Month: August 2004

As you may know, I’ll be doing a crash course in parachuting – hopefully climaxing in a solo freefall – next weekend, to celebrate my (finally) getting a degree, courtesy of my dad. The weather reports don’t look too favourable, though – potentially stormy at the end of this week. Hmmph. We’ll see. It’ll take more than a little lightning to stop me from throwing myself out of an aeroplane.

In other news, Claire‘s been using the student loan repayment calculator on The Guardian’s Education site, looking at different career paths and calculating how long it would take her to repay her student loans (at £18,000 + inflation only, it would take her about 40 years). She clicked on “Web Site Designer”, just out of curiosity, and the resulting page caused her browser to crash. Somehow, this is very funny.

Whoops. You’d have thought I’d have learnt my lesson when I fucked around with BIND last year, and ‘broke’ a small portion of the internet, but no. I managed to ‘break the internet’ again while playing with the Domain Name System settings on big. That’s why Scatmania was inaccessible for the last day or so (to most people).

In other news, spent Sunday in the office, working on getting the database for the project I’ve been working on live and online, with some success, despite the power company’s best attempts to stop me. Those in Aber will have experienced the power cuts of Friday and Sunday (half an hour in the second case), which crippled one of SmartData‘s computers with a power spike to it’s PSU – one I’ll be glad to be rid of, admittedly (yet another cheaply made piece of junk from Microland UK). But nevertheless, the power cut was of great inconvenience to those of us trying to work to a deadline, on a Sunday, and wanting to get home in time to go out and see I, Robot. I sat outside in the sun-come-drizzle and read a book that was one of my recommended course texts but that I never got around to reading while I was actully doing my degree, and listened to the ocassional screams of the UPS bricks to let me know that I still couldn’t actually get on with some work.

I, Robot was OK… kind-of a re-hashing of the concepts put forward in Blade Runner, Electric Dreams, The Matrix, A.I., and Bicentennial Man, with an excessive use of bullet-time and slow motion. Coherent, though… but you will come out of the cinema saying “See every other robot movie for examples of this theme.”

Right; off to work…

This is actually getting quite painful. I’ve now been at work for 13 hours straight, and for a total of 40 hours so far this week. Still; next week should be marginally better.

The knackeredness I can deal with. What’s nasty is that I’m not seeing as much of Claire as I’d like.

A large number of orthodox jews have descended upon Aberystwyth as part of an annual tradition going back for as long as anyone seems able to remember. They charter a train and rent out PJM, the student village. It’s an interesting spectacle. I recall that about this time two years ago I had a fire on the beach. The people I’d been there with had gone home, and I stayed to tend the embers. Eventually, I fell asleep, curled up beside the fire, and when I woke up (at around 3am) I found myself surrounded by orthodox jews (of all ages), standing, staring out to sea. As you can imagine, I assumed I must be dreaming, but it gradually became apparent that no, this was actually happening, and the beach really was filled with jews. Trippy.

On other jewish related news, are any of you familiar with Dor Yeshorim, a schecme to reduce the frequency of close-society-breeding related genetic disorders in jews of Eastern European origin? I guess not, but anyway – SmartData is writing the software that tracks the genetic samples submitted by Dor Yeshorim service users, which is keeping folks like Alex and I immensely busy with lots of early mornings and late nights.

In other news; he saw beans, lots of beans, lots of beans, lots of beans; he saw beans, lots of beans, lots of beans, lots of beans.