It's probably a bit of a disappointment after buying the iBook on Thursday, but this what I ordered last weekend:
It doesn't look like the Sipix Blink camera I got a few months ago will ever be supported under Linux. As it doesn't work with MacOS either, it's just a paperweight at the moment, and I want to be able to send everybody lots of amateurish pictures of Chapel Hill. The new camera works with both Linux and MacOS, so expect lots of pictures in the near future. I'll probably be putting them up on my Linux box; at the moment there's two test pictures for you to view (I'm still playing with all the features, so forgive me if they look less than wonderful). It's also 5cm x 2cm x 1cm, so it's not much bigger than the Blink, and it has a 1.3 Megapixel CCD, so the pictures should be quite reasonable.
I should have kept quiet yesterday; once again I have a huge workload, And the marking...the horror, the horror...
The fates twist again: one of my midterm exam dates is October 23rd. I'm going to the Sleater-Kinney concert the night before. Normally, this is where I would consider not attending the concert in order to revise. That Is Not Going To Happen. I've been looking forward to this for three years, and a poxy exam isn't enough to prevent me from being there. Incidentally, this may the greatest weblog post in history. Han and Charlie make a great stalker double act.
Bonus points for setting the alarm off in daylight hours. However, actually causing a real fire is looked upon as cheating by the Gentlemen of the Fire Alarm Sport Commitee. The Committee also resents having to spend two hours wandering around Chapel Hill, not being able to do anything because their wallets are still in the building. Bad form.
This weekend hasn't been as hectic as most weeks, but I imagine that it's just an aberration. I have some more marking to do tomorrow, for a start. The mid-term exams are not far off as well, which is fairly scary.
Where am I at this moment? For a partial answer to this question, point a vCalendar-compatible application at my first iCal calendar, At the moment, it only shows when I have lectures or TA office hours, but it'll grow as I get busier.
Finally managed to catch up on some of the outstanding DVDs I have to watch last night. I started with Double Indemnity, which was a rather depressing affair, but a well-made film nonetheless. After that, I decided I wanted something a little more upbeat, so I unwrapped my just-arrived copy of Singin' In The Rain. They did a fantastic job on the restoration - it looks like it was made yesterday. Technicolor Goodness. I still have His Friday, The Apartment, and the new special edition of Pulp Fiction to watch, plus I will have two new Netflix films heading my way tomorrow - oh, and I taped Wait Until Dark during the Audrey Hepburn special on AMC last week, so there's that as well. It's a good thing that the current cinema releases are fairly uninspiring at the moment (The Truth About Charlie has been pushed back again, this time to October, so I can't even go and watch that for train wreck amusement), otherwise I'd be even further behind.
I can't believe that the bank charged me $2 for a statement. Am I supposed to just know the contents of my bank account? Okay, I should really sign up for the Internet banking system that they have, but I still don't have my Social Security Number, so I'm not allowed to yet. Strangely, I seem to have much more money in my account than I think is correct, so I might have been paid this month after all...
One of the many long-running jokes over at The V Forum is that Nick Locking, purveyor of fine robotics, gets teary-eyed when watching the final scenes of The Iron Giant. Having finally managed to sit down and watch it last night, I can see what he's talking about. *sniff*
Apple released iSync today, so I've been playing about with that this evening, filling the address book with entries from my Visor. I'm still getting used to MacOS X, but it seems rather wonderful so far...
Thanks for the advice, everybody. It seems that the majority opinion is that my power supply is simply too feeble for the new chip. When Fall Break comes around, I'll get a 400W power supply, and see whether that fixes things.
If nothing else, yesterday showed me the dangers on just relying on one computer. So I bought a new one today.
I have now reached the apogee of computer elitism; I now own an Apple Mac. A 700MHz iBook, to be precise. My sister refuses to talk to me. Especially after she found out that I had an AirPort card as well. First thoughts are very positive - iTunes is as easy to use as they say it is, and I have access to almost all of my Linux software through the Fink distribution. I haven't been able to connect to a wireless network yet, but I might be able to try and find one tomorrow...
