Projects and presentations, and it's only the first week

After the downpour and icy winds of the last couple of days, I was amazed when coming in to St Andrews this morning to be driving through something resembling the Windows XP background. That kind of weather isn't native to this part of the country at all, and therefore the Goldfish Bowl was more of a greenhouse, making listening to the Architecture lecture all the more difficult. I can't really recall anything worthwhile from the lecturer, but I seem to remember some frightening Assembly commands being put up at some point.

Uncharacteristically for a Computer Science class, Multimedia looks like it's going to be pretty hysterical as it's mainly based on groupwork rather than sitting around being talked at. I'm not too thrilled with having to do a group presentation for the first practical, but after that there's a practical on video editing to come. The lecturer has also requested people to present some multimedia projects of their own, and I'm not really sure whether to put forward Crystal Towers or not. Other things that are being done include the madness of some people's iMovies and sixth year projects.

I also have to start thinking about what to do my presentation on at The Burn this year. I was going to do "Prince of Persia in 20 Minutes", including a talk on rotoscoping and video capture techniques as I ran through my immensely self-absorbed speed video, but I don't think that I could fill up the time very effectively, and having a presentation and video running side by side could be awkward. Besides, the quality's terrible and the licence has run out on my video software. It's likely that I'll go with a "Random Numbers" presentation so that I can send everyone to sleep, but I'd rather like to group together with a few people and do a presentation on the Junior Honours Project instead - at least then it would be something worthwhile. My only worry there is that some of the more outgoing (loud) members of the class would undoubtedly feel they could do the presentation more justice.

The project is also coming up - the one that I'm most interested in so far is a method of determining the location of a mobile device via its signal strength and therefore distance from a number of known base stations (keep reading, it gets better, I promise). If a system like that could be made accurate enough, then it's possible that the locations could be uploaded to a central server which could display a floor plan, complete with Marauder's Map-style dots that show people's locations as they move through the building. It sounds interesting, but I was concerned that I had very little experience in networking. The lecturer who set it didn't seem to see this as a problem, though. According to Al, many senior honours projects fail as miserably as the junior honours ones, so there's no worry there.

[Edited because I suddenly became stupid and got all the letters in "justify" wrong so that it read "center".]

New Releases

It came to my attention via 's recent post that Stratovarius released a new album a couple of weeks ago. Gamma Ray have put theirs out early as well. This is very bad for me when I'm trying to be on a budget.

Broadband

Broadband was turned on last night! The DSL modem is a fairly unimpressive grey box that features gill-like ridges as if it were an unlikely plastic fish, but in contrast to the connections that I've used in the past, its presence means that we can use the Internet:

• At all times of the day
• Without dying from old age while waiting for a page to load
• Unrestricted, with no blocked ports resulting from ITS paranoia

I would write more, but I have to beat the world at Unreal Tournament (or failing that, just the people on the New Players Only servers).

The First Day

"What a load of bollocks", a classmate announced as he walked past me out of Distributed Systems. I was waiting for my Artificial Intelligence lecture to start at the time, and that assessment made me even more glad that I had favoured it this semester. In fact, my timetable at the moment is a complete joke, with me having one lecture a day, starting 11 in the morning at the earliest, and two hours of Multimedia in the afternoons every Thursday. This will eventually fill up with the PSAC lectures, project and any practicals that come our way, but Honours Computer Science creates at least the illusion of having a relatively free timetable.

It happens that I'm now using Whitney's Mac to take notes in lectures. I know it's a bit of a turnaround from my attitude towards them last year, but it's clearly the more portable of the two laptops we have in the house (mine having no battery, a self-inflicted insane keyboard and a serious weight problem). The Mac got on with me quite well right up until the very end of the lecture when it decided to treat what I had saved to my pendrive as read only, and to convert all I had typed in to "I don't know this character" squares when I tried to save to the hard drive.

