Good lord. Just finished a 250-hour effort to finish my summer project and get it shipped to my employers in the States before they got angry enough to dispatch hitmen. Whilst successful (and to the tune of £6500 :D), this meant spending roughly 14 hours a day at the lab (though some of that was supervising and so on).

As a result, since achieving my freedom this last Thursday, I'm suffering a sort of free time decompression sickness. By this I mean having become completely unfamiliar with the idea of free time you have to do something with, rather than which is reserved for some pre-existing engagement, like going to the pub, drinking, or just plain imbibing.

On the plus side,

* Whilst 70-80% of my waking hours were spent working, my solitary long weekend off was spent marching once more on Edinburgh, where mountain biking gave a good excuse to descend on strigidae and mchr3k (though on the downside I picked the one weekend when thebiomechanoid was up in Cambridge to be in a non-Cambridge location)

* Greg obligingly purchased Brütal Legend whilst I was in busy-land. Yae, and I have looked upon it, and it doth rock.

...for a further 21 hours!

Got back from New Jersey as of yesterday at 7am (i.e. 2am NJ time), going to Switzerland at 3pm tomorrow. Woot! Still feeling like my brain has been removed, prepared for roasting (application of salt, pepper, marinade etc) before an angry sous chef realised something was a bit iffy about this giant truffle and rammed it roughly back 'tween my ears. Less woot :)

The swiss soujorn shall be followed by 10 days in glorious North Yorkshire (just long for the rose tinted specs to turn a sort of vermillion,) then back to Cambridge just in time to do one Dof those PhD things. Yeah!

I've just completed my sternest Princeton work day, clocking in at an unenviable 14.5 hours. Oh yeah.

Just time before I ought to go to bed to relax by watching the next Red Dwarf (I've been working my way through series 1-6 over the summer) -- and that is.... Quarantine. For those who don't know every RD episode like the back of your hand (are there such people?) that's the one with Mr. Flibble. For those of you who don't know this particularly malevolent glove puppet, it's this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKHLOo1WgDQ.

That should bolster my already-teetering sanity... :)

Today's XKCD (http://www.xkcd.com/621/) has me on three counts from four. Thank goodness for the beer panel.

A month without writing anything? That resolve certainly evaporated quick-a-like. Anyhow a brief summary:

Film reviews in 10 words or less!

Up: Quite fun, The Incredibles was better, adult when slapstick restrained.
Frost / Nixon: He wishes he was a good person. Subtle? Or projecting?
Let the Right One In: Horror movies are actually surprise movies. This isn't either, but wonderful.
Gran Torino: Heartwarming, unsubtle, but who cares? Occasional descent into exposition theatre.

Waffling in 10 words or more!

Elaborating briefly on the horror movie thing: most horror movies I find don't portray things that are horrifying per se; they just try to make you wet yourself by doing unexpected things, like your "friend" leaping out from behind your door and watching as your heart explodes out of your chest and makes a bid for freedom. Which would actually be horrifying, but you see what I mean. The worst example I can think of is 30 Days of Night. Truely dreadful film. Every 10 minutes or so they'd decide you hadn't inhaled a piece of popcorn in too long, and something totally inconsequential would happen, but accompanied with a sharp orchestral sting to keep Dr Heimlinch in business. Something like a bird flying across the screen. Hence "surprise movie". I'm not horrified, just startled.

By contrast, Let the Right One In isn't surprising -- things happen which might ordinarily be considered horror movie fare (y'know, small girls eating still-living peoples' faces, the usual stuff,) but it's shot so as to remove the surprise element -- we see it happen from afar, and can see her approaching for a good 3 or 4 seconds before she strikes. Yet the film still works, to a degree for the fact that the things taking place are genuinely horrifying, but mostly because they construct a genuine human tragedy from love between vampire and human. It's an old story, but it works -- who needs horror, or surprise?

Finally: here's one from the "it can only happen in Ameirca" file: a few weeks ago I went to a festival in New York, and amongst others tried to watch a band in the Sara D. Roosovelt park. However the band was unable to take the stage, due to militant bicycle polo players who refused to yield the stage area. Bicycle polo. Genius.

Every now and again the world just dumps free comedy on your head in a way that suggests there might be actually be a god, and if so, he's enjoying all this a bit too much. Today was such a day.

Walking down the street into work I passed a car waiting at an intersection, frustrated at a big black car that was dawdling across the street he wanted to join. Wishing his frustration known, he gave a good firm blast on his horn. A good hooooooooooonk.

