Just back from my first ever self-drive into London. It wasn’t as bad as I’d expected, actually. Mind you, I do have Hettie to help me out, and I do not regret buying her for even a moment I took the aforementioned laptop down to my uncle and we got everything set up. Other than a slight IE6/Gmail glitch (most odd) everything worked fine. It was fun to catch up with him too and I had a good time.

My grammar appears to be hacking its own path through my sentences, so I shall be to bed. Before I go, can you guess what annoyed me in this shot? Click through to flickr to find out…Night!

My physics AS consists of three exams. The first is on “Mechanics and Radioactivity” and the second is “Electricity and Thermal Physics”. The third unit is a choice between Astrophysics, “Solid Materials”, “Nuclear and Particle Physics” or “Medical Physics”. When I went to Solihull School back in March, he asked which option I wanted. I said that I’d prefer particle physics, but astrophysics was fine too. He said he wasn’t sure they did the former and he’d let me know. I received the final timetable last week after phoning up and chasing it.

So I was lying in bed this morning, and it occurred to me that I didn’t actually know which option I’d be sitting. I’ve just checked, and it’s solid materials. Great. I haven’t learnt that. Physics 3 consists of a practical and a written paper, and the practical is this coming Tuesday. So that’s this afternoon sorted, then

And to end this afternoon’s posting triptych, some mutterings from me.

I had a dream last night which involved Angelina Jolie and naked water-skiing. I know this happened, but I can’t remember a damn thing about it! Not fair!

Dancing last night was entertaining. We first went over our existing steps in the jive. Lynsey and I were spinning away when the couple next to us said:

Wow! They haven’t taught us that one, well done!

Lynsey and I laughed politely and attempted to carry on dancing, when they continued:

How did you learn how to do that?

We’d have been happy to tell them, had we actually been doing anything new. So we muttered something along the lines of ‘oh, well, we don’t know, it’s just, kinda, something we do…’ and thankfully they turned away.

A couple of weeks ago a man joined our class, and he could accurately be described as flamboyant. He swings his partner around very quickly and takes very large steps, and when on his own continues to hold his invisible partner. Because he moves so fast he’s always in the way, too. I’m sure he’s a perfectly pleasant man, but he just seems rather slimy. In fact, a lot slimy. Like, David Dickinson slimy. I don’t know what it is, it’s just mildly creepy. Incidentally, why is it that women flock to him like bees to a honey-pot, as Lynsey put it? Thankfully she’s not fooled
Anyway, towards the end of the evening Lynsey and I were practicing the waltz, when suddenly I felt an hand grab my arm and push it upwards. I looked around to see that the aforementioned Captain Sachet had hold of me.

You’ve got to lift your arm more.

I was a little taken aback, and said something like: “oh?”

Nice shirt, by the way [strokes my upper atm]. If you’re going to wear a shirt like that then you need to hold your arm higher.

Now I really didn’t know what to do. I think I said “thanks” or something similar, and he went away. Was he implying that my shirt was camp? If so, I disagree. In fact, since I’m wearing the same shirt today, I’m going to prove it. You can see it in the photo. What do you think of the campitude of this shirt? I disagree as to this shirt’s membership of the tenting fraternity, but others do not. Tell me, is this shirt camp?

Since our spectacular computer failure a few weeks back I’ve been pondering the best way to manage data. With the server down Mum and Dad could literally do no work at all, as everything important was stored on the one computer. The office had an internet connection, but that was pretty much it. One of the main reasons I set it up like that in the first place was to make backups easier, and this really paid off as the most recent backup had everything bar one day’s worth of emails. I’d never been so relieved in all of my life.

I still think that the server is the best way to go. It’s far easier to run backups from the one location, as well as meaning that work can be done from any computer in the office (this is occasionally a problem if there are meetings going on somewhere.) We can connect remotely, too. So the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, I think. However, we were one backup DVD away from complete catastrophe, and I don’t want that to happen again.

This ties in with a trend I’ve been noticing in myself recently. I’m increasingly using online resources over locally-based alternatives. Bloglines over newsgator for rss feeds, flickr for photo storage, this blog for useful files…I think this is the way to go. If my hard drive died today I’d lose a fair chunk of photos, documents and emails, because I don’t have a DVD writer to easily back everything up. This is a Dumb Thing. I want at a minimum two copies of anything important, and if one of those could be in a remote fire-protected building with a regular backup policy, all the better.