I've decided to start doing this because in the second semester last year we were lectured in the lab, with computers in front of us, and I typed vast essays out on to my own laptop as the lectures went on, and it behaves very well as long as it's kept static and gets a socket to itself. Now, though, the third years are being lectured in the left side of the lab (which now has no computers), our practicals are to be done on the right side, and we're being lectured in the Goldfish Bowl. It's a mystery to me why they did this, but I wanted to keep typing things out as we go along because I got my best marks ever last semester, forcing myself to pay attention and write something vaguely coherent.

It's also come to my attention that we weren't supposed to hand our proximity cards at the end of last year. I handed mine to to return, and now that I come to think about it, I never heard of my £5 deposit again.

Stirling Castle

To say that nothing important has happened between my last update and now would be rather rude to the fair number of people that I've met up with since arriving back in the St Andrews area - over the course of the week, Whitney and I have been in and out of St Andrews and have met various people from the hall last year, and ran in to a few from my classes in the Union - Jenny is back this year, Natalie is now living with Shelley, and I saw Andy at the bar, who greeted me by happily shouting "You water-drinking homo" across the room a couple of times.

The rest of the time has been taken by settling-in activities, and no one wants to read those because it's just a list of "Went to Tesco, went to St Andrews, went to Dundee, ran out of milk, was abducted by aliens, saved the Universe", and so on. Our costs have been greater than I'd imagined and at present we've spent more than my estimated monthly budget in a week, so we're going to have to reassess that. The sooner Whitney's potential employers get around to replying, the better.

Today was our most major excursion since coming here, as I drove Whitney to Stirling castle. The castle is defended by a ridiculously complex one-way road system that James V built to confound any enemies that got within a mile of it, and it was only after a large amount of guessing at the roundabouts and weaving in and out of jutting-out pavements that we managed to work our way to the top of the hill. It doesn't help that no one in Stirling knows how to use the roads, either - we frequently had to dodge obstacles like people who walked out in front of us or parked in the middle of the street.

The castle was bigger than I had imagined, though, and was just about worth the £8 entry fee. The tour plaques did seem to put an extraordinary amount of emphasis on the ceilings, and when they weren't talking about those they were describing the gigantic Hunt of the Unicorn tapestry reconstructions that hung there. I can't imagine how anything that large could be done by hand - it seems to me to be completely overwhelming, like the project that I'll be supposed to start in three days.

Setting up

Sunday morning was our first ever shopping trip, to get things to stock up the cupboards, fridge and freezer. It came to £57.68 rather than the heart-attack-inducing sum that I'd expected, and further trips will be less than that. I am increasingly convinced that clubcard points are useless, but according to the receipt I earned 57 today, bringing the card up to a total of twelve. Admittedly I failed AH Maths, but I suspect something's gone wrong there. We've even been so efficient to sort out a budget file to keep track of our spending - even though we have money now, I'm not quite used to spending this much, as the trip this morning came to over four times my weekly budget last year.

In the afternoon, we visited St Andrews for the first time this academic year. Ironically, after escaping from it long ago, I found myself back in Melville to use the computer room for Internet access. It was the first time I'd used it since the room was upgraded from Scrapheap, and it was pleasant enough, though busy as ITS have decided to get people to apply online for their network connections this year. While there, Whitney sorted out our broadband account, which should be available in about a week - this update's being put up over the dialup account that we've been given as a backup.

Yesterday we were awoken by my mobile phone at 8am, which was caused by the startlingly efficient phone engineer. He seemed a bit odd at first, but when plied with coffee he became more talkative. It seemed we had three phone ports - two extensions in the bedroom and the main one in the living room - but only one phone, which looks like something left over from the Spanish Armada and is hilariously labelled the "Phonanza Dialatron". You can hear the pulses in your ear while dialling as it simulates a rotary phone, so automated services don't work.

