radiac.net

I appear to be 21. Starting to notice a pattern here...

Today I was woken by a text message wishing me a happy birthday, and the rest of the day has followed a similar plan - I had lots of cards and presents and things, including jumpers, DVDs, a photo album, chocolate and money. Went round to a friends house for lunch (which was delicious, but massive) and left there at 5.30. Got home, and went out for dinner at 6.30, which was again delicious, but massive, so I am feeling very full. Probably didn't help that I have now eaten all of my chocolates... And after that, Leela rang me. Oh yes, yay for a month :)

So now I'm 21. Scary stuff.

Thank you everyone who has sent me cards, presents, e-mails, text messages, instant messages and/or commented on my previous entry, and enjoy this. And to those of you who haven't, shame on you!

I have done lots of stuff since my birthday. Let's see. Lectures... Ooh, had a birthday pub crawl on Saturday, it was cool, thanks everyone :)

Oh, and Sunday Tristan suggested we (me, him and his friend from America) go for a pub lunch to a pub just down the canal. Being Tristan, we left for 'lunch' at 2.45, and were still walking at 3.45. Didn't get home till about 7. I hate him so much sometimes. Still, he made tacos last night, which made up for it a little...

Anyway, I have a sore throat, making it painful to swallow, which sucks a bit. And I am tired, so I'm off to bed. Night!

I haven't made a post for a while, so I thought I'd do something a little unexpected and out of the ordinary, and copy and paste an e-mail.

These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts, and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters who had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place.

Q: Are you sexually active?
A: No, I just lie there.

Q: What is your date of birth?
A: July 15th.
Q: What year?
A: Every year.

Q: What gear (e.g., 1st or 2nd) were you in at the moment of the accident?
A: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.

Q: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
A: Yes.
Q: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
A: I forget.
Q: You forget? Can you give us an example of something that you've forgotten?

Q: How old is your son, the one living with you?
A: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can't remember which.
Q: How long has he lived with you?
A: Forty-five years.

Q: What was the first thing your husband said to you when he woke up that morning?
A: He said, "Where am I, Cathy?"
Q: And why did that upset you?
A: My name is Susan.

Q: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo or the occult?
A: We both do.
Q: Voodoo?
A: We do.
Q: You do?
A: Yes, voodoo.

Q: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
A: Did you actually pass the bar exam?

Q: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?

Q: Were you present when your picture was taken?

Q: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
A: Yes.
Q: And what were you doing at that time?

Q: She had three children, right?
A: Yes.
Q: How many were boys?
A: None.
Q: Were there any girls?

Q: How was your first marriage terminated?
A: By death.
Q: And by whose death was it terminated?

Q: Can you describe the individual?
A: He was about medium height and had a beard.
Q: Was this a male, or a female?

Q: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
A: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.

Q: Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A: All my autopsies are performed on dead people.

Q: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
A: Oral.

Q: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
A: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
Q: And Mr. Dennington was dead at the time?
A: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an autopsy.

Q: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?

Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for blood pressure?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for breathing?
A: No.
Q: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
A: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere

(Thanks to Jared for the email :))

In other news, I have written a funky file editor for usml, which will of course need to be totally re-written when I restart usml. Really need a new name for that thing...

Read all about the dangers of DHMO.

I had no idea. I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for this in the future...

It is 8.09, I've just had my shower, and in a minute will have to leave the house for university. And it is pissing it down. BAH!

By keeping the windows open for long periods of time, I have got the temperature down to something approaching cold, which is a lot nicer to sleep in. My approach to heating up to now has been you can always open a window, but I've realised that this doesnt really apply when it's raining and your only windows are over your computer and over your bed. So my new theory is that you can always put on more clothes.

Had a meeting with the tonbschl people on Tuesday; they basically said I have to catch up with the work I'm behind on, by next Tuesday, or they find someone else. Whee, only 40 emails to go!

My final year project could be going a lot better too... well, it could be going, that would be a start...

And I got another birthday present yesterday - a swiss army knife! It does everything, it's even got a magnifying glass! Now all I have to do is work out how to get it onto a plane without the airport staff arresting me for terrorism. Well, to be fair it does have a massive knife bit...

