Photic Sneeze Reflex (or An Interesting Entry, Honest)

I had a dream about Bill Bailey turning in to a zombie last night. Perhaps it was because I'd been playing King's Quest 2 all day yesterday (so that I could hear the MIDI strings instrument in my ears for hours afterwards). But that's not the point of this entry - I realised a while ago that even though I'd mentioned it to many people before, I haven't asked people on LJ about photic sneeze reflex. I find this a fascinating condition, because even though a significant number of people have it it's hardly noticeable to others, and those who have it don't tend to think anything special of it. I am one of them, and so is my father, but not the rest of my family.

Photic sneeze reflex is a condition where you sneeze in bright light - often when stepping outside on a bright day after being indoors for a while. Because of the way that light causes sneezing, sufferers also tend to turn to lights when they feel a sneeze coming on, to speed it up. It occurs because the nerves for light reception and sneezing are very close to each other in the brain, and if they are close enough, then light can trigger a sneeze.

I'd like to find out how common this is among people reading this - does sunlight make you sneeze? Or is this all entirely new to you? When Whitney made a post about it in Philip's forum they all thought she was just mad. Personally, I had assumed that it happened to everyone, so didn't think to even ask people about it until last year.

This Entry took Fourteen Edits to Get Right

As fewer people than I’m hoping will have already noticed, recently I’ve changed from updating my journal with the regularity of, for example, changing my T-shirt, and begun to update with the regularity of changing the colour of my T-shirt. Yes, it’s been fully three weeks now, my LJ has remained with a post about Computer Science at the top, and I am still wearing a black shirt with a Chinese message, the meaning of which I’m only dimly aware. The reason for this is that Whitney visited me during the last fortnight to remind me that there was still life outside the five minute route between my room and the Junior Honours Lab.

Because quite a lot happened in those two weeks, I anticipate that this is going to be rather a long entry. The amount I write depends on how far my interest in this outweighs my interest in going to bed, but I remember that managed one that was upwards of 3,000 words not so long ago and that seems a limit to aim for.

DDR (You have permission to skip this bit)

During my escape from St Andrews three weekends ago, I stopped in Dundee to find the Japanese DDR machine (Extreme) that was hidden somewhere in the city. I had found the address online and had quite a while to waste before my bus arrived. The address turned out to be easy to find, but finding the machine inside was not - it ended up being at the top of a tall dark tower through a mirror-lined labyrinth that reminded me more than a little of the Crystal Maze. The song selection wasn’t quite as great as I remembered, but I did manage to (barely) pass a 9 that I’d never seen before, so I think my ability might be rising.

The place (HYND Amusements) also had an alternative Bemani game by the name of “EZ2 Dancer”, which I had a quick go at on the way out. It involves only three pads on the ground but two sensors for the hands as well, and this makes things rather more complex as I discovered when I confidently attempted a level 7 song and failed miserably. The whole feeling of having to flail my arms in front of me as well as spasmodically thrash my feet around to arrows seemed exponentially more humiliating than DDR could ever be, so I retreated hastily from the establishment.

Start reading.

I made my way back to the Megabus stop, musing that Megabus seemed like some sort of secret black market transportation system because of having to find an alternative stop. They might have bothered to put some benches around the stop, though. When the bus eventually arrived, close to quarter of an hour late, all feelings of secrecy vanished when I saw that it was bright blue and yellow. That’s rather conspicuous in the brown and grey Dundee badlands. So I stumbled home to Inverurie and collapsed in to my unmade bed in my tip of a room to spend a night before meeting Whitney again. More on my room later.

When I eventually got to meet Whitney, I was unfortunately late at the airport because I had been checking the arrival times on Teletext and they seemed to have forgotten to update her one until ten minutes before it was due to land. Because of the small time I had left, I went as far as to drive at almost an acceptable normal speed to the airport, made a couple of laps of the full car park, found a space, and dashed through the freezing cold combined hail, rain and snow to get to the gate. I arrived there just before Whitney phoned her parents in the belief that I’d abandoned her at the smallest airport in the world.

