New Math

Browsing the Warwick Computer Science maths forum a couple of hours before my exam resulted in my finding the following snippet:

I thought that maths is about knowing how to use a particular method, not about getting the right answer...

Tom Lehrer, you have been validated.

In which I do the run-on sentence thing far too much

I know, two entries in two days. Don't fall out of your chair in shock.

I had an exam yesterday (which was the second of four in this block of exams, though I had another three at the beginning of this term (two of which I found out about roughly six days beforehand, when I had a large essay to do)) which, on the one hand, didn't go brilliantly, but on the other hand, it seems that most people found it pretty horribly difficult too, more so than past papers. This brings a small level of comfort, but unfortunately no increased result.

It was also the first maths exam I've sat that didn't have a formula sheet — our lecturer, who writes the exams, doesn't believe in them ("you should either know them or be able to derive them" — on the spot, in mid-exam panic). I was okay with most of the required formulae, but then they had to go and bring up arc length (which I knew) and volume of revolution (which I thought I knew, but then realised I was thinking of surface area of revolution instead).

So now I have an Information Structures exam on Saturday (ADTs, seach and sort algorithms, complexity, etc.) which, being in the afternoon, pretty much knocks out the whole day (except for the evening, which we will use wisely by finally going to see Star Wars (which we were going to see last weekend, but on Sunday I woke up to find a nerve was playing up — and still hasn't completely returned to normal — which meant that I couldn't look up, down, or to the left without a reasonable amount of shooting pain at the base of my skull. We concluded that we should postpone the cinema trip) and eating lots of barbecue-type food because, dolt that I am, I accidentally bought a reasonably reasonable amount without seeing the Best Before date that said "04 June", and the sign saying "NOT SUITABLE FOR HOME FREEZING") (you might wish to retrace your steps to the text just before the second parenthesis of the paragraph in order to continue reading) (thank you) and then a half-day of rest and relaxation with Kevin here before panic revision starts for the last exam (functional programming) on Tuesday.

Sometimes I really wish I had the ability to write in short, coherent sentences. I should maybe start limiting myself to three clauses per sentence.

Tomorrow will be spent doing as much revision as I can nudge myself into doing before Kevin arrives and we go to look at two more properties in the afternoon, the details of which I shall move onto another blogpost for. (Also possibly tomorrow.)

This post brought to you with significantly more parentheses than usual, and requisite apologies.

These feet weren't made for walking

Kevin was supposed to drive up here slightly early today so that we could go and see a flat and a house in Coventry (at 4pm and 5pm respectively). Unfortunately, since his car fell apart as he set off to get petrol, and he's not yet got tax or insurance documents for his new car, he's been somewhat delayed. This, then, saw me setting off alone to catch a bus this afternoon and attempting to locate the flat.

Since the block of flats has a fairly generic (unGoogleable) name, and the road it's on is 6 or 7 kilometres long, I'd had to phone the agents yesterday to ask for more information about how to find the place; nearby sideroads, for instance. The woman I spoke to, however, had never been to the place, and the exact instructions I received via her from her colleagues were, "It's before you get to the school". Useful. (Particularly since there are at least two schools along that road — so I found out as I walked along most of the length of the road in the rain — with the flats being situated between the two.)

On the plus side though, to reward my panic, paranoia, aching feet and dampened spirits hair, the flat was gorgeous. It was lovely. It's a brand new block of flats, never been lived in, and there's brand new wooden floors and furniture everywhere, and sparkly new bathrooms (one proper and one en-suite) and a fabulous, beautiful kitchen (dark worksurfaces and wooden cabinets). The only thing wrong, that I can see (other than the downside of it being a furnished flat, which is that there's an extra double bed in the way that we wouldn't need) is that, when these fine people built the kitchen, remembering to include a half-fridge hidden behind a cupboard door, what they apparently forgot was a freezer. There's no freezer. How can they expect people to live without a freezer?

