a lecturer that wasn’t replaced (he retired) and others who left and weren’t replaced. Courses were scrapped (including ones I was doing! I’ve got Data Mining and Intelligent Agent Technology on my list that don’t exist any more; I managed to defeat the dreaded and quite pointless Australia and the Asia Pacific with patience, it died before I needed to graduate). Other subjects on my list have drastically changed, such as my networking course which went from having a strong programming and development component to basically be a Cisco course. Other things have started being palmed off to other departments, such as the new Oracle requirement for the web development course which is a Business course and a rather practical one at that. It also looks like the system administration course is shipped out to business as well with the “d” in the Unix permissions now meaning “delete” not directory (yes, on NTFS or NSS from Novell both have a ‘delete’ or ‘erase’ attribute to set however this wasn’t that).

In some respects I’m happy that I got in when I did. I had courses when they were low numbers (great ratios!) before they were cut and things were enjoyable. You ended up in classes where it was easy to have reasonable discussions about things in lectures and practicals. It was good.

So now I’m looking at doing my masters, I’m already enrolled and having a look at some of the projects to do. The first subject on my list for summer is e-Commerce, which looks pretty interesting and I think that I have got a project in mind that should work properly for it. I wonder if I’ll get the chance to finish my masters the way I want to or if my luck has run out.