This is blog entry 100. Which is fairly scary, but not as scary as the calendar, which shows I've made an entry every day so far this month. I've made a few changes to the site this morning, fixing a few links, and moving some old pages into the MovableType system. You shouldn't notice too many differences. I suppose I should get around to updating the Amazon entry, as I finished Newjack two weeks ago.
One thing I do miss about home is the music shops, specifically HMV. You can go inside any HMV in Britain, at any time of the year, and there'll be a huge sale on. They range from 'Two for one' deals on chart albums, to a general clearing of their stock. Obviously, there's a lot of rubbish, but you'll always find something worth buying. By contrast, the music shops over here don't seem to have anything on sale except for "Pan Pipes play Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music". Which is a shame, as it means that all my music purchases now happen on the Internet. Amazon tends to be cheaper than most of the shops around here, plus they have a bigger catalogue of titles available...
Did I mention that I hate computers? Why does nothing ever go right?
The new Athlon XP chip arrived today. After spending two hours trying to get the original fan off the motherboard, I managed to install the new chip. Satisfied, I reconnected everything, and switched the machine back on.
Nothing.
When I say nothing, I mean Nothing. Everything was happily whirring away, but I wasn't even getting the BIOS POST on the screen.
I then tried to get the new fan off, so I could replace the new chip with the old one. But this fan was twice as big. And impossible to get off.
This is where I went a little crazy. The computer has all my work. Everything. It's also my way of communicating with people, my TV/Video/DVD/Music system, it houses all my scripts and ideas - in short, this was a Bad Thing. I apologise for the babbling phone call home, but you should have seen me twenty minutes beforehand, when I had given up hope of the machine ever working again.
In the end, I was able to prise off the fan by stripping the case down, taking everything out of the motherboard, removing the motherboard, and using a big screwdriver to lift it off, only being slightly terrified about cracking the processor housing.
Everything is now back to normal. Except the power LEDs aren't working. But I can live with that. Of course, I now have a Athlon XP chip gathering dust in a box, but hey....
It turns out that all the work I did last night was worthless, as I didn't run the experiments for the required time period. Which wasn't made clear to us until this morning. Curses.
Did I mention that my new comic shop is fantastic? Yes? Well, I'm even happier with them this week; I arrived to pick up my standing order, and they had found an original printing of St. Swithin's Day for me. Of course, the acid test will be Flex Mentallo, but I'm impressed with them so far.
Back over to the bad news - my stomach has done the university contraction again. I had a rather bigger lunch than normal, and spent most of the afternoon in my room trying not to be sick. Thankfully, I succeeded. Personally, I blame all this on the fact that Kula Shaker was playing in the restaurant while I was eating....
The Buffy season opener was what you'd expect; a mysterious bumper which will obviously become of utmost importance five episodes in; checking back in with characters (English location shots ahoy!) , and setting up a new status quo (the new school). A solid beginning, and the scenes with Spike were...intriguing, to say the least.
Smallville was business as usual; poor special effects in the starting tornado sequences, more Lana simpering, and Lex is still the most sympathetic character in the show (with the possible exception of Chloe). Nice to see that Token Black Pete Ross got about three scenes this week, which must be something of a record. There were a few good bits, mainly whenever Lex or Chloe were on screen, but it looks like we're in for more "Love me, Lana!" whining from Clark.
Tomorrow: President Bartlett returns.
Well, it's good to know that somebody is thinking about the bigger picture. Admittedly, Al Gore doesn't have that much sway over anybody these days, but you wouldn't have known it from watching the CSPAN feed of his speech. He looked more animated than he ever did during the entire 2000 campaign. He pointed out some very scary features of what Bush intends to put to Congress, the main one being that it would essentially allowing the President to wage war whenever they have a whim. Meanwhile, back at home, Mr. Tony Blair published his long-awaited dossier spelling out the threat Saddam Hussein poses to the 'free' world (As an aside, why do we call him 'Saddam'? We don't call Tony Blair 'Tony'). It didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know already, but at least he was fairly guarded about the possiblity of regime change, preferring to insist upon Iraq's compliance with UN resolutions. I think the rest of the world would prefer it if America talked that way, instead of hinting that the Allies are going to come in and raze Baghdad to the ground...
