wap wap wap II

I'm typing this on my Nokia - rather pointlessly, perhaps, as I'm sat in front of the PC, but it demonstrates my snazzy new home-made WAP interface to clunkyblog. This means that my site is now technically a "moblog". Horrible word, that. Anyway, expect some action-packed updates on the move, if I can be arsed.

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wap wap wap

Note to self: Write a WAP interface for blog updates. Would probably get used, like, once ever, but would take 10 mins max to construct, and would have a degree of cool.

Note to everyone: Google are said to be looking at excluding blogs from their search results, which is both interesting and vaguely worrying.

I seem to have been randomly included on this list of Warwick students' blogs. Which is nice.

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Self help

Online diagnosis thingies are amusing. Particularly the ones on mentalhelp.net (thanks, Rob). If its learned tones are to be believed, then I'm a moderately manic, moderately depressed alcoholic ("Hazardous Usage: Help Strongly Urged") with borderline Adult Attention Deficit.

Or, in English - a Student.

Needless to say, we didn't win last night (if we had, I'd have mentioned it by now). We were happy enough with how we played, though, so we shrug and move on. The winners were some curious kind of 80's soul effort with a drum machine and a Prince/George Michael wannabe singer. Hmm. Great stage presence, though.

The low point of the night was Fine Line allegedly trying to make off with Neil's bag in their van - said bag containing as it did a grand's worth of cymbals and such things, as well as his phone and car keys. Kudos to Mike for spotting something was afoot, confronting them, and retrieving it. You really don't expect that kind of shit from another band.

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Raindrops

This is going to be a very long update. If reading a list of mostly dry, factual goings-on followed by a few faintly amusing links doesn't sound like your thing, then go elsewhere.

So. Last weekend saw frantic revision that utterly failed to prepare me for Monday's Discrete Maths Exam From Hell™, which proved a painful reminder of why I'm a programmer, not a mathematician. I approached the exam in quietly confident mood, bolstered by having sailed through the past papers, but I was swiftly crushed by the failure of this year's paper to bear them any reasonable resemblance.

[28.04.2003] [16:34:01] * Paul|exam_of_d00m is now known as Paul
[28.04.2003] [16:34:04] <@Paul> omg
[28.04.2003] [16:34:05] <@Paul> death
[28.04.2003] [16:34:08] <@Paul> destruction
[28.04.2003] [16:34:10] <@Paul> etc.

I think I scraped a pass, though. Assuming the negatively marked (bastards) section didn't wipe out too much. The four proof questions were inherently evil. We had to answer three, vs. previous years' two. One was about graphs, and all of the others were about functions - in particular, set countability. I hadn't revised graphs or functions particularly well at all, having concentrated on other topics - based on the nice, varied choice of questions on the past papers, I had decided to concentrate on understanding about half of the syllabus really well. The wrong half. So I filled an answer book with vaguely mathematical bullshit and left. It's only worth 10% of the year...

Monday night, rehearsal with The Stolen, nothing worth boring y'all with.

Tuesday was interesting. Honest. Professional Aspects class test in the morning, nothing remarkable. In the afternoon, however, the Programming for Computer Scientists (or "Java speedwriting") exam followed the previous day's example by rejecting everything that its past papers had stood for. Perversely, though, I think this one actually worked in my favour. The content was similar enough to previous years - but there was approximately twice as much of it, and having wandered idly into the Panorama Room after half an hour's revision, expecting to finish the paper in an hour, get bored, and wander out again, I found myself filling two entire answer books with scribbles bordering on the unintelligible, pen flailing violently to the end. I did actually finish the exam - just, but I kept fairly quiet about that afterwards, as I encountered several dozen people who didn't, and nobody else who did. It was an exam that just about everyone had expected to be easy, but many actually found it even tougher going than Discrete. Afterwards, fifty or sixty computer scientists were in the bar below the exam room (the one inspiringly named "The Bar"), and Stephen Jarvis, our once esteemed Java lecturer, descended the stairs to a resounding chorus of boos from the floor. Classic. The ill-feeling lives on - to this day, frustrations are being vented on the course newsgroup :-) I shouldn't laugh. I just hope I did comparatively well enough to offset Monday's disaster.

