Why Liz Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Text

Yesterday, I received the following text message from Liz, out-of-the-blue:

Hey! Hope your[sic] having a great time. Yes i[sic] care. L x

I thought that was a little unusual, but as this is Liz (who once sent me a text to tell me to “stay sexy”), I didn’t think too much of it.

Today, while I was in the RockMonkey chat room, where Liz was logged in as well, I was even more surprised to get a text from her (after all: she could just have typed her message to me). This one read:

Our stats coursework is back. I got 83 per cent. So so amazed. L

She announced this to the chat room at the same time, and so I started to wonder whether she’d meant to send me this message, and, of course, on a similar train of thought, whether she’d meant to send me the previous message.

<Ava_Work> You were so impressed with yourself… you texted me, too [as well as telling me here]! =o)
<LizH> sorry I was trying to text other dan [her boyfriend]. Damn what else have I been texting you. If itas anything naughty im sorry. Im so gonna have to start checkinigwho im txting now

For a moment, I was tempted to write this blogpost and make up that she’d texted me something naughty. Like, “Dan, I want your cock in me right now.” But then, if she’d have been sending me messages like that, I’d have not for a moment thought that it might have been destined for somebody else.

The End Of An Era

Well; yesterday saw the final Troma Night ever to take place in The Flat. Not to worry: there’ll be more at The Sharp, as I’m currently calling Claire and I’s new home, because “it’s like The Flat… only a little bit higher.” Still, it feels odd taking down all the film posters and things and packing all the tech’ into boxes.

It’s amazing quite how much stuff we’ve accumulated. We’re taking the oppertunity to purge some of it. I climbed into the attic here and started emptying it yesterday. This resulted in a find of:

Three computers in various states of disrepair
Two monitors
Two printers
Heaps of other stuff, tech’ and non-tech’

Most of this ‘spare’ computer tech is going to CRAFT for recycling, unless any of you want it, in which case come and claim it today and it’s yours. We don’t have an attic where we’re going, and we’d rather not fill up the spare bedroom with stuff just because we never use it – if we never use it, we don’t need to keep it!

Don’t forget, we’re moving Wednesday and all help this week – Wednesday, and Thursday/Friday for packing, moving, and cleaning/unpacking, respectively – is much appreciated. And a huge thanks to Paul already for doing the washing up, which is no mean feat!

Right – Claire’s complaining that I’m not helping her find the TV remote, so I’ll go do that. Jimmy – we’ve acquired a copy of last night’s Space Cadets (which, of course, we missed as a result of an overlap with Troma Night) so if you want to see it, come over sometime during the day.

Back to the packing;

Chef

Those who found themselves confused by my programming recipe the day before yesterday can now be a little less confused (hopefully): here’s the explanation.

The program is written in an esoteric programming language called Chef, who’s sole purpose is to be able to write computer programs that look like recipes. There are even competitions to write programs in it that can also be cooked as real dishes. It’s a strange world. Each of the ingredients is a primitive kind of variable (for the non-programmers: a named entity [eggs, penne pasta, etc.] that can contain a value). The values that these variables can be instantiated with are numbers, and the numbers are given at the start of the line. Therefore, at the start of the program, eggs=3 and penne pasta=56.

These are “put” into the mixing bowl one at a time. The mixing bowl is a stack – the things put in to it first appear at the bottom, with other things on top of it (for the non-programmers: stacks are immensely useful in almost all programming languages, so programmers tend to have no trouble with being told “the mixing bowl is a stack”). So, when the first item (penne pasta) is put into the mixing bowl, it (and it’s associated value, 76) sits at the bottom of the bowl, ready for other things to be “put” on top of it.

However, we do some more complicated things, such as “adding” a birds-eye chilli. “Adding” is not the same as “putting”. When something is “added” to the mixing bowl, the value of it’s ingredient is added, mathematically, to the value of the thing at the top of the bowl. So, for example, when we add “1” birds-eye chilli to the mixing bowl which contains only “76” grams of penne pasta, we end up with a mixing bowl containing just “77” grams of penne pasta.

