Another week, another blog

So, another (3-day) week back at work and I'm suddenly realising that I have only 10 weeks left on my contract. Due to my surfeit of annual leave, I'll only be working three (or possibly two) more 5-day weeks before I go. Ahh, the benefits of having worked zealously up until now :-)

Last week I took a couple of days off work to drive Kevin to Oxfordshire so that he could have some fun driving Ferraris and suchlike. I did the driving there and back firstly so that I wasn't just sitting/standing around all day, secondly so that Kevin wouldn't be over-tired by the time we got home, and thirdly because asking him to drive sanely and sensibly on public roads might have been a slight challenge after doing 100mph+ in big expensive sports cars. Also, his own car might have got jealous while it was there.

I of course got to be the official photographer of the day - which is why, incidentally, many of the photos and movies aren't terribly good - you should have seen the ones that were rejected for the webpage! The funniest display of my incompetance was when I tried to take a movie of Kevin driving off in the first Ferrari (355). The instructor climbed in and shut the door, so I hurriedly whipped my (Dad's) digital camera and started the movie playing in order to capture the Moment.

(As background information, this camera allows you to take movies that are precisely 16 seconds in length. There is a way of stopping it earlier, I know, since during the day I inadvertantly took a few that were less than 3 seconds long, but I didn't actually know how to do this. Back to anecdote.)

The camera's rolling. The car's sitting there. The camera continues to roll. The car continues to sit there. When it gets up to about nine seconds and the car hasn't yet moved, I decide to stop the movie: take my finger off the button, find out that I can't stop it, and hastily point the camera back up again in case Kevin drives off photogenically in the next five seconds.

Five... (the car doesn't move)... four... (the car doesn't move)... three... (the car doesn't move)... two... (the car doesn't move)... one... (the car doesn't move)... Zero. Okay, no worries, I'll just start recording again—

It shot off! In the two available seconds between the movie finishing and my being able to press the button again.

What made it slightly more galling was that I managed to do exactly the same thing again when Kevin got in the F348, so I have two videos of him sitting stationary on tarmac in two different Ferraris. Um, I meant to do that, honestly.

The camera has quite a few different settings for dummies (so I used them, naturally), including one "Sports" setting intended for photographing fast things as they whizz by. I'd been advised to use this and, reasoning that a Ferrari came under the category of "fast things", used this setting to get shots of Kevin as he whizzed past. The only thing is that it's too good - the camera set the shutter speed so fast that it sometimes looks as if the car is sitting on the tarmac while there are slightly blurry trees in the background. Still, take it from me that the car was actually going quite fast at the time :-)

I spent the weekend in Essex, and we rented Shrek since Kevin hadn't seen it. Luckily it was still just as good as I remembered from seeing it in the cinema - bring on Shrek 2!

I've finally been shamed into redoing the markup for my books page, since I complained at Kevin yesterday that it was throwing silly errors that seemed to be different on each reload. He checked the page against the W3C Validator and found that it had about a hundred or so errors. It didn't surprise me really; I expect a lot of my pages have similar issues since I created them using the little knowledge I'd gleaned about HMTL, and didn't really have a concept of validation, or specs, or what I was doing. Since then, it's just been laziness preventing me from doing anything about it.

However, it's finally done. It even has nice sortable tables, courtesy of Stuart Langridge.

The thing that's happened today is that I was fiddling with the key to my lockable cabinet at work, locked it, idly pulled the key out, tried to put it back in and found that it doesn't fit. It just came out of there! Right now the cabinet's still locked, and my thumb is red from trying to push the key back. This is so stupid...

And the band played on

1. Apparently my shortness of leg (length, not lack thereof) means I have a higher chance of developing heart disease, which I think is blatantly unfair. Not only am I consigned forever to high heels just to reach the height that I want (a couple of inches is all I'm asking, honestly), it now appears that I'm inherently less healthy than taller women (whose totally unwarranted and unnecessary wearing of high heels, by the way, I am sure is only to spite me).

2. When you buy a week's worth of train tickets at once, and then inadvertantly use tomorrow's tickets instead of today's (thus causing complaints and "Seek Assistance" messages from all the ticket barriers you pass through), you expect that at least one of the four separate ticket inspectors to inspect your ticket during the day would notice the incorrect date and tell you about it.