After that bad start, her break picked up, though. My parents had neatened my bedroom amazingly, it looked like a hotel room when we got back - they do so much for both of us. A couple of days later, we drove down to St Andrews having convinced my mother in to letting us borrow the Fiesta for the fortnight, and even though it was the first time that I’d driven down to St Andrews alone it went without any problems at all. Double roundabouts are just very ordinary roundabouts with more roundabouts at the end.

Now that I’ve finally come to sit and write about what’s happened since I last updated, I’m finding that it’s very difficult to remember anything at all. The highlight, quite apart from having Whitney almost to myself for the whole fortnight, was that I didn’t have to eat Melville food, and instead we survived mostly on a diet of bagels, soup and pasta cooked in the kitchens. And we didn’t set the fire alarm off once. How can it be that difficult for other people? Come to think of it, Melville hasn’t had a fire alarm in about a month now, which I think is something of a record. I was terrified of having to wake Whitney up and guide her out during the night.

This paragraph is about work. Stop reading.

As much as I would have liked it to, the stream of work being given to me didn’t stop during that fortnight, and the main problem was the second Logic practical. This entailed having to implement a priority queue in PVS, an obscure specification language that none of the class had been fully taught about or had any idea how to use. Searches on the Internet revealed that no manual or command list seemed to exist for it, so we arranged for Tom the lecturer to come up and give us some help. Even that wasn’t of much use, though, despite him merrily insisting that once you’ve found the knack to PVS it’s fun to use. It made him seem like a sort of excessively tattooed, bald-headed Mary Poppins.

Eventually I did make some sort of effort towards it, eventually submitting one and a half answers out of a possible three along with a text file saying how I had no idea how to do the rest.

OK, it’s safe again.

Whitney did meet a few of the people I know down in St Andrews and up in Inverurie, but not many as I have never been terribly good at organising things. I even feel like I’m doing people a great inconvenience by typing to them and causing an IM window to pop up on their computer. She even saw the interior of the lab one evening, though, and was bored to near death by the experience.

During the weekend in the middle of the fortnight, Whitney and I ventured out to Cambridge via train to meet Philip, a friend that she had met in Oxford when she was over last year. Now that I come to think of it, it was only the second train journey that I'd ever made in Britain, and it went very well despite what everyone says about the trains in this country. In fact, the worst part was when we were sitting opposite some loud men from Newcastle who decided to watch a film on a loud portable DVD player and disturb everyone else in the carriage. They left a Daily Sport behind when they got off. I had a quick glance through it - I had heard the Daily Sport was a bit trashy, but I was overwhelmed by the sheer breast count.

Philip's family was very welcoming, though a minor thing that unsettled me was the way that Philip kept various weapons around the house - he had about seven swords in his room, a crossbow and miniature trebuchet in the kitchen, and a ballista in the attic. The first day was spent wandering around Cambridge in the blazing sun which had come from nowhere, followed by meeting the people from Philip's forum and playing the card game equivalent of Mornington Crescent with them.

As for the second day of the weekend, we walked around some fields nearby. It was at this point that I started calling Philip "Stuart" for no apparent reason - usually I either remember people's names or I don't, but why the name in my mind suddenly changed I'm not sure. A day later, we got back up to Scotland again safely despite the huge number of transfers we needed to make on the way.

One excursion that will no doubt stick in all our memories was the “family day out” to the Megabowl in Dundee, with Whitney and I in the front and , and in the back. The trip took upwards of an hour of driving round in ever decreasing circles towards the Stack complex. This was largely my fault, as when I printed out the map I’d forgotten that my printer had no black ink in it and that as a result we would not have the advantage of any street names. However, I eventually stopped to look at the map myself, then by navigating via curves and the stars we eventually reached it. I took it optimistically, thinking it would have been a disaster only if I hadn’t eventually got there, and the whole experience has completely put Whitney off having children.