Ladies and Gentlemen, this man writes New X-Men.
Tonight, I went to the first meeting of the Writer's Block screenwriting group that I talked about a couple of weeks ago. Looks like fun. Once again, the prevailing opinion from the ex-professional screenwriter we had was that Film School is probably a Bad Idea. And he's a friends with a Mr. Spielburg. Bonnie, put the knife awaaaayyy....
Our TA duties for the next few weeks got sorted out today. I'm handling the programming exercises, while Huijang is going to do the written assignments. I felt a bit guilty, as this means she's going to be doing the marking again this week, but she says that she would prefer not to do the programming section, as she's fairly new to Java, and that the written papers will help with her English. So we're fairly happy with the arrangement.
Shiny update: Not here yet.
One thing that has been missing in the course so far is any notion of how I'm doing. That was rectified somewhat today, as I had to demonstrate my two different web servers for COMP 243. As normal, my heart rate increased almost exponentially as it got closer to the time of the demonstration. I needed have worried too much; my programs passed the tests and the interoperability sections. The Professor said it was excellent. I was just happy it worked.
It's my Dad's birthday today, so Happy Birthday! (although back home it isn't his birthday anymore - curse those pesky time-zones)
The problem with locking yourself in a room over the weekend to do work is that you have nothing to write about. My CPU fan arrived today, so you could take a look at that, but it's not very interesting unless you get excited about air flow rates.
The general Internet opinion seems to be that Firefly wasn't very good at all. I disagree, but you have to consider that I'm about to spend the next three hours watching My Fair Lady again, so my thoughts are highly suspect.
I finally gave in to the lure of the shiny today. No, I haven't bought the iBook yet, as I want to be sure that I'm being paid regularly before I go into that. What have I bought? Not telling. At least until it arrives.
They've cut the starting overture. A longer entry tomorrow, perhaps...
Bear with me - the next few weeks are going to be rife with reviews of the new TV season. There'll be the usual whining of a privileged white male, in case the reviews bore you...
I said I would give Transformers: Armada some chance to establish itself before I gave up on it completely. I'm regretting that. 'Comrade' was rife with bad animation, horrendous plotting and pacing, and riddled with continuity errors. From the previous episode. I'm not claiming the original series was high art, but at least it didn't solely feature a desert/canyon scene for the first four episodes. Plus it had some actual robot battles, rather than having characters stand around letting themselves get shot. Okay, I'm not in the target audience anymore. But it looks cheap and nasty when compared to Justice League, which immediately follows Armada on the Cartoon Network. Where's the explosions? The mass destruction? A plot different from Hunt The Mini-Con? I probably won't be seeking out any more episodes.
Today also saw the premiere of the new season's most hyped shows: Firefly. Other shows claim to be a Western in space. Joss Whedon actually delivers. The first episode was a fairly understated affair, introducing us to the main cast via a train robbery. Yes, a Train Robbery. We're not being secretly ironic. Disappointingly, this then develops into the standard Star Trek Moral Dilemma scenario, but there's enough going on with the crew and the toned-down, but still sharp dialogue to keep you interested.
Refreshingly (and I imagine Warren Ellis will be pleased), the crew don't all want to hug and love each other like in most versions of Star Trek; there's a good deal of mistrust among the various crew members, mainly centred around one character who hates everybody. As you've come to expect from Whedon, there's a Big Mystery which will mostly likely form the spine of the series, but it's wisely confined to a few scenes in this opening episode.
The show reminds me of Cowboy Bebop, although without the jazz influences. My sister will probably hit me for saying this, but I think there's a little bit of Blake's 7 in there as well. It's not the second coming of sci-fi drama (at least not yet), but it was a good debut, light years (do you see?) ahead of the turgid Enterprise.
I like Enimem, because he hates homosexuals. But his music sucks.
