radiac.net

I hate revision. And at the moment, it's mostly firstvision, which I also hate. Still, in 10 days time I will be freeeee! Yay!

So, I woke up at 6.30 this morning. My nose was running like the French supporters will be from the English this weekend, only with less wussy arm flapping and bleeding and whining and screaming. My eyes were streaming so badly I could hardly open them - when I did and looked in the mirror, they were totally bloodshot. Sucks to be me. So I took some Clarityn, but that's not working so good any more, so I popped over to the chemist this morning. They have given me some Benadryl, which contains something else and will apparently be better. Well, they didn't give it to me, they sold it to me for £7.55. What a rip off. And I bet it'll send me to sleep in the middle of my exams, which start tomorrow! AAAAARGH! Back to the revision, methinks...

Well, I've taken my first exam. Went OK, I think... Next one is on Friday, at the ungodly hour of 9.30am. How do they expect anyone to do any well that early? Well, back to the revision.

I'd like to apologise for the dullness of my diary of late. Too much work done, not enough sleep had, and nothing of interest occured. Well, nothing I'm going to tell you about. Will have more interesting things to say from this time next week, when I will be FREE! And unemployed - woo! Bring on the dole!

Oh, and thanks for the sympathetic comments on my previous entry! Didn't send me to sleep during the exam, but I was exhausted by about 10 in the evening. Still, seems to be working pretty well! Oh typical, I just sneezed. Never mind.

Yay. Last exam is tomorrow! It's vision, have been revising, and it's boring. I can't face much more revision. The only thing that's making me keep going is that in 24 hours, I will be in the exam room. AAARGH. And hey, in 26 hours, I will be unemployed! Woo!

Well, that's my last exam ever taken. This means that I am now unemployed. How crazy is that. I don't have anything to do... ever... yay!

I have set up an NTP server on one of my machines, and have all my machines syncing with it, which is nice. I thought I should do that since I'm running my own mailserver now - it was a little confusing to get e-mails that are arriving 45 minutes in the future...

So, today I woke up, had a shower, and did some work for tonbschl, so I guess I'm not totally unemployed. Then installed the new Firefox - not keen on the theme, the memory usage, the blah blah blah, it seems like a step backwards. Never mind. At least the plugin system is good. Looking forward to the next version of Thunderbird (which will have the same new plugin system) - if it doesnt do everything I want, I'll be writing a couple of plugins for it. Like sorting by recieve date, that sounds pretty useful, eh?

In other news, it's the summer ball on Saturday. I need a dinner jacket, but the only shop we can find won't know if they have any stock left until Thursday, by which time it will be too late to look elsewhere. Sucks. Any suggestions (apart from going to the costume shop, Simon) are appreciated.

So today, I bought something from an Apple shop.

But I'll come back to that. In other news, Tristan and I have managed to get some clothes for the ball! Result. We turned up on Tuesday to try and get them, but they didn't know what their stock was like, so they told us to come back on Thursday. Cutting it a bit fine, I thought, but we got there at about 9.05 this morning, were their first customers, and it's all good - trousers, jacket, shirt, everything. Oh, actually, need socks. And crap, just noticed that I've lost my new black shoes (unworn) so I'll have to get some new ones tomorrow. GRRR.

Last night Tristan and I went to Revolutions which was too loud and I really really wasn't feeling very good - my hayfever is pretty bad this year, and even with my drugs, I frequently find myself with a streaming nose and sore eyes and throat, really doesn't make going out any fun. I'm on cetirizine dihydrochloride now, lets see if this is any better. Anyway, after that they went to Score, but went home because we thought it sounded mildly dull. Laura came too because she didn't want to go either, so we went into her house and ate sausage rolls while playing cards, which was fun. Going back over there in a minute for a barbeque, followed by an end of year pub crawl. Sorry, pub tour. We have burgers and buns and stuff, should be good.

