The few remaining buildings and chimney of the former Carlton United Brewery on Broadway, Chippendale.

It was interesting to come back to Sydney after a year, and find the space opposite UTS raised to the ground. An expanse of open space, and this one tall chimney.

I see that this project has been coming along for some years. And that it is intended to be a green urban renewal project.

It will be interesting to see what it looks like when finished, in 6 to 8 years. But for now it is nice to have a little more open space so close to Sydney CBD.

Last weekend there was a festival at Tokyo Institute of Technology to promote the university, much like an open day at Australian universities. There were many stalls of food run by different clubs at TiTech. And a few other stalls that had things other than food, like the baloon making stall.

The main purpose of the weekend was to promote the university. And, as such, there were many labs open to the public with information about their research. With the aim to convince people that this was the uni to go to.

Here are some pictures I took while at the festival.

It’s funny to see user error messages on computers that act as public notice boards. You would think that this process could have been automated.

This photo was taken of one such notice board at UTS in building 2.

Finishing lunch under the tower building a low whining sound could be heard in the background. And after a minute I realised it was a file alarm. And moving out side I found these 2 fire engines attending the building.

Turns out it was just a false alarm on level 2. No need for me to be late to my next lecture. And most people seemed to have ignored the alarm, continuing what they were doing.

So who’s responsibility is it to evacuate people if there really is an alarm? When I realised it was a fire alarm should I have pointed this out to the rest of the people in the food court? Should building security or people from the Union make announcement and organise people to leave the building in an orderly manner? Who is the fire warden for that area?

If/when there really is a fire in the tower building at UTS I hope that more is done to evacuate people from the building.

An arrow made from plastic cups in the fence on Broadway, opposite UTS building 10. Quite nicely done.

Last Friday I came across this device in the men’s room at UTS. A shiny new hand drier, with an LCD screen.

As you stand to dry your hands advertisements are displayed (along with tinny music).

Is the uni finding itself so low on money that it needs to display adverts in the toilets?

The final SDP presentation was Friday a week ago. And Richard was there taking more photos. Here is another photo of the photographer.

Yesterday was program demonstrations, ie does the program you designed actually work, we got 100%. So the group decided to allocate marks then and there. You can see a photo of the whiteboard used to allocate marks. (Unfortunately I only had a camera phone on me, so the picture is a little fuzzy.)

Oh, the joys of group work and group mark allocation. Office Politics 101.

Yesterday was the mid semester presentation for many SDP* groups. Being the subject coordinator, Richard went round taking pictures of the different presentation. (We knew it was going to happen, there are photos of last semester’s groups.)

So I took along my own camera along and took pictures of Richard taking pictures.

* SDP - Systems Development Project, a 10 person group work subject run by the Faculty of IT at UTS.

The UTS tower building seen through the leafless autumn branches of a tree from a bus stop across the road.
(Taken on 20 March 2007)