Not the sort of thing I was expecting to hear in ultra-liberal Chapel Hill. Thankfully, the person above left fairly soon after that. I went out again with Rishi last night, to meet up with some of his friends (who were very friendly and seemed a lot nicer than the above person, who we met along the way). My body isn't quite back into the going to bed at 2am routine yet, so today has been fairly tiring.
The curse returns. Over a month in, and I've already killed a newspaper. Fear my POWER!
Dr. Wigand is a brave man. North Carolina is one of the biggest tobacco farming states in the USA, so I suppose a frosty reception was expected. Still, I was surprised at the question and answer session, which ranged from accusing him of placing the bullet in his letterbox, to asking whether there were any benefits to nicotine (after he'd spent over an hour going into the details of nicotine abuse). Apparently, Michael Mann was still being threatened up to the day of the Oscar ceremony over the film. Wigand paints a rather depressing picture of today's corporate America; the lies and deceit present in the cigarette industry seem to have spread to other companies with disastrous effects for the entire nation. What's worse is that people know this is true. Last week's Question Time had the entire American audience laughing at Ed Koch's depiction of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld as honest men of integrity. But no-one seems to be doing anything constructive to change things.
Glad to hear that you don't have writer's block, Joanne. However, the book was supposed to be out last year, was it not? Mind you, she's in an envious position; she can tell her publisher to jump and they'll outpace Jonathan Edwards....
I still don't have a Social Security Number. Which means I won't get paid at the end of the month, unless it arrives fairly soon. Of course, if I really think about it, I can probably last for about three/four months before I'll start to have money problems, but it would be nice if the US Governement could send me my magic number, if they have any time to spare while planning Gulf War II: Die Harder.
Another list - upcoming albums that I'll probably be buying:
- yanqui u.x.o. - Godspeed You Black Emperor!
- () - Sigur Rós
- Scarlet's Walk - Tori Amos
- And not forgetting the soon-to-be-classic Once More With Feeling.
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The next person who sets the fire alarm off at 1am will be shot. Wal-Mart sells rifles at reasonable rates, you know.
The current argument over RSS 1.0/2.0 took a very ugly turn this morning, with Dave Winer virtually ensuring that the détente that had been building for the past two weeks is now wrecked beyond all repair. The next step seems to be that the RSS 1.0 group will change their name, and eventually become a W3C standard, thus leaving RSS 2.0 to twist in the wind. Probably not what Dave had in mind when he announced the new spec a few weeks back.
As I've mentioned, I'm not all that impressed with Transformers: Armada so far. The cartoon hasn't impressed with the first three episodes, and the toys have been a let-down as well. After the extreme poseability of the Beast Wars/Machines and RiD toys, it's a bit jarring to go back to the restricted movement that the new toys have. Even the new Optimus Prime toy isn't that great. I was prepared to skip most of the line. Then I saw some pictures of Jetfire. Oh yes. Now that's much better.
The hyper-productive Brem X Jones has the latest installment of his Hit mini-comic up at NextComics. I don't think it's as good as Hit 1, but it's definitely worth your time.
I've decided to take advantage of the insane prices of CPUs at the moment; a 1800 XP Athlon is currently heading towards Chapel Hill, along with a new fan to stop it from melting. It should help the MPEG encoding (I did some more testing today on The Daily Show - it's taking 50% of CPU time and seems to be fairly fragile, but audio/video seem to be in sync and are of good enough quality for burning to VCD) which will be starting in earnest from this Friday with the Firefly premiere.
Thanks, everybody, for your encouraging comments. And I'm sorry if I mistakenly gave the impression that I jumped out of my window last night by not answering any e-mails or responding to IM messages. I'm feeling better today; the two pieces of work that led to yesterday's message have been finished and sent to the appropriate place. I even answered a question in a lecture today...
Hmm. I saw a poster today that seemed to indicate that this week UNC was having a talk hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Wigand (the whistle-blower that Russel Crowe plays in The Insider), but I can't seem to find it on-line anywhere. Maybe it was for last year.
I am deeply disturbed by the indication that two of my friends back home have swords. Bicester isn't that rough yet, surely?
