Kind: Articles

Paul: you might be interested in this (just for the challenge of watching them all) – Time have produced their top 100 movies list; take a look.

Claire and I went out with Sundeep last night to Reload at the Students Union, which was surprisingly good fun, apart from that weird man who briefly kidnapped Claire and the queues for the bar.

And in other news, progress seems to be being made on a number of new RockMonkey WikiGames, including Ruth‘s much-anticipated “The Adventures Of Tootie and Sweetie in the Land of the Happy Pixies”, which I’m looking forward to.

She’s particularly dippy tonight –

Woman on TV shopping channel, talking about product: “This is the R.S.P.C.A sleepshirt…”
Claire (commenting on apparent stupidity of presenter): “I bet she can’t even spell R.S.P.C.A.”

Claire: I’m not very confident about my exam this Saturday. That’s why I haven’t done any revision. And why I stopped attending the lectures.

It’s exam week, and so I find myself surrounded by stressy students. Sundeep, in particular, worries far too much about her exams; but even Claire‘s not immune: while on the surface she’s fine, she’s been having weird dreams (of missing an exam… of failing an exam… spot a theme?) and has been getting frustrated easily. It took until I pointed this out that she noticed that this could be a result of subconscious stress about the exams. Bless. I remember being a student… while I too would always be cool as a cucumber, particularly challenging exams left me with (more) bizarre dreams for about a week afterwards.

Watched the Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy movie yesterday. It wasn’t as good as the TV series, which in turn wasn’t as good as the radio show, which in turn wasn’t as good as the books. But it was still pretty good: suitably trippy and “out there”, and with some great interpretations of the story and ways of putting it forward (including a stunning-looking scene where Arthur and Slartibartfast zip around the construction site of Earth II). A little fast-paced, it could have spread the story out a little more and thereby left less of the audience so confused, but as somebody who knew the story already, it made great watching.

Played through Full Throttle (on ScummVM) for the first time in years. It’s a short adventure game, with some ludicrously stupid puzzles, but it really is fun. When you’re hanging on the front of an armoured battle truck heading at breakneck speed for a cliff while the driver tries to shoot you with a pistol… and you panic… and look at your inventory… and the best thing you can think of to do is to shove a battery-powered fluffy bunny toy into the air intake… bzzzrrrt… “Fun!”, that game says. Ah, sweet. JTA, I’m assuming that now your exam is out of the way that you’ll be wanting a copy.

Rocking soundtrack, too, mostly by The Gone Jackals.

Work is good: I’m on a nice project that’s keeping me well-enthused, albeit also taking a lot of my time. It’s got polymorphic recursive PHP5 code in, that forms middleware between a relational database and an object-oriented model, so that’s pretty cool.

Speaking of programming, does anybody want to take on Jimmy‘s RockMonkey BigCloud Mapper (scroll down) challenge this summer? I don’t have the time or the inclination myself, but I’ll lend support to anybody who does.

Contrary to what JTA thinks, it’s quite easy to read by candlelight. I couldn’t sleep last night (or, to put it another way, I wasn’t even remotely tired by the time Claire went to bed, which is perhaps more a result of the fact that she’s not used to getting up so early in the morning as she had to yesterday, for her first exam), so I ended up reading for quite awhile to the light of two candles, and the light levels were fine. Perhaps your gamma correction is turned down too low, JTA… I have a screwdriver…

Right now I’m reading A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby, which is quit un-put-downable. Darker than Hornby’s usual wit, it tells the story of four people who, coincidentally, on one particular New Year’s Eve, all choose the same tower block from which to commit suicide. The story is told, alternately, from their four unique perspectives, using their own unique language, and it’s… well… it’s just a fascinating story, so far.

And now, I’d better get off to work. But I’ll leave you with this satellite photo from Google Maps – what’s the large object in the centre of the picture?

“Does she?”

45 minutes ago Claire went to get dressed so we can leave the house. She’s just finished putting her jumper on.

Our toaster at work just blew up. It’s an Inspirations 4-Slice Toaster and I’d recommend against it to anybody. It’s actually the second such toaster we’ve had: Alex bought one from Woolworths so we could toast things and before long it developed a problem such that only 2 of the slots actually worked (the others just held on to cold bread). Later still, it exploded as it was turned on, shooting blue sparks in a plume up to the ceiling.

This new toaster was a replacement, and it soon developed the same “2 slices only” problem. While Gareth was making himself toast this morning he loaded up all 4 slices and I reached over to demonstrate that a particular two didn’t work… as soon as I pressed the lever down, there was a flash: a sparkly orange plume shot up out of the device and the circuit breakers engaged.

So now I can’t have my muffins for breakfast. And I’m hungry.