To add to the meagre telephony hardware, we went to Nickel 'n' Dime to get another phone, eventually coming out with miscellany like picture frames and a hair trimmer. The receipts from that place are patently useless, as every single item is marked down as "Shop sales", and the itemised receipt called the shop "Nickel 'n' Dime" but the card confirmation argues that its name is "Nickle & Dime". Nevertheless, we now have a working phone line - if you want the number, phone and ask me for it.

I also had the experience of joining the library that day. That's not something that I'd ever done before, as my previous library card had been taken out for me when I was about three and it somehow found its way into my wallet between then and when I was actually inspired to use it. Cupar library's system involved us writing all our details on to cards and then the librarian painstakingly entering them all in to the computer - there's room for more efficiency there. When we eventually got on to the computers, the machine I logged on to warned of some kernel process giving illegal instructions and then warned me that it had serious hard drive integrity issues, so it's probably just as well that we've got backup dialup access here.

And now that you can read this entry, you can see that the backup dialup access is actually working - I was panicked when it didn't connect at all last night, no matter how much I fiddled with settings, changed from tone to pulse dialling and back, got it to dial more slowly so that the pension-drawing phone line could understand, told it to ignore the fact that it couldn't hear a dial tone when there clearly was one, ran checks on the modem, pleaded with it, or hit it with a sledgehammer. Eventually a new cable from the modem to the wall solved the problem - we had been using the same one as from the Dialatron (the Dialatron!), but evidently there's some difference that I didn't know about.

Last night's entry, today

Before Whitney and I embarked on our journey down to Cupar, I had to undergo a painful extraction at the optician. It was £181, to be exact. My eyesight is actually improving, and the spot that occasionally appears in my right eye is apparently caused by things floating inside it, which sounds sick-making but is quite normal. The result of my eyes springing back into shape just a year after my NHS coverage ran out is the vast cost of getting new glasses, but I had the new experience of driving without my eyes feeling like I'd poured lemon juice into them afterwards.

It's anyone's guess when this entry will be put up (it's being written on Saturday evening), because we don't have Internet access at the flat yet. At least in having no service, we can be safe in the knowledge that we're not on ResNet. Not that I had much of a problem with their uptime or speed, but it was their paranoid attitude to port blocking that got to me. I used to regularly use FTP to transfer files between my computer and the Honours server, but after Christmas last year it suddenly stopped working. When I emailed them to complain, they told me that it had always been blocked, and that this was "normal operation of the ResNet firewall". It remains the most Orwellian email I've ever received.

The phone service will start on Monday, so after that I'll look around on Uswitch, and if no better options present themselves (and provided it's available for us) we're going to go with PlusNet.

Things have been unpacked, which took ages, and I've run up and down the ladder in to the spacious attic to store suitcases and boxes. It still doesn't seem like the university year is near at all, because normally at this time I'd be sitting in Andrew Melville with my door propped open playing Prince of Persia and meeting my lunatic corridor-mates as they came in. Instead, after forgetting to have lunch, we went to the Indian place to avoid any real cooking, and the adventure of going to LiDL will begin tomorrow.

Interlude

We got the box open eventually. It turns out that the "administrator" had taken the keys to the department just before vanishing, so that's what she was after. One of the developers eventually opened it by chiselling the rod out of the hinges, looking suspiciously like he'd done it before, followed by a joint effort of levering the two halves apart using a set of screwdrivers.

We have another German over temporarily, by the name of Julia. She's been visiting my old school and meeting all the terrifying language teachers. Listening to her and my mother speak has unfortunately made me realise how terrible I've let my German ability get.

Whitney has been rather ill with a cold all day (which if you ask me could be some sort of karmic retribution for when she likened The Crystal Maze to Supermarket Sweep). I've been feeding her on vegetable stock, biscuits, crisps and other healthy revitalising food, so she'll hopefully be better by Saturday when we move down to the flat.

