radiac.net

Best slashdot troll ever.

Tristan and Jason saw an advert on television during the holiday. Apparently, it said "leaving your television on standby will use as much energy as an entire evening's viewing". So they thought 'Crap! We're burning money!', and have taken to turning it off.

While I see their point that wasting money is bad, it is a lot more convenient to press the power button on the remote. And modern life is all about convenience isn't it. In other words, sitting down and realising I've got to stand up again, is pissing me off.

But anyway, I digress. While I am impressed by my flatmates' desire to protect the environment, it occurred to me that what they didn't take into account is that the advert missed out how long you have to leave the television on standby for in order to run up the bill by the same amount as an evenings viewing.

So first, lets work out the power consumption of an evening. Lets say the time frame for our entire evening's television viewing is the Google average of 3 hours and 44 minutes. That'll do, it sounds reasonable. Now, my television, in viewing mode, consumes 90W. That means that an evening's viewing is about 0.336kW/h, and works out at approximately £0.027.

When in standby mode, my television uses about 1.4W. And so, by my calculations, my television would have to be on standby for exactly 240 hours to counteract that. Hell, if we left the television on standby for 365 days straight, we'd run up an electricity bill of £0.99. Split four ways, that's almost a whopping 25p a year. Including VAT. Well spank my arse and call me Judy, that's a saving. I spend more on stamps in a month paying the bills for this house...

I don't know how I didn't post when I found it, but this is fab.

This is just getting silly. I've been working on various bits of coursework non-stop for the past 2 or 3 months. Well, not quite true. I stopped for food, sluggy, pub and teaching holiday courses.

Today, I woke up at 12. I am going to bed now. the sun is coming up.
Today, I made some silly little boxes line up.
In the scheme of things, I have got virtually nowhere.
Tomorrow, I will wake up and do the same.

Such is the nature of coursework. Gotta love it.

Hope this catches on.... ;)

Thanks to Andrew for pointing me at The Meaning Of Life FAQ. This guy had far too much free time on his hands.

And I hate PHP, I really do. What a stupid stupid language with a rediculous syntax. You want to match '\]', you'd think a regexp for \\] would do the job - escape the \. But no, it needs to escape those, since the string parser sees \\ and thinks 'ah, thats a \ thats been escaped', so sends off \] to the regexp parser, which thinks 'ah, thats a ] thats been escaped'. Retarded. And it makes you have rediculous regular expressions like "/^(.*?)\\[([^\\]]+?)(?<!\\\\):([^\\]]+?)(?<!\\\\):(.+?)(?<!\\\\)\](.*)$/". See what I mean? Dumb language. They copied the good bits of perl and implemented them in such a way that they're hell to use. And they say php is friendlier than perl. They can't even give their functions a standard interface. Pah.

And you've got to love IRC...

Yaaay! We're going to war!

And this one has to be a Darwin award winner...

Thank god that there are some people in the world with some sense

I completely forgot to mention that I have in my posession the most perfect book ever written.

It is called "The little book of essential foreign swear words".

Finally, armed with phrases in French, German, Spanish and Italian, including such gems as "I think I might have stepped on something unpleasant. Yes, it's your country." and "Please stop talking loudly in that annoying language", I can holiday upon the continent.

Fantastic.

So anyway, mir died this morning...

A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A R G H !

WTF IS CONVOLUTION?!? FOURIER TRANSFORM?!??

THIS THING IS DUE IN 2 HOURS!

OK, so I'm up till 2am writing up a bit of my group software project. Then I start my graphics coursework. I get maybe an hour sleep, get up again and continue with the graphics coursework. My compilers coursework is due in at 13:00. So I stop working at 12:00, knowing I have to print out my graphics, and seeing as mir melted (thats the printer server), I have to get my laptop to print it. So I take the laptop downstairs, plug it into the printer, and print it. For once, things are going my way. Sure, it's about 7 pages too short, and I'm missing most of the stuff I should have, but mehhh, it's close enough.

So anyway, I leave the house at 12:20. Plenty of time. If I run. So I run down the hill. From my home to the bus stop. There's a bus there. I'm in luck. I run to the bus door. I reach for my bus pass.

