radiac.net

Been listening to the Kill Bill soundtrack, it's pretty good.

Yesterday, I put up a new curtain rail for Tristan. It's a bit of a mess, because he was too cheap to buy a straight track, and he helped by bending it too much in the wrong place :)

Last night we watched some random things on television, and then were flicking through when we came across the end of what we thought was quite possibly the best film ever made, The Glimmer Man, starring regular reader Steven Seagal. Then that ended, and we kept flicking round, and then we came across the start of what is actually quite possibly the best film ever made; Twins Of Evil. The basic story line was a pair of sexy twin sisters move in with their witch-burning uncle, and one of them gets turned into a vampire by Count Karlstein. Half of the cast then die in amusing ways. A true classic.

So anyway, back to the website work...

So, I've re-done the tonbschl site, using only css for the design and layout. While some of you may see this as a plus point, I'm pretty sure that tonbschl wont, since a large number of the browsers that they use are not capable of CSS.

Happy happy joy!

See, this is what the css monkeys never seem to take into consideration - clients. I'll probably either end up doing an alternative table-based layout, or dropping css layout altogether.

Happy happy joy fun goodness!

Once again, I'm up on campus early in the hope that I might be able to meet my project supervisor. But of course, he's not here... This is getting silly. I've been trying to meet with him for over a week now, and he hasn't replied to my email.

And of course, now I have about 25 minutes to waste till my lecture. And if he does come in, then knowing my luck he'll go again either during the lecture or during my meeting with the other member of my pair for the agents coursework.

I would now scream, but of course I'm sitting in the library, and I'll get some odd looks. Aww, screw it, I'll do it anyway.

Heh that was fun. The lady opposite is looking at me like I'm a crazy person.

Well, there's some good news - the person at tonbschl likes the new design, so yay!

1, 2, 3.

Burn them. Burn them all.

On the other hand, I want one of these

Azumanga Daioh hentai is quite possibly the most disturbing thing ever.

Just been to see the matrix reloaded. Nice ending to the series, methinks.

But I still can't believe that Trinity is morpheus' father!

I went to Boots today and ordered new glasses. Even though the prescription will be wrong. The dumb guy in Sevenoaks got it wrong, and the person in Bath said I'd either have to pay £20 for a retest, or buy new glasses, wait until I have them, wear them for a bit, then go back in and say they got it wrong, and then they'd retest and replace the glasses for free.

Pretty stupid.

Oh, and I made it round Smiths without the security guard following me, which has to be good.

How come the world is so fucked up? It's really starting to piss me off.

How crazy is this?! I've met my project supervisor! And I'm STILL doing the same project!!1

What's up with that?!

Oooh and my 360 degree torch arrived from play, and it's pretty :)

The local co-op has a 3 DVDS for £10 offer. Now, naturally, they are all really bad DVDs. These are the ones I bought, in ascending order of age certification, starting with...

• Gladiator: No, not the one with the feisty Australian, but one which has the subcaption 'The End Of The Lost World'. You just know from that that we're on to a winner. And to reinforce it, they added 'They must fight against each other... arena of DEATH! THE ULTIMATE SPECTACLE'. So, without further ado, here's the blurb off the back:

  Lost adventurers discover a place inhabited by intelligent life forms that have descended from the dinosaurs. These evil 'lizard men' are the rulers and the humans are their slaves. In this strange world and explorer, Roxton is captured and made a GLADIATOR. In order to save himself and his companions, he must fight and kill one of the human slaves in an arena known as the PIT.

  Where death is the ultimate spectacle our hero must survive or it will be the end for all of them, the end of the journey and the end of the lost world....