The big black car, subject of his anger, would turn out to be a hearse. Not only that, but it was followed by the traditional parade of well-wishers, who drive in procession behind the hearse at around 10mph.

At least the first three in the procession wound their windows down to flip this guy off. There were at least 50 cars in the procession.

Watching the driver attempt to somehow hide without reversing into traffic was a sight to behold :)

Okay, so I set out yesterday to buy a second-hand guitar with the aim of keeping in practice whilst I'm out of the country. 20 minutes later I had a nice-ish acoustic, and had parted with not a dollar. What I can't work out is... why? Here's what happened.

Cast of characters
--------------

AGING HIPPY LADY (AHL), an elderly female with a box of Joni Mitchell LPs gathering dust somewhere, who probably owns a musical instrument shop, or at least works there.
JOHN, a tall, heavy-set, genial black man who works in the same shop and probably does not own it.
CHRIS, a customer of said music store who seeks a rubbish second-hand guitar.

[AHL is behind the counter. Enter CHRIS]

CHRIS: Do you sell second-hand instruments?

AHL: No, but I can give you the number of a guy who sometimes does... there's not much of a market in Princeton though, so I wouldn't get your hopes up.

CHRIS: Ah. Well, if I were to buy new, what's the cheapest you stock here?

AHL: Well... there's this one here [walks over], but that's $110.

CHRIS: Yeah that is a bit more than I was hoping to spend... I'm only looking to own it for 3 months until I fly home. Quality's no issue though, as I'm really bad at actually playing it at the moment.

AHL: Hmm. [Grins] I know what I'll do.... in fact, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do.

[Enter JOHN from a back room]

AHL: John, you still got that guitar?

JOHN: No, I gave it away already.

AHL: [Gives John a look]

JOHN: 'Course I've still got it, it's in the back.

AHL: [Retrieves the guitar, gives it to Chris]

CHRIS: [Plays, badly]

AHL: So, what do you think?

CHRIS: Sounds good!

AHL: [Pauses thoughtfully]... Take it.

CHRIS: Huh?

AHL: Take it. It was a donation. Just one condition: when you're leaving the country you have to give it away to someone. It was a donation. Now, goodbye.

CHRIS: Well... thanks very mu-

AHL: And don't bring it in here. BYE.

[Exit CHRIS]

------------

So, answers on a postcard for what in the hell just happened?

Available evidence:

* AHL was in a position to give this guitar away.
* John expected the guitar to be given away, as he said "I already gave it away" without prompting
* AHL will be in some sort of trouble if I return to the store with the guitar
* Therefore, somebody knows about the guitar, as otherwise it's disappearance wouldn't be an issue.
* But given that it makes a difference if I come back, it's alright for it to have gone...
* But it's not alright if it turns out *I* have it...
* Maybe it was for some particular special customer? But then wouldn't AHL be rumbled when the customer didn't get it?

So yeah... postcards?

My bicycle has successfully crossed the Atlantic Ocean and *appears* to work without undue mangling of my parts! It has somehow survived the baggage handlers' game of Who Can Break the Most Expensive Stuff (not to belittle their efforts; I'm sure there were far more valuable freight items to which they wisely paid more attention)! It endured the 100-foot amplitude sinewave our plane described upon takeoff from Heathrow (which is rather worrying when your ground clearance is about 300 feet)!

It even wethered my hamhanded attempts at reassembly! There exist, I am told, souls with an empathy for mechanical devices. Noble individuals able to pick up a wrench without clobbering some important organ. Able to note that they're screwing the wrong way *before* the item in question is fused inseperably to its nearest neighbour. Able even to note that when faced with five indentical screwholes, one of which is shiny and clearly recently abraded whilst the others look distinctly rustic, that One of These Things is Not Like the Other. But not I.

Hopefully clean-slate networking research grants you heck of XP...

The California Academy of Sciences is pretty cool! They have a rainforest-in-a-dome along the lines of the Eden project, though I think without the latter's self-sustaining ambitions. They also have a huge exhibit about evolution at the moment due to the Darwin anniversary thing; relatively few Christians were torching the displays, but I guess such people would avoid said academy entirely.

They also had a planetarium, something I'd never visited. It more or less blended 50:50 mysticism and actual science: the "main feature" was very superficial and focused mainly on inspirational language about "oases of life" and such, as they zoomed around the solar system Google Earth style and basically said "Jupiter! Bit too hot. No good!". However after that the museum's resident geek took over and told us about recent progress in exoplanetery imaging, including Hubble's direct photography of Earth-scale planets (3 pixels,) as well as the upcoming Kepler mission which is to note exoplanets using very small scale star luminosity variance.

