Off to the Doctors With Me

I think I'm going to have to go see a doctor. Recently I've been having rather a lot of funny turns. Not good. It could be something as simple as stress, but it could be something as sinister as a heart related problem. Whatever it is it isn't worth taking risks over, so off to the docs with me on Monday.

Historick, you say?

The website that text was lifted from was called "AskOxford" and is in some way related to the Oxford English Dictionary website. Yet somehow they've managed to spell "historic" as "historick". Googling for historick seemed to yield only German results, and googling for "an historick flavour" yielded only the same page and another one that had quoted it. Seems they made a cock-up.

Perhaps it's "cartogropher's folly"? They've put mistakes in on purpose to catch people copying the text from them :)

Ah-ha!

I'm not thick after-all.

'Fayre', 'fair', and 'fare': which is which?

So when I've used the word "fair" in the past to describe a gathering of stalls and amusements, I was in fact perfectly correct.

5585 Words ...

I handed the report in at 1:45 (15 minutes before the hand-in period began) at a whopping 5585 words. I hope it's okay. The finishing stage was, admittedly, a little rushed.

Also, I had my first two lectures as a returning student today. The first one was okay, although it seemed a little like they were pointing out the blatantly obvious a lot of the time. Mind you, I've felt that about a lot of lectures. It seems the key to success in University is to be able to filter out all the unimportant dross that lecturers talk about and instead pick up on, and really learn about, the important bits in-between. The subject looks fairly interesting though: Interactive Multimedia with the emphasis being on interactive. There was one smart-arse at the back of the lecture though and I just couldn't help but smirk at them.

The lecturer asked if someone could describe a form of Multimedia. The smart-arse reeled off some spiel about "responses to stimulii" and other such crap. Seriously, they said something involving words such as "stimulus, response, perceived". Can't remember what it was now. It sounded really impressive with only one small drawback: They were completely wrong. I had to fight back the urge to burst out laughing.

Later on I had the "Professional Issues in Software Engineering" lecture. Oh my, it looks like it's going to be a long Semester 1. Still, I'm quite proud of myself for following the lecture all the way through to the end without switching off. Taking notes on the laptop seems to really help. I find I concentrate more and think more carefully, rather than just scribbling doodles all lecture. No paper, no temptation to draw doodles. I'm not about to start trying to doodle in Paint with a track-pad.

In about 10 minutes I have to go to the Wine and Nibblies (<EddieIzzard>"Must. Have. More. Nibblies!"</EddieIzzard>) evening, and then around 8:30-9:30 I shall be heading down the hill to meet all my ex-colleagues on their night out. They're having an Indian in the station and then heading out for a few beers. I wasn't going to go, but John (my ex-boss) rang and persuaded me. The words "I'll buy you a beer" cropped up after I'd explained my cash situation and somehow I felt inexplicably drawn to meet them after their meal. I've no idea why ...

2000 Words

Well I went to registration today. It was the usual shambles. I started queueing to get the first form I needed, and after about 10 minutes some bloke asked if I was doing BA. Turned out that the BA queue had got so long that everyone thought it was just one big queue for everything, and that the science queue was about a quarter of the size. Fucksakes. So we went and joined the other queue. Got my paperwork, was told I had to resit a module.

"HAVE to resit it?"

"Well you have a resit form there."

"But I only failed it by 2 marks. I scored 38% on it, the highest I could get is 40%, so surely there's no point?"

"Well you'll need to discuss that with your department."

"Mkay."

Stood in the queue for the first part of the CompSci registration process for about half an hour and then got to enjoy having Chris Loftus repeatedly cock up my modules choices. Because I was also changing schemes he had to change my core modules. He put something on the form saying it was core, but I didn't have it on my own list which I had made last night by closely studying the schemes database. I pointed this out.

"The website must be wrong," he said, "you'll need to take that up with Lynda." Then he stopped and looked at the form he was reading the core modules from. "Oh no, I'm looking at the wrong scheme."

*sigh*

He corrected it and carried on asking me which optional modules I wanted to do. I reeled off my preferred choices. He marked them down.

"I thought that module's code was CS32110?" I remarked as he wrote something completely different on my form. he looked back at his paperwork.

"Damn!" He said and changed it again. He crossed out no less than 3 of his own mistakes. I then queued in the other queue for CompSci, which I've never really seen the point of. All they do is count the modules to make sure they don't come to more than 120 credits and then ask you if you've thought about your CS390 project. Oh and they handed me an excellent invite for a wine and biscuits evening tomorrow to welcome use back to the department:

Those last 2 lines are genuine. Seriously, that's how it was written. I half expected "hugs and kisses".

After that I was told to join the queue for the very last bit which was up the stairs. When I got to the stairs there was a vast queue going up them. I joined the back of the queue, and then thought it sensible to ask if I were in the right queue. The woman I asked seemed very helpful and told me that it was indeed the queue for the last part of the whole chirade. Thank god for that.

45 minuites later I was at the top of the stairs. After a while I became aware that the queue I was in did not stretch into the part of the building where I was to hand in my form. I was in the wrong fucking queue. Arse. Went and found my way into the queue for the science's where I met up, once again, with Terry.