And finally, a quote from regular reader Arnie

The difference between Sly Stallone and me is I am me and he is him.

Is it any surprise this guy is my hero?

I'm slipping with my diary posts! Must get back into the habit of posting random nonsense so that people keep reading and, more importantly, commenting (hint hint). I've really got out of the practice, this is taking me ages.

Had a very good weekend - went out for a meal on Friday with Leela and then we watched Oceans Eleven, which was excellent. On Sunday, Tristan and I went out for lunch, and Leela, Laura and Hannah decided to come along, and they made me leave before I had my pudding! CHOCOLATE BROWNIE PUDDING! Every time I think about it I want to cry :(

Still it was a good weekend in all. We had a shakeaway instead of pudding, which kinda makes up for it, I guess...

The tonbschl updates are pretty much sorted (finished at 5.30 this morning, d'oh), just a couple of things left to do. Of course, they're the biggest things, but never mind.

And here is some gratuitous gadgetry. I want it all.

Hi. I have had a fantastic day - woke up happy, did a lot of cool stuff, and just as I'm about to go to bed, found Desktop Sidebar. Yay!

Last night was the roman romp, and I decided to go along. Seemed like a good idea at the time! It was fun, although I wasn't wearing a toga, so I felt like a bit of a party-pooping loser. I had planned to go as Russel Crowe, and say things like 'On my signal, unleash hell!' (when arriving at a pub), or 'Kate drew on my favourite t-shirt! I shall have my vengeance, in this life or the next!'. However, that required a lot more preparation than I had time for, so that will have to wait until the next toga night. I went along with Leela, Laura, Hannah, Scary Laura and Jen, who all wore togas. Apart from Laura, who wore her cat cosplay outfit, and got a lot of attention from everyone, especially that drunk bloke on the dance floor. It was a fun evening, despite them repeatedly running off to dance and leaving me to look after their bags ;)

I am a little disturbed. I had drunk no alcohol since before Christmas, had not been drunk since, ooh, the summer? Last Easter? I dunno, I can't remember, if you're bothered you can look through my diary archive, but I'm know, I just know it's been a while. So I was thinking 'Hey, I'll have lost any alcohol tolerance I may have had' - £20 and some donated shots later, and I was still alarmingly sober. As in totally :(

Right-o, so what else have I been up to that has been earth shatteringly exciting? Ooh, I bought myself a VCR! We don't have one at home home any more, so I thought 'Hey, a VCR would be a great idea, then I can watch all those videos at home'. Also, I wanted to watch 'If', but it was on at the same time as Footballer's Wives, so a VCR was the only way I was going to get to watch that... So, having heard all the reports of how difficult a VCR is to program, I was suitably pleased with myself at how quickly I set it up to tape 'If'. Unfortunately, it turns out they are quite difficult to set, so 'If' didn't record. For some indeterminable reason, it is not enough for a VCR for you to set a timer... no, you also have to press the button that says you set a timer, please take notice of it. Dumb.

If you're reading this, please comment, it makes me feel happy :)

I have also bought myself a new desk lamp. My previous one stopped working one evening; it might have been the bulb, or it might have been the fuse, so I decided to not faff about, and just chucked it in the bin and bought a new one. This one is so much better; not only does it not fall over when I try to adjust its position, but it also does not give off choking headache-inducing toxic fumes - bonus!

In other news, so far this year (nearly a quarter) I have had 28553 spams (last year I got a total of 41206 for the whole year), which works out at an impressive 14.03 spams per hour (compared to 4.7/hour last year). Go spammers! Don't get discouraged just because I haven't bought anything yet - send me more and more, and I'm bound to buy something eventually! Well, at least my crude spam filters pick up approximately 2/3 of the spam, which still seems to leave about 100-200 spams a day for me to pick through manually. So apologies if I don't reply to you if you e-mail me, this is why. At some point in the future I will be setting up a nifty set of spam filters, but that will be something for the summer, methinks.

I have a Belle and Sebastian CD on order from play.com, but I can't remember which one it was. And in Die Hard, Brucey Baby sticks the gun to his back with CHRISTMAS TAPE! HAHA! So there, Tristan.