I still haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to work things (a 128k upload speed makes internet backups tricky), but I’ve made a start today in that copies of all my emails will be automatically forwarded to a gmail account. So I can carry on using Opera Mail as normal, but if everything goes titsup.com I’ll at least have a backup of everything from today, without having to do a thing. With 2gb of space I can just forget about it, which is great. I’m also using gmail as a file storage mechanism (admittedly google may stomp on this at some point) for those very important / useful files.

I’m also going to set up a RAID system on the new server, although that wouldn’t have helped in the last situation as I’m fairly sure the PSU killed everything in its path.

Any cunning suggestions?

I think I’m not a monkey
‘cos monkeys live in trees.
I’m glad I’m not a monkey
as monkeys never sneeze.
The money’s not in trees these days,
the prices are too steep
I think, all things considered,
I’d rather be a sheep.

A sheep. A sheep. A wooderwongacowabunga sheep.

If I owned a baby sheep
I think I’d called him Fred.
He’d summer in the dishwasher
and winter in the shed.
He’d be a great companion
on long hot boring evenings.
And when the winter comes around
truly excellent for eatings.

A sheep. A sheep. A chewylugiebarbanooga sheep.

But if I lived in Switzerland
With a gay butler named Diarmuid.
Fred might get way too jealous, so
I’d swap him for a marmot.
For they’re extremely fluffy,
but I hear they’re sometimes divas.
and sadly they can’t cha-cha-cha,
perhaps I’ll get a beaver.

Just added a caching plugin for Wordpress which will hopefully speed up page loads somewhat. The cache only last an hour and I’m not sure my site gets quite enough visitors for it to make much of a difference, but we’ll see. Please let me know if you spot any major improvements or problems.

Take a look at this image, then come back.

Done?

Continue reading ‘Lighting Fixture’

Ok, I’m back to revising full time now. I admit I wavered for a few weeks, but now the exams are Real and Scary I’m getting my act together. Currently on a 10-min break from differentiation, and just read this on Ben Hammersley’s blog:

When ever I write an article about the BBC’s latest new media offering, the newspaper I write it in always gets a ton of letters from aggrieved businessmen complaining about how their ability to start a, say, sports new service, is unfairly hindered by the BBC. It’s not fair, they say, for the BBC to be online at all. Given the license fee 1 (To have a TV in the UK requires a license, the proceeds of which pay for the BBC) it’s entirely anticompetitive for the BBC to be on the web. What chance do real businesses have in making any cash at all in the areas the BBC are in? 2 Laying aside the two responses I twitchily come back with. One, dude, society doesn’t owe you a living and but it does owe itself a maximisation of the common good, which this arguably is, and two, your business plan involves competing with the BBC? Idiot..

That’s possibly the best rebuttal I’ve ever heard The full article, here, concerns the launch of BBC Backstage, which provides APIs and feeds of pretty much all the BBC website’s content for you to do with as you will (non-commercially). You can publish your own BBC News website, if that’s what you feel like doing. One person has done exactly that, but has added automatic Wikipedia links for capitalised phrases and acronyms, as well as Technorati feeds so you can see who’s linking to that particular article and what they’re saying. Very cool indeed.

I’ve had word from the college, and my exams are officially as follows:

18th May:
Physics Practical 1

23rd May:
Pure 3
Pure 1

25th May:
Physics Practical 2

7th June:
Mechanics 3
Mechanics 1

10th June:
Physics 1
Physics 2
Physics 3

16th June:
Physics 5
Physics 4

20th June:
Pure 2

24th June:
Mechanics 2

27th June:
Physics 6

Graphically, June looks like this:

Although there are a couple of nasty days, it’s not as bad as it could be. Pure 3 is early, but I’ll be devoting all of next week to that. Then there’s a decent gap before Physics starts properly. It does occur to me that I have no idea what actually happens in Physics practicals, mind, and my first one of them is next Tuesday!

This morning, in a Life Coach’s reception hall:

Andrew: Can I pay by card?
Receptionist: It’s cheque or cash I’m afraid
Andrew: No problem, a cheque’s fine
[opens cheque book and bends down to write]
Andrew (by way of something to say): What’s the date?
[Andrew checks watch for today's date]
Receptionist: The 10th
[Andrew pauses, then continues writing. Hands over cheque.]
Andrew: Thanks very much, bye!

This afternoon, in a Henley office-building:

[Andrew is attempting to fix weirdly broken network]
[While waiting for DHCP to kick in, Andrew's mouse hovers over Windows clock. The date appears]
[Andrew bangs head into desk.]
[For Andrew's watch says it is the 9th. Andrew, for no apparent reason, decided to believe his watch over the live human being standing in front of him.]
[Not only does this mean he wrote the wrong date, despite having been told the correct date only moments before, in the reception hall of his Life Coach, but his watch must also have been wrong for all of May!]

