Year: 2003

[this post was lost during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004; it was partially recovered on 21st March 2012]

They must die.

My alarm clock has an interesting featurette. The design is, on the hole, like many similar mains-powered radio alarm clocks. It has a button for "Time Set", and one for "Alarm Set", and …

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Today, Orange sent me a text message apologising for charging me for two picture messages earlier this year, and have apparently credited me 80p as a gesture of compensation. The Register reports that this has happened to others, too, but I can't help but feel that Orange's mistake is even larger than they thought it …

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Oh yeh; and, in case you hadn't noticed - AbNib is down. And it's not my fault! The server fucked up something rotten, but seems to be okay now. And whoever posted a comment to one of my entries the other day and had it not-appear; sorry: same issue.

I'll try to get AbNib up again …

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Woo and indeed hoo. Just when I was about to wander down to Richley's and take advantage of their sale on jeans (having had a nasty shredding-related accident with one-too-many of my existing pairs of trousers a couple of weeks back), my Auntie Anne sends me a parcel of goodies, including several pairs of trousers …

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Gave a presentation about my dissertation today in a poster session which is worth 0.825% of my mark for this year. Seems insignificant, but they say that it all adds up. In any case, it went very well; people seemed interested in the technical side of my ideas and nobody bothered to ask any questions …

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I've just beaten Mario Kart: Double Dash's "All Cups Cup" (the cup you gain access to having already beaten all the other cups - including the Special Cup - at the maximum engine power) at 150cc! Which makes me a happy bunny, 'cos now it's unlocked all the tracks... backwards! Another excuse to waste lots …

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Just watched Adaptation with Claire and Paul. Absolutely fantastic - a post-modern marvel. Put simply, it's an adaptation of a book entitled The Orchid Thief - a true story about the author, Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), meeting John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a horticultural specialist who collects endangered orchids, set to the backdrop of Charlie Kaufman, …

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I've just written an artificial intelligence gamebot, designed to pseudointelligently play simple board games which involve a finite upper number of moves and a board of tokens - for example: Connect Four, Noughts & Crosses, Go!, or Othello. It uses the (appropriately-written) rules of the game in order to pre-anticipate a vast number of moves, …

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...and one day, on your beat, you catch a guy driving the wrong way down a residential one-way street. Well; that's not very good, so you flag him down and investigate. Upon reaching the car, you discover that he is driving the wrong way down the road as a result of a lack of due …

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I've been thinking about a popular mathematical document easily available on the web, More Monkey Business, which uses the maths behind the otherwise inconceivable "infinite monkey problem" (if a million monkeys at a million keyboardsetc.... also known as Usenet...) as a gateway to argue against molecular biology's evolutionary theory, which states that life 'came together' …

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It turns out that Windows Longhorn is a lot like the child of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but (at this early stage) less stable. Just what we've come to expect.

On the other hand, it's a lot faster than I might have expected (considering its dependency on the .NET framework). If you play with …

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