radiac.net

Who doesn't love bubble wrap?

Crazy people, that's who.

ENTRY 700!!!1!!

And I just noticed that this is entry 700. GO ME!

I just watched MacGuyver (as I have taken to doing recently) and pretty much the whole of the last quarter was copied from the chase scene in the Italian Job!

He messed with the lighting system, they got in some minis, and then it cut to Italian Job... I could overlook the fact that the wrong guy was holding the chicken, but what's with all the football supporters?

*Sigh*

The next one is Worlds Wildest Police Videos, and it started 'Due to the graphic nature of this program, viewer discretion is advised'. YAY! You know that anything that starts like that is going to rock :)

Back in bath. Conference starting monday, I'm helping at it it. Other stuff happened, some interesting, some not, some related to computers.

Might tell about it later.

I'm going to bed.

It is the end of the first day of the conference.

So what has happened since I last updated properly? Probably quite a bit. Let's see.

Well, I restructured the tonbschl site again (that will probably relaunch sometime later this year). I think it still needs a bit of work, but it's a lot better. They want a redesign next, so since that I've working on a few ideas in between my work for the conference.

Went to the pub on Thursday with Jared for the first time (Mr P, the computer/electronics technician I have spent most of my free time with since the start of lower sixth) - it was fun. He beat me at pool, although I suck so that's not much of an achievement.

Friday I packed my bags and left for Bath. Arrived at about 8, went to the co-op, went back and ate tacos. Fantastic. Saturday, we had a meeting about the conference in the afternoon then went to the pub and had pizza, and Sunday I went up to campus in the morning and spend the rest of the day working on the timetable display thinger.

I know I have mentioned the timetable display thinger before (or at least I think I have) - it is a web page that is displayed on a large screen in reception. It's powered by javascript, which loads data from a perl script, and is quite cool. However, I spent about a week and a half on it at the start of the holiday, and I spent friday night, saturday morning, saturday evening, all of sunday (apart from the indian meal with the other student volunteers), and I started working on it at about 7.30 this morning. I finally got it working to a state where it could be run on the screen by about 1PM. And then spent most of the afternoon fixing new bugs as they arose. And I'm about to start working on it again.

And this is just the screen for monday and tuesday. It needs a different one for wed->fri.

Anyway, this is a HCI conference. We have lots of fun toys to play with. For example, my timetable thing is displayed on two extremely large plasma screens, and I spent some of my afternoon playing on a tablet PC, surfing the internet and playing a kick-ass game called inkball. It rocks.

So that's most of what has happened.

Interesting, huh?

Just got back from the conference meal at the bath pump rooms. Mark took some photos, some are here. Captions will follow, but they are me with pizza, reception at bath pump room, tristan and andy, drunk SVs, Jo looking at a different camera, me and Bob Regan, who works for macromedia and wrote a book with rachel, and me and mark, who has his hair tied back.

I am sitting making this entry on a tablet pc over a wireless connection. It's pretty quiet for me atm... I've got the information screen working, nobody needs to get on the wireless network, so I'm just sat here just dealing with small things. Heb, and with that l have to leave

Back home now... I had to give back my ipaq and tablet pc *Sob*

Oh, and I had over 1000 spams waiting for me when I returned. Joy. Only had about 8 legitimate emails.

Hopefully going to the pub in a minute though. Things are looking up ;)

I just completed super mario land again. Without losing a life, and with 50 lives left at the end. It was alarmingly simple.

How did I ever find it difficult?

See, I told you quake 2 skills were transferable...

And Andrew sent me to this

This morning I woke up uncharacteristically early (10am), and decided it would be a good idea to continue tidying my room, and found the power dvd 4 cd that came with a £25 DVD drive, so I thought I'd upgrade from the old version. And of course I had to test it out. But with so much to do, I thought it would be a good idea if I didn't watch a whole film, just enough to see it work. So I chose Air Force One, but I forgot it started with a gun fight. Oops.

Mehh, Saturdays are always unproductive. I only have a few hours before I have to get ready for pubbage. So now I'm watching Voyager. I just noticed some aliasing in sickbay. AAAARGGH OH MY GOD, WHAT HAS MY COMPSCI COURSE DONE TO ME?!

But like I said, I have been tidying my room. This holiday I have thrown away all the stuff in my room that I didnt want, put everything else into folders and drawers etc. I also built a new computer, shifted hard drives round and installed debian on mir and chili (which used to be my main desktop), and gentoo onto the new machine. On Thursday, I think I took things too far... I put elastic bands round as many cables as I could find.

You know how cables manage to tangle themselves while they're just sitting there in the drawer? And how you never know how they manage it? Well, I know why. It's the cable gnomes (close relatives of the underpants gnomes, sp 217); phase 1: tie cables into knots, phase 3: profit. No? Well, you come up with a better explanation, I dare ya.

I have tried quite a few things to stop them; I tried just coiling the cables up, but that was easy for the gnomes to do their satanic work. Wrapping the cables round cardboard was ok for a while, but the ends just flapped around, and they were evidently all too easy for the gnomes to get the ends off and tie them all together. I've tried coiling the cables and tying the ends of individual cables together, but they're too easy to untie. However, the elastic bands seem to be too tight for the gnomes to undo, and my cables just sit there. Result! So I now have nearly three boxes of elastic bands keeping my cables tidy, and another drawer to band up.

Woo for Saturdays...

UserFriendly makes it's point pretty badly. Perl geeks do it well.

Glorious.

I have been up for an hour... an hour without internet!

I noticed last night that the PSU fan in my router had failed, so I thought it might be an idea to turn it off. Just before I did, I noticed that it had reached 57 days and 6 minutes of uptime, which is (thanks to pipex) a record for here. There was that machine at tonbschl which made 197 days (iirc) uptime, before someone tried to log in at the console as if it was a windows machine... ie, he hit ctrl+alt+delete. I wasn't too happy.

So this morning I woke up, replaced the PSU and added an intake fan at the front of the case. I'd probably have been able to do it in 15 minutes if it wasnt for the shakes...

Apart from doing some work today, I haven't done a lot. However, I decided it would be a good idea to play vice city. From scratch again. Hohum...

And then Peter pointed me at multiplayer vice city. I had seen the one for the original GTA, but never got round to trying it. However, this looked easy enough to set up, so I put a server on my linux machine and set it going.

Wow.

This is one sweet mod. We played for 2 and a half hours. There's no mission or scripting or even AI peds or cars. The only things in the game are you and cars (and helicopters etc). If we can waste 2 and a half hours with just two of us, this must be insane at a lan party. Or rather, this will be insane at a lan party.

UserFriendly has done another strip that doesnt suck!