The bridge between goals and accomplishments

You may have noticed it's been a little quiet around here lately. Or if you're reading via RSS you may not have noticed per se; this may simply be your weekly reminder that I'm still alive.

(And that, incidentally, is one of the many wonderful things about RSS — not only does it allow you to manage your plethora of blogs that you must keep up with, but it's also particularly suited to following those individuals who blog infrequently or irregularly. You can simply forget about them until you're politely informed by your aggregator that there's a new post awaiting your perusal. As an example, when Phil Ringnalda recently started blogging again after a four-month dry spell, I knew about it the very same day when... uh, when I saw people linklogging it, come to think, rather than directly from subscribing to his feed (my Linklogs folder is above my Dormant Blogs folder in Newzcrawler). Never mind.)

I've actually been blogging even less frequently than last year when I had a full-time job. I certainly can't argue that I have less free time than I did then — it seems I've just lost the enthusiasm. I remember the time when I would immediately make a mental note to "blog that!" if anything interesting happened. Even when in the dentist's chair.

Now, however? It doesn't really occur to me. I've been out of blog-mode for quite a while - gone are the carefree (and not car-free, as I tyoped) days of, um, sixth form and A-levels when I hammered out twenty posts a month. I used to think that maybe since then I'd refined my writing a little, and that even though my posts were fewer in number, each one was perhaps more likely to be worth reading. But really? I don't think so.

On a not-unrelated topic, I seem to be having a bout of a lack of self-discipline, despite my well-intentioned New Year's resolution (who'd have thought that could fail?) Meh. I've stuck to two of the four at least. However, I'm still not getting enough sleep (almost entirely my own fault), and the courseworks for this term are piling up one after the other, though at least that's better than them piling up all at once. There's more focus this term on actual programming; we're doing functional programming (in the guise of MosML), more Java (specifically ADTs), a tiny bit of Assembly and C (for the hardware module), a small amount of Perl, and shell scripting in the form of Bash (with the option of using other available scripting languages for the coursework if we want, which to me means Python, but I may not have time to learn enough Python — from my basic level of NONE — to complete the assignment. Besides, it looks like awk will do fine).

In other news, the house-hunting frenzy that seems to have gripped everyone else has passed me by. Within the first week of term, it seems almost everyone had decided who to live with next year, and those who hadn't were left dazed and wondering just who they could share a house with. (I'm fine though; I settled on my housemate quite a while ago.) It's now scarcely a month later, and many people have viewed houses, selected houses, signed the contract and chosen a bedroom.

It's surprised me because all the advice we are given regarding this is: don't decide firmly on groups yet; don't jump at the first house you see; whatever you do, don't sign a contract this early! The reason being that, realistically, you've only known these people for the 10 weeks of last term. There's an awfully long time between now and October to fall out / meet new friends / find a better property, and you can't get out of a contract once signed. We are reassured over and over again that there's no rush, there are more houses available than students, new properties come on the market every month, and so on. And yet still the madness. It's starting to panic me after all this reassurance :-)

All You Need Is Lunch

Oh my. You spend this long waiting for an entry, and it's just this. I'm sorry.

I was perusing blogs earlier today and stumbled across Chaotique's suggestion that, to mark Valentine's Day (late, I know, but everyone else seemed late to me with their celebrations/contemptuous loathing taking place on the clichéd date of 14th February — we did pseudo-Valentine's Day on Saturday since Kevin wasn't here on the Monday), we should substitute the word "Love" in any song title with the word "Lunch". I found this far too amusing:

• Beatles - All You Need Is Lunch [There's nothing you can eat that can't be eaten...]
• Beatles - You've Got To Hide Your Lunch Away (can't be too careful)
• Beatles - Words Of Lunch [soup, sandwiches, quiche...]
• Aerosmith - Lunch In An Elevator [Lunch in an elevator, eatin' it up when I'm goin' down...]
• David Gray - This Year's Lunch [This year's lunch had better last (another 365 days...)]
• a rather disturbing entry from Oasis - She Is Lunch [You can fill me up with what you got, Cus my stomach's meant to keep it all]
• fairly sensible advice from Robbie Williams - Let Lunch Be Your Energy (not a word about breakfast though)

You can blame iTunes for making that far too easy with its snazzy search.