I also bought another chocolate bar from MANOS. I kept a look out for DAVE, but his nationalist diatribe was staid for this day.

A brief addendum to yesterday's ramblings: I met an honest-to-goodness stereotypical no-clue-about-anything-outside-American American! I'd thought they were invented for the purposes of rubbish observational comedy!

It all went a little bit like this:

Cast of Characters
------------------

MANOS, a Spanish shopkeeper and retailer of CHOCOLATE BARS
DAVE, a towering black man and friend of MANOS
CHRIS, a customer, who seeks a CHOCOLATE BAR

Act I
-----

CHRIS: One chocolate bar please, good sir.

MANOS: $1 please

DAVE: (At CHRIS, bellowing wildly) SO WHY DON'T THEY GIVE THE ACADEMY AWARD TO ALL THE ENEMIES OF OUR COUNTRY?

CHRIS: ...Uhh?

DAVE: (Still bellowing) IRAQ! IRAN! PAKISTAN!

CHRIS: Shwaa?

MANOS: (Waggles his eyebrows at CHRIS as though to suggest this is nothing to worry about)

DAVE: SLUMDOG! SLUMDOG!

CHRIS: Uhh...

MANOS: They gave the Best Picture award to Slumdog Millionaire just now.

CHRIS: Aren't... aren't India on your side? OUR side?

MANOS: (Nods)

DAVE: (Bellowing less now) They had terrorists! Mumbai, man!

CHRIS: ...Against them...

DAVE: (Back to bellow mark 10) THEY GOT THE BOMB!

CHRIS: Er...

DAVE: (Lowering face close enough to CHRIS to concievably bite off his EYEBROWS) WE INVENTED THAT!

CHRIS: (Runs away)

I feel DAVE is spiritually the same man as a friendly chap I met in Northern Ireland not too long ago...

Sweet jesus. SF greets me with miserable bastard weather par excellence. All my maps have dissolved. Free maps, fortunately, but still. Anyway. The first day:

* The seafront is pretty.
* Pier 39 is an awesome temple of tourist bollocks.
* The Maritime Museum is intriguing! Turns out the trip New York --> San Francisco took 5 months by cargo ship until around the beginning of the 20th century, which is frankly mind-boggling. It'd be quicker to mail instructions on producing the item in question, even if that meant establishing a new industry. Though you'd probably have to ship them the factory equipment.
* The Haight is the renowned District o' Hippies; however it's basically Camden. Quite fun to wander through, but unremarkable when you've seen said piece of London before.
* The Golden Gate Park is pretty and absolutely unreasonably large; something like 3 miles long. The paths all meander too, so traversing the thing and returning would consume most of an afternoon; to this ends my plan is to obtain a bike and do this properly.

Meta-things:

* I'd forgotten how crap the grid-of-roads system was. Pedestrian crossings every 40 seconds are a pain, and every time you get a green light to cross the road, the people wanting to turn across you get a green too, and whoever successfully intimidates the other gets to use the road. Seeing as I don't weigh a metric ton or sport a suit or armour, the cars have been winning. The locals seem to fling themselves madly into the paths of oncoming cars who then stop without complaint, but this conflicts with my default don't-be-flattened plan.

* Metro systems, light rail systems, buses, and all other public transport devices of a similar pay-some-money-to-loan-some-kinetic-energy nature really need a page of fairly obvious quirks documentation at their stops -- i.e. something which briefly notes all the ways this particular system differs from the others, e.g. does/doesn't give change, does/doesn't need you to keep your ticket, does/doesn't require validation of tickets once on the train, and so on. London for example would need to note that the ticket gates can't be worked with coins (unlike the US), tickets don't need validation (unlike most of Europe,) but must be kept (again unlike the US) This lot would only be useful to tourists and other travellers who are a minority, but they take up a bunch of time when they blunder in with incorrect assumptions.

* Not unrelatedly, the SF metro appears to employ an inordinate number of women whom they equip with PA/speaker systems powerful enough to pass simple messages between stations via the tunnels, and appear to select for a strident, nasal tone of voice that serves to add an implicit "you fucking idiot" to the end of all statements. Grr.