I then started trekking for another mile to reach the house — it would have been longer, but luckily a bus appeared to transport me a little way down the Long and Winding Straight Road, and gave my feet a little break. The house wasn't a nice as the flat, though it is a) larger overall, and b) cheaper. Oh, and the second bedroom had one bright yellow wall, one bright green wall, and Winnie-the-Pooh characters all over the walls, so that's a bonus. (Also, still much nicer than the house we saw last week, which was a bit of a let-down.)

After that I walked around the area a little until I came out somewhere I recognised, and could therefore catch a bus home from, which I did. Getting home revealed that one reason that my feet were hurting so much was that I'd managed to walk a square centimetre flap of skin on my sole loose, giving the effect of a relatively deep cut multiplied by area. It's a little painful.

Anyway. Do you realise that if you extrapolate my blogging habits for this month, logically it means I'm going to blog 30 times in June?

*me makes a hollow laughing*

Let me count the ways

Forms my revision procrastination has taken:

• (Re)installing PHP, MySQL and Apache
• Reading up on PHP and MySQL
• Designing and building my small database to replicate the flat HTML page I had previously...
• ...doing $deity knows how much data entry for it (as little as possible by hand, but still extremely time-consuming)...
• ...and writing a little form so that I can update it in three clicks
• Seeking out and subscribing to more than twenty new blogs...
- ...one of which, I realised only the day after I subscribed to it, is written by the author of a book I read a couple of months ago
• Discovering and enjoying LugRadio, despite knowing next to nothing about Linux issues
• Discovering and enjoying Firefly, of which I have (*sob*) only five episodes left to watch (Incidentally, I don't want any spoilers, but I'd be grateful if someone could tell me whether the series has some kind of resolution/wrapping-up or if it just stops very abruptly - I like to be prepared :-)
• Discovering, and watching the whole first season of, Lost (and getting frustrated at the thought of just how long it'll be before the second season is shown on UK terrestrial TV)
• Attempting to discover CSI, but failing because of all the other programs I'm ploughing through
• House-hunting obsessively

Forms my revision procrastination has not taken:

• Reading (partly due to my fear that my limited book-supply will run out, partly due to the fact that, at the moment, I'm stuck reading The Trial which I'm not enjoying (mainly because of the stiff (translated) writing style))
• Blogging. (You guessed that, didn't you?)

Out of sync with the world

I have no idea what day of the week it is.

On Friday morning I knew it was Friday because I was going to see Kevin in the afternoon.

At Friday lunchtime it felt like Thursday, because Kevin wasn't going to come until the next day (he couldn't tax his new car without insurance documents, which were in the post and on the way, and therefore he could take them to the post office on Saturday morning and get a tax disc, and drive up in the afternoon).

On Friday afternoon it felt like Saturday, because I was — shock, horror — outside university grounds, walking around to see potential properties (which Kevin and I had done the previous Saturday too).

On Friday evening it definitely couldn't have been Friday (because Kevin wasn't here) or Saturday (because I had to go to bed early for an exam the next day). I reverted to it being Thursday.

On Saturday morning it felt like Friday again, because I was going to see Kevin in the afternoon, and I had an exam (exams Shouldn't happen on Saturdays).

At Saturday lunchtime everything went haywire when Kevin phoned to say that his insurance documents hadn't been in the post, and the post office wouldn't accept the faxed copies that the company sent him instead, so he wouldn't be able to drive anywhere until at least the post on Monday, when it would be Monday, and the week, and not the weekend, and so I wouldn't see him for another week.

So now I'm very confused because it's very rare that I don't see Kevin at the weekend (this is the third weekend in the past 18 months that we haven't seen each other, and for one of those we saw each other the next Tuesday anyway (for John Cleese's birthday party :-) )), and he's not here, so it can't be the weekend. In fact, I feel like there hasn't been a weekend at all — we've skipped over it, but it's also not the beginning of next week yet, so I'm in some Limbo place until that happens.

We'll see Star Wars next week.