“Combining” is another Chef operation. After we’ve put the fresh ginger (17) in, we combine it with the cinammon (5), which results in a multiplication of the top item in the bowl, resulting in 85. “Removing” the birds-eye chilli (1) reduces this number by 1, because the “remove” operation means “reduce the value of the ingredient from the value of the ingredient in the top of the mixing bowl”. Later, we “stir”, the mixture, which moves some of the values in the stack around (read the spec if you care). And eventually, we “liquefy” the contents of the mixing bowl, which turns the numbers into their Unicode equivilent (typically letters): N, A, M, T, A, C, and S.

The baking tray is the output buffer (buffet?) in which things must be placed to be output to the screen, and the “serves” directive indicates which baking tray (we only have one in my recipe, but the language specification allows for multiple bowls, trays, and even delegation of sauces and other side dishes to other chefs – see the recipe for Fibonacci Numbers with Caramel Sauce [and notice the recursion – “caramel sauce should be served with caramel sauce”]) we output to the screen.

Jon earns himself a pint from working through the program, the mad fool that he is. There was a flaw in his logic, though, that made him come up with “NAMTACS” as the answer: he forgot that the baking tray, too, is a stack, and that the order of the ingredients is not changed in the transfer from the mixing bowl to the baking tray (check the spec!)… when popping ingredients out of the baking tray, they come out in reverse order. A pint to Paul for spotting his mistake. The correct output is “SCATMAN”.

Thanks to David Morgan-Mar for this fantastic programming language. He’s also the man behind LenPEG, an image compression algorithm which, for selected images, can achieve lossless compression at a ratio of 6,291,456:1, and HQ9++, an object-oriented language which provides the most code-efficient possible method ever to write test programs such as Hello World, 99 Bottles Of Beer, and the Quine program, although nobody has ever successfully written a Fibonacci generator or a Towers of Hanoi solver in it.

ALP Property Management, Again

Regular readers might remember that a few weeks ago I had dealings with ALP in Aberystwyth, a letting agency. This afternoon I received a phone call from a representative of them.

He seemed to be threatening to take legal action because of “discrepancies in the allegations” I’d made in my weblog post. Of course, I don’t ever want to be responsible for any libel, so I gave him an e-mail address to which he can address his concerns, so that I can deal with them speedily. It’d be particularly troublesome if we couldn’t come to an agreement over the terms used, because it’d be a real bother to have to look into U.S. libel laws (Scatmania is, of course, hosted in the United States of America, which has significantly different laws on things like libel – and, if I remember correctly, any legal case would have to be raised over there).

Just in case any other letting agencies or landlords read this, I’d like to make it clear that I just “say what I see”. And, to demonstrate this, I’d like to say a few words about some of the other property letting agencies in Aberystwyth that we’ve been dealing with in our hunt for a new home. In order that I remembered them:

GD Lettings don’t open on Saturdays, which is remarkably inconvenient, but seemed friendly and pleasant.
Lloyd, Herbert and Jones are friendly and willing to discuss pretty much any arrangement – RECOMMENDED.
Alexanders charge £35 for a credit check before you can let with them, which is a minor concern, but are extremely professional and knowledgeable about what they do.
ABA charge £50 “agents fee” before you start letting with them, which seems a little steep, but always seem to have plenty of interesting properties to look at. The staff are laid-back and friendly.
I’ve heard mixed things about Phillip Evans, but nothing to cause me excess concern. Sadly, they never seem have any interesting properties available when I’m looking for one, but otherwise they’re good. Plus, their plastic business cards are great for opening locks to which you’ve lost they key.

All in all, the Aberystwyth letting scene is good (if a little expensive, but that’s just the area, I guess). In my mind, it’s only a minority that are disappointing.

A Challenge For My Programmer Friends

So you think you’re a dab hand at learning new and unusual programming languages: even the most bizarre of them. You can get your head around Perl, and you might have even looked at LISP. Well, let’s see who’s first to correctly tell me what the output of the following computer program is. It’s unique (I’ve just written it, and you won’t find it elsewhere on the ‘net), so you’ll have to first work out what the programming language is. At that point, you’ll need to either find a platform on which you can run it, or “whitebox” decipher it by hand.