  I hope you noticed there how they had the words 'GLADIATOR' and 'PIT' in large letters to reinforce their importance, and had added an extra full stop at the end, as if to say 'oh yeah, you know you want to see this one'. And to be honest, after that, I do, but IMDB gives it a depressingly high rating of 4.5/10
  
  
• Alien Intruder: This one's already sounding good. The tagline along the top says 'A lethal creature beyond their worst nightmares', and along the bottom 'In space, man isn't the only creature that kills for sport...'. You'd think a front cover can't get better, but it can. There's a picture of the 3 big names; some random woman who acted in Dynasty, a guy brandishing a large tacky silver laser gun thing, and a picture of BILLY DEE WILLIAMS! Yes, that's right, the star of this show is the same guy who played Lando Calrissian in Star Wars! How can I not get this, I thought to myself. And so onto the synopsis on the back:

  Four convicts get a chance at freedom by volunteering for what seems to be a routine salvage mission, but with the appearance of a mysterious woman TRACY SCOGGINS the Captain BILLY DEE WILLIAMS begins to lose his sanity, crew members start dying, and the navigator MAXWELL CAULFIELD discovers too late, that there's an alien on board with a mission of it's own...

  It almost makes it sound like a good film, doesnt it... Well, IMDB gives it a more encouraging rating of 3.8/10, and someone has described it as "A really warped science-fiction adventure". Now we're getting somewhere! Onwards!
  
  
• Secret Ninja, Roaring Tiger: What can I say? I have taste. The front text reads 'The 200 year old sect of silent assassins - this time they've gone too far...' - now tell me how I could have put this one back on the shelf. The text on the back reads:

  Dragon Kong, a victor of a millionaire's martial-arts contest, is about to begin the most dangerous mission of his life. For his prize, the millionaire's ravishing daughter Susan, has been stolen - kidnapped by a Ninja sect headed by Tiger So. a legendary Ninjitsu super-foot.

  Why Tiger has taken Susan, Dragon can only guess, but as the shocking truth begins to dawn, and the final showdown approaches, the violence of the Ninja reaches its fatal peak.

  Here's hoping the film is all dubbed as badly as that has been translated! Maybe it won't even be dubbed! Good or what? But as if that wasn't good enough, they put this screengrab on...
  
  
  Wow. Best. Purchase. Ever. Unfortunately, for some reason that only IMDB knows, they gave it an appaulingly high rating of 5.1/10. Yes, that's right, according to IMDB, this is the best dvd of all three. I would agree, but for a different reason. A little disappointed? I was. Until I read what someone had written about it; "Slightly above the bottom of the barrel. But not much. Acting is poor, script is nonexistent".
  
  Fantastic.
  

The guy in the co-op recognises me, I go in almost every day, and it's almost always him serving. You should have seen him trying to keep a straight face. It was priceless. Well, actually it was £9.50 with my student discount, and worth every penny. Now, if you will excuse me, I have some films to watch.

I hope you all have your sacrificial altars ready, there's a lunar total eclipse expected tonight. Apparently it will start at 11.30pm, and the total eclipse will last from 1.06am to 1.31am. Hopefully there wont be clouds so we'll be able to see it, unlike the aurora they promised us after the sun went crazy.

Well, today has been thoroughly unproductive. Well, not thoroughly - I've made a couple of mini changes to the diary (moved the 'latest comments' link to the bar on the left, and merged the 'link' and 'comments' links - the old link function will work for the forseable future, but may be turned off eventually). Oh, and I made runner beans for tea. I ate them with toad in the hole, and they were fairly tasty. Result.

I am certain that you will all be pleased to hear that I have now added to my 'Guide To Science' the information you need to understand how you can go round the world in a helicopter in 24 hours.

I had too much to drink last night...

It was Hannah's birthday (happy birthday Hannah!) so we wandered over there and drank wussy shots of things like archers aqua and beer and champagne. Well, I say shots, but I had a wine glass and whenever Laura poured me a drink it took up half the glass - I poured one out into shot glasses just to see, I ended up with 3. But anyway, the idea was to drink 21 shots (Hannah being 21... happy birthday Hannah!), I made 14 (I got there late! although I guess it was really more like 42), and then we went to Caddies where we sat around chatting and I drank more and it was fun.

And then we left at about 1, I got home, didn't drink any water and didn't get enough sleep since I went to bed at about 2. Oh, and I fell asleep as soon as I fell into bed (awquardly), and so I ache.