Whoo! Ten hour flight to San Francisco! More tolerable than I had expected. Neither of my seat-neighbours smelt really bad, or fidgeted lots, or wanted to tell me about their dead tortoise. I think it's possible I was that guy.

This also meant watching three random films on the way over here, which I shall briefly review.

Meta-review: United Airlines *still* have the Film System Of Suck. The one where there are 8 films, but they're broadcast TV-style so you have to design a Gantt chart to figure out when the things you'd like to watch are starting and ending and so on. Curiously the only time I encountered the Film System of Awesome, where everything's streaming video cued on demand iPlayer style, was in 1995 on an American Airlines plane. Either they were really ahead of the time or United are a bit rubbish in that department.

OK, so the films:

1. The boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

Brief summary: Nasty Nazi bloke runs prison camp. Son of said Nazi notices that his back garden backs onto said camp, and is charmingly clueless about the nature of his new friend's existence in which he wears prison attire and always sits behind a huge electric fence. Oddly the Jewish kid only thinks to mention the imprisonment thing after three quarters of a film too. Nasty Nazi defends his doings by saying the Jews aren't real people and so on and so forth, but then his son sneaks into the camp and accidentally gets himself liquidated, and we close on NN realising his staggering bollocks-up and making the Egads face.

Curiously IMDB really likes this thing, and it's won awards and everything. Personally it seems tremendously lazy. The mentality of a concentration camp organiser would be a *really* interesting thing to go into, but like all such films the Nazis have only a token smidgen of humanity and are otherwise cold-hearted verging-on-sociopathic killers. We mainly follow some surrogate Americans (i.e. Germans who think like Americans reckon they would have done had they been Nazis with the benefit of hindsight). The lead kid delivers all his lines with the personality of an ironing board and there's lots of moral-highgrounding about the final solution, which is a bit of a movie Godwin's. Finally the ending doesn't make any damn sense. It's supposed to point out that NN can't divorce himself from his genocidal funtimes any more because he's accidentally genocided his son, but given his previous statements about Jews not being proper people, the incident is similar to if he'd accidentally run his son down in a combine harvester -- a tragic accident for sure, but far from a convincing argument against mechanised cultivation. I'd revise IMDB's 8/10 to more like 5/10 here.

2. City of Ember

Brief summary:

Boy: Damn, our city is falling to bits. Also, it's an underground city and there is nothing outside according to dogma. Hmm.

Girl: Hello. I'm very pretty but also look about 15, so that probably makes you a bad person. Also, I love nothing more than rigidly adhering to a formalised role in society. Man I could do with a boyfriend with rampant Asperger's.

Boy: City still falling apart. A way out perhaps?

Girl: Perhaps!

Boy: Aha!

And that's really it. All the rest is background texture. And the background texture is really cool, if a bit simple-minded. Ember feels like a benign communist state in principle, in that all kids are assigned their jobs by the mayor when they turn 16, and all labour appears to be for the state and the people. It's sort-of steam-punk, in that everything's a bit steam era and everything's falling apart due to lack of materials for repairs, and we spend much of our time following the people who patch it together. Everyone seems tremendously proud to serve the state and has a work ethic cast from purest gold, for some reason. I guess it'd work if you could instill that as a principle of the local culture, and if Ember was small enough that it didn't all fragment.

But yes, no plot to speak of beyond this. For some reason Ember has *one* power generator running the whole place, which periodically buggers up. For some reason, rather than try fixing that,it's time to decode a weird message from the Master Architect guys that tells you how to get out of Ember when the time is right -- which turns out to be basically the Super Fun Happy Water Slide, with a bit of engineering tinkering thrown in to justify the first half ot the film.

The whole problem with the last bit is that it loses all empathy, making the same mistake as Doctor Who -- I'm in no way engaged by watching to people stare at a tin box saying "I wonder how to make it do X?" then scratching the bears for a bit before prodding it at which point it makes some stuff happen and the problem recurs with something else I can't appreciate particularly. Sort of like watching a point-and-click adventure game, but the object names and verbs are in Yiddish. IMDB's 6.5/10 is about right here.

3. Sixty Six.

Awesome! I'm tremendously glad I watched this one last. Essentially a young Jewish kid plans his bar mitzvah as super awesome, but gradually realises that in many ways both he and his dad suck as people, and therefore that ain't happening. Finally a film I can identify with. Plus it was really genuinely laugh-out-loud hilarious at times. IMDB: 6.5. Me: 8.5. Those IMDB guys broadly suck.