Otherwise, things are going pretty well - she's at least here, and I got an email asking for permission to perform the Memory of Babylon yesterday. I have also been receiving an avalanche of messages from a scarily enthusiastic Crystal Towers fan who writes about one thousand words per email. It's always nice to be appreciated.

Last day of work

I seem to be on something of a sugar high just now. This is unsurprisingly the result of having nothing to eat except sugar all morning - I brought in a pack of doughnuts and a supply of the best biscuits in the Universe (Fox's Golden Crunch Creams, if you're wondering) in return for the never-ending stream of goodies that I've been plied with since starting work here. The effect isn't quite as bad as the time when I drank hot chocolate with about ten spoons of sugar in it right after giving blood, but it's causing me to be rather twitchy, especially as I'm just sitting here with nothing to do until 12:30 except sort out some papers so that I can make them marginally more decipherable to whosoever I decide to land them on.

I was given a card by the rest of the team (half of whom are mysteriously out today). I didn't think my leaving was a huge event as I've only been here for two months, but it was much appreciated.

Actually, I have right this moment been given my last assignment - breaking in to the petty cash tin. Someone's misplaced the key for it, so I've been handed the tough black box and a selection of hammers and pliers to bash it open. This could prove to be my most difficult task yet.

In addition, it turns out that our new departmental administrator doesn't exist. After phoning in saying that she's fallen down her stairs, no one in the office could get hold of her for ages. The deputy director decided to contact one of her references, and it turns out that she's done this before - got a job, come in to work the first day, phoned in with an unfortunate accident and vanished off the face of the earth. No one knows why she does this. In fact, no one even knows who she is at all, as she's most likely using a false name.

I really couldn't make this up.

Whitney's Journey

The helpdesk officer's computer has just exploded. Well, more accurately it was the power supply, but the office is now filled with a plasticky burning smell. There was a problem with another computer's video card this morning as well, so there seems to be a disease going round them at the moment. It livened up the day a bit, at least.

I will shortly be free of detonating computers, because this is my last full day working here - I have this afternoon and tomorrow morning, then my role as a VLE Administrator (Temporary) will be over and I'll go back to being a Student Programmer (Mediocre).

Friday afternoon seemed to take ages, as all afternoons leading up to life-changing events do. I got out of work and decided to ignore Whitney's advice on taking the bus, instead walking up George Street to the Queen Mother Library.

When I turned the corner on to Bedford Road, someone who sounded like he was from Spain shouted across the road to me, asking if I knew where Bedford Place was. I hollered back that I wasn't sure, as I wasn't from around there (something that I said to try and politely avoid being asked directions, as I know very little about my way around Aberdeen - I know how to get to work, the beach, and that's about it). Unfortunately he was friendly and asked whereabouts I was from. On the spur of the moment I replied Bristol, which I haven't lived in for about seventeen years, but it was the only thing that came in to my head at the time to save embarrassment at not knowing the way around my own local city. It turned out that he had family there, so he asked me more about myself. We continued the conversation as we walked down the road, with me shouting my entire fabricated life story piece by piece to him across two lanes of traffic. According to this improvised fiction, my parents live in Aberdeen, and I get my accent from them even though I live in the south of England. The experience was rather surreal, and I was rather glad when he found the place he was looking for and turned down a side road.

Eventually I got to the University of Aberdeen library, and had enough difficulty getting in because they've secured the place against outside students and peasants getting in with a turnstile system. I asked where I could use my laptop, and they said that I could just ignore the "No laptops" signs everywhere because of it not being term time. I set myself up, and spent a couple of hours playing Megazeux. It's another of those games which seems to charm me in to liking it.

After what seemed like ages, I went down to Cataloguing to pick up my mum, and we went to the airport together, arriving about fifteen minutes before the plane was due to land at 16:35. I went in and saw that the plane had been delayed until 17:40. I went out again and informed my mum as such, so she went away to do some shopping.