He shuts the door.

I wave at him frantically.

He waves me away.

I plead best I can without being able to speak to him.

He ignore me.

So I think 'Hey, it would be good if I ran across bath to get to the next bus stop before him'. But, of course, I dont make it (I'm kinda tired after the hill), so I run back to the main bus stop just in time to get the next bus.

This bus stops at every stop on the way.

I arrive on campus at 12:56.

I walk across campus to the computer department. I arrive at the office at 12:58.

They shut the door.

8 hours and 12 minutes!

:)

Just so you know, I bought something today.

I probably won't be making any more posts for a few days.

Wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

So, my new PSU for mir arrived. It's the right dimensions, but, as you would expect, it isn't quite right. It's not that I ordered the wrong one, I ordered the only one. Turns out the power socket is on the end of the PSU. Not abnormal for a PSU, you may think. However, my PSU lies along the front of my case (under the floppy drive), and the old one had an extension cable to the back to plug the thing in. So either I have the computer turned off, or I have the lid on, it's my choice.

Oh, and there are no screw holes in the right place.

Still, should be able to get it to fit, with a right angled plug to a socket for the back, and a healthy dose of meccano to stop the PSU from falling onto the motherboard and crushing the capacitor goodness.

And I said that this was all a bit wag-the-dog-esque... Look at this. Right again...

Anyway, I'm at uni. I have been doing work. I want to go home. I am missing vice city.

YOU CAN SHOOT OUT THE TYRES!

I just watched the original matrix.

It is so so so good.

I am going to watch the new one very soon.

I cannot wait.

Hi. It's the weekend. Um.

I finished my cursework (that was a typo, but I think I'll leave it) on Friday. We handed in the penultimate bit on Thursday, and went to see the Matrix Reloaded. It was cool. But I was disappointed.

It felt like a bunch of over-extended fight scenes just so they could use some special effects, strung together with an empty plot so that they could cash in on the brilliance of the original.

It was actually a very good film, but it still felt like a bunch of over-extended fight scenes just so they could use some special effects, strung together with an empty plot so that they could cash in on the brilliance of the original.

I think it's partly due to the brilliance of the original, which was a bunch of fight scenes using some special effects, strung together with a brilliant plot and perfectly arranged sound track. That film was pure genius. Reloaded was not.

On it's own, Reloaded is a fair film. There is a story, there are a lot of very impressive special effects, and it's all very shiny. As a sequel to The Matrix, it's poor. It's how Quake 3 feels to Quake 2; prettier, but nowhere near as good. Having said that, I think it has the potential to be a solid middle to a brilliant trilogy; it just all depends on the third film.

Watched the Eurovision song contest last night - it was fantastic. Wogan was on top form, again.

Tristan told me he got some spam today (although I thought spam was unsolicited?), and he thought that he should share it with you - however, since his hosting sucks, he doesn't have a blog at the moment, so I've got to host it for him. The e-mail was titled "Manhood enlargement for you":



Very droll.

And with that, time to return to revision mode - exams start on Thursday. Woo.

I'm revising. Apparently.

I've got lots of paper on my desk, and my keyboard pushed away to one side to stop me from using the computer.

It's not working... I've been up for about 2 or 3 hours now, and havent read any of my notes. ARRRRRGH

And what's up with my central heating? The radiators are on. The heating control panel thing says they are off. But they are most certainly on. And my house is so hot it's rediculous. Can't sleep and stuff. Very uncomfortable.

And damn Vice City.

This has been buzzing around - finally, a valid excuse that isn't improving my hand-eye coordination :) And the scientists said so!

I accidentally played Vice City all day. I am now 40% through, and have 7 properties. I believe I started the day with 2 properties and 25% through :p

I am running a couple of neat little programs at the moment, made by Nullsoft (they also made Winamp). Beep (thanks Andrew), a program that beeps along to your CPU usage, like the computers in the movies do, and SafeSex - like it says in the 'About' window, it is 'a secureish notetaker thing'. It's an updated version of Sex, which I used to use a while back; I remember they had something in the readme like 'Why is it called Sex? So we can say we have sex on our desktops all day long'.

Right.

This guy is my hero :p