When the Easter break eventually arrived, Whitney and Jamie and I piled in to the car accompanied by our possessions, thanks to some amazing Tetris-like packing of the car done by Whitney. I’m not sure how it all fitted in to a Ford Fiesta. The trip up was largely uneventful apart from a pheasant almost dying, and we kept ourselves amused by singing selections from Avenue Q and Fitness to Practice.

Our engagement is the current big news in Inverurie, it seems, and a large number of gifts have arrived. Many of these have been household items, making the whole thing seem much more real and frightening - we’ll be living together next year!

Whitney came along to the brief Easter service on the Bass, which I think made her a little uncomfortable - maybe mostly because of the rain and cold, and the people she didn’t know coming up to congratulate her. At least it was in a language she understood, unlike when I was taken to synagogue. More congratulations came when many of my parents’ friends came round that evening, but after a few glasses of wine conversation returned to normal, such as how Mark knocked himself out while putting on his trousers.

Oh, time to do my song downloads. Back in a while.

Hello, Microsoft Word. Very well, thank you. Anyway, the morning after that evening I sadly had to drive Whitney to the airport and say goodbye, about three times thanks to the queue that winds in and out of plants at departures. After that I went and sat in the car for a while, then decided to take my mind off it by busying myself with other things.

I decided to tidy my room. This is a task that had not been attempted since September 2002, and my room had become the dumping ground for a large amount of things no longer needed by people. Unless they wanted to borrow a Terry Pratchett book, of course - if that was the case, they tended to take it out then return it upside-down in the wrong order on the shelf missing its cover, if at all. I went some way towards battling the junk, but there’s a long way to go yet - some parts of the desk are at least visible now. I think I’m going to have to throw a lot of things in to the basement rather than out, which seems like cheating a little.

Another approach suggested by Whitney is selling things on Ebay - if people will pay upwards of a thousand dollars for ghosts in jars and Windows XP New Folders, then it’s quite likely that items of dubious value such as the Stormtrooper Mouse (useless) will go for reasonable prices if collectors/idiots see them.

Today, rather than continue with the tidying task, I completed King’s Quest 2 (VGA remake) in its entirety. It’s only the second point and click adventure that I’ve ever completed without resorting to a guide at any point (the first being Simon 2) and I’m rather proud of that. I do, however, have three weeks to make a train junction simulation, four to complete my project software, and five to write the documentation for it. Will I make it? Find out next month.

Meanwhile, in the lab...

The Worst Essay in the World (aka. The Use of Formal Methods in Software and Hardware Design, Implementation and Manufacture) has not come back to haunt me as I expected - in fact, I've just found out that I somehow got a grade 18 in it, showing once again the pattern of my mark on essays being inversely proportional to my own opinion of them.

In other work, I finally got down to seriously doing the Databases practical, and found that it was easy once I'd actually decided on what scenario to model. At least, it would have been easy if it wasn't for the SQL client that we're using, which is astonishingly even less reliable and coherent than many of the programs that I write myself. The whole process is akin to some sort of psychological torture - we're using a program in which you can't save, and which could segmentation fault at any moment. The only solution is to work out what makes it crash (mostly, either right-clicking or dragging and dropping) and try to avoid doing them until you're fairly sure that you're past a point where it's auto-saved your work. To reflect the mental anguish which we're all going through, I've named the Advisors in my database after the cast of the Silent Hill series. I doubt the reference will be picked up, but it's a small satisfaction nonetheless.

Also, I still don't understand Logic, which isn't a good thing because we've just been given another practical on it. The lecturer appears to think that proving formulae using a computer-assisted prover is "like a computer game" because you can either take the long route or find shortcuts, and you get better at it the more you do it. I don't know what kind of twisted games that he plays to have been able to draw a comparison between them and the dullness of formulae verification - I'll stick to Transport Tycoon. Which now that I think about it is about running a transport network. Actually, he may have a point.

Food, Glorious Food (Not AMH Food)

Unusually for a student, I hadn't tried Super Noodles until yesterday evening, when I bought a few packets as an alternative to the ramen that I usually bring back from America when I'm over there. Having chosen to ignore the cooking instructions, I just made it in exactly the same way as I always had, and this process resulted in something very ramen-like in many properties. In fact, I'm having a second packet just now after being unable to face another AMH chicken risotto. One major difference between the British and Japanese versions, though, is that I can literally feel the fat coating the noodles sliding down my throat. It feels somehow more Scottish.