I decided to fill up the time by devising some sort of purpose for myself, and that was to walk all the way up to the nearest garage and top up my mobile phone, which I hadn't used for months and had a total of 12p of credit on it. That didn't take long enough, so I just walked in random directions around the airport and played Maze of the Kings, which I noted had the worst acting in any game ever (and this area is hotly contested).

The plane was "on approach" for at least twenty minutes, and I was waiting at the UK Arrivals gate for Whitney to emerge. Getting fed up of that, I wandered off to find Whitney emerging from the UK Arrivals 2 gate, which hadn't existed the last time that I had been in the airport. The plane had waited on the runway at both Heathrow and Aberdeen for ages due to "weather issues", because evidently no one had expected it to rain in Britain. We collected her soaked luggage and went off home to moan about it there.

Whitney

Oh, and Whitney arrives today. I just thought I'd mention it, as this event is going to more or less change my entire life from now on.

Music, videos, music videos

"Don't you think this would be a great video to edit pineapples into?" asked Richard as he opened Stratovarius' video of "Hunting High and Low". He is clearly mad, but I could see his point in a bizarre sort of way. (It would take too long to explain.)

It wouldn't be the first time that he's ventured in to video production, either - recently, he and a group of friends put together a music video for Dragonforce's "Fury of the Storm", with them with their faces painted and wielding plastic weapons, interspersed with shots of other random nonsense. It's entitled "Fury of the Grünt", complete with heavy metal umlaut, and I won't put it up here because it would hurt my dialup connection and your sanity.

I am immensely impressed, though, with the recognisability that Dragonforce have gained. They haven't been an absolute favourite of mine, but they're decent enough, and now it seems that they're very popular with the in-crowd, a couple of years after their first album came out on Noise Records. I hope, though, that their becoming more popular doesn't put me off them. Like I mentioned a couple of months ago in that gigantic article that you didn't read, it seems that the more popular a band becomes the less likable it is to people who knew them when they weren't. Even though I can feel this happening, I'm going to try and stop thinking like that because it's immensely silly. It is, at least, a step forward for the recognisability of the music I like. Now all we need is for Sonata Arctica to do the same.

Iron Maiden in "decent artwork" shock!

It came as a surprise to me yesterday to find out that Iron Maiden had recently released a new album. Called "Death on the Road", it's a live release, so it's not as big news as it could be, but it still made me realise how little I'd been keeping up with them. I was near-fanatical about them in school, but let my interest in them slip when I discovered that many other bands in Europe were more than competent at imitating and surpassing their style. They now seem to be rather repetitive and uninspired to me, because Steve Harris lost the ability to write choruses around the time when he wrote The Angel and the Gambler (ten minutes of song with roughly three minutes of content).

I've never really appreciated live albums that much, because they seem to be rather a contradiction in terms to me - seeing a band live is about seeing them live, and I like the neater sound of music when it's recorded and produced. Nevertheless, what strikes me about this release is that shockingly, it has decent cover artwork. Iron Maiden have had a problem with this ever since Derek Riggs got fed up of them, and have since had an appallingly tatty piece that looks like an old Megadrive game and an episode of Reboot gone badly wrong. But with this one I think things are looking a lot better - they've even got the obligatory Eddie reference in, and the pun in the title (continuing their track record with "Live after Death" and "Maiden Japan").

was right when she said that as Whitney's arrival on Friday gets nearer, time will slow down in a parabolic fashion. Well, she might not have put it exactly like that, but the idea was the same - today has simply been dragging along, I've imported some files and weblinks, and the highlight of the day so far has been receiving an email about door wedges.

Sorry, I try to make a point not to write spontaneous complaining posts for the sake of them, but it's at least something to pass a minute or so. While I'm at it, I might as well mention that I found a reasonable amount of pencil sharpenings in my bed last night. My siblings do have a habit of messing up my room, but I think that must have required special effort.