Talk to me

Kevin pointed out half an hour ago that no one using IE could see the input fields on my comments form. I rushed over to check — true, there was a big blank piece of background where my inputs and labels should have been. You could still click on (or tab to) an input, and end up with a blinking text cursor on a blank background, but that was it.

What caused this? Well, ten days ago I took out the MT-default inline CSS, and put it in my stylesheet. And had the audacity to left-float my new div.inputs. So IE vanished it. Of course. (Actually, IE did this with my blogpost titles too, which is why, instead, IE gets them on one line. Grrr.)

So, IE now gets a non-floating, and visible, comments form. Happy?

Tracking my habits

For those who don't know, Audioscrobbler offers plugins to most major media players that sends data to their server about songs that you listen to. They then build up a personal profile of your listening tastes, and can do funky things like telling you, "other people who listen to $foo and $bar also like $baz".

It sounded good to me when I came across it, and so on November 22nd of last year, I installed the iTunes plugin, and then promptly forgot about it completely.

Today, however, I was lamenting my loss of play counts and ratings in iTunes since the last time I reinstalled Windows, and Audioscrobbler popped into my mind. Curious, I went and looked up my profile, and found it very scary indeed after seven months of data-accumulation (not least because I'd half-forgotten what it was for).

That's the song that just finished playing! And the ones before that! Hmm, according to my artist stats for last week I have a thing for Buddy Holly at the moment (actually, I knew this). And, heh, I'm Shannon Campbell's biggest (Audioscrobbler) fan by a long way... Oh, and Clair added me as a friend at some point, meaning that she realised I was a member before I did :-)

I'm currently resisting adding a "now playing" list to bent back tulips...

One track that definitely wouldn't have shown up in my Audioscrobbler statistics is Bat Out Of Hell. I've played it once in the last four years or so. Not because I dislike the song, but because it is sheer magnificence. Since shortly after I first discovered it, I've maintained a policy of actively avoiding listening to it for a long, long time between plays, so that its impact wouldn't be dulled through familiarity on the day when I finally decided to listen to it again.

Today was one such day. And even though I knew I hadn't heard the song in something approaching at least two years, I was still amazed by the effect it had on me — a casual observer would have seen me sitting plugged into my headphones, eyes closed and a grin of delight on my face provoked my the music I was listening to. There were occasional goosebumps too (headphones is the only way to go with this song).

Superb. I'll probably listen to it again sometime in 2007.

N-n-n-n-n-nineteen

Cathy

so Troubled Diva's doing a survey of his readership

Kevin

ooo-er

Cathy

and he's posted 25 questions in 25 different posts, and you have to answer in the comments

Kevin

lol

Cathy

he has Javascript comments, which pop up and are quite slow to load

Cathy

so I'm going through and answering questions in order

Kevin

champion

Cathy

and on question 19

Cathy

19!

Cathy

THAT is when Firefox decides it's going to start blocking these boxes that keep popping up

Kevin

lol

Cathy

so I click on the box for options, and I click "show [this box]"

Cathy

and it doesn't

Cathy

and I click again, and now it has two "show [this box]"s, but no boxes are visible

Cathy

and I click "allow popups from"

Kevin

have you tried unblocking that site?

Kevin

else Ctrl-Click

Cathy

and I try clicking the link again, and it's blocked again

Cathy

and I click "show this box" again, and it doesn't

Kevin

aha! :-)

Cathy

and I go to Tools, and turn off popup blocking

Cathy

and try again

Kevin

you may need to unblock the comment site as well as TD

Cathy

and nothing happens

Cathy

and I give up and use IE

Cathy

but I turned off popup blocking!

Kevin

yeah, I typed mine before I saw that though

Cathy

and why did it let EIGHTEEN boxes pop up before it decided they were bad?

Kevin

FF sucks?

Cathy

yes!

Kevin

if only we'd heard that before :-)

That happy feeling

So, that's it then. Exams are over, and I don't have to do any work for about four months. It's not really sinking in at the moment though, because my relief at the end of exams began on Sunday, two days early. The "just one more" syndrome, which led to me being quite relaxed until late last night, when I got very stressed again at "ack, I haven't done enough revision", which was due to the relaxedness.