   Apparently, though, this doesn't always happen, which is why my ticket was taken by the ticket inspectors (since it hadn't been swallowed by the barrier) and I had to buy a new ticket the next day, once I realised what the date was.

   My excuse: it was a Monday. I think that's more than enough to justify my brain-fade.

3. I'm getting far more lax about updating my Reading sidebar - for instance, I haven't been reading either of the books listed there (until just now) since last week, so it's just plain inaccurate now. (And I know you care so much, don't you?) I was going to update it from Kevin's at the weekend, but I forgot and my perfectionistic instincts have been nagging me ever since. (Incidentally, see how much I'm taking over his computer... not only do I have my own XP profile - with separate bookmarks, iTunes library, games on the Desktop, etc. - but a couple of my own programs as well, including an FTP client. We haven't quite reached installing a separate email client for me yet, but I think it's possibly coming soon...

4. After about a year of thinking, twiddling, conceptualising and designing, I think I may have finally decided (ooh, see the decisiveness there!) that I don't want to change the design for bent back tulips. I'm not really a designer, and of the (four or five, so far) new redesigns that I've posulated, none of them are as good as the current one. Actually, there's one that I think was equally as good, but not as distinctive. Plus, a) people didn't like the colour scheme, and b) it turned out to be quite autumnal in tone, so I don't really want to implement it when summer's just kicked in.

   And by a startling coincidence, I rather like the design I have at the moment. I should go and completely redo the CSS at some point though. (Something else I've been saying for about a year. One of these days...)

5. I've been going on a slight cheap-DVD spree lately. I tell you, it's just dangerous to look at Play.com, Sendit.com, or others of that ilk if you have a credit card close to hand. They're even worse than browing Amazon - Amazon at least have the decency to try and put you off by charging you postage, and by having lousy navigation on their "Bargains" sections.

   See, since I want a decent-to-superduper computer for university, capable of playing DVDs well, I've been thinking over the last year that it'd be a good idea to accumulate films on DVD so that I can still watch them at uni (since, presumably, the only access to a video I'll have is Kevin's). Of my favourite films, one that I'd really like to have on DVD is Blade Runner, so off I trotted to Amazon to check editions, prices, and such.

   Having searched, I find out that the only version of Blade Runner that it's possible to buy on DVD:

   1. is a special edition
   2. has no mention of any special features, other than being able to see that it comes in a large box
   3. costs £50 RRP.

   What, might I ask, is so special about this special edition that it is worth this inordinate amount of money? And why the deletion of other, simpler, cheaper editions that people might genuinely want instead? Searching Usenet for "Blade Runner DVD special edition" found a lot of people (quite recently) speculating on when the special edition would ever come out, since it's been promised for a couple of years. So I'm not quite sure what to make of that, other than wishing that a) someone would buy me the really expensive version (my birthday's coming up in a few months, dear readers!) or b) they'd bring back a cheaper version for me.

6. After nearly a year, I'm still the first Google result for "Discworld fanfic", despite the fact that, to my knowledge, no one has ever linked to the article in question. All I can say is "Gah", very loudly.

Lack of entries

I'm currently in my "Nobody loves me my blog" stage of the cycle, with trimmings of "I can't write beyond mediocrity—I'm sure I used to be able to write things". The latter not being helped by my having attempted a blogpost this week only to find that it was rambly and largely pointless, and the only real point of the post was overturned rather quickly. That and the general flatness of entries lately (where "lately" == "the last few months").

Don't mind me, I'll probably be happier next week.

With mathematical precision

As part of my gap year before I go to university, I'm doing a maths course online, for which I have to complete eight tests and upload the results so that they can be tracked and I can get a nice shiny (well, maybe not) certificate at the end of the year.

"The end of the year" being June 30th, and this being me we're talking about, I just today started looking at my final topic (differential equations). After bemoaning the fact that I've largely forgotten my differential equations from last year—except that second-order ones were much easier than first-order, for some bizarre reason—I set to looking through the notebooks and revising my knowledge.

A little way in though, I wondered just what percentage I needed to obtain in this test in order to get my certificate. A little internetting and algebra later, it seems that I'll need to get between 0% and 100% to pass the course and get my certificate.