A pint, and my respect, to the first person to solve it. If nobody solves it, the pint’ll go to whoever seemed to be most on the right track.

Scatman Dans Pasta Bake.

A quick and tasty meal for programmers everywhere: baked pasta with a spicy
kick. Cook and drain the pasta first, and pre-heat oven to 175 degrees Celcius
(gas mark 4).

Ingredients.
76 g penne pasta
75 g fusilli pasta
65 g grated cheddar cheese
64 ml vegetable stock
21 g courgette
17 g fresh ginger
11 g crushed garlic
8 teaspoons olive oil
7 g parsley
5 level teaspoons cinnamon
3 eggs
2 sliced new potatoes
1 birds eye chilli
1 pinch hot chilli powder

Cooking time: 30 minutes.

Method.
Put penne pasta into the mixing bowl. Add birds eye chilli. Add hot chilli
powder. Put crushed garlic into the mixing bowl. Combine parsley. Put fresh
ginger into the mixing bowl. Combine cinnamon. Remove birds eye chilli. Put eggs
into the mixing bowl. Combine courgette into the mixing bowl. Add sliced new
potatoes. Put vegetable stock into the mixing bowl. Add eggs. Put fusilli pasta
into the mixing bowl. Add olive oil. Put grated cheddar cheese into the mixing
bowl. Stir for 5 minutes. Liquify contents of the mixing bowl. Pour contents of
the mixing bowl into the baking dish.

Serves 1.

Warning: do not try to cook this dish as if it were a genuine recipe!

Driving Theory Test

Took a mock driving theory test provided by Statto today. Think I did quite well.

certified by
The Statto-JTA Mock Driving Theory Test

You’re a

surrealist

driver

Your passengers think you’re a little crazy.

Every road trip takes in a fantastic landscape of dreamlike imagination as you trip the tarmac fantastic. You’re still convinced that one day you will find the ‘man putting up an umbrella’ those signs keep warning you about.

take the test at
www.ktab.co.uk/drivingtheorytest

Sorry, Statto – had to make a few tweaks to the code to make it “work” on my blog – negative margins are bad, okay? Floats are the way forwards.

Let’s Get Packing!

A huge thank you to Paul and whoever his four unnamed helpers were who helped to pack up a lot of the stuff in The Flat this weekend into a huge stack of boxes. This is an enormously good start, and really morale-inspiring for Claire and I. Thank you.

Now; we’re not ungrateful or anything, but you lot do know we’re not moving for another week and a half, right? We came back, expecting that Paul would have, as he implied, cleared up the kitchen window ledge… and, in actual fact, this is just about the only part of The Flat that hasn’t been moved, disassembled, or put into a box… eek!

But seriously: Paul, and whoever your four helpers are (and I’d appreciate you naming them) – thank you!

Mr. And Mrs. Melton

Wedding was fun. Rain held off, barely, but it was still bitterly cold – who gets married in December, anyway? Piccies (bigger ones – clickies):

Congratulations, Jon and Pat, and all that.

We’re going to visit a few people while we’re in this part of the country, then head back to Aber this evening. Hope Troma Night went well. See you all soon.

Claire’s Dad Is Getting Married

Claire and I are off to Norfolk this evening, for her dad’s wedding tomorrow. He and his lady have finally decided that “living in sin” wasn’t for them, and they’re tying the knot.

Traditionally, wedding gifts were household goods, appliances, etc., but both John (Claire’s dad) and Pat both own their own houses, fully stocked, and so – contrarily – we might find that for this couple, who already own two toasters, two food mixers, two washing machines, etc., the best gift they could possibly receive would be an eBay account from which to sell all of the duplicated homewares when they formally move in together, soon.

It’s interesting to see how the traditions of marriage are having to grow to fit the times: with fewer and fewer couples for whom getting married is synomymous with “leaving home and starting a family of your own” – and particularly in this case, which two retirees exchanging rings – the conventional symbols of marriage (what does “their wedding night” honestly mean any more?) and weddings (what do you buy for a couple who’ve already started their lives in the bigger wider world?) are dying out.