Luckily though, today's exam was much like the weekend one, in that beforehand I was panicking that I didn't know the subject, but the paper turned out to be full of things that I could do easily once I'd calmed down.

The "whoo! Exams are over!" feeling that I had yesterday (and that I'll probably get today or tomorrow, once my delayed reaction kicks in) was stronger than for GCSEs or A-levels because I wasn't stressed during those times. They didn't seem like such a big deal by the time we actually took them (this is what two dozen practice papers per subject will do for you).

Now, though, I'm appreciating the benefits of nag-learning as opposed to independant study :-) And have also resolved that, next year, I'm going to actually do work between lectures, summarising notes and going through examples. Current prediction is that it'll last no more than ten days...

When insects attack

After weeks of gloom and drizzly rain, it finally feels like summer's arrived. Today's been warm and sunny and people (people who aren't attached to their computers) have been outside sitting in the sun, playing football, or having a barbeque.

Unfortunately, the warm and sunny weather is attracting insects. And since my window's fully open, many of them see this as an open invitation into my room.

Normally I don't really mind, as long as they don't buzz around my head and they're not 2-inch crane flies (which we've had a fair few of lately). This morning, though, the large insect that chose to come flying into my room was a rather large hornet that did the usual flying insect thing of, "Hmm, I know I got in here somehow, there must be an exit— no, wait! I'll bet I can get outside again by boring a hole through the window with my antennae!".

My window has two panes; one of them is in a movable frame that slides across the other, allowing for opening and closing. Large as the hornet was, all 1½ inches of it managed to get stuck between the two panes while I stood in the middle of the room panicking and clinging to a newspaper (with which I would, theoretically, sweep the hornet out of the window in an authoritative manner). See, I really, really hate large insects (well, large insects and medium- to large-sized spiders), and if there's anyone else around when I encounter one, they're damn well going to be the ones dealing with it. I live in hope that I will never again come across a stag beetle, particularly a flying one, since they are probably the one thing that provokes the greatest irrational fear response in me. I'm getting nervous just typing about them.

*shudder*

When the hornet was finally gone (I did my bit during the five minutes by occasionally and heroically flapping the newspaper at it, and having it ignore me utterly) I looked up hornets (or vespa crabro as I now know) on Wikipedia and found another childhood myth ousted. I've always thought that bees = okay, wasps = bad, and hornets = run. It seems that they're far less agressive than common wasps, though, and unlikely to sting you.

Ultimately though, my irrational fears hasn't been dispelled with logic. I'm sure I'll be just as scared next time I come across a hornet :-)

Catch up

Since the end of exams two weeks ago I've been in the position of having nothing to do until tomorrow when the results come out (when there'll probably be a short flurry of activity and then, ten minutes later, I'll have nothing to do until October).

The weekend before last, Kevin came with me to look at the lovely flat which I'd seen the previous week. We ooohed and aaahed and made other suitable encouraging noises, and the estate agent gave us a couple of application forms to fill out, should we want to.

I went to stay with Kevin all of last week, which was lovely. Apart from watching the original Star Wars trilogy after having finally seen Sith at the weekend, a lot of the week was spent running around trying to sort out application forms though — since Kevin and I were in Essex, and things like my proofs of ID (passport) and address were in Surrey with my parents, who also (as my guarantors) had to fill out a form, which was in Essex, and had to wing its way to the letting agents in Coventry. Fun fun fun.

We managed to get almost everything sorted (as much as we were able to) and decided to drive back up to university on Saturday, pop into the agents in the afternoon, and make a formal application. We got up earlier than usual and ran around trying to do lots of last-minute things before setting off for the 3-hour drive during the hottest portion of the day, on one of the hottest days of the year so far.

When we finally got back to my halls of residence at around 2:30pm, Kevin phoned the agents to ask about suitable parking spaces round their way, and discovered that they'd closed at 1:30pm. Damn. After all the rushing around that day, and being worried all week that someone else would make an application first, it seemed doubly galling. I asked Kevin to stay until Monday so that we could go in to the agents together. And so we did.