Also new on the Café de Room 71 menu is Crunchy Nut Clusters. They're like all the greatness of CNCF (no, not carbonitrofluroride) with the shape of Country Crisp. However, its weaknesses is that like the latter cereal, it lacks cohesion, and tends to consist of a lot of atomic particles which degenerate into a porridge-like mass when milk is added. I think some sort of sweet adhesive such as honey may solve this problem.

showed me this a while ago. If you're absolutely sick of All Your Base jokes it's unlikely to change that, but I found it entertaining - perhaps mostly because of Andrew Kepple's involvement in it. Zero Wing Rhapsody!

I, Dancing Robot

I'll start this off by pointing out something that I've just corrected on the front of the TDC - "Congratulations". Quite a hefty word in terms of length, I admit, but why is it misspelled so often consistently? How can anyone possibly think that it has a "d" in it?

I was told in a dream last night that I was making too many short Livejournal entries. I can't remember who told me, but it was some unlikely figure of authority like the Mayor of Warsaw. Having a dream that even remotely relates to Livejournal is bad enough in itself, so I don't think the details are necessary. To make this one a bit longer, here is a screenshot of the XML dance writer I'm writing just now for the project.

As you can see, there are a couple of buttons there that are very much temporary, but I'm still immensely proud of it. All that I need to do now is get it to save and load correctly, and I'll be free to worry about the entire remainder of the classes.

Thought for the Day

There should be a volume lock on speakers that limits the volume in direct proportion to the quality of music coming out of them. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to stand the atonal droning emerging from Room 70.

Stuck in CS forever

This is tragic, I'm writing a program to interpret and write XML dance routines and am finding it fun. There's no going back now.

Are you justified in taking life to save life?

Over the past couple of days I've realised the full greatness of Dream Theater's "The Great Debate". In general I find their music takes a while to get in to as sometimes it's more about showing off than the musical coherence, but it eventually clicks somehow and is suddenly fantastic. It still seems that fourteen minutes is a bit overlong for its content, but a lot of that running time is taken up by the buildup at the start and finish where voice samples from interviews about stem cell research are placed over the music - the religious side and the scientific side.

Turn to the light
Don't be frightened of the shadows it creates
Turn to the light
Turning away would be a terrible mistake

Those lines are wonderfully ambiguous. It could mean the religious "light", and not to be afraid of what we're missing out on because of stopping the research. On the other hand it could mean the "light" of knowledge, and to not worry about the moral questions that it raises. Well, I analysed that horribly, but you get the idea. It's also one of those songs that have a very unlikely title that somehow works, much like Iron Savior's "Made of Metal" or Kamelot's "A Feast for the Vain".

Speaking of clever ambiguity, we watched Terminator 2 (thanks to Don) last night, correcting the fact that and hadn't seen it before. You don't get more cleverly ambiguous than the first half an hour of that film, when it leads you to believe that the roles of the two Terminators are reversed.

Edit: I've just realised that that last sentence contains a fairly major spoiler for the film, so I'd better put a warning. So here it is: This entry contains Terminator 2 spoilers.

Also, OpenTTD works over the network - it's fantastic.

OpenTTD

Everyone must download this now. It is my decree. I can't think why I haven't heard of it in all this time, in fact - it looks like it'll take some work in setting up, the same way that TTDPatch did, but it looks like it even has a stable network mode this time. Additionally it goes some way to making ships less totally useless, which is a great achievement.

Today's Menu

Breakfast
Bowl of dull cornflakes
Egg (coloured blue)
Watery mushrooms

Lunch
Sacrilegious bagel (filled with ham and cheese)
Pastel-coloured cubes tasting of nothing in particular (assumed to once have been vegetables)

Dinner
Suspiciously green fajita filled with unidentified substance

I love hall food, I really do.