Right, so, why do I feel dirty. Well, as some of you may already know, I don't really hold Apple in terribly high regard. In fact, I think they sell overpriced overhyped underperforming crap, with a logo on the front which makes them instantly appealing to the society style sheep. So as you may imagine, I had a pretty good reason to go in there.

As I said recently, I have bought a Sony Vaio Z1 series laptop. It is very shiny and good, but being Sony, it came with the barest possible accessories; a battery pack and a recovery CD. Hell, I even have to buy a floppy drive separately. Dabs are seling a Sony Vaio external USB floppy drive for £70, and a Sony OEM external USB floppy drive for £20. I make that £50 for a shiny silver case and the word 'vaio' on the side - wonderful thing, logos. A bit like Apple really, only Sony stuff is good.

OK, so as I was saying, my Vaio arrived short on accessories; in particular, it didn't come with a case. My last laptop came with a case, so why can't this one, I thought. Never mind. But what I really wanted was a slip case - something to put the laptop in which would protect it from getting scratched, when I put it in my rucksack or other bag. Interesting fact: Sony produced a slip case for the Sony Vaio Z1 series, but stopped shipping about 6 months ago. So I went into the Sony shop a few days ago, and asked the guy if he knew of anything that would suffice - he told me he was being visited by someone from Samsonite on Wednesday, and that I should come back on Thursday. So I showed up this morning and the Samsonite guy was there and told me to get a Tucano case from the Apple shop up the road. In front of the Sony guy, which made me smile - a certain someone won't be selling their cases to a certain Sony store today...

When I was in the Apple shop, I showed him my laptop and asked him if he had a slip case that would fit. After this, we had the following conversation:

Him: Ooh, thats a thick laptop
Me: It's 2cm at this end, it's only 2kg, and it's got the best resolution of any laptop of this weight that I've seen.
Him: Oh, what resolution?
Me: 1400x1050.
Him: Oh is that all? Here, have a look at this! [walks over to one of those ugly brick-stylee Apple laptops and brings up the screen resolution thing] See, uh, 1280... uh... oh.
Me: [smug] Mmmmhmmm

So having humiliated the Apple nazi, I took my slip case and left.

So hopefully that will be the last time I ever have to go into an Apple shop. Excuse me while I go and scrub myself clean.

Well, it was the Summer Ball was yesterday. We met up at Laura and Hannah's house for food, before going up to campus. Having heard of the shambles in past balls, I was surprised and impressed with it all, it was very well organised. Here are a couple of photos:


First off we went into a marquee and got drinks and strawberries, then we went over to some jazz music and had more drinks. Then we decided to look at the fair - yes, they had shipped in a fairground, complete with dodgems, dodgy rides and dodgy carnies. And, of course, insane queues. I was desperate to have a go on the dodgems, so we made our way there, and in the process met Laurence, who was there juggling.

You will find some more here, and if you have any more of the evening which you would like to send me, please feel free :)

After that we had candy floss and Laura won a coconut, then we went to the casino up in the plug. Since we weren't playing for money, I bet recklessly, won quite a few chips, and then lost them all in two hands. Never mind, it was fun. Tristan lasted ages because he only put one chip down at a time. We hung around until he had finished (the table closed), and then went over to the pool tables where we played pool for a couple of hours, and I played the best (read luckiest) game of my life ;)

All in all, it was a brilliant evening and a great way to finish off the year.

Leela's flight from Gainesville was cancelled yesterday, so she took off earlier - she is now somewhere over the Atlantic, and will be landing tomorrow morning at 6 AM! Woo!

Delta have a flight notification service - you tell them your e-mail address and the flights you are interested in, and they e-mail you whenever there is a change. I got an e-mail at 18:03 saying that the 4467 from Gainesville had been cancelled. I rang Delta and found out the new travel plans they had set up for her, and then rang her mum and told her. Of course, nobody had any way of telling Leela, so she arrived at the airport about 4 hours later... But todays flights have been fine, and I have just recieved an e-mail telling me that the DL8 will be landing at approximately 5.34 - let's just hope she's on it...