"Have you finished your industrial year report?" He asked.

"I've done a lot, but it's certainly not finished yet. Do you know when it has to be handed in?"

"Yeah. Tomorrow afternoon."

Ah. I was sure the deadline was approaching, but I hadn't realised it was approaching that fast. He told me where the information was, I was sceptical as I'd looked at that particular page only that night and not seen it.

Eventually I got to hand my form in. The woman on the desk seemed really perturbed that I'd not written in 6 inch letters "NO I DO NOT WANT TO RESIT THE SHIT MODULE I FAILED 2 YEARS AGO" on the resit form.

"We need to have a decision either way, otherwise you could come back at the end of the year and claim you weren't given the opportunity."

Like it really mattered. I wasn't about to fork out £20 to try and get another 2 marks; you can't score above 40 in a resit, even if you've attained super-human powers overnight, and my "fail" mark was 38. In the grand scheme of things it wasn't about to make a lot of difference to my degree so I signed the piece of paper to say I wasn't bothered.

When I got home I checked the part of the website Terry had mentioned and sure enough there was the information on when the report had to be handed in, and sure enough he was correct about the date and time. I dug out the notes on how to write the report, grabbed the laptop and started reviewing.

"The report should be approximately 5000 words" stated the notes. A quick wordcount revealed only 3000. Shee-ite. It's a good job I'm a fast typer really. I've already halved that figure to 1000 words remaining within two or three hours, and the notes say "about 5000 words" not "no less than 5000 words" so it isn';t a grave crime not to use that many words.

Quality, not quantity and all that. Actually I'm tempted to just stick a picture in and call it done. They are after-all, supposedly worth a thousand words.

Better get on with it. I'll want to proof read it and stuff tomorrow. Then I'll have to print it and all the rest. God, I hope I have some printer credit.

Parents

Seems they're actually being really helpful for once. My Mum has requested that I send her some paying-in-slips, and she'll then pay £100 or so per month into my account! She's also asked me to work out how much money I need per month to keep my car on the road, and food in my cupboards. Splendid.

After discussing the oil related issues of the car with my Dad we reached the conclusion that the oil observed was actually a result of the car trying to dispense with excess oil as the guys at ATS actually overfilled it when they did the oil change. All good then. Mind you, that doesn't explain the odd noises I heard when changing gear. I suspect that's the clutch though, which is almost certainly on its way out.

Registration is happening tomorrow. I hate registration. It's such a weird way of doing things. Why they can't just have us select our modules from a web page or fill out a form and hand it in at CompSci or something I do not know. Plus they always scare me every year by pointing out that if my student loan doesn't come through in time (it never does because I'm never organised) then I will in fact be liable for the full tuition fees and that's a hell-of-a-lot of money.

Mind you, I can hardly blame them for that...

Steve, Don't Eat It!

This guy is a genius. Do NOT visit the site unless you've got a strong stomach, and don't visit it while eating, just after eating, or just before eating. Some of the stuff this guys has eaten is rancid, but it's all hilarious.

Steve, Don't Eat It!

Oil Leak?

I've been keeping a close eye on the car since the drive back to Aberystwyth when I discovered the oil leak. It seems to be fine, the oil level doesn't appear to be dropping or anything so I am now wondering if maybe there wasn't an oil leak. Maybe the oil I found was from a car that had been sat in that particular parking space before I arrived? There's absoloutely no sign of a leak any more, so I don't know what to think. The only problem is the clutch does seem to be making some peculiar noises and I suspect it may not have long left. There's no way I can afford to even think about getting that replaced just yet, that'll be one for the parents I guess.

Gentoo

I'm so impressed with Gentoo, it's a great distribution. This is the way Linux should be. The tools don't get in the way, they let you do what you want to do. Emerge makes installing stuff a doddle (if a little slow, but that's compiling from scratch for you).

Another Comedy Error Message

While trying to get to my blog Mozilla attempted to load my home page which is a CGI script running on the Aberystwyth servers. It didn't run and instead returned a generic error message. To see what the problem was I asked for the debugging version of the page which includes lots of useful stuff about what the script was doing when the error took place. It didn't run either, and instead I was confronted with a comical error:

PJM

Back in Aberystwyth again. I got home last night after a tiring 5 hour drive. Half way back I discovered an oil leak (I am not pleased with ATS) and just before I reached Aberystwyth I think I hit an Owl :( Something very Owl-like launched itself from the hedge and hit the bonnet of my car with a sickening thud. I didn't see what happened to it, I can only assume it's dead. There was nothing I could do though, I was travelling at 60 Mph and I was being followed closely so if I'd braked I could have caused a crash. Poor little thing.

Met my flatmates over the course of last night and this morning. They don't seem too bad. My next door neighbour's door really needs some oil on it though, it squeaks like hell whenever he opens it.

I'm now trying to get X11 to cooperate, which it isn't. Seems me and X11 always have issues. Currently my display is at a resolution of 640x480 (unsure what the pixel depth is) and the UK keyboard layout doesn't load unless I specifically tell it to after X has loaded. It's doing my head in and all the resources I can find on this subject have been useless.

Now I've got to go to the CompSci department and tell them I'm not doing the same course any more.