Ketchup

That was what my friend and I used to call "catch-up" mode on Need For Speed II. The person who was behind in 2-player mode would get a small increase in the top-end speed of their car to help them catch up, but "catch-up" soon became "CATCHUP!" which sounded like "KETCHUP!" which we then simply adopted and used in normal everday conversation... Anyway this is a ketchup blog.

When the window was jammed shut, the temperature in my bedroom promptly rose from a reasonably comfortable temperature of somewhere around 20 degrees, straight up to about 40 odd. (Numbers may not be accurate as I just made them up) As a result I hardly slept at all before my exam on Wednesday and was rudely woken up by my alarm clock at about 8am, very bleary eyed and barely able to balance.

Still I don't think I did too badly in my exam, I wrote loads -- I was actually still writing when they said "llychwyn agoch pynau dwn, pens down please" (the more astute readers may notice that this is not real Welsh. The rest of you, please ignore this bracketed section) but I'm not sure how good what I wrote was. I'm sure Chris Loftus will be quite proud to see his lecture slides regurgitated in the form of an exam but I doubt he'll see fit to give me a first.

After the exam we headed to the union. At one point I thought the hill was going to defeat me, and I was almost at the point of telling the others to bury me wherever I should fall when I saw the top of the hill was within sight and I got a new lease of life. There we bumped Crompton, an ex-CompSci who I once got very drunk with after handing in an assignment in the first year. He was struggling to remember his pin-number for the cash machine after a heavy night of revision and eventually the machine told him to piss off and locked his account for the day. I didn't even bother trying to remember the pin number for my credit card, I knew I had no hope.

We went inside where Saad kindly obliged in buying me a beer (damn, I owe too many people too many pints) and then we all played a little bit of pool. We had some excellent doubles games which took ages as they got rather tactical. My mad pool skills have sadly vanished over time. It seems you have to keep using them or you lose them. Ah well. I improved a little as time went on.

So having consumed the worst pint of supposed Caffrey's and played some pool, we headed back to my place to get the details of the B&B that I am designing a website for. The person who runs it is an ex-colleague and I offered to build her a website in exchange for one night of accommodation when I come back to Aber for my graduation. Splendid! Problem is, the picture she sent me was on paper and I don't have a (working) scanner so Saad had agreed to let me use his, but I'd left the details at my place.

On the bridge to PJM we found a starling lying on the floor. Odd. I rolled it over to see if it was still alive, which it wasn't, but was surprised to find it was still warm. It must have only just dropped out of the sky. It hadn't been mauled, the only sign of damage was that the poor bugger had cracked its head open on the pavement. We decided it was best not to leave it in the path, so we put it under a tree to let nature take its course.

When we got the paper with the picture of the B&B we decided it'd be better to just go down to town and take pictures ourselves as the quality of the picture wasn't too great after printing. We headed down there and took some pictures, including one where I stood in the middle of the road to get a picture of Aberystwyth Castle and probably confused the driver of the car who was driving straight at me...

Today I went down into town to get my cards from my parents/sister/brother/grandma/aunty. Aberystwyth is like one big construction site at the moment. They're tearing up Penglais hill, the main road from the retail park all the way to the roundabout near the train station, and the footpaths are closed on parts of Chalybeate street as two different buildings have got scaffolding over them and have intensive works. Walking through Aberystwyth earlier was exactly how I could imagine hell being: Busy, crowded, noisy. No matter where you stand you're always in someone's way, and no matter which way you move someone or something will always be in your way.

Now I really must revise for my robotics exam. I've looked at the past papers and can't answer a single question on any of them...

Window Fixed - At Long Last

Actually it's not fixed but they've closed it a bit and they're coming back soon (probably tomorrow) to fix the buggered hinge.

Tired

Bah. Forced myself to get up early today: Firstly to get some revision done. Secondly because my sleep patterns have been shifting towards nocturnal recently, and I can't have that when I have a 9am exam tomorrow.

Hungry. Must find food.