Thiazolidinediones

I don't think a caption is really necessary.

In my first year of university, there was quite a colossal in-joke surrounding this image (mostly perpetuated by and latched on to by myself). I'm not sure what's quite so appealing about it, but there's something I find inherently funny in the simplicity of two disjunct pieces of clipart stuck crudely together.

Today I was looking round the Virtual Campus again, and I discovered that I'd been using it as my profile picture since testing the system a few weeks ago. Taking it down may be the best option (even though it may be quite an accurate assessment of many of our users) but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that at the moment. Still, a small inconvenience.

During my time at the RGU I've managed to avoid most of the data entry tasks that I was warned about before I started. My first task (after a week of nothing much) was to input staff accounts on the system for the whole university. After finishing this several weeks sooner than was expected, I was given odd jobs to do in the code and testing, and eventually put in charge of the external testers for the site. However, my luck has run out, and my last week of work is now composed of shovelling a whole lot of weblinks from the old site to the new one.

I wouldn't mind, but the system isn't really designed for mass movement like this. I should really ask for direct access to the databases because that would get things done a whole lot quicker, but the people in charge are away and the developers have enough to do already what with all the schools complaining about the changes that we've made.

The main difficulty with the task (but also what makes it interesting) is the way that for the new system, all weblinks must have a title along with their URL and description. This title can be no more than 50 characters, and selecting fifty characters out of the description is rather difficult because some of them are more like five hundred. Added to this is the fact that they're for Pharmacy and are composed of a whole lot of incomprehensible medical terms, so I really have no idea about what's important in them. Creative shortening of the descriptions is necessary to accurately summarise the content - for example, "Guidelines on the use of zaleplon, zolpidem and zopiclone for the short-term management of insomnia" might become "Sleepy drugs that begin with Z", and "ABC of complementary medicine: The benefits of acupuncture as an alternative medical procedure" can be shortened to "Sticking pins in people". Well, I don't quite have that much freedom, but it does lend some illusion of thinking to what would otherwise be a very monotonous task.

I had a dream last night that I had a Mini which could fold up to the size of a USB drive. Perfect for saving on parking spaces. I was rather annoyed when the alarm woke me up.

Broadband

I'll break the silence for a while to ask another question about broadband. This is something that's entirely new to me, so I'd welcome any comments and suggestions that other people have.

The situation with the phone line is that it won't be active until the 19th of September, but it's likely that it'll be simple and free to switch it back on. For phone service, I think we only need BT Option 1, as it's the minimum we can pay (it includes the line rental) and it's adequate for how much we're actually going to use it.

Broadband is more difficult, as I don't have any experience with any companies here. At the moment, there are three possibilities:

Pipex Lite 2000 5GB - 2MB maximum bandwidth, 5GB usage a month, free hardware and setup. They advertise it as £9.99 a month, but it isn't really - it's that for the first two months, then £23 after that, which is still outwardly comparable with the other services in terms of price. Choosing this gives Don a bonus from customer recommendation!

PlusNet Broadband Plus - 2MB maximum bandwidth (split between 50), unlimited usage, with free hardware and setup. This is the company that I know the least about, but it also looks the most promising. They say that the Plus package is for "email and surfing" rather than downloading, but I can't really see why. It's £14.99 a month.

Tiscali Something - I've been warned to stay as far away from Tiscali as is humanly possible, and further research on the Internet seems to agree with this, but Whitney used them two years ago in Oxford and never had a problem with them at all. They also seem to change their offers by the week, so it's a bit difficult to choose one. The one I'm looking at just now is £14.99 a month, and gives 1MB bandwidth, unlimited usage, and a phone service that's cheaper than the BT one. 2MB is only £2 more a month, though.

As the phone line isn't switched on for a fortnight, I can't actually check the availability until then, but from looking at this directory it seems likely that we have access to them all.

Any ideas? Comments from people who have had experience with these companies would be much appreciated.