Settling in

On Sunday I was deposited in my hall of residence at Warwick University. Since then I've been thrown into lectures and such, and it's been a busy, busy week. Whenceforth comes the myth that uni students have so much free time and can sleep until 12 every day? I mean, I could do that, but I'd miss four lectures a week, and have the cleaner walk in on me every day.

So far I've only had one piece of work (which I did quickly this evening, in time for Monday) and I've still had barely any idle time. I have many books to read (more than I planned since I discovered that the university bookshop also stocks fiction) and my brother brought me Shaun of the Dead on Monday as a birthday present. I've managed to read a total of 126 pages since Sunday, and Shaun is still shrinkwrapped. (Even despite all the special features!)

Lectures are going okay, if a little slow at the moment (though I'm sure I'll appreciate that in later weeks when everything's whizzing by). Nearly all of my lectures have been maths so far, but it's nice maths — set theory and algebra and logic. I did manage to turn up to the wrong lecture without realising it, since I thought the time was an hour later than it actually was. I wasn't greatly helped in realising my mistake since it was a computer science lecture that I erroneously sat in on :-)

My TV tuner is being one of the biggest sources of annoyance at the moment. When we got here and set up the computer, we checked to make sure everything still worked. The TV software didn't, and we decided we had to reinstall the drivers. This solved the problem, and yours truly was a happy bunny once more.

Until a couple of days later, when the same "initialization error" came up as the program refused to start. Since then I've had to reinstall the drivers nearly every time I've used it. This includes a reboot of the machine, which isn't that nice when you're actually trying to watch something now. We're going to try to reseat the card at the weekend and see if that works, otherwise I'll still be Really Quite Annoyed.

The other thing that isn't going so well is sleeping. The noise level's mostly been okay so far (but on the other hand, I haven't experienced Friday or Saturday nights yet, so we'll see). The bad thing is the streetlight shining into my room through the not-very-thick curtains that are in place. To be honest, it probably wouldn't be that much of a problem for most people, but at home I had a blackout blind which left almost no light at all. I like sleeping in as close to pitch-blackness as I can get. I have difficulty when there's enough light in the room to clearly make out shapes in the darkness. This is worse in that there's a very obvious difference between the light levels when I close my eyes, and when I hold my hand over my closed eyes.

I'm going to see whether I can sleep in an eyemask, such as people use on planes. It's really making a difference; I'm sleeping so much lighter than I used to. I usually am a very heavy sleeper, the kind that doesn't wake up during horrifically loud thunderstorms and will sleep until she is woken. For the last five mornings, however, I've been waking up every ½-1 hour from about 5am onwards. I'm exhausted even though I've only got up at 10am on three mornings and I've been going to bed before midnight every night. It's really not doing me much good.

Neither is my diet at the moment really (I'm sounding terribly doomy and gloomy, aren't I? Apologies). I've lost my appetite quite a bit since arriving here; of the potential 16 meals I could have had, I've only had 6 'proper' meals (as in, food that requires plates and possibly cutlery). And when I have eaten proper food I feel full incredibly quickly — even the cheese sandwich I had on Tuesday meant I felt stuffed for hours afterwards.

Maybe it'll settle down. If not, at least I'm saving myself some money ;-)

And the kitchen lesson for this week is: when confronted with an old-fashioned toaster, of the kind with mechanical lever for putting down and popping up the bread and a toasting dial where you turn according to how burnt you want the toast and let it slowly rotate back to zero — do not be tricked by the dial rotating round and the lever working smoothly, since the toaster will do this anyway even if the power's turned off.

Hello, world

Today I used a *nix GUI for the first time. A year ago or more, there was some kerfuffle about attempting to install first Red Hat 5.2, then a recent version of Mandrake, then finally FreeBSD onto my poor little laptop, which didn't take the strain too well. We did get FreeBSD on there, it's true, but the machine just couldn't cope with a GUI. At one point we tried moving the mouse. Nothing happened, except that four minutes later the cursor jumped across the screen :-)

So today I used a *nix GUI for the first time (on Red Hat, if you're wondering). And today I wrote my first ever Java program, which worked perfectly first time. This was a bit of a shock, since even the couple of sample programs that we copied out character for character came up with errors because of my typos...

I was very chuffed though since it was complicated enough that we had to look things up, and my previous Java (and programming) experience consists of reading through tutorials and maybe writing down the salient points on paper.

Yay me.

Licensed to Ill

We're only in the third week of term, and I'm taking the day off sick. It started last Wednesday with a simple cough; since then I've gone through sore throat, great hacking cough, great hacking cough with nasty phlegm, chest pains when executing the great hacking cough (or even breathing deeply), extreme tiredness, and reasonable dizziness.

Kevin tried to take me to the doctor on Saturday when the 15-minute walk to Tesco proved too much for me and resulted in the aforementioned chest pain and dizziness. However, his cunning plan was thwarted by the fact that the university health centre is closed between 4:30pm on a Friday and 9:00am on a Monday. I obviously didn't qualify as a medical emergency, so there was nothing for it but to wait until yesterday morning.