Anyway, time to get ready for my 10.15

I have had enough of this stupid agents coursework. It's dumb. I've spent nearly all day working on it, I spent most of the weekend working on it, I've had enough. It doesnt work, our strategy is flawed, and my thread dies in the middle of a loop for no apparent reason. And if that wasnt bad enough, apparently I need to get it finished for Thursday, but I need to look up convolution and write an edge detection algorithm in matlab. GRRRR. I'm just fed up with all of this. Do I really want a degree this badly?

Right then. Tomorrow I have a meeting with my project supervisor, for which I'm supposed to have learnt all about convolution and written an edge detection algorithm.

However, I haven't started that, because I have spent all week (pretty much literally) writing my agent for the agents coursework.

An agent which, as it turns out, has a fatally flawed strategy.

So I have just deleted it and started it again. With a new strategy which isn't quite as flawed. 20 hours work my arse.

My group partner is not too happy, since he has almost finished the 10 page write up.

And for some reason, this makes me feel guilty...

I now know a little about convolution and I have the Prewitt and Sobel convolution masks. Fantastic. However, I was unable to implement them in matlab, because unfortunately it seems that I used up todays quota of luck by catching the bus home. Well, actually I missed the 418 and had to hang around for the next one, so I didn't really catch the bus, but never mind. Anyway, matlab goes on about some permission thing, and spews out lots of red writing, which must be bad. So I closed it. I will go up early tomorrow morning (argh I guess it's later this morning now) and have a play.

I will leave you with the link for today; nTAG. Go look at the little flash video things (like this one), they're fantastic! Can you imagine anyone using these things at a conference or something?!

On campus before 9, an hour to learn matlab. This sucks!

What also sucks is the way that I got the 8.22 in the hope that it would get me to uni significantly earlier, and then the 8.34 caught us up because they took a shortcut and we stopped at pretty much every bus stop between Oldfield Park and the university, and our bus nearly broke down on the hill. And matlab doesn't want to work here. I have a feeling I have to be added to some list somewhere by someone important. Yay!

Right then. Time to write something in C.

I have just had a meeting with my project supervisor... it started at 11.15, and went on till 12.40. This was great, apart from for the fact that I had a lecture at 12.15...

And FINALLY I have had some post in my departmental pigeon hole! 5 CDs from tonbschl for the website, in a large jiffy bag. Fantastic :)

Unfortunately this means I have to do some work on that this weekend (as well as agents and edge detection), so WHEEE for me.

Right. So much for an hour implementation; I've been working on my agent since about 12.40 yesterday (friday). I've managed to completely break entertainment, but it's still doing pretty well, so it's not all bad. But I'm now very tired, so it's time for bed.

Oh, and I found out that they'd like the new tonbschl site done by Tuesday, so this will be a fun weekend...

The downstairs neighbours are having a 70s house warming party. We'll be going down in a minute, but we suck so much - we haven't got a costume or anything :/ But we've bought them a bottle of wine, so it's not a total loss ;)

Well, it's now 7.30 on saturday evening. I've been working on my agents coursework all day, it seems to work quite well (it just got a score of 5014?!), but of course this means that I haven't started work on the tonbschl site changes >_<

Still, there's a day untouched tomorrow...

Got through the first 3 pages of change last night, and got over 4 hours sleep too!

One day left to do agents, one day left to do the website. Looking good... ;)

I think I've packaged my agent, so that's all done now.

Spoke to person at tonbschl today about what I had done over the weekend; it seems they'd like the front page to be prettier, and images to have nicer edges. I think I'll hire a graphic designer.

However, all my work is sat at home, so I have actually found myself with a few minutes with nothing to do!

Time to write a ray tracer :)

Good morning. So anyway, I failed to finish the tonbschl site last night, although I did repackage my agent so that it had my agent .class in it rather than the .java...

I know I slept through 2 alarms, and remember hearing two others; since I only have 3 alarm clocks, which means I must have re-set one to go off later without waking up (they dont have snooze buttons), which is pretty impressive. Well, at least I think it is.

Anyway, time to get ready and get the bus :)

So, I have new glasses. Shame they look crap and I can't see straight because they got my prescription wrong...

However, agents is handed in, which is nice - one less thing to worry about.