Here are some sentences:

Back in Cambridge. Continuing to waste time with Rock Band, as has become my defining characteristic. Bought the Who track pack, including the monstrosity that is My Generation, the Leeds version. Writing an honest-to-goodness paper for an OS conference, which is good fun, and might mean a trip / junket to Switzerland. Going to Princeton for June-August, to work on a research project which is ridiculous but studded with good ideas. Been offered a free formal at Churchill, for not going there anymore. Been warned by el Fawcett that statistically there is an 8% chance it will poison me. Hoping that the free wine will offset that. Is a free dinner that may cause short-term chunderage but won't harm you thereafter worth it? Just about done turning Greg's DE2 board into a guitar effects processor. Ineptitude at actual playing, however, continues to be a problem. Jools Holland turns out to be quite fun. This can probably be attributed to The Hold Steady. They are awesome.

Blegh. Well that was the worst Christmas in living memory.

Mainly this is because I caught the fairly-minor-flu or pretty-monstrous-cold or really-pitiful-ebola on Christmas Eve, and so spent all of the time between then and the 28th craving an environment heated to 40 celcius. Except the times when the fever went the other way, when it was all about living in the fridge. Either way I couldn't be arsed to move off the sofa and actually gain access to the volcano / refrigerator, so I guess it doesn't matter.

This aside, presenty goodness was awesome -- I've got a couple of classic PC games courtesy of Yahtzee's ranting (specifically Psychonauts and Sands of Time), and some interesting reading for once, as my dad discovered the "customers who bought this..." field on Amazon :) Also got a nice dressing gown, so I can stop scarring my housemates' precious eyes at 8am as I sprint showerwards wearing only a bath towel.

Most fun thing has been my little sister's shiny copy of Guitar Hero World Tour, which I've been hastily thrashing my way through since the death wore off. In summary:

* The GHWT drum set is cooler than its Rock Band companion, and velocity sensitive drums (also present on RB2's kit) make for better drum fills.
* Rock Band is better designed. Period. Example: the meter showing everyone's relative success or failure is evident in RB, unreadable in GHWT. Another example: if someone fails in RB, you can save them with star power; in GHWT the song suddenly ends and everyone looks around accusingly to figure out who buggered up, as you don't know in advance due to the aformentioned sucky interface.
* Both GHWT and RB2 are watering the quality of the music down something awful this time around. They're both boasting 85 or so songs, compared to 45 or so last time. This all sounds good until you notice that both RB1 and GH3 had a further 20-25 "bonus songs," i.e. songs of dubious quality they didn't want to inflict on the main setlist.

These "bonuses" have vanished for both RB2 and GHWT, meaning the shit has been mixed in with the good stuff. In some cases actual specific songs which had been excluded from the main setlist previously are in, such as Tokio Hotel's dull and droning Monsoon, which was a "bonus" in RB1 and now a main track in GHWT. Similarly the thoroughly mediocre Lacuna Coil was demoted to "bonus" status in GH3, but appears twice in the main setlist this time. I don't mind too much with the dodgy metal that prevades, but the rubbish new indie stuff is stultifying, and has to be played to unlock the proper stuff.

Finally, it's new years' tonight. Unfortunately, all of the 3 people I still keep in touch with from school times have gone back home, so for the first time in about 5 years it's time for the depressing new years' mainstay: Jools Holland with the family. Fuck yeah...

1. Rock Band is awesomely fun, and myself & housemates have been doing little but wasting time playing it since Tuesday evening.

2. Playing the singer has caused me to learn the words to songs I previously thought awesome. Apropos of which...

Nobody gonna take my car
Im gonna race it to the ground
Nobody gonna beat my car
Its gonna break the speed of sound
Fair enough. Your car is awesome. I accept this.
Oooh its a killing machine
Its got everything
Everything? A built-in ironing board? A little stuffed squirrel that does the charleston when you break traffic laws?
Like a driving power...
Well yes, otherwise it'd be a rickshaw, but do go on...
...big fat tyres
And everything
That's cheating

I love it and I need it
I bleed it yeah its a wild hurricane
Alright hold tight
Im a highway star
*pat* *pat*

Though this verse really pales in comparison to...

