Kind: Articles

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?

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.

Hey, I was just looking at Troma Night‘s last Hollywood Pizza receipt, and I’ve noticed that they’ve stopped writing the full address at the top of the receipt for the delivery driver. Now they just write “Cambrian Place”.

After 75+ Troma Nights, we’ve finally managed:

1. To be their only customer in Cambrian Place: or, at least, their only customer worth mentioning on a Saturday night.
2. To get them to regularly bring the pizza straight in and up to the living room, if we leave the door unlocked and put a sign on it requesting this, and tip the delivery driver.
3. To know who we are based on the size and time of our order, and so not have to state the address, sometimes.

Goals for the next 75 Troma Nights include:

1. Improving upon point #2 – if we don’t call by 9pm on a Saturday, they should be at a point where they’re considering calling us. To help them in this, we will now always give them the landline phone number when we order.
2. To get a regular customer discount – we hear that the owner is particularly unlikely to provide this (a customer that orders several times a week hasn’t yet managed, but perhaps we can persuade him otherwise by mentioning that we’ve been approached by Pier Pizza (Pizza Royale) with a better offer… hmm, perhaps we should wait until Troma Night 150 first).
3. Getting them to suggest pizza based upon who is present (“Is Andy there? Okay, so that’s a Meat Feast…”) or, at least, to reverse this association upon delivery (“I’ve got a Vegetarian With Jalapenos On Half, umm… that for Sian and Ruth, right?” from the deliveryperson). Perhaps we could not take the pizzas from them until they’ve learned everybody’s names, and work up fromt here.