It's been lurking on the horizon since Wednesday, but today it caught up with me. Little things like starting work a little bit later every day, not getting as much done as what I said I'd do, stopping to check my mail every five minutes, getting distracted by webpages I meant to read after I had finished. Today I was supposed to start work at 11am. I belatedly started at one. Today I broke down. I couldn't do what I was supposed to do, didn't want to do it, couldn't summon any enthusiasm for any of the things I was working on.
This always scares me; several years back, when I was in the Sixth Form at Bicester, I was ill for a long time. Everytime I went near the school, I would get light-headed to the point of almost passing out. I was tired all the time, and couldn't concentrate. I just couldn't do anything. The doctors had no real idea what was going on. Eventually, it seemed to go away. But I worry about it coming back.
At about half-past two, I'm still not getting anywhere, and by this time I've managed to convince myself that I'm a total failure in just about everything. That's when I have to stop. Before I break something. Like myself.
I took an hour off, and tried to rearrange things. I did some small things that I had to get done for tomorrow out of the way first, and then went back to what I was working on before the meltdown. It's mostly finished now. Do I feel better? Not really. Because it's going to start over again tomorrow.
Okay, so the pancake rolls were probably a bad idea. I know this now.
It's taken me a month, but yesterday I finally spent the last $20 note that I entered the country with, so on Monday it's time to start drawing from my new bank account. The final note was sacrificed to Make Comics Better; I started a standing order at the comic shop. Such a difference from back home, as the guy behind the counter was friendly, talkative, and laughed at my inclusion of Ministry of Space. He thought he might have one thing I was looking for in stock, so he went and had a look (they didn't, but they'll order it for me). Such a change from Oxford.
Through no real effort of my own, I seem to have stumbled across several people who I thought had dropped off the Net today. There's Paul O'Brien, who seems to post less to the rac* hierarchy these days, but is over at the V Forum (yes, I broke down; I'm not going back to the WEF though - the amont of unread messages scares me. And I like Nick's Transformer stories), and he has a LiveJournal site. I checked up on Priest's weblog to see if he's made any postings about Black Panther #49, and he gives me a link to Elmo, who I thought had disappeared years ago. Nice to see that they're still around (mind you, it's not as if they know who I am - I posted about once every two months to USENET back when I was at Manchester, and apart from getting scolded by Roger Stern once, I didn't make too much noise there).
Today's pick from the Netflix account was Rushmore. Not the extra-fabulous Criterion edition, just the regular version, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Especially the escalating battle between Murray and Schwartzman.I can see why people rave about Wes Anderson now; I've got Bottle Rocket in my queue, and I'll probably pick up The Royal Tanenbaums as it's rather cheap for a Criterion release...
Thanks to the BBC's quite useful website, I managed to watch tonight's Question Time (video quality was awful, but with a programme like QT, you only really need audio). An entertaining hour, if surprising to discover that the person getting the most cheers was Michael Moore. I think a backlash is slowly beginning to gain some momentum.
My mentor at UNC complimented me on this site today, so I'd just like to say thanks, if he's still reading. I'm a bit more talkative on here than in real life - I apologise for being a bit shy today...
Looking at the date, it seems that I've now been here for a month, which is normally the point where I stop keeping track of such things. And I haven't boarded a plane home yet. So things are going reasonably well. I've also just discovered that the university does in fact have a film society, and I went to the first meeting tonight. It's a little bit more involved than Manchester's 'Let's put a film on every so often' take on things. The CPG produces a short film every semester. They teach you how to light, edit, operate cameras, and create sets. They have a sister screenwriting group that meets twice a month to spitball ideas - plus seminars with people like Chuck Palahniuk. It costs $10 for a year. I left with a big smile.
I've spent the last hour trying to find out whether it's better to order the Dexy's back catalogure from here or the UK. I'm blaming Kieron.