Nobody gonna take my girl
Im gonna keep her to the end
Fair enough...
Nobody gonna have my girl
She stays close on every bend
Ouch. Man. Your rhyming dictionary sucks.
Oooh shes a killing machine
Let's root for a metaphor!
Shes got everything
Oh no...
Like a moving mouth...
Um. So in the car metaphor.... no, it doesn't make sense. And for his girl? Clearly he has had issues with lockjaw in the past. Let's... let's not dwell on that.
...body control...
Eh? So for the car... this would mean he's able to move the body. So some sort of transforming car? One moment an awesome sports car, the next a dinky hatchback so you can leave it in dodgy areas, or park in motorcycle places? Or maybe just the body moves more or less where the rest of the car does. It does not shed pieces of bodywork when moving.
And for the girl... well I should hope so! Issues with both lockjaw and... parapalegia? Or perhaps rather than *she* can control her body, he means *he* can control her body? If so either he's a sort of male dominatrix (dominator?), or else he has mastered the Imperius curse, possibly by way of some servos, a remote control and a backstreet surgeon. Either way, its probably best to send the police to Mr. Blackmore's house now and ask questions later.
And everything
I dread to think...

I love her I need her
Fair enough... but I fear for the rhyme...
I seed her
Ouch! Oh! Jesus. That was... unnecessary.
Yeah she turns me on
Alright hold on tight
Im a highway star

And there's some more, but it all pales in comparison. Think I'm going to lie down somewhere dark now.

Let no man suggest the Chris Party does not deliver upon its promises! A brighter, cheerier post was promised, and henceforth shall be delivered!

In the form of a quick rundown of the summer, mixing the twin purposes of 'keep up with the peoples' and 'convince myself it was better spent than at first sight it appears' :)

I liked that first para better. Right, ready? Go!

1. O2 Wireless Festival, Hyde Park. Went on my own due to aformentioned apoplexy. Went to see The Hold Steady, who sucked owing to a live sound which utterly destroys all intricacy present in their recorded work, but the day was salvaged by a truely amazing set by Counting Crows, whom I had previously discounted.

2. Learned all about the innards of Windows NT and COM, which ought to come in handy and is fun when you're a colossal nerd like me.

3. Cambridge Rock Festival, which was absolutely awesome. Four days for but £80, and awesome bands of ye olde variety such as Bad Company, Wishbone Ash, Juicy Lucy, Floyd and Zep (the latter two in tribute form, unfortuantely :)) Coupled with legions of local hard rock and blues bands, including the excellent Caimbo of Strawberry Fair fame, a great time was had by all, by which I mean me.

4. Learned all about OpenGL, which is a 3D graphics library. Can now make cubes spin in elaborate arrangements, with still more elaborate effects and suchlike :D

5. Read lots of my to-read pile, some of which had been in the pile for upwards of two years. Highlights include The Shipping News, a Cordwainer Smith collection, and FINALLY reading Godel, Escher, Bach, which makes easy going and even amusing reading of really mindboggling mathematics. Oooh and Masters of Doom, which tells the tale of Johns Romero and Carmack, the geeks behind Commander Keen, Doom, Quake, and so forth. *fantasize*

6. Saw Hayseed Dixie, who were awesome :D (though like every band ever, their new stuff isn't as good, wish they'd play more of the classics, etc) They even managed to get through the entire set without any yokel-type gaffes bar one, in which the clanging phrase "make sure you don't convert to Islam!" somehow worked its way into the stage banter -- though given the context, I'd like to think most people will have mentally edited in a [-ic Extremism] there. The guy was nonplussed by getting a cheer for mentioning anti-personnel mines, so his heart seems likely to be in the right place on this one.

7. Learned how to play the piano properly again, inspired by finally scaling my way to the top of Guitar Hero III :D Am buying Gen's (shudder) Urban Hero guitar in a couple of weeks, so hopefully they're transferrable skills and not just days and days of time wasted indulging in fantasy rock with my little sisters :)

8. FINALLY saw Idle Jack and the Big Sleep again, one of my top candidates for Best Band Evar, and certainly Best Band Evar in York Who Aren't Well Known. Though typically their set was a bit rubbish owing to the singer being almost too wasted to stand, and the venue's new sound system which eliminates all melodic content in favour of knocking listeners' eardrums somewhere into their cortex. Oh well :)

9. Relatedly, drank large proportions of the York beer supply with a couple of old school friends, one of whom I was sincerely surprised to hear from again :)

10. Went to Ireland with Georgie and co! Lots of fun was had by all, including a great gig by Triggerman (?), and I only got interrogated on nationalist grounds once and assaulted twice! One of those times from a neighbouring building, the assailant being armed with heavy building supplies! The "fuck all [Protestants|Catholics|Sheep] and may their progeny burn in the fiery pit" murals were as mildly terrifying and utterly unhelpful as expected, as was the 'oo-ar you don't walk down that street, thar be [Catholics|Protestants|Presbytarians|Donalds]' that would occasionally come up. Politics aside though twas great to see the Irish crew again; long may such escapades continue :)