If you're still with me, but about to drift off to sleep, I suggest you end the misery by crashing your Internet Explorer with these 5 lines of HTML. Hours of fun are bound to ensue. (Yeah, it's another Slashdot steal.)

If you use Mozilla like a proper person, or if you just don't fancy nuking your browser, then you could go and play with Dan's glorious new ASCII Mandelbrot generator. Fractals never looked so retro-chic.

Right, back to the diary. Sorry. I'm going to compress the rest of the week as far as possible.

Tuesday night, with exam trauma now over for four whole weeks, featured a pleasing combination of comfy sofas and alcohol in The Graduate. Thursday night bore the now-usual visit to the Colosseum for cheap vodka and good music. I don't remember much about it. And last night I felt awful, so wussed out of the union's new indie night, much to the disgust of my peers.

I need to backtrack to Wednesday here. Don't worry, it won't take too long. Mike and I attended a lecture organised by compsoc, starring the Dr Solomon of Dr Solomon's Antivirus Toolkit fame. It wasn't a lecture as such - more of a two hour Q&A session, but some interesting stuff came out of it, although most of it was of purely nostalgic value. Anyway, I'd write more about this if I hadn't just passed 700 words. Erk. Okay, quickly, Wednesday night, The Stolen played at The Jailhouse in Coventry. Great gig - nice venue, great sound, friendly sound guy, good crowd, other bands were cool, and I got random applause and cheers for a solo (in Beasts and Cavaliers, no less), which never happens. People never notice keyboard players :-) So that was cool.

Back to the present day now, and in other news, #alt.fan.elite acquired its own community blog yesterday. May your god(s) help us all if it actually thrives. And premature birthday greetings for tomorrow go to Nikki, who has been enduring an overlapping string of ailments that, collectively, make SARS look about as serious as a stuffy nose.

I leave you with a brief pre-synopsis of the near future. Tonight will feature The Stolen in action in Northampton once more, in the battle of the bands final at The Abington, where we'll take on old rivals Fine Line, and maybe prevail. I'll stay over at Henrik's afterwards, hopefully returning tomorrow in time to rehearse with Unreal Coriander and do some of the lab report for Tuesday. On Monday, The Stolen shall return to a favourite haunt of yesteryear, Coventry's Whitefriars, where we'll play a reasonably long set of 90 minutes or so. And on Tuesday night, Unreal Coriander will be supporting Silverman at the SU with some kind of acousticish set that we haven't really decided on yet. But enough about events that haven't occurred yet.

There, I finished. Told you it was big. If your brain hasn't melted and seeped out through your eye sockets, then I congratulate you. Now, go and do something productive.

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A-Life

Good evening. I'm Paul's blog. You will be delighted to learn that I have taken to auto-updating, since my owner has spent much of the last week procrastinating doing it himself.

So what have I been up to?

Well, not a lot. As usual, I spent about 99.5% of each day unconscious. I woke up a few hundred times, but only for a few milliseconds. Some strangers came and stared at me. Some even clicked on me a few times. In fact, on Friday someone actually left a comment on an old entry - boy, was that exciting.

Last Thursday sucked, mind. m3fe.com died and I completely ceased to exist for a few hours.

So yes, quite a week, as I'm sure you'll agree. Perhaps Paul will tell you all about his week tomorrow. That is, if he's still alive in the morning, after pillaging the Colosseum's cruelly cheap double vodkas tonight.

Good night.

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"Hack the planet!"

Little to report. Just avoiding revision again. Six gigs presently scheduled in the next five weeks, which is nice. Five of The Stolen's and one of Radiohead's. New (as in, not yet released) Radiohead album is highly functional.