For a moment there, there was a risk that I’d be perceived as a traditionalist, or, worse yet, as a fundamentalist: to the contrary – I think that the ideas behind marriage are well overdue for an overhaul, and, as many of you know, I have personal objections to marriage which mean that you’re not ever likely to hear wedding bells from anywhere near where I’m standing.

Nonetheless, weddings are a fun excuse for a party. Like funerals, they bring families together in a rare bonding moment, but unlike funerals you don’t feel so guilty for getting pissed and hitting on your cousin. And in the end, isn’t that what life is all about?

Operation: Ursidius Migration

Claire and I have sorted out where we’re going to live following the announcement that we were to move out of The Flat on Cambrian Place.

Despite a fruitless first few weeks of house-hunting we’ve finally found somewhere which is pretty much ideal: a little larger than The Flat, not too much more expensive, and still centrally located. More information on the move and the steps it will involve can be found on the RockMonkey page “TheFlat“, including a debate on naming the new residence.

We’ll be moving on Wednesday 14th December. Time to start cashing in on all those favours we’ve built up by helping everybody we know move house over the last three years! (Kit can be let off with not helping)

Fab.

ALP Property Management

What follows is a true account of my dealings with ALP, a property management and lettings agency in Aberystwyth.

READERS ARE REMINDED THAT THIS POST CONSTITUTES THE OPINIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS ONLY OF THE AUTHOR, AND THESE ARE NOT TO BE TAKEN AS REFLECTIVE OF THE OPINIONS OF ANY OTHER PERSON. (since this blogpost, ALP have phoned me)

Like many of you, I’d heard the horror stories about ALP, the property management/letting agency at the roundabout at the end of Alexandra Terrace, in Aberystwyth. A friend of mine reports that while he rented part of a shared house with them, an agent would frequently let himself in and refuse to leave until due rent was paid in cash. I’ve also heard reports of them witholding deposits without cause (until taked to court to reclaim them), among other atrocities.

But perhaps that’s just the way they treat the tenants of the ‘student houses’ they let out. Or perhaps these are isolated cases. In any case, they can’t be that bad. There’s certainly no harm in viewing a property they manage, is there? So Claire and I thought…

At half past nine we met up with ALP’s agent at their offices, and he took us out to see the flat we’d expressed an interest in: a third-and-fourth floor two-bedroomed flat on Albert Place, opposite the council offices. The agent unlocked the door and led us upstairs, where the usual tour began: this is the main bedroom, this is the bathroom, blah blah blah. We got to the door to the living room, on the upper floor. The agent tried to open it, but only got it ajar before it jammed against something. The agent put on a pleasant tone: “I’ve just got some tenants I’d like to show around,” he called in.

“Why don’t you come back at the agreed time, 2pm?” came the response: slightly shaky, slightly rehearsed. The agent pretended not to hear him.

“I said I’ve got some tenants to show around,” he repeated, pushing the door a little further. Through the crack, I could see that the tenant had wedged a chair against the door handle and retreated to the opposite corner of the room.

“Why don’t you come back at the agreed time, 2pm?” the tenant answered again. So this was a rehearsed response.

The agent pretended to the tenant that he hadn’t heard him, and continued to jiggle the door handle to try to dislodge the chair. He turned to us and imitated the tenant’s words in a mocking mime. The tenant repeated his message, adding, “You said you’d only bring people after 2pm.”

The agent made his little performance again, showing us what he thought of the tenant’s concerns. Then, having moved the door enough to get his hand around it, he manuevered the chair carefully out of the way and entered.

I needn’t even discuss the legality of what he did. We were sufficiently disgusted with the attitude towards tenants to not even consider renting property from ALP. As we left, the agent tried to belittle the problems with the tenant, implying that he was paranoid delusional. Whether or not this is the case is completely irrelevant, of course, to the fact that the agent unlawfully entered the home of a tenant, and, when asked to leave, continued to force entry, thereby technically being a tresspasser. God knows how intimidated the tenant feels by them to resort to trying to barricade the doors of their own home.

I’ve not sure I’ve ever been so disgusted by the actions of a company disregarding it’s customers’ rights. Sony’s rootkit‘s got nothing on ALP.