Grades

I've just spent a few minutes working out what grades I am likely to get in my various modules. There's a lot of guesswork involved but it's mostly based on the results of coursework and, as most of my modules were 100% coursework this year, the results are likely to be fairly reliable. Basically, having looked at the figures, I think it's extremely unlikely I'll get a first as I had hoped. Ah well. I'll get a 2:1 without any trouble though, which is a good grade.

Hmmm I appear to be procrastinating again... I'd better get on.

Watch Fixed

Well I got the watch sorted out and somehow got conned into also buying insurance for it. It's probably a wise investment, if you own a £200 watch, but I suspect this one is worth a value closer to £20. If the watch gets damaged in any way within the next 2 years I now get either a free repair or a new watch worth up to £99 if it can't be repaired. It also insures it against loss and theft, so if I want a new watch in the next 2 years, all I need to do is say I lost it.

I'm currently waiting to pay the University some of my rent. The wankers in the finance office are at lunch though. At lunch! You'd think they don't want the money. If they really care about collecting money from students then you'd think they'd try to make it easy and not close the office for a full hour of the day when students are quite likely to be wanting to pay them. I always get this, every time I come down here they're closed and I have to wait for them. Somehow I always forget though.

So I decided to use one of the public workstations here in the Old College to kill some time. Sure enough it killed time - just logging on took 5 minutes. 5 minutes of watching the computer do, basically, nothing. Then followed a further 5 minutes of watching it agonisingly slowly draw the box that says "you've got no mail" and the box that says "there is no message of the day", then 2 or 3 minutes of waiting for explorer to open and be usable... Why the hell did they ever put Windows XP on these machines?! They could perhaps manage NT 4, but XP is way too much for them.

Anyway, I'm now going to see how much I can pay the blood-sucking parasitic bastards in one chunk (damned daily limit on credit card) and then head back up the hill without my birthday presents (which are being held at the sorting office because there is an additional fee to pay on them) seeing as the bank won't let me withdraw cash on my credit card. Great.

Fork-Bomb

That was a little silly. I just, essentially, fork-bombed my own machine as "root". I have a script which resets the permissions of a set of files on the hard-drive which has to be ran as root. Unfortunately I always forget to "su" to root before running it, so I added a line at the start of the script to check for this eventuality and automatically run the script again as root:

(Formatting slightly buggered up by my blog, I'll have to look into fixing that at some point. It might look alright on the RSS feed though, not sure...)

Basically this should run as me (matt) then ask for the root password. When getting the root password it should then rerun itself using "su" to become root. The problem is, unknown to me, su doesn't alter the variable $USER so, having become root, the script thought it was still running under a non-privileged account, and so would rerun the "su" command. No problem, or so you might think. Except, of course, when ran as root the "su" command doesn't need a password, and so it doesn't ask for one.

What happened was the script repeatedly ran su and told it to re-execute itself, so the script went around in a loop constantly forking itself and instances of the "su" command.

The machine wouldn't even shut down. In the end I had no choice other than to flick the switch on it. D'oh.

In Aber

I've made the trip from Newbury to Aberystwyth for the last time. Well, it's the last time I have to make the trip but I will actually be returning as I doubt I'll be able to get my entire room into the car to take it to Newbury.

Actually I nearly had a nasty crash on the way home, it really could have been my last trip. I was crusing at the speed-limit (50 Mph) and I thought I saw lights around the next corner, so I slowed a little. When I got round the corner there was a very good view of the road and it was clear there was nothing there except for a car coming towards me which must have been the light I saw. Then, all of a sudden, a tractor drove stuck its nose straight into my lane leaving me with no choice but to swerve across the road. Luckily the oncoming car was still a fair distance away. Bloody tractors.

When I got here I got my birthday present from Liz (she sent it to Aberystwyth as I hadn't planned on being in Newbury for my birthday) which was a copy of Fatboy Slim - Palookaville and Portishead - Dummy. Two excellent CDs. I've been wanting to listen to some Portishead, I never realised how many tracks they have that I like but never knew who the artist was.

My bedroom window still hasn't been fixed and it's been over a week since I reported it. I'm going to complain in a while. Fuckers, it's freezing in here.