Spot the intentional *cough* error in the following C code:

mystruct *create(int bar) {
  mystruct *a;
  a = (mystruct *) malloc(sizeof(mystruct));
  a->foo = bar;
  return a;
}

mystruct *add(mystruct *a, mystruct *b) {
  return create(a->foo + b->foo);
}

int main() {
  mystruct *leaky_goodness;
  leaky_goodness = add(create(1), create(2));
  printf("I leaked all over myself: ", leaky_goodness->foo);
  return 0;
}

If you don't do C, all you need to understand is that I'm very stupid.

If you do do C and you still don't see it, take a look at what happens to the three mystructs I create... Oh, and at least I noticed it :)

My ray tracer works!

Well, it works in that it renders spheres to the console. It's a start. And it also means that my data structures work, and should be ready for more complicated things once I've added them. Which is nice :)

Oh, and I found out why I didn't win the lottery last weekend - it's a rollover today, they're saving it up.

For those of you who enjoy reading about the minutia of my life, I have just had a shower and am about to have a shave, and for some unknown reason, my shower has decided that it would be a good idea for the water to flow out of a small plastic tube in the bottom of the heating unit, rather than the more conventional manner of flowing, from the shower head.

For the rest of you, apologies, there will be no entry at this time.

That is all.

It happened again.

I went and got new clothes, the old stuff was getting dirty. Apologies to those of you who attend university with me, you may not recognise me for a while. What am I saying, you should be thanking me, now you can pretend you haven't seen me :)

I have a new pair of trousers, three new jumpers and six new pairs of socks, and they are cool. And, more importantly, they don't suck as much as my current trousers, jumpers or socks when I wear them. Fantastic!

Many thanks to Leela, who took me to shops, pointed at things and made helpful noises, and then hung around until I gave the nice shop people money and was allowed to leave. Finally, a clothes shopping trip that was fun :)

Unfortunately we didn't find any new shoes, which is a shame since mine have very large holes in the bottom of them, so get very wet when I step in puddles, and they spend the rest of the day squelching noisily as I walk around.

So, next on the list is get shoes with soles, and sort out my dumb glasses. Quickly followed by a haircut, I think it's starting to develop plans of world domination :)

Finished my ray tracer last night. For some reason (damn you, mihtjel), I thought it would be a good idea to then add cubes, rather than doing the writeup.

This was at 5pm.

There was a film on at bufs which I had wanted to see. However, coursework must come first, I said to myself...

Cubes can be defined in 3d space by defining planes and then bounding them.

By 11pm I was starting to think that maybe implementing cubes wasn't such a great idea. My planes worked, but the bounding, uh, didn't.

By 2am I decided it would be a good idea to start the write-up while waiting for my images to render. Unfortunately I had chosen a fairly complicated scene, and poor little mir didn't like that. The fact that it waited until it reached 86% before it told me was not really too helpful, especially since it took about 12 minutes to get to 86%. Thinking it might have had something to do with the way I had compiled/run it, I tried again. Four times. Then I gave up, copied it to one of the uni servers, ran it and it traced the rays in about a minute. Depressing.

So anyway, I finished printing my work at about 4.15, and went to bed at about 4.30, finally fell asleep about an hour later, and got up at 7.30 for my 9.15 lecture.

But at least my render looks kinda pretty:

I bought two pairs of new shoes yesterday. It's great, now I can walk around in puddles without squelching!

Last night Laura had a cake party, it was cool. We ate sausages, sausage rolls, crisps, cakey things and truffles, drank milkshakes, and ate her chocolate cake (which was extremely good. A whole one would cost £17 at her place of work, apparently). Lots of fun.

I'm tired, so I'm going to bed. But not before updating you all on the many exciting things that have happened to me since my last diary entry at 11.24 this morning (ok Peter, yesterday morning).

I ate a chicken cajun wrap at munchies, hung around at the BCSS lab, and then went into town where I got a haircut. My hair is now... uh... interesting. It's a bit of a disaster, really. I think I'll have to wait and see what it's like after a wash though. I also bought new trousers and a belt. I think I might have a shopping disorder.