To be honest, I was a bit apprehensive about today. While I knew that the university wasn't shutting down, and classes were proceeding as usual, I felt that today was going to be a very subdued affair. Instead, it turned out to be a fairly normal day; yes, the flags were at half-mast, there was a ceremony at noon in the centre of the campus, but for the most part, people were just going about their lives, joking with their friends, talking on mobile phones, or trying to get the shopping done. Slightly different to the day's events in New York, but no less important, I feel.
I decided to take the afternoon off, and finally get around to leaving Chapel Hill for a few hours, even it was only to go to a shopping mall. The pull of the Apple Store was just too great. It's rapidly becoming a question of when, not if...
A shorter entry today, I think. It's time for DVDs Ian will be purchasing over the next few months!, the first in an almost inevitable regular series. Anyway, on with the list:
- We'll get the obligatory Audrey Hepburn films out of the way first. The Children's Hour, War and Peace, and Roman Holiday are all coming out between now and Christmas. Only Roman Holiday has any extras beyond the trailer, but Paramount has gone to the expense of spreading War and Peace over two discs, and I'm impressed that MGM even considered releasing The Children's Hour, so I'll be picking up all three. Now if only Warner Brothers could be persuaded to release Wait Until Dark and The Nun's Story. And Fox has been promising How To Steal A Million for a while now...
- Singing In The Rain: Special Edition. Warner Bros. has supposedly come up with an entirely new process for restoring old Technicolor films, and this DVD is the first title to undergo the conversion. It looks fabulous, and boasts a commentary featuring Stanley Donen. My order is already in with Amazon.
- Reservoir Dogs. No, I don't care what colour the box is. I just need to replace the bad taped-from-Channel 4-on-a-bad-VCD copy I have at the moment, and this edition has a load of extras, so I might as well get this one. Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction are also high up on the video-replacement list.
- The My So-Called Life box set should finally ship later this month. It's been a long and tortuous ride, but Jason Rosenfield has held fast like a rock, even after he was fired from BMG. Thanks to him, not only are we getting a full collection of the series, but we've shown that their is a big interest in collections of old TV shows, hence the myriad of new box sets coming out this Autumn (I'll start buying Law & Order when it hits the fifth season set)
- The Back To The Future Trilogy. All three films, with director's commentary, writer's commentary, deleted scenes, and all-new documentaries? Excellent...
- Sunset Boulevard. God knows why it's taken Paramount so long to release it on DVD, but they make up for the wait with a proper special edition, rather than a bare bones release.
- This is getting quite long, isn't it? I'll finish with my two upcoming Region 2 purchases; Battle Royale: This Time, Tartan Promises it Won't Release Another Version in Three Month's Time edition, which seems to contain all the features that the Japanese special edition had (hopefully with the addtition of English subtitles), and what's hoped to be the definitvie version of John Woo's The Killer. Maybe it'll send the eBay prices for the Criterion edition down a little.
Why is my wallet screaming in pain?
I feel somewhat responsible for the position the INS has found itself in. I know that somewhere within the mound of 800,000 change of address cards, there's one written hesitantly in blue ink. I wonder when they stopped caring about the original 1952 law.
The report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies seems to be slightly exaggerated in today's press cycle. Iraq could make nuclear weapons if it had enriched uranium or plutonium? Isn't that like saying if I had a million dollars, I'd be a millionaire? The detail that the report seems to omit is that the technology for the original atom bomb is almost seventy years old; any competent Physics A-Level student can tell you how such a bomb works, and how to make a crude version, equivalent to about 15-20,000 tons of TNT. The hardest part is getting hold of the radioactive material, and the report says that they don't have any, and haven't had much success in finding sources. As a validation of America and Britain's hawkish stance, the report comes up fairly short.
While I accept that, yes, Saddam Hussein is guilty of severe repression and genocide, and I'd love to see him share a cell in The Hague with Slobodan Milosevic, is it worth turning the entire Middle East into a bloodbath to get him? Will the people of Iraq thank the West for deposing Saddam, or will it generate even more resentment? What happens if democratic elections vote Saddam's party back into power? Would the Allies accept that? At the moment, the American and UK governments keep on saying that Saddam must be stopped. But, apart from razing Iraq to the ground, they don't seem to have much of a plan for Iraq's future.