So yay for that, I don't actually need to do anything. And given how much time I've spent resenting how much of my precious free time this course takes up, the logical thing to do would be to disregard the notes and practice tests, and just go straight to the final test clicking on random answers (it's multiple choice, mostly). The annoying thing is that I can't bring myself to do it—I still have a compulsion to get a decent result.

Gah. Perfectionism sucks.

Entre les blogues

(That title reminds me that I wanted to hunt down the book that Vertigo was based on - it's in French, and called D'Entre Les Morts (Among the Dead). Must note that down somewhere. Ooh, maybe here.)

[A reply to a letter]

Dear Cathy,

Aha, the long-promised letter! Damn. Does this mean I have to write things and blog things now?

I said I'd write this a long time ago, and I suppose that nowish is vaguely apropriate considering the extent to which we've both been bemoaning our lack of blog productivity lately. Well, you've been bemoaning, I've been... um, I'm fairly sure I have also been bemoaning, I've just been doing it a little more offline than you. To be honest, I have so many other slightly more serious things that are completely falling apart in my life that the blog really is rather far down on the list of things to bemoan.

Lack of blogging... indeed. I am hoping that this last year of working and little blogging doesn't mean that I'll have lost the knack completely when I try and get up to full speed again once I have sufficient free time.

It's strange how much the audience of your writing alters the writing itself (or at least, the frame of mind you're in when sentences and ideas float into your head). I remember my blog writing changing as I gradually sussed out who was reading my blog, how they wrote, and I then had a definite audience in mind. Mind you, it's not just the audience that's critical - writing this also feels a lot different than writing blogs because I usually compose my blog posts in an HTML editor, rather than the text editor I'm using now. (By the way, HTML-Kit's a really nice editor, should you be in need of one - it's the first editor I've ever used where I felt right at home straight away.) Of course, I'm still marking things up and typing in HTML entities without even realising, which is slightly disturbing. It's akin to the fact that the large amount of IRCing I do means that I'm having to desperately refrain from littering my posts these days with smilies. And that I have inadvertantly thought (though not said, yet) "lol" before now. Anyway, be prepared for rambling that even I wouldn't normally let loose on my blog.

It's annoying, I do want to mark things up even in this text editor - such as your paragraphs in blockquotes to reply to, although I'm still debating whether to do the paragraph-reply thing as I would in email, or write a proper lettery letter. A lettery letter would, um, feel more like a letter (okay, I'm sure I had an intelligent thing to say there when I began that sentence), but after years of electronic communication, I'm not sure that I'm up to replying to a whole letter without being able to reference things in the preceding paragraphs.

But what to write and say? I'm currently sitting in my most favourite of social hotspots, the 24 hour computer room. I got back to Cardiff yesterday and moved into my new house. It's a nice place, a bit further from the centre of town and not nearly as big as the last, but at least this one has a living room. No curtains as of yet, but I've hitched up a combination of blanket and cushions to the window which keeps the room at the level of gloom to which I am accustomed. I managed to break the bed in the process of unpacking, completely buckled the frame. This is the first bed I've ever broken and I didn't even get to have hot sex in the process. Very disappointing.

Oh my :-) Thumbs up for a living room, anyway. Work's plodding along, and I'm currently marvelling at the incredibly wet, windy, cold (and did I mention WET?), beautiful Britain-in-June weather we're having right now. Okay, okay, I'm being unfair. We did have some nice weather about ten days ago, didn't we?

Remember how I said I'd learn PHP this year? Well, um, yeah. I did read through the manual a few months ago (since I couldn't find a decent tutorial), but due to my lack of a local PHP environment, the only thing I ever actually did was my Hello World. I've done slightly better with Python, which I started looking at out of boredom a couple of weeks ago. Although, never having programmed before, I'm in chapter 8 of 18 of Dive Into Python and having to start slowing down and reading things twice. I don't think I'll be able to get to the end and understand everything in there, but it's passing the time for now. (The things I do for fun, huh?)