I'm really looking forward to flying off on my holidays. It sounds like so much fun...

So, yes, it's been a while since I made a proper diary entry! I have gone back and written up the two place-holder entries for the Summer Ball and Leela's flights, so you may want to read those first and come back to this.

So, how come I haven't kept you all up to date with what I've been up to? Well, mostly because I couldn't be bothered, I had better and more important things to be doing.

What I didn't say in the previous entry about Leela's flights is that I had booked a taxi to get me to Gatwick for 5.30. I went to bed at about 1, then got up at 3.30, so that kinda hurt. But I got there at about 5.30, and was there for when she came out of arrivals, so that was cool. We got the Gatwick Express to Victoria, then the underground to Paddington, and sat around for a couple of hours drinking/eating while we waited for our train to Bodmin. We must have arrived at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and Leela gave me a t-shirt from American Eagle, so now nobody can complain I only ever wear t-shirts from the HCI conference, because I now have stylish clothes.

The next day, on the Thursday, we went into Bodmin and had a look around. It's a nice town. In the evening we went over to an Italian restaurant in Wadebridge, and for some reason, I thought it would be a really good idea to try something different to the normal cheese pizza. So, not one for doing things by halves, I had an extra spicy one.

It hurt.

I'm not talking a mild tingly pain, I'm talking 2 glasses of Sprite in a row and it's still agony. And that was after only one mouthful. Jalopeno peppers are evil. But I'd bought the pizza, so I couldn't just leave it - I ate nearly all of it, I didn't do too badly, but by the end it just hurt too much, so I gave up and left some of the green slices of pain on the plate.

However, my pizza selection incompetence was dwarfed a few minutes later by the combined efforts of the brain and I. Apparently determined to prove she still deserved her title, Leela had parked us in a car park that closes at the same time as Tescos, so we got back to find the barriers on the car park closed, bolted and padlocked. We drove around the whole thing in the hope we could find a secret exit, but of course, no chance. Much to the amusement of the local hooligans riding their bikes in the deserted car park, I walked up to the exit barrier and had a look to see if there were instructions for getting out, or magical escape buttons or anything, but no - just a sign saying "If you get stuck in the car park, ring the council or the police". Yay. So Leela rang the council, and apparently the conversation went something like this:

Leela: We're stuck in the Tesco's carpark!
Council guy: Urr, drive up to the exit barrier and it will open.
Leela: I did that... maybe I just didn't go close enough...

So yes, it turns out we had been stuck in the car park for about 15 minutes, and all we had to do was drive up to the exit barrier...

Say nothing.

Friday we went over to Plymouth so Leela could buy some more clothes and shoes. And I bought myself a new top, it's cool - it has a picture of a man in a tank, and he's pointing and saying 'To the pub!'. The fact I don't really go to the pub that much is irrelevant, it's a neat shirt. That evening we had a takeaway, and the next day I came back to Bath. On Sunday Leela left for another 3 months, but at least this time it's only a short motorway trip away in Loughborough, where she is doing exciting top-secret and highly-dangerous pharmacy research.

The past few days have been less hectic and exciting - on Monday, Tristan and I went for a pizza with his Mum and Gran which was lovely, but apart from that, I have pretty much just been working on the new design for the tonbschl website. It's quite a complicated one - they want it to look like a shield, and putting a curve at the bottom of an HTML page in CSS is surprisingly difficult. Actually, I believe the word used over at quirksmode was 'impossible' - but I showed them! Hahaha! Well, ok, not quite - it's not perfect, there are issues when you make the browser window stupidly small, but I'm hoping that will never be an issue - I'll just have to make sure I put a nice lot of text on every page.

So as I have said before, I am free - bring on the holidays. The only things scheduled are results this Friday, and graduation in two weeks - although something tells me I won't be invited to that one; a few days ago I had a dream where I got 42%. Well, I can dream I passed, right? And after that, it's the holiday courses for 6 weeks.

Exciting, eh?

I'll let you know.