Pasta Battle

I would like to take a while to sing the praises of LiDL instant pasta, which I am alternately burning myself with and eating with chopsticks at the moment. Anything "instant" sounds fairly revolting from the outset, but this is far from the studentiness of Super Noodles - it's true that it resembles a pile of grit and a mass of dry vague semicircles when you tip it out into a pan, but after adding water and boiling the daylights out of it for a few minutes, the smoke clears to reveal a mass of surprisingly edible vague semicircles. True, it's not exactly Gordon Ramsay, but it works.

The reason I'm eating with chopsticks is that apparently if you're totally useless with them like me, being forced to eat more slowly makes it feel as if you've eaten more. This is because following a number of comments from my dad around the Christmas period, I have resolved to stop moaning about how fat I perceive myself to be and do something about it. The main reason, I feel, is the lack of proximity of a DDR machine, which is pretty much the only exercise that I've got since I learned to drive. (I recently realised that I'd missed my chance to come home to my siblings and say "You lot can all move up a bike", which was very funny in my head. Does the same bike hierarchy exist anywhere but my family? Ramble, ramble.) I have resorted to doing fifty sit-ups a day, normally just before bed as I completely forget about them until then.

Surprisingly I did some work on my project yesterday - it now has a GUI instead of putting everything on the command line, but no matter how low your expectations are you'd be disappointed if I showed it to you. It looks pretty appalling, but it's in a window now, and if that's good enough for Microsoft it's good enough for me. I give up, I'm going to get a fork.

Name Me

This week I have to continue with the Overwhelming Project of Death, start writing the Gigantic Essay of Despair and look at the Career Sites of Bostonicity. Getting up the motivation to work is proving difficult after having had such a long break from it (exams notwithstanding), but writing them here might make them seem a bit more real.

Lately, Whitney and I discussed what to do with our names after we get married. She doesn't want to change her name to mine in the traditional way, and who can blame her - I wouldn't want to change mine. I wouldn't be able to do the little hooks on the Ns in my signature, for one thing. The other normal approach, concatenating the two names, produces either the unwieldily long "Newton-Leader-Picone" or the lengthily unwieldy "Leader-Picone-Newton", or permutations thereof. Permutations thereof. Sounds like I'm in an ideal state to start on this essay.

Anyway, keeping our original names sounds like the best solution for the time being, but what about children later on? They'll either take my name (which is great until you start taking Physics at school) or hers, which is not as close to palindromic as mine. Of course, one solution is to think up a new name entirely, and the commonly accepted method of doing this is, of course, playing Boggle.

N E O E
I W A E N
C L P D
O R N T E
From the above grid, a number of possibilities are opened up. Anderton New-Icepole, for example, is relatively normal though verging slightly on the pretentious side, and Ornatewine Pelcend takes the pomposity to absurd levels. Cowpaint-Leederonen has a slightly Dutch flavour to it, unlike Wireleap Conned-Note. I don't think either of us would be quite satisfied with Irate Clooneen Pwned.

Nothing worthwhile or productive can even come of this, but it amused me for a moment or so.

Putting the "Metal" into "Mental"

I tend to piece together ideas for longer LJ posts in my head a couple of days before I actually get around to writing them. When I drew up that band diagram a week ago, seeing the large amount of overtheatrical silliness on the Metal Archive gave me the idea for a "Top 5 Ridiculous Power Metal Bands" sort of thing, something that I didn't think would be difficult to write due to the clear abundance of subject matter.

I've been forced to abandon this idea, however, because Lost Horizon deserve at least all five of the places. Clearly inspired by the Highlander story, the site appears passable at first glance (the "No Fate, Only the Power of Will" header and slightly AOL-like flame graphic notwithstanding) but becomes gradually more insane the more you look through it.

Take the Members page (or Warriors, as they choose to call themselves). The bassist - sorry, "Orchestrator Of Thunder & Seismic Harmonizing" - is known as Cosmic Antagonist, and his real name, included on the page as largely an afterthought for us lesser mortals, is described as simply his "Earthshape". The whole thing would be agonisingly pretentious if it wasn't so hilarious.

The biography page describes the history of the band as you'd expect, but reads like the plot for an episode of Masters of the Universe. Elsewhere, the band describes the message that it's trying to convey. Surprisingly, I agree with some of the sentiments under "True Metal", but the rest of it goes on about the Force and might as well have been written by Obi-Wan Kenobi. The whole site's a classic example of overdoing things.

Still not convinced? Look at this album cover and one of the wallpapers. I don't think I need to add anything here.

The trouble is that when I pointed all this lunacy out to Whitney, she said that she didn't see a difference between them and all the other bands that I listen to. Perhaps the problem is worse than I thought.