Sunday passed without incident, but on Monday morning everything else seemed to be going wrong. I visited the Academic Office first thing to collect an official letter confirming my student status (for the application), which I had 'ordered' last Wednesday through a website form. The system apparently hadn't worked, they couldn't find the email, so please fill out this form and come back tomorrow. Yay, another thing we don't have to show the letting agents.

Even with directions from the AA, we had a little bit of trouble and panic finding our way around Coventry's ringroad system, not helped by the fact that Kevin's gearbox had started playing up in the heat; putting it into fifth gear was tricky, and first gear was unattainable, leaving him having to start in second at the many traffic lights we encountered.

When we got to the agents they did all but "tsk tsk" us, telling us that they needed more details and documents than either a) was noted on the application form, or b) they'd told us when I phoned to check last week. They also told us that the flat we wanted had a viewing booked for that day, and if those people decided to make an application for it, obviously there'd be nothing they could do about it.

All of this meant one of two things to my sometimes superstitious brain: 1) all the things going wrong so far were a bad sign, and we wouldn't get the flat, or 2) we were going to get the flat, and the badness was just balancing karma pre-compensating for it.

At the moment I'm thinking it's #2 (hopefully), based purely on the fact that the agents called today to say they've received most of the extra documentation that's been posted/faxed to them, and that the people who booked the viewing for Monday had never turned up.

My fingers are still crossed.

One year down

After a trying morning of internet technology failing me in my attempt to get my first-year results online (and thus avoiding the half-hour walk to my tutor and back to obtain results face-to-face), it finally came through — pass in all modules (which equals "Honours"; I personally take issue with the fact that a round 40% in each module merits Honours, but that's another story) and a solid 2.1 overall.

Predictably, my best marks were in a) all the programming exams, and b) the English essay writing course we had in the first term. Worst was in Maths (but then, everyone agreed that was a pig of a paper).

Ah well, one year down, done and dusted. Hopefully I can do better in my next three years :-)

Things I won't miss about living at uni

• Sharing one kitchen between twelve of us. Apart from having to stagger everyone's meals so we can have access to the grill/hob/oven unit, and the sweltering heat in the summer when various cooking has been going on for two hours, one fridge and one freezer in the kitchen works out as half a shelf in each per person. This is kind of a sore point with me, because it means I can't buy in bulk at all, just because there isn't room to store it.
• Having a toaster that will either do nothing to or burn your bread product, depending which of four slots you put it in. The toaster also swallows most breadstuffs, and will shred at least the lower half of it to pieces when you try to extract it.
• Having a (usually open) window facing the road that half the university uses on their way home from the student union. This means that, come midnight, I'm usually treated to a procession of drunken students yelling, shrieking and staggering their way down the road outside. (It could be worse though. At least they're actually moving past my window, rather than camping out.)
• The fire alarms going off (and, naturally, building evacuation) every time someone burns their toast, or cooks burgers and leaves the kitchen door open (the smoke detector is immediately outside the door). There was a memorable 3am fire alarm last term (in January); that was fun.
• People playing an Xbox game in the next room and having to yell every ten seconds, as though their football team had scored 5-0, because they either gained points, or narrowly missed gaining points.
• Cleaners unlocking the door and coming in at either a) 10am (which meant getting up at 9:30, boo), or b) any time between 10am and 4pm (which meant getting up at 9:30, and feeling unable to have a shower or even go to the loo until they'd come and gone).
• Having a laundrette (not far away, but still) instead of a washing machine — or even better, a washing machine + maternal parental unit to do washing :-)
• This bloody desk chair that's been provided — it's non-adjustable (four legs) and is too low down for me even with cushions. Generally by week 6 in a term I have a constantly aching back, and sometimes an aching right shoulder (from reaching for the mouse).
• Only seeing Kevin for two days a week (or less, occasionally). But that's about to change :-)