Every now and again, I seem to be afflicted by grand visions of things I could be doing. As some of my friends will testify, most of these come to nothing (although sitting here 3,000 miles from home suggests that not all of them are idle dreams), and I move on to the next daydream. My current obsession is a huge comic epic, a trilogy of stories spanning a hundred years of life in New York. I Am Not Sane. Each story will focus on a specific era; the first is a tale of rigged boxing matches, chloroform attacks, Bowery boys, and a chase across the old Elevated Line. The second story will be set in the 1950s or 60s; political intrigue aginst the backdrop of Robert Moses's ruthless remoulding of the city, and the final story, set in 1971, involves a jail break at Sing-Sing, a jewel heist, and inventive uses for a TV antenna. Look for the advert in Diamond's catalogue in early 2003. I'm being secretly ironic, of course.
Scarily, the John Cusack for President campaign may just have a point. His defence of his new film, which follows the early life of Hitler, is eloquent and forceful. I'll try and catch this film when it goes on general release next year.
Okay, I admit that deciding to recode half of the server this afternoon wasn't the smartest move I've ever made, but I didn't like the way it was transferring files in one big gulp. Four hours later, and it's streaming a 300Mb file with no trouble. Still, I imagine they'll find lots of ways to break it.
I have drunk almost 4 quarts of Kool-Aid this weekend. This scares me a little. At this rate, I'll need to buy more sugar this week.
Finished off this evening by watching Rififi. They weren't joking about the 15-minute silent sequence. Pretty good, although it seemed to cause my DVD player no end of trouble, jerking all over the place. More DVDs to come soon; I'm posting Rififi and Notorious in the post tomorrow.
I did intend to write more today, but I'm feeling tired, and McCoy is about to get going, so I'll leave it for tomorrow.
Again, not much to write about. I spent all day working on my web client. Which is now working. Yay for that. I also managed to get mp1e to record some video to the hard disk, so once the gatos people apply the patches that will prevent Linux from crashing every one in ten times I try to capture video, it should be ready for the fall TV schedules.
There are times when I hate programming. Normally, these times occur when I'm three days away from a deadline, using a primitive language that I've barely touched for three years, and running out of inspiration. Welcome to Hell. It seems I managed to waste eight hours of work today; I spent the morning and afternoon grinding away at the web server, getting more and more desperate as time drew on. Nothing was working. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't belong here. How on earth did they ever decide I was good enough to be here? Anyway, one two-hour break later, and I solve most of the problems in under an hour. At the moment, I'm stress-testing the server by sending an infinite series of requests. It's been running for about ten minutes, over 10000 connections, and it's still going. Of course, it's killing my computer at the moment, but that's to be expected. Now all I have to figure out is getting the client to work. The chances of me venturing outside this weekend are very remote...
In a strange twist, I found myself helping my professor design a course for a year at Manchester today. Turns out that they have a Study Abroad student going over there next semester. They've added a few new courses, it seems, and bumped the C course into the second year, which seems rather strange. Everything else seemed the same. I hope the student has fun writing their OpenGL solar system simulator. I also found out that it was probably Roger Hubbold who left the UNC-Chapel Hill cards out on the noticeboard, which eventually brought me to where I'm sitting now. The Applications course seems forgivable now...
Busy day today. Firstly, lots of students wanted to have their grades changed. In most cases, it was because I was an Idiot, and failed to notice that they had done something when I thought they hadn't, for which I apologise. Still, out of fifty or so papers, I don't think I did too badly, and I shall be more attentive next time.
After that, and one of those lecture-things that seem to get in the way (Fourier Transforms are just a matrix operation? Hell, even I can manage that), I finally made it to the comic shop, for this week's delayed comics. They had only received a partial shipment, so I'll have to pick up the rest next week. It's not a bad little shop - it's smaller than Comic Showcase in Oxford, but the staff are much friendlier. They also have a bigger graphic novel section, which is very good news. However, it's still a comic shop; they've infuriatingly arranged the graphic novels by title, rather than author. making it very hard to navigate. And they didn't have a copy of Kill Your Boyfriend, so it looks like eBay is my only hope. I did managed to find one of the out-of-print Quantum & Woody books though, so it wasn't a total waste of a trip.