On grades

Rough Grade Guide
Range	Result
19-20	Astronomical
17-19	Great
14-17	Fairly great
12-14	Passable
9-12	A bit mince
5-9	Mince
0-5	Total mince

I am most impressed with myself, in that I've managed to resist checking my exam results for three full days. Just a week and a half to go now until there's actually a chance of them being visible.

During my three and a half years at St Andrews, I have been continually mystified by the entire grading system and what my results actually mean. Grades are awarded on a curved scale from 0 (useless) to 20 (amazing), with 5 being a pass. That's simple enough, but even though a 5 is a pass it's still a pretty poor grade, and an 11 is apparently the minimum that most people should be aiming for.

The grade conversion table provided a while ago by helps a little. I wouldn't rely on it too much, mostly because it varies from department to department anyway, but more worryingly because it notes that getting a lower second class grade requires a reasonable degree of "presision".

More seriously, at the moment I am on a 16.3 average - this is a rather awkward place to be as there are only a couple of fractions of grades between getting a 1st and a 2:1 at the end of it all. There are two weeks until I find out just how hard I need to work next semester, and it looks like the grade system is forever going to remain a mystery.

Bits and PCs, and numbers, and panic

During the weekend at home, I had to make what for me passes as a mature and reasoned decision: the 386 is going to have to go. It's been languishing under my desk for as long as anyone can remember, but when I started it up to try and retrieve QBasic from it, it couldn't find its 100MB hard drive, and even when I gently pointed it out it failed to find any sort of operating system on it. So I can only conclude that the hard drive has finally failed catastrophically, and no parts of it are of any use to any other computer in the house, so it's been earmarked for dumping. It's euthansia, really.

I made up for it by peeling apart the 486 instead and putting the larger of its two hard drives into the P3. I quickly found out that it had the worst designed case in the world, necessitating not only removing the floppy drive before getting to the hard disks, but also the power cable and the entire drive bay as well. I actually did all this so that I could see the old TGF/MMF files on them again, but unfortunately they all turned out to be much more appalling than I remember.

When Whitney and I got down the road, it was obvious that my own computer had somehow heard about me skinning and eviscerating its friends, as it stuck firmly at the Windows XP Home bootup screen, and when told to use the last known good configuration it simply reset itself repeatedly. I went to the library to find some online advice, and after a panicked evening of going into Safe Mode and trying some System Restores, I'm not even sure why it's working now. Apparently it's something to do with my new graphics card's software being dodgy, but the card still works fine in itself. Computers are too much trouble sometimes.

If I could find my blasted pendrive, everything would be great.

Visa

Herzog Zwei. Have you any idea how astonishingly overcomplex the process for getting married in America is? I've just called the premium rate £1.20-a-minute advice line to see if I was mistaken, but the process is genuinely this bad - Whitney has to fill in the catchily-named I129F form and send it (while in America) to New Hampshire, where it'll be looked at, approved or disproved and sent to London for processing, all for a small filing fee of $170. London will then send us up another set of forms, which have to be filled out and sent back to them, then they'll contact us about getting an appointment at the embassy, leaving us to try and find some way of finding the time and money to get down there. Maybe we'll just live here instead. The stress is enough to make someone make two LJ entries in one morning.

Exceed 2

After a few practices on Stepmania and another visit to the Union, I think I'm getting quite good at Exceed 2 now. Playing it is rather like learning DDR all over again, but I can now read songs of difficulty 5 to 6 fast enough, and find my way around the pad well enough to pass them. I'm certain that the game's more difficult than Euromix 2, though, even ignoring the different layout. What's mildly distracting is the way that arrows scroll off the screen rather than burst even if you hit them with a slightly off-beat hit, so you think you've missed them.

It turns out that the only thing you have to do to get a chance at the scoreboard is complete a game, rather than complete a preset course as in DDR - this means the difficulty is in finding high-rated songs that you can pass without overdoing them and collapsing/dying in the middle. So far I've found "Beethoven Virus" and "Vivaldi Winter" decent songs for this, with the only drawback being the distracting faint whirring sound as the respective composers turn rapidly in their graves.

Bandcest

It was Whitney that coined the term "bandcest" while describing my taste in music and the way that everyone involved in its creation seems to switch groups every five years or so, forming one large band that encompasses virtually the whole of Europe. As I've now finished my exams, I took the time to do what all students do when they have time on their hands - draw out insanely complex diagrams. Maybe that's just me.

I was going to take account of guest appearances compared to leaving one band and joining another, but I think that would have required me to invent a couple of extra dimensions in order to make the whole thing readable. It's large enough as it is for one morning - I kept on discovering new links that I didn't know about, and decided to give up when it began looking rather silly and escaping the genre. Oddly enough, I couldn't find any links from Nightwish to the main tree at all, so you could say that they are the only non-incestuous power metal band ever, as if that's something of which to be proud.