ALP phoned me regarding this post on 9th December 2005.
A man who’d like to remain anonymous has allowed me to publish the story of his dealings with ALP, in June 2006

Troma Night

Troma Night last night was fantastic. I’m sure those of you who care will hear more soon, but I just wanted to make this little blog post to thank Matt P for his card (a heavily-adapted “100 Today” card) and to prompt Gareth to upload or otherwise get to me the photos he took, so the world can see!

The Rails Cafe

This Rails Cafe article made me smile. Rails really is a lot of fun. If SmartData gets the upcoming project I hope it does, I’ll be pushing for Rails to be the development platform: the project would lend itself very well to it. Perhaps I’ll hammer out a hundred lines or so in advance, in order to demonstrate my point when the discussion comes. Again, assuming the client takes our quote.

I’m limping a lot better today, almost up to a normal walking pace, and my foot hurts a lot less (except when I walk for more than ten minutes on end).

Claire‘s made a great start on looking for a new place for us to live, finding a few possible places already and arranging for us to visit one this evening. This possible new place sounds fantastic, but might be a little beyond our budget. We’ll have to do the maths this evening.

Still Limping

Well, I’m still limping, but I’m not in quite so much pain. Claire has parodied my attitude to my injury in the current episode of her webcomic, The Aber Effect.

In other news, I received a pipe-cleaner e-mail out of the blue from my old friend Gary, who I speak to about once every couple of years, recently. Apparently I’ve made a Scatmania-reader out of him, but I’d never have known, because he never leaves a comment. Ah well. Let this be him told.

Abnib Real Ale Ramble 2005

Well, Claire, JTA, Jimmy and I made it back safely from our weekend of rambling across the mountains of mid-Wales and participating in one of the biggest Real Ale festivals in the UK. Some photos are up on Abnib Gallery: all from my mobile, so far, but I’m sure that JTA and Claire will add a few that they took, soon. I’ve also put together a comic-book-esque collage of some of our activities [354K, JPEG], for if you just want the highlights and can’t even be bothered to read on.

Highlights (and other bits-of-interest) included:

Llanwrtyd Wells is even smaller than the maps imply. Jimmy went exploring, and 15 minutes later he’d seen pretty much the whole town. On another occassion he wandered into an unstaffed bookshop (breaking the door handle on the way) and took a book, leaving some money on the counter for the shopkeeper upon his return. Nevertheless, even with Jimmy’s directions, Claire and I couldn’t find the chemist.
We managed to have not only a “Geek Night On Location”, playing two games of Scotland Yard (a copy of which was conveniently left in the chalet we rented) but a “Troma Night On Location” too, watching The Machinist and Sin City.
Our preferred drinking establishment, the Neaudd Arms, had, at one point, 74 different ales on. There were closer to 40 by the time we got there, but several other ‘regular’ ales were also available on tap.
I think I’ve broken a bone in my foot (one of the ones from where my little toe connects to).
We did the 10-mile walk on the first day, and (with the exception of Jimmy, who wasn’t well) the 15-mile one on the second. Thanks to my limping, mostly, we ran late on the second day, and this, coupled with the bitter cold in the valleys, meant that the beer station operators had given up and gone home, leaving us to drink as much as we liked (rather than having to trade in tokens, as was expected of us). So we did.
On our first night, the chalet was so cold that we all repeatedly woke up shivering. Claire solved this, in a dream, by imagining some HTML tags helping to tuck in her duvet, and slept soundly thereafter. Jimmy – not knowing HTML, presumabley – had to suffice with turning on the fire.
For the weekend, we played “Jimmy’s Game”, who’s rules were as follows: none of us were to make any “another game, with the inevitable consequence that we all spent the entire weekend “out of The Game”.
We all want to go again next year, if not before!
The second day was so cold that beer left standing would begin to freeze after a few minutes.
We’d finish each day – perhaps in order to undo what health benefits might have been given by the walking – with a huge fried supper: sausages, eggs, bacon, mashed potato loaded with cheese, tomatoes, baked beans, and mushrooms. Plus desert of swiss roll or sweets. I’ve never seen Claire eat such a full plate before. Perhaps I need to make her climb hills more often.