Finally, I decided to go shopping today rather than tomorrow, to give myself more time to work on the web server project that has to be in by Monday (*shivers*). Throwing caution to the wind, I made it as far as the frozen section this time. I now have little cheese things with bits of meat in them. How exciting. I finally broke down and bought some Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate as well. Begone, foul American chocolate!!
I'm certain that everytime the BBC Website has a story about George Bush or Donald Rumsfield, they go that extra mile to get a silly picture.
Yes, it's true; my conversion to a full-fledged hermit took a massive step backwards last night. I went out with Ritchie, Sonal, Pylin, and Shelley to Henry's, where the International students all go on Tuesdays. Good fun, although I think I need to take a crash course on how bartender-tipping works before I go back. Do I need to give him/her a dollar everytime I get a drink?
My web server now responds to Mozilla! It sends the requested file back! It also has no idea what it's doing, so it's almsot as insecure as IIS! But the spec doesn't say it has to be secure, does it? It balances out the awful Compilers work I'm going to turn in tomorrow. I found I just couldn't write more than two pages, and that was after spending five or so hours thinking about it. Hmph.
Bonnie - how did your first day back at school go? I hear you're being a slacker this year :-). Hope it went well.
Double Indemnity arrived today, so I now have my first three films from Netflix. I'm planning on watching the first on Friday night. Should be fun....
I do wish she'd stop sending me letters. Firstly, it's not as if I can vote, and secondly, just even holding a picture of her hugging George W. Bush makes me feel slightly ill. Hopefully, they'll stop after the election. Oh. It's only the primary in September. Silly me.
My frirst Amazon survival package arrived today, containing more books than I have space for, and the uncut version of Leon (including Mathilda's first assassination. Pre-teenage Killer goodness). Plus, the first DVDs from Netflix arrived. Now all I have to do is find the time to read/watch them all.
Fight! Fight! Actually, it does seem as if they're asking for quite a bit of money, but I imagine Labour will not want to get in a position where the papers can cry out about a 'Winter of Discontent'. On the other hand, that sort of payrise would put a significant hole in Gordon Brown's spending plans, especially when all the other public sectors decide that if the firemen can get away with it, they might as try and see what they can get.
Two fun Slashdot stories. The first brings up the hope of Ogg support in Apple's iPod soon, while the other one is a fun vision of the future that Microsoft and the RIAA/MPAA would like to have. Let's not let it happen.
It's been pretty dark and dismal here for the past few days, so I've been locked away in my room, working away on my various assignments. Today, the weather has changed somewhat - brilliant sunhine is now coming thorugh my window. Which would be nice, but it completely obliterates my view of the computer monitor. After fiddling with the blinds for about ten minutes, I managed to get a nice interference pattern, but still couldn't see the screen properly. The weather is telling me to Stop. So I'm on a break.
Okay, so I know they're not going to be reading this, but congratulations to Roy and Rosie, two friends from back home, who have just got engaged. Yay!
Blog entries are a bit short at the moment, mainly because I've been locked in my room. Things should get a bit longer from tomorrow...
Marking is hell. I have tremendous respect for teachers who have to live with it everyday. When they've done everything right, it's simple; you just check off all the little boxes, and move on. When they get something wrong, you have to gaze at their code for several minutes, and work out just why their code doesn't terminate and prints infinite amounts of ?s onto the screen. I hope people will find my comments helpful.
Now this is interesting. I don't have my copy of The Nation's Favourite with me at the moment, but I'm fairly sure that she's beginning to approach the audience levels that Mark & Lard were attracting. Yet she gets a £333,000-a-year deal for the next three years? Let's hope that Mr. Parfitt's tenure at Radio 1 is coming to an end; he's managed to undo most of the work that Mattthew Bannister did to rescue the station back in 1994. And no, I'm accepting 1Xtra or 6Music as an excuse, excellent as they are.