11. Went on a brief escapade to see Batman de la IMAX with the Physics crew; ditto previous comments re: good to see the peoples, especially those who won't be returning for another year. On the other hand, whilst Batman was great, the IMAX-itude didn't really improve it much. A sharp tonal divide, and lots of fun, was provided by the preceding AVENUE Q, progenitor of the "internet is for porn" song, which provided a barrel of laughs in its juxtaposition of cutesy puppet musical numbers and occasionally sharp satire.

12. Threw myself down a succession of mountains in the Dumfries region (alright, two), which were awesome and occasionally terrifying (and even more occasionally painful).

13. Spent a week cycling cross-country with Tomski -- we did Edinburgh-Stirling and back, and Edinburgh-Glasgow one way. It was good to get the stamina back, and gave my shiny new bike a good road test, as well as a patina of dirt which will hopefully reduce its stealability.

14. During breaks in the previous, got to see Martin & D and consume some Scots beer therewith :D Ditto previous dittoing of previous remarks regarding long may such things continue and so forth :)

15. Met (well, re-met, having met once a few years ago) a girl who can be briefly summarised as 'excellent' during my York-ly drinkin! Who was going to another continent the following morning! And then spending the rest of her life in Lancashire! And so whom I'll probably not see again for a further three years! Yeah!

16. Started being a Research Assistant at the computer lab! It's the first job which could ever be reasonably said to challenge my technical wossnames, which is both awesome and very scary indeed. Paranoia ensues regarding what exactly people are expecting of me.

17. Went to France with the family, breaking my record for 'earliest holiday in a term of work' with '1 week in' :) Twas much fun, and served to deflate the new-job tension a treat :)

18. Wrote a lengthy LJ post describing the preceding the morning after returning from France, whilst waiting for my hair to dry out.

19. Added a meta-comment to same post, during which slightly more drying took place.

20. Added a meta-meta-comment, in half the time of the previous.

21. " meta-meta-meta- " half " "

22. -meta, half

23. -m, 1/2

-m/2

-

.

Sigh. Plan for the summer: avoid the usual sedentary crap and get out to some festivals for once.

The results:

O2 Wireless fest last week: not a single person came. Went anyway, since the last one pulled out about 4 days beforehand; it was okay, but kind of depressing spending the entire day on my own.

Cambridge festival next week: had two people saying they'd come. Phil just pulled out now for unknown reasons.

Andy Stewart had originally contacted me in June about going to some combination of the Cam fest and Latitude. Though it turns out he only asked me along in case I had a car. Nice. Still, we formed a plan that we'd try for Cam/Latitude, falling back on just going to Cam if Latitude sold out. Which it duly did, so I bought myself a Cam weekend ticket and texted Andy with the news.

Presumably he decided he couldn't be arsed anymore.... and decided to indicate this by ignoring my texts and hanging up on calls for the past two weeks. So I'm left with a ticket, which I'll probably want to sell, since an entire 4-day festival with no company will be a bit galling, but which might still turn out to be useful, so I can't get it on ebay until I pin the man down and get some sort of answer out of him. Twat.

This is all the more galling for the fact that I spent May Week in similar fashion, hearing about other people's fun doings after the fact, or in advance but with a clear 'but you're not welcome' overtone, and struggling to organise anything myself, trudging against the vague reluctance of most of my so-called friends to spend any time with me at every step.

There are obvious exceptions to the previous statement; those people, you know who you are :)

Bonus non-irony: I originally set out to write a Livejournal post at some point this summer so that the previous post wouldn't sit on the front page of smowton.net/chris forever, favouring something a little sunnier. Which this is, I suppose. If it's a linear trend, the future looks good.

Edit: Phil's reason turned out to be lack of available holiday, which is fair enough. Andy S remains a twat until further notice. Also to make the second-to-last paragraph clearer, specifically if you're reading this, you're not one of the people I'm talking about :)

Took a decision I probably should've taken 5 months ago: avoid Gemma for a good while, as far as is practical*.