Hmm, yes, that's a point, it is time to go to play.com again...

Right-o, that's another dvd ordered! Black Christmas - the first and finest slasher film ever. Not released till the 8th either, so I can do all my work and then watch it! YAAAY!

You know what sucks? Hair.

It keeps growing. So you go to some cowboys who attack your head with a strimmer. And you shave, but for some reason your hairs decide to start growing into your skin, leaving painful red bumps pretty much all over your face.

My face looks a bit like I had a nasty accident with a combine harvester. Feels a bit like it too...

Too much work to do - project stuff for tomorrow, website due Monday, literature review and compilers coursework due a week on Tuesday... gwah!

So anyway, today I had another eye test. I'm sure that all of you who are regular readers of my diary will remember the fun with my glasses... well, I went back today and got my eyes retested.

To simplify the explanation, we will say that prescription A is the prescription for my glasses which I am wearing at the moment, which I got in 2001, and prescription B is the prescription that I got from an incompetent in Sevenoaks in September of this year, which is in my new glasses.

Prescription B was different to prescription A because the right eye prescription had changed a bit, and the left eye had changed a lot. (When I say a lot, I mean a lot, she showed me the numbers today)

So, I had my eyes tested. First she checked my vision with prescription A, and I scored 6/7 or something, which she later said she would not have expected if they had changed as much as they had from A to B. Then I tried reading it with prescription B, and couldn't even get through the third line (you know, where the letters are so big that even blind kids can read them).

Then she put the machine in front of me and tested various different lenses. I played mark's game of saying 'hmm, I'm not sure, can I see those again?' many many many times, and then saying 'hmm, yeah, they look the same'. And 'Yep, definitely the red. Or maybe the green. Yep, the green. Or perhaps it was the red. Hmm, could I see again?'. To be fair, my answers were truthful, but it was still amusing to hear her voice trying to be patient. Poor lady.

Anyway, turns out that my new prescription in the left eye is identical to that in A, and the prescription for my right eye went up from A by 0.25. "Interesting," I said to the lady, "because I think that's how much my contact lenses were changed by after my first aftercare." I was, of course, correct.

So it turns out that my new prescription is identical to my corrected prescription A (which was corrected for my contacts about 3 months after I got my glasses in 2001, which means they got that one wrong too). This means I have just spent £130 on new glasses which I did not need. Well, I guess the paint was peeling off these a little...

And the best bit? I don't have a Boots advantage card, so didn't get any points for them. Sorry Leela :)

Yesterday I finished as much of the tonbschl site as possible (nearly there!), didn't win the lottery again, and went to a bath uni concert.

Tristan always tells me about the concerts (he's in the orchestra), but I hadn't been before, mostly because I've heard him practice. However, it actually wasn't that bad, especially once the orchestra had finished. They played a few things (mostly in tune), then there was a choir which sang some stuff (including Zadok the Priest, although most of the time I couldn't make out the words), there was an interval where I ate a mince pie and some of Hannah's M&Ms (yay!), and the band (which Leela is in) played some jazz pieces, which were actually very good. It was fun, I should have gone to them in the past. It also made me realise I miss not playing, especially the piano and violin - found myself wanting to be there playing. I should have another go at them sometime, I haven't really played since I left school 2 and a half years ago. Bit of a waste really - got up to two grade 7s, and a grade 5 and 4 on the stuff I used to play. Didn't take any harpsichord exams though, although most of those lessons were chord progressions on the electric keyboard...

However, now I have to start the compilers coursework, which sounds like it's going to be horrific, so I'm procrastinating as much as possible by checking lots of websites and writing this entry. I have told tonbschl that I won't be able to do much work on the site for the next week and a bit - I also have a literature review to write (which I haven't started either).

I think I'm a little screwed.

I have come to the conclusion that, in a few years time, after Hannah, Laura, Leela and Mandy are rich and famous, and their phrases have made it into popular culture, Oxford University Press will release a dictionary with a photo of me next to the definition of 'luck out'

Oh, and you all know what happens in 12 hours and 5 minutes, don't you... :)

I will leave you with an amusing link of the day (thanks mihtjel).