So, with this diagram I was trying to answer the question of whether the large number of European metal bands are actually all the same one.

Yes.

Stage clear!

This exam period has to have been one of the most difficult ever - not necessarily because of the exams themselves, but because of my body's complete refusal to co-operate. I woke up at 3am this morning, and had to dash to the bathroom roughly once every half hour from then until 8, these periods interspersed with the nightmares that my argumentative brain decided to throw at me.

This is all very strange - normally I don't suffer from exam nerves, and far less have to spend mornings bringing up nothing before each one. As a result, I've sat them all while hungry and uncomfortable. It can only be that I had food poisoning on the first morning, then was sick about being sick on the other two. My head is fine but the rest of me disagrees, and wins by majority. It's as if it doesn't think that Mike Weir's remarkably sparse AI notes make things difficult enough.

Nevertheless, my exams are now over. I know that reading about other people's exams is almost as bad as having to sit them yourself, so for ease of comparison I have plotted the exam difficulty on the Rojometer, a scale that I invented for my Benchmarking presentation and that is dedicated to one of the more outspoken members of the class. No one outside computer science is going to get this. Still.

I'll condense this to mention just the major drawbacks. I'd say that today's exam, the AI one, was the one that I thought would be most difficult, but in reality I found myself being able to answer pretty much everything. It came to nine pages, as it happens. Frustratingly, each of the two massive formulae that I'd learned were given on the sheet and were only worth four marks anyway, so I avoided that question, but otherwise they were remarkably similar to some of the questions that we'd already covered in lectures.

The formula travesty, however, couldn't quite compete with a question in the Architecture paper: Give a description of hazards with regard to pipelines, and provide outlines of data, structural and control hazards. [1 mark]. Writing half a page of descriptions just to get one mark borders on absurdity.

But when it was all over, we went to Aikman's and talked about everything from psychology to ears and jet planes, then I wandered off to try and remember where I'd left the car, and drove home belting Glory of the World. I was stuck in a huge traffic jam for fifteen minutes, which spoiled the mood a bit, but the idea was there.

And now at fast approaching quarter to four, I think it's high time for some breakfast.

Theatre of Unspeakable Horror

I've noticed that and are in the habit of writing open letters to bits of themselves. I never really had the inclination to do so, but I would really like to ask my stomach what it thought it was up to this morning. I like to have a decent breakfast before exams, and if I am forced to un-have it half an hour later it doesn't make for the most comfortable of situations in which to do anything stressful. In fact, so violent was the expulsion of my Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes that I burst a significant number of blood vessels around my eyes, and my face now looks as if it's been hit by an annoyed woodpecker.

This Exorcist-like scene ended with me being guided to the sofa and shaking all over, and we even went as far as trying to phone James the McKinna to see how difficult it would be to allow me to do my impending Multimedia exam at a time when I wasn't feeling like all my internal organs had suddenly turned to jelly.

As it happened, after failing to reach them I stumbled into the car assisted by Whitney and drove in to town regardless, the risk of dying due to nausea still not quite outweighing my intense aversion to public transport. After finding a parking space I walked unsteadily to the Stewart Room, felt better once I'd got there, reverted to critical when I was waiting for the exam to start, and gradually got better from there. I then drove home, was accosted by an insane old woman when I parked on the corner next to her, and have not left bed since.

I wasn't even that nervous about the exam this morning - it was just something inside me sulking for a bit. I was confident that I knew the questions that were going to come up (which they did, and were comically similar to those on all the past papers) and that I could answer them. I do have two complaints about the exam, though, and just on the off-chance that Alan Ruddle/Miller reads this, I'll give my criticism here. (Roy Dyckhoff did. It caused no end of problems.)

The first was that the areas of which we had learned every little detail were only allocated four or five marks on the exam, when I could easily have written ten marks on each (JPEG compression and RGB/HSV/YUV/CMYK/DDR/PIU colour models being two of the ones that stick out in my mind). In fact, I did write all I knew about them, and as a result the last question took me a full hour rather than the expected thirty minutes. The second was that out of nowhere in the middle, we were asked about the properties of the human eye that allow us to watch colour TV, and the roles of rods and cones and their distribution on the fovea. If I wanted to be asked questions like that I'd have taken Biology.

I would be able to give the matter more attention were I not perched upon this wardrobe.

As it's Friday the 13th I gave myself the morning off in case the Jack Cole Building collapsed, or I was killed on the way to the lab, and so on. I've been pretty safe so far, but there are two pieces of bad news from recently...

The first is that the bank are charging us £30 because I transferred money into our joint account a couple of pico-seconds after it was debited by PlusNet. I've been on the phone trying to get out of it, which took a minute of discussion preceded by six minutes of rather pointless security questions and setting up of my account for telephone banking. And in the end they're not budging about the charge. I hope that Whitney is busy at work today, because I haven't actually told her this yet. Hello if you're reading.