We spent a vaguely devastating 11 hours in the rehearsal room on Monday recording some demos. Got about fifteen tracks of varying quality - some are going to be good enough to tout for gigs with, which was the whole point anyway. This reminds me, I think we're playing at the Jailhouse in Cov on Wednesday. More details to follow.

I wrote an essay on "cyber-terror" the other night. I quoted Hackers (see entry title) and managed to use the word "clunky" in proper context. All while still managing to undercut the minimum word count by 300 words. Oops.

Heading home in a few hours to pick up the stuff I forgot to bring back to uni. Then back to the great slog o'preparation for Monday's discrete maths hell.

So ends one of those entries that are supposed to give blogs a bad name. c.f. Xama on blogs:

[...] it depends what blogs are used for, if it's ranting about stuff [...] they can be good, the "i got up, took a shit, ate, ate, ate, went to bed" bollocks that a lot of the livejournal shite seems to be is what has teh ghey [...]

Good afternoon.

PS nView is broken.

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Random words

Egads, what a night. I'm in DCS, of all places. Fancied a walk to clear my head. And they have a vending machine here. And computers with which to update blogs in ill-advised fashion. There's one other person here. Strange. I expected either lots, or none. (Your) god knows what he's doing here at this hour. Wondering the same of me, perhaps. I'm being purposefully loud with my Twix wrapper to try to annoy him, but it doesn't seem to be working. Now he's only giggling at something on his screen. Bastard. I came here to be alone. Thought I was going to be the only one in this building.

(Pondering how long to stay here)

Think I'll work on the site for a while...

Added Dan Jones' blog to my blog nav box thing, for something to do. His dubious reward for knowing what OctaMED is and being rather perceptive :-)

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Advice for the Young Bride

If you haven't already, read this and be simultaneously amused and horrified.

If I wasn't single, I'd be glad I live in the 21st Century :-)

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'kthxbye'

This would be the last update before I move back to uni, then.

Wednesday night saw Red Trap's first gig under their new name The Stolen, at a Battle of the Bands at The Abington in Northampton. We were the third band on, and rather appropriately, were followed by The Crooks :-)

To shorten a story of some length, we won - much to my surprise - having not been able to hear very much up on stage, it wasn't clear how good, bad or awful we'd sounded. We must have been alright, though, as the competition were excellent, especially the first band, who'd been together twenty years! We return to play in the final on 3rd May, which means I'll miss Nikki's party. Arse.

Anyway, all must visit The Stolen's new website - at least after it's stopped being a 34SP holding page.

This final aside has nothing to do with me. I had to laugh, in the nicest possible way, at Nullsoft, for they've released yet another version of Winamp 2 (2.91), while Winamp 3 languishes untouched since its buggy first release. I applaud this retrograde behaviour, of course, as the 2.x series was always preferable to its dubious successor, which appeared to me to be more of a media playing skinning system than a skinnable media player. The mighty 2.91 sports a slightly sleeker default skin, a host of bugfixes, and some new features in the Winamp Library introduced in 2.9. Get your copy here.

Now, to revision, and packing :-(

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Special bonus CD with some filler material, available for a limited time only

A less than brilliant rehearsal, but these things happen. The high point was undoubtedly Nikki calling me from the Placebo gig during their cover of Where Is My Mind? Sounded about as good as it could possibly sound, having been blasted at ear-damaging levels into a Nokia, mangled down to 9,600bps* and transmitted all the way back to a reception-decimating industrial unit in Leamington Spa. Good enough for me to make out someone near the phone screaming the wrong lyrics over the wrong part of the song ;-)

Congratulatory noises to both Nikki and James for passing various modules today. I haven't asked Tom what his results were like yet...

* I'm not sure about this. 9,600bps is GSM data bandwidth, I know, but is the bw for voice calls the same? I assume so.

3 comments