Kevin walked me to my 9am lecture and then made an appointment for me afterwards. The doctor seemed fairly unconcerned about my dizziness — it seems that having had labyrinthitis earlier this year means that my inner ear will henceforth be more susceptible to being affected by simple flu viruses. Fun, fun, fun...

I managed to go to most of my lectures yesterday, despite very nearly falling asleep for real in the last one (I had to resort to biting my fingers for the last ten minutes in order to stay awake). Today I got up at about 10am ready for my first lecture at 1pm. As the morning wore on I felt less and less like going outside, having spent a good half an hour trying to cough up the night's phlegmmy congestion. My trusty bottle of Benylin seems to be less effective today than other days (yes, that's how ill I've been feeling — I voluntarily bought and am taking Benylin), and it's been incredibly grey and gloomy outside all day, which is probably affecting my state of mind too.

Hopefully this'll clear up sometime soon — after all, I definitely need to be well in a couple of weeks' time for a Very Special Birthday Party (for which I still need to find a silly hat to wear). More details soon...

Going mental

Terry Pratchett's latest, Going Postal, was published recently. Thursday 7th October actually, although as much as three weeks ago I was being made jealous by the fact that Aquarion had found a copy in Waterstones. Grr. Where's my copy?

I generally like to read the latest Discworld book as soon as I possibly can, and this is why I don't pre-order them from Amazon.co.uk — they'll only ship it to you on the official day of release, add a couple of days for delivery (and since it was published on a Thursday I'd most likely only have received it the following Monday), and in the meantime you've wandered past dozens of copies in all the many many bookshops that sell it early (ie. almost all of them), thus causing mental anguish and frustration that is guaranteed to make Cathy Not A Happy Bunny. (Gosh, that was a long sentence. I profusely apologise for my lack of grammatical structure.)

So, Cathy waits. And waits. And in the meantime, a few hundred messages eagerly (one assumes) discussing Going Postal turn up on alt.fan.pratchett which she cannot read and has to mark to be read Later, as well as instructing her newsreader not to throw them away because they're more than five days old. (As a further consequence of which, I now have all the messages on AFP for the last three weeks, and haven't been able to see the threading of discussions for about that long because threaded messages go rightwards. And offscreen.)

Still, I thought. There's a university bookshop on campus, and also a Tesco fifteen minutes' walk away. Even if neither one sells the book before publishing, they'll certainly be selling it then. After all, I am told that the supermarkets Down South where I used to live have been selling the book since about a week prior to the release date, so no worries there.

I have no idea if the local Tesco has managed to find copies as yet; certainly they hadn't by the Saturday after publication. The on-campus bookshop, having only bothered to order the book the day after it was published, only started selling it three days ago. This is when I got my copy.

But I didn't buy it from them. Instead, I have a copy of Going Postal that's travelled 150 miles from Chelmsford, Essex to Up Here, courtesy of loving boyfriend. And since I barely read it while Kevin was here at the weekend, I'm only on page 158.

If you'll excuse me, I'd like to read for a while.

A Long-Expected Party

So anyway, that Very Special Birthday Party I mentioned a while ago?

It's John Cleese's.

See, I signed up to the "please tell me when your website will launch" mailing list, and three weeks ago I found a special invitation in my inbox asking me to "join us for coffee, pastries, laughs and a very special ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate Mr. Cleese's assault on cyberspace!" They've randomly selected a small number of people to invite and I happened to be one of them. Which is nice.

I'm allowed to bring a guest on condition that we both wear silly hats, so I gave Kevin the task of finding two silly hats. I've apparently opted for a baseball cap with a stuffed seagull on the top, though I've never seen it. Don't worry, you'll get pictures :-)

The only downside is that it's in London on Wednesday morning, so I'll have to spend 3 or 4 hours on buses and trains on Tuesday evening, get up fairly early to attend the launch party, and then do the 3 or 4 hours back the other way, and hopefully get back before it's too dark. And bring enough books for the journey, and hope that my iPod battery lasts.

Wednesday is also the day that our first programming coursework is due in (the classic robot-in-a-maze) and we have to go in for an 'interview' with the marker to answer questions about the code and so on. So I've asked to do that on Tuesday morning instead, which just gives me a little less time to complete it...

On the plus side though, I'm going to John Cleese's 65th birthday party :-)

The man himself

In short, Kevin and I had a wonderful time at Mr Cleese's birthday celebration. He was just lovely, chatting with us (and the other nine people who were there) for a couple of hours, giving us cake and allowing us to blurble at him about the silly hats which were a requirement.

I know I promised a photo of the silly hat I wore (a baseball cap with an alleged stuffed seagull, which turned out to be a stuffed dove instead) but I'm afraid we didn't get one. You may still be able to see it though, if the video of us all in our silly hats turns up on the website. One of the fun parts was that, due to the very small number of people present, it really was mostly a sitting-round-and-chatting session, with the added bonus that as more and more people turned up, John went round the table introducing the present fans with the newly-arrived. So I've been introduced by John Cleese about half a dozen times today :-)

You should really read Kevin's post for more details, plus the guess-the-major-Hollywood-Star-whom-we-spotted-in-Leicester-Square (and-whose-head-Kevin-managed-to-photograph-the-back-of) competition :-)