Back from the depths

I haven't been blogging. Again. But here are some of the things that I would have blogged about:

• Last Friday, the bus from uni hurtled its way straight past not one, not two, not three, but four consecutive bus stops where people wanted to get off, and who were indicating this by a) filling the aisle by trying to stand next to the door, and b) repeatedly (and ever-more-viciously) pressing the audibly beepy Stop button whilst the driver was all the while ignoring every one of us. (And unfortunately, we were all too English to ask him what on earth he thought he was doing.)

  Net result: I missed my connecting bus completely as I was dumped over a mile up the road from where I wanted to be (I wanted the first bus stop that the driver had ignored), had to get a substitute bus that went vaguely in the right direction (the driver of which completely ignored my running alongside the bus and waving for him to stop, and then had to stop two seconds later anyway because there was a woman with pushchair whom he hadn't let off the first time. But anyway) and then walked the last 15-20 minutes, all the while cold and also With Cold.

• Warwick Uni has blogs system. Whilst many of the postings are of the "what I did last night" variety (due to the very insular, LiveJournal-type community), I'm currently still trying to overcome my shock at the blogger seriously, if unintelligently, arguing for forced abortions and jail sentences for under-age pregnant girls. Even so, it wouldn't have stood out in my mind quite so much had I not just read another Warwick post pondering whether or not "chavs" should be allowed to vote.

• I've been getting deluged with information about careers and recruitment fairs and internships and am now starting to vaguely wonder if I should be doing work experience over the summer.

• Although most of the deadlines are in the next 2-4 weeks.

• I've been getting distracted from my courseworks by a pet Python project (or rather, I started a Python project in an attempt to avoid coursework).

• Unfortunately this only took two days, so I'm back to coursework again.

• (although I do still have to convert it from a simple script into a CGI script callable from a webpage)

• (and try to improve the error reporting)

• (and then announce it to the world)

• I've been wondering why our database coursework specifies that we must not use NULL values.

• Especially since this means that all of the optional fields in the spec have to be farmed out into completely separate TABLES.

• I'm also wondering if I'll ever grasp concurrent programming, but that's a by the by.

• I note that my cooking, whilst not great, is at least better than Anna's.

• (But only because I follow a printed recipe for complicated meals.)

• And I wonder if I'll ever ever learn to do all the washing and ironing at the weekend, without leaving dry pre-iron clothes hanging up all week.

• I've also been saving the world a bit. But only at night.

Waking on sunshine

I'm not a morning person. This fact can be deduced from the fact that the thought of having to get up before 10am unfailingly induces moans and sighs from me. (You'd think that the fact that I have to get up before 10am four to five times a week would reduce the amount of moaning, but in fact it just makes me difficult to live with.)

I'm also quite sensitive to sound when I'm asleep, especially in the morning, which means that I can hit the snooze button on my alarm clock within a second of it going off, even if I've hidden it behind the big book on my bedside table. And, often as not, I'll fall back asleep again with no memory of having done so. When I do finally manage to open my eyes and haul myself out of bed I'm usually rather groggy and don't feel fully alert until a number of hours later.

Last week, I decided enough was enough. Being permanently tired and grumpy in the winter doesn't exactly help my happiness levels, and I decided there must be a Better Way. There is.

My new alarm clock is a Lumie sunrise alarm clock — for 30 minutes before the buzzer goes off, the bulb gradually builds from nothing to full brightness, allowing your sleep to get lighter and lighter before you are finally woken up.

I've only tested it on three mornings so far, but by gorrah, it seems to work. It doesn't make me less tired overall, but I'm certainly a hell of a lot more awake in the mornings. I can even get up the first time the alarm goes off! I never thought I'd spend £40 on an alarm clock, but I think (I hope) this is going to make so much difference to my state of mind in the mornings that it'll be worth it.

It has a "sunset" function for night time as well, which is less successful from my point of view since I like to sleep in complete darkness. It is quite good for winding down watching television in bed, or just talking, but more often I'm reading and I've found the light dims a little too quickly for comfort. Still, the brightness can always be manually adjusted (though you'd need to do it every five minutes, but let's not get into that.)

I love my new alarm clock. I should have got one years ago.

Waiting for windows

The flat that Kevin and I moved into in August had been newly converted from office buildings, never been lived in before. It eliminated a lot of problems that can crop up when moving into a house or flat; things like the carpet being infested with dog hair, or strange stains hidden underneath the sofa, broken (or terribly old) kitchen appliances, and so on. However, we have encountered a small set of problems characteristic of the flat being Brand Shiny New. Things like the electrically-live cooker hood, the lack of a phone line (both sorted out within a mere six weeks), and the hole we discovered in the window three or four weeks ago.

Now, you may wonder why we never noticed a hole in the window prior to this. To be honest, it's just a small gap between the window and the window frame; tiny enough that you can't see it unless your head's at exactly the right angle, but certainly large enough to see daylight through the other side. A number of other windows have draughts too, getting ever more noticeable now that the weather's turned colder and the wind's stepped up. Yesterday we even had the blind blowing out behind a tightly shut window due to the draught!

We phoned the letting agents to inform them of the problem, and didn't hear anything further for another ten days. Finally we managed to get an appointment for last Friday afternoon (last week). After having moved all the furniture in various rooms and cleared window ledges so that people could get in to fix things, Kevin phoned back at 4:30pm to check where the window-fixey people had got to. Nobody at the company knew quite what had happened; nor did they when he phoned again on Monday. Eventually we got another appointment for this morning, and lived in the hope that come the weekend, we could turn the heating down and be warm in the absence of draughts.

Today's appointment was for 10:15am, and when I got home from Warwick four hours later Kevin met me with a manic grin. Apparently the last he'd heard, the window man "had been on our road at 10:30", but never turned up. A couple of phonecalls later, Kevin turned to me and said, "You'll never guess."

My sarcastic reply of, "Car-jacked?" turned out to be far closer to the truth than I imagined — apparently the guy had pulled over somewhere on our (very long) road and got out to ask some builders where to find our building. While this was happening, someone nicked all the tools from his van, and also his mobile phone; hence he spent a lot of the day at the police station.

Someone's coming on Monday instead to fix our windows. Maybe.