And secondly, I received a worryingly low grade of 10 for my second Architecture practical. This isn't disastrous because it only brings my average down to about 14, but that's still the lowest grade that I've had before an exam. Actually I was expecting a low mark for it because I was well aware that my program was rubbish, and I had tried to cover it up with an outstanding report. Apparently the marker saw through the scheme this time, but it's hardly surprising as to be honest the entire thing was a complete pile of arse from start to finish. The computer science department have a patently unfair policy that means that grades are capped at exam grade + 2, which means that practicals can drag your grade down but they can't bring it up, so the plan of winging the Architecture exam might have to be reconsidered.

That's it - I'm going to the lab. And I'm taking this pack of revolting Tesco Value cookies with me so that I can spread the pain out a bit.

DDR, PIU, and other TLAs

(Disclaimer: If you are not one or more of , , , , or , you can probably skip all this.)

DDR in the Union is no more! Actually, that's a bit overdramatic - after a two-year run, the Euromix 2 machine has been updated, but it's a fairly major change this time. was the one that informed me of the change, saying that they now had a "third-party game with five panels". Being able to make a pretty good guess as what it was, I rushed off to the Union, pausing only to drop the guests off at AMH, go back to the flat, sleep, go to the lab and do a day's revision, pick Whitney up from work, have dinner, and sleep again.

But eventually, as I was saying, I found out that the Union now has PIU - it's PIU Exceed 2, to be precise, even though the top of the cabinet says that it's Premiere 3. I don't think it's going to draw quite as many people to itself as Euromix did, somehow - this isn't to do with the new layout, but more because there are very few recognisable songs on it at all. From what I've seen, there are three sets of songs - original ones (consisting of quite a few Yngwie Malmsteen-style classical rearragements on electric guitar for some reason), a set of Korean pop, and a set of what I can only call Other Pop.

I began to get a feel for the layout of the five panels (one at each corner and one in the centre) faster than I had imagined, but it still feels a little strange stepping in different places, particularly the resulting diagonal jumps. DDR sometimes got surprisingly intricate with only four panels, and using five opens a large number of other step patterns to get used to. It could be my imagination, but I think that the panel needs stomped on a lot harder than the DDR one for it to register your steps...

What's most interesting about this, though, is because of the completely different style of the game that comes from the new panel layout, even the DDR experts are going to have to get used to it all over again, and everyone will be restarting from pretty much the same level (on my first try I failed a five-rated song quite flagrantly, but the difficulty level of the game seems to be a lot higher than DDR in the first place). However, I've already seen some initials suspiciously similar to 's beginning to appear on the scoreboard, and it's only 50p a credit, so I'd better start going to the Union regularly again if I'm going to have a chance of keeping up.

Computery Things

I have not written in this in absolutely ages. Well, a week. Somehow I haven't had much to talk about, because my life either consisted of getting up at 12 or being ill and not bothering.

At least I got my PSAC reports done. I never thought that I would have so much difficulty producing 2000 words, but I chose to write about cryptography and challenges facing IT professionals. The point that I realised that I was in trouble was when the textbook I was blatantly copying bits from mentioned "an amusing anecdote concerning cryptanalysis of polyalphabetic ciphers in the eighteenth century".

Thanks to Whitney, I now have another 80GB of storage space - we shared an evening crowbarring the drive into the computer. It seems my case is built in a particularly stupid way, as there wasn't enough room to mount it in the normal space and it's been put in one of the CD drive bays instead. This was difficult enough in itself because the fan was blocking most of them - there are catches at the back to swing the motherboard out, but it's rather attached to the other side of the case by about a hundred little screws, making this feature largely useless. But it's in now and works fine, and probably will until we try and move the computer.

So as a result of all that I've finally been playing Civ 4, given to me by a while ago. After playing it for a few hours, I've concluded that it does mess with the rules a bit, but it's so nice about it that you don't really care. Everything on the map is updated constantly rather than using icons like the previous games - you can zoom right out and get a globe of the world explored so far, or go in to hear your civ's theme music playing in the towns, in which you can see the houses and improvements you've built so far. It's rather like Google Earth, in a way.

I've looked at the Multimedia past papers and am absolutely terrified, even though they seem to be virtually identical from year to year.

DOOM!

I just remembered something - the world's going to end again this year, according to the Bible code or something like that. Apparently it's had quite a decent record of being right, but then, so did Petre de Notredame and we're all still here. So as long as we try and keep the planet together for another 365 days we'll all have achieved the considerable accolade of living through three apocalypses - that's a decent target for the year, I feel. That and completing Treasure Tower.