The life coaching went well, I think. The lady was very friendly and easy to talk to, which was a relief. Her leaflet describes the introductory session as ‘where we talk about your history, your current issues and start defining what you want your life to look like’, and that’s what we did.

It’s surprising how different it is talking to somebody impartial. I’m fairly open with family and friends (and the whole world, if they read this blog) but there are always behind-thoughts about what you can and can’t say. Not unpleasant, you understand, but because I might be worried about seeming like a bad person or something I’m nervous about is related to them in some way - that kind of thing. Being able to say whatever and knowing you won’t be judged for it is very freeing.

We went over various aspects of my life and tried to narrow down the areas in which I’m having problems (that turned up some surprises, actually.) As you may have guessed, we’re going to work on work / career plans, as well as my self-image. She gave me some advice which I’ll attempt to put into practice between now and next week.

After seeing my posts last Wednesday, all the women in my house decided it could be a good idea for me to talk to a Life Coach, and I’m now booked in for a two-hour session tomorrow morning at 1000. Here’s how the leaflet describes the basic idea:

Coaching is an extremely powerful method of helping people to achieve whatever they want in life. It helps them to attain extraordinary results and far faster than they could alone.

So far, so much marketing. The ‘How does it differ from counselling?’ section sheds some light:

Coaching is future orientated and although touches on the past, it is predominantly focused on creating a better future. It is very practical in its approach, as it involves proactively planning specific actions, which will enable step changes to be made. Progress is often rapid and hence can be fairly short term.

So that helps a little, and it does sound to be exactly what I need. I was a little concerned when I spotted that of the four companies in the building, the other three specialise in osteopathy, homeopathy and acupuncture, all of which are pseudoscientific and have yet to be proven to have any effect when compared to a control group. It’s your basic quackery, in other words. However, the wikipedia entry for Life Coaching says the following:

Life coaching is a constellation of techniques utilized by a growing coterie of counselors to aid their clients in transitions in their personal life and in the process of self-actualization. Life coaching draws from a number of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, career counseling, and numerous other types of counseling. The coach, or counselor, applies mentoring, values assessment, behavior modification, behavior modeling, goal-setting, and other techniques in assisting clients.

So there is at least a structure, and it doesn’t seem to be totally founded in nonsense, unlike, say, psycho-analysis. The Canadian National Review of Medicine doesn’t seem to mind it, either. I’d like to see Penn and Teller’s take on it (series 3, episode 4) but it probably hasn’t aired yet.

It may be that talking things over with somebody objective will help in itself. I’d certainly appreciate any help, and if she really can do what she says she can then it’ll definitely be worth the money
I don’t want to give away her techniques, that wouldn’t be fair, but I’ll report back on what generally happened.

I’ve just put my car up for sale on Autotrader, so if anybody’s in the market for a 2002 1.2V Renault Clio for

I’ve never actually walked out of a film, and there aren’t many things that could make me. Like everyone, I’ve seen movies at the cinema that I thought were truly awful, but I’ve always stuck with them until the end. Sometimes through sheer stubborn determination; sometimes through wanting to know the end of the story; sometimes just with the hope that it’ll redeem itself somehow. There’ve been movies that have shocked and disturbed me, but I like to have new experiences and those kind of films normally have a message of some kind. I imagine that hardcore pornography or violence to animals, both consistent, could make me leave a cinema in certain circumstances, but given the kind of films I see it’s highly unlikely that this would happen without me having advance warning.

I have, however, twice remained in a film only because I needed a lift home or was due to taxi somebody else. The first was A Knight’s Tale, and then, last friday, we saw Kingdom of Heaven. I didn’t have my car for the latter so there was never the option, but I think that had I been on my own I’d have been out of there. Which is weird, for me, as I like to give things a chance. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for either of those two particular films on those particular days.

Whatever the reason, I just got back from The Interpreter, and my faith in cinema is entirely restored. I enjoyed it very much indeed. And, incidentally, going to the 21:55 showing on a Sunday evening is so very quiet - it’s great.

• I was in front of a group of people and had to put my contact lenses in. I was nervous about doing it with an audience, and ended up attempting to insert a 50p piece instead.
• I was playing computer games when I realised it was dark. I walked over to turn on the light and suddenly got terribly scared. I couldn’t see anything, and when I reached for the switch I instead felt a hand, which abruptly clamped over my mouth and tried to kill me. And you know what? It was Ben. Don’t do that, Ben. I actually woke up with a yell, which hasn’t happened for years.

It’s a good job that dream analysis is a load of crap, or I’d be carted away.