I have seven weeks left of work before I'm let free again. Actually, you could make that six weeks since Kevin and I are going on holiday all next week. We're staying in a self-catering apartment in the Lake District, and appear to be above a Peter Rabbit Shop. We turned down the chance to be above a bakery - while there might be nice smells, and the chance of freshly-baked rolls each morning the lazy person's way, it's also quite possible we'd have been woken up around 4am each day when baking began...

We got the information for it last week, including directions. The directions, rather disturbingly, include eight left turns in a row once you reach the town - about half of those being "first left"s. I'll be driving, because of numerous benefits of taking my car the car I'm allowed to drive at home, if I ask nicely, rather than Kevin's. It's a bit more comfortable; it has aircon (and I hope we'll have the chance to be glad of it, rather than having to use the heater all week); it's quieter; and a few other things besides. Still, it does mean that I'll be driving about twice as far as I've ever driven in one stretch before - about five hours according to the AA, and that's not including breaks. And hopefully the one-way system at the other end won't flummox me too much.

In any case, I don't have internet set up yet. It's on my top priority to-do list, along with, ahem, getting the bed fixed and finding some therapy. Literally. My mum made me promise to get myself some help, so it's off to the couch and guided meditation with me again. If entries suddenly re-grind to a halt maybe it'll be because they've finally come to their senses and locked me up somewhere with bright lights and helpful restraining bands. Maybe they'll stick me on some heavy medication instead and I can keep blogging, long artistic entries full of star-spangled butterflies.

Duly noted, and I hope you feel it's worthwhile. Shout if you want me to send out a rescue mission, though, if you're gone too long.

The bells chime midnight, and I wanted to get this done before then. I miss you, it surprises me over and over how I can still miss so many people I haven't seen for so long. You need to start blogging regularly again. I remember when you first set me up blogging and I first started reading blogs regularly. It was new, then, hardly seeing you, but the feeling that you hadn't gone very far at all completely bowled me over. I heard as much from you by way of your blog and email as I always had seeing you every day, especially as writing lends itself to larger chunks of speech. I know you always had to listen to me babble on for God knows how long, but it was strange and refreshing to hear you talk at length on something. Between me and G. I'm surprised anybody ever got a word in edgeways, let alone found a chance for a class to stay on topic.

Are you saying I'm quiet in person? :-) Well I've always been a little shy and awkward with people - communicating with people via the internet, and the written word (which has, in the past, been one of my strengths and joys) just made it all so much easier for me, and lets me declare my thoughts and arguments much more effectively than in person. I like being me online, and I like being me-online when I meet online people in real life (did that make sense?) because I have a rough idea of how they see me. At the two blogmeets I've attended - and if there's another one in the next three months, I'll surely drag you along - I've felt more comfortable with people whom I'd met for between zero and four hours previously, than with many people with whom I'd spent two whole years in the sixth form.

This is one of the things I think is so wonderful about the internet - that and the fact that I've received a fair number of items from my wishlist sent by people who've never even met me. That's nice too :-)

Thank you for introducing me to this world, you've got a lot to answer for, as you well know. So. Get your arse back here, there's no way I'm letting you strand me all alone in this fearsome blogos... I did not just use that word. You hate that word. I hate that word. I did not just use that word. It's all your fault I know the word and have even heard of blogging in any case. The Blame. Is. All. Yours.

Yeah, well. You got me into Buffy and Angel, so nyah. And to date that's cost me lots and lots of money buying a total of five seasons of Buffy and Angel on second-hand DVDs. So don't you go complaining at me, 'k?

Wrapping this up before it becomes too rambling, I hope you enjoy Sandman, I've just got back from crying my eyes out at Japanese Story, have fun with the differential equations (they're all yours now) and I have so much orange juice in my fridge I'm sure I could drown in its happiness.

Sandman is being very cool right now - I'm currently reading the second book at night, and its 'chapters' are of a good enough length that I can read one per night. I bought the third book at the weekend too, when Kevin and I went to Staines to see The Day After Tomorrow (yay for Books Etc. only closing at 7pm! :-) ) I think this could lead me down a very expensive path...

My God. I feel like I can write again. Huzzah! And thank you, for this.

Lots of love and speak to you soon, Missiedith.

(Because I can't remember the last time I signed my real name outside of a shop.)

It's okay, I'm quite adept at mentally flipping between people's real names and screen names. How could I not be, by now? :-)

Cathy