Mostly this is because I've found her attitude to me very depressing for the past month or so, and the past few days in particular. It's generally felt like I'm the only one doing any work to try to sustain any sort of friendship between us; I can't remember the last time she actually initiated a conversation, either online or in real life, or put any real effort into one I initiated. She also never seems to invite me to anything fun she's doing any longer, and I tend to end up having to invite myself if I particularly want to go, which feels pretty awful. Basically I'm miserable at how little she seems to care for my company.

That's probably unreasonable; I usually perceive such things as worse than they are, but point is it's making me miserable as hell lately so I guess avoidance is the only decent solution.

Sigh. So that's another friendship well and truly down the pan. It's like high school all over again!

* I guess practicalities include already being signed up for Greg and D's formals. Picked a bad time for this one...

An escapade! Haven't had one of those in a while.

Last night was an odd one indeed. I went to the Google event called 1MLN, which challenged compscis to figure out how to solve world hunger using a million computers. Nobody accepted my idea of exploiting that in a silicon-on-insulator process, the insulator could easily be beef. The guys who organised the evening, Mattias and Kenny, got a massive great 72 pint keg of Wherry in, of which about 10 pints were consumed by compscis, mostly by myself and Mattias after the talk was finished.

I then went to the CURAS pubmeet, which was good fun. As the Bun Shop prepared to kick us out, John, Greg and myself decided it would be good to go back to the lab, since it's fairly near Churchill, and drink some more of that keg. I texted Mattias, asking if he minded -- no, he said, drink away, it's at Google's expense and needs drinking.

So we did; from half eleven til half one or so, we played drinking pool, drinking compsci, and sometimes drinking drinking.

(What's drinking compsci, you ask? Simple enough: everyone has to code some simple algorithm (we tried bubblesort and mergesort) in a language of their choice. Any attempt to compile your code that fails: down a cup of beer. Program runs, but doesn't produce the desired output: down half a cup of beer. Program segfaults: down two cups of beer).

At around half one, I noticed that whilst we'd been failing to code mergesort, the keg had been slowly leaking beer onto its trolly, and the surrounding floor. I hastily set about bringing stacks of paper towels to make right the situation. I tried to flush them down the toilets, so there wouldn't be a really suspicious pile of beer-soaked paper towels sitting around, but this frequently blocked them and I ended up having to unblock the damned things by hand, which was really very unpleasant and necessitated a long shower after I got back to college.

Thinking my unpleasant task done, I set off down the stairs to hear a resounding BLERRRRRRRRGH! from below. Balls, thought I, this doesn't sound good. Indeed it wasn't; John had chundered vigorously over the main hallway. Cue another pile of paper towels, and we finally went home at around half three, leaving the hallway clear but smelling faintly of bolognaise.

I then woke up at ten with a splitting headache to find Mattias was phoning me. He was less than pleased; apparently he'd received an email from the Gates building manager saying they'd found chunder in one of the lifts, and as such Mattias was to be banned from holding future events at the Gates building, strung from the flagpole, set about with a cat o' nine tails, etc.

Thinking it probably better to apologise now, rather than wait for the building card logs to be analysed or the CCTV footage of us shoving a keg around and wiping spew off the floor, I hauled arse to the Gates building and prostrated myself before the building manager. Thankfully, he turned out to be entirely reasonable, and accepted my proposition that we were idiots and Mattias was not, and that he should be given back his priveleges regarding holding events, not being up the flagpole, etc.

So what've I learned from this?

1. Free beer is hazardous.
2. It is, however, awesome nonetheless.
3. Doing stupid things is fine, so long as you're contrite and apologetic about it the following morning.

Huzzah!

Sweet jesus it's hard to get people out to gigs. My gang of 9 people to go see the Fairport Convention today (i.e. Friday) swiftly dwindled to 3 in the 24 hours running up to dragging our arses to the Corn Exchange, as people discovered their wallets to be empty / found better things to do, with the former presumably sometimes code for the latter. Bleh.

On the plus side, the gig itself was awesome :D It was all seated, which was weird, so people generally defaulted to theatre mode, applauding politely when the band first took the stage. Their first half was a little stodgy, with a lot of very 'meaningful' songs, but the second half put the 'rock' in 'folk rock.' One man / woman (I lacked glasses) even lurched from their seat and began dancing really sillily, which the band seemed to love, clustering around them to provide a personal serenade of sorts. They tried with great gusto to get the others on the front row up for some proper foolish dancing, but the crowd, being English and averaging an age of 45 and a profession related to insurance, were having none of it. My excuse was being in the balcony, where crazy folk dancing correlates rather well with plummeting to one's inevitable doom :)