Swiss army knife blades are sharp. My poor finger.

My HCI group project is redesigning the interface for my digital camera, which promises to be fun. However, my dissertation and final year project still hasn't really got anywhere, so that promises to be less fun. In fact, it promises to be pretty much a disaster. Woo.

I've been wearing the same shirt for the past 3 days. Oops.

I finally got round to buying another can of compressed air today! I noticed that the campus computing shop sold compressed air cans sometime last term, and have been meaning to go get a can ever since, because it really is the greatest thing ever! Apart from toast, but then that goes without saying. Anyway, as I was saying, I bought myself a can of compressed air, and all excited, I went over and showed Leela, who wasn't at all impressed. Then Laura came over, and I showed her, and she said I was lame. I have such fantastic friends.

I really need to fill out that graduation form, since it's due in tomorrow. Not that it's really an issue (see above paragraph concerning project)...

Well, I guess I had quite a bit to say.

While I'm here, I may as well say Tony Blair sucks, Sainsburys' Chicken Nacho Melt rocks, and I am listening to 'Living Next Door To Alice', by Roy Chubby Brown.

Right, time for food, so I am off. Good night everyone!

The title seemed appropriate, seeing as I am listening to the song by The Animals, and I am going home in a few hours.

I wrote a fantastic and glorious entry on Friday. However, it was lost because the server filled up and they didn't have space to save it! Grrr. Not only that, but they didn't have space for any of my data, so I lost my entire diary and counter. By some enormous fluke, I had backed up my diary on Thursday evening just after that post! How cool is that?! I never back up my stuff, this rocks. And, as you can see now, they have freed up some logs, and there is space for my fantastic and glorious entries once again. Fridays entry, however, remains lost.

On Friday, I had some lectures. Two, to be precise, and they were as interesting as ever, and I made them even more exciting by getting out my PDA, connecting to the internet via bluetooth and my mobile, and reading people's blogs. Woo for technology! I can't believe it was the last day of my last Easter term ever! Bring on the holidays! Well, not so much holidays, more courseworkdays, since I really should make a start on my project, and the group coursework won't do itself. Especially since we're doing it on my digital camera. In the evening, Leela came over and was only an hour and a half late. We made fajitas and chocolate brownies, and made chocolate brownie and ice cream and chocolate sauce puddings, and both were incredibly good. We ate them while watching the episodes of Footballers Wives and ER that I had taped on Wednesday.

On Saturday, I had some muffins and more chocolate brownie and ice cream and chocolate sauce pudding for breakfast, before going round to Leela's house to help carry stuff to the car. In case you don't know, she's off to Florida next week for a 3 month holiday and won't be back in Bath until October, meaning she has to move out now. So as you can probably imagine, she had a lot of stuff to move out. Well, I say 'as you can probably imagine' in a 'however much you're imagining, double it, add 10, and square it' kind of way. And that will still only be about half of her stuff. This is amazing bearing in mind she had the smallest room in the house - it filled the hall, the lounge and Laura's room. I arrived just in time to see her and her mum struggling to get a chest of drawers into the car (they had managed to puncture the door seal in the process - should have waited for me! ;)), and we went for for lunch in Bella Pasta (and had chocolate brownie and ice cream and chocolate sauce for pudding). Then we returned to pack all the stuff into the car. I was very impressed - not only did we fit the bedding, cushions, 4 suitcases (presumably clothes), 8 bags of books and 15 bags of more clothes, but also the 23 bags of shoes. How she's going to get all of this on the plane, I don't know.

After waving goodbye, I went home and had another chocolate brownie and ice cream and chocolate sauce pudding, before plugging in my new 250gb hard drive and copying some stuff onto it. I now have over 850gb of hard drive space. I'm getting there... Tristan and I then watched The Godfather Part 1 while drinking twix milkshakes and rosé, and eating chicken kievs and chocolate brownie and ice cream and chocolate sauce pudding. I went to bed feeling very very full. And ever-so-slightly sick.

Unfortunately, the chocolate brownie and ice cream have now run out, so it is time for me to pack up my stuff and leave for home home.