Dreams

I just remembered a dream I had last night. I was outside some sort of big building. Thinking back it looked a little bit like Brynderw halls where I was living in my first year at Uni. There were some students outside it causing trouble (they were more like A-level age than student age, weird) and the police eventually turned up and with paintball guns and had a huge shoot-out with them. Very odd. And what should trigger this memory?

Man arrested after 'shots fired' from the BBC News, Wales section. There were shots fired last night in Queens Road. Weird. No I'm not trying to imply it was a prophecy, I don't believe in that sort of thing. It's just a weird coincidence.

Today I was waiting for Liz to get home for lunch as I was going to cook lunch for us. I kept looking at my watch and thinking "plenty of time"... "plenty of time..." whilst tutting at the laptop for being half an hour fast again. This went on for ages until I got this slight nagging feeling that the time on my watch might have been the same every single time I looked at it. Sure enough the little fecker had stopped. It was lucky I spotted it when I did! :)

Anyway I feel sort of lost without my watch :( If I wear it then I look at it and think "right, it's half ten" and it takes me a while to remember that it's stopped. If I don't wear it then I'm constantly looking for it. Bah. I never thought not having a watch would be debilitating. I've not been without a watch since I was at school: People seem to keep buying me new ones but lately I've not been bought any (that work as they should) so I've been relying on the same one for the last 2 or 3 years.

A trip to an electronics shop to buy an extortionately priced watch battery is now in order...

Motivation

It's less than a week to my first exam but I just can't get motivated. Anything is more interesting than revising Agile Methods and J2EE design patterns. Ugh.

My birthday was good: Liz cancelled going to the theatre with some of her friends to spend the evening with me. She turned up with a load of beer and food and we had a nice quiet evening in watching Flash Gordon and Spaced Good stuff :) We had planned on going to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which Liz had already seen, but I hadn't) but in the end we didn't feel like going to all the effort to get there and everything.

*** Spoilers below -- if you've not seen Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and don't want it spoiling then stop reading now! ***

Instead we went on Thursday, i.e. yesterday. My thoughts were: It was alright, but not great. I think that Adams' tone was lost a little by the attempts to make the film more slapstick and the addition of the romance between Arthur and Trillian didn't fit with the rest of the film. The intro song was awful, but as far as I can tell opinion is generally divided on that matter.

The casting wasn't too bad, Arthur was a good choice (although he delivered some of the lines with completely the wrong tone in my opinion). The Vogons were fecking irritating, as was Zaphod. Alan Rickman as Marvin was a good choice (although he's not credited on IMDB for some reason). John Malkovich was incredibly scary. Oh, and Trillian looked scarily like my older sister (when she was younger)!

Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast was an excellent choice and he delivered it brilliantly.

Anyway it's worth seeing once. I'm glad I saw it at the cinema as there are some stunning effects that almost certainly won't look anywhere near as good on DVD. There is talk of a sequel. Who knows, maybe they'll get it right if they do a sequel? :)

22

Today I celebrate that I am one year older, and still alive. Yay! I'm in Newbury watching Liz's mice throwing themselves around their cage, they seem to have just woken up and are full of life. I wish I was that energetic in the mornings. Today I am particularly knackered because I'm used to going to bed at around 4am and getting up around lunch-time, but that's not really practical when living in the same house as someone who works 9-5, so I spent most of the night awake and then got up a few hours after I fell asleep. I shall certainly sleep well tonight, at least.

As noted in my previous blog my visit to Newbury was quite a spontaneous decision. I'd planned on spending my time in Aberystwyth "revising" (ie not doing very much at all) but I decided I needed to see Liz before the exam hell begins. The problem with this last-minute decision is that everyone has sent my cards/presents/vast sums of money/inheritance/etc etc to Aberystwyth. Therefore the only present I have so far received has been a CD from Saad who I saw just before I left. (It's a Lemon Jelly - Lost Horizons, very chilled, very cool. I should be seeing them live at the Summer Sundae later in the year all being well)

So now I should do some revision. Bah. Ah well, happy birthday Mr Lowe.