hello

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 14:06:11 GMT

Ahaha Harry Potter seven has been posted on BitTorrent by nerds

Voldemort dies
Snape dies
Harry doesn't which is disappointing
The last chapter is really, fantastically rushed and takes place nineteen years after everything else. Fourteen year olds doing GCSE Creative Writing have better conclusions
Ron and Hermione get married, have kids, dogs, domestic arguments about the washing up
Harry is the final horcrux thing
er
yeah

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:52:45 GMT

Watching a natural disaster unfold on telly while seeing the exact same helicopter out of the window is really strange.

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 08:59:38 GMT

Thou mayst not know it, but this PhD lark is rather demoralising! I've been here for about eighteen months and have accomplished nowt, and as a reward for doing nowt I've been flown off to Mallorca, Hungary, even St Andrews; there's threats of Venezuela and Australia if I actually do something. Man I was doing OK for the first six months, then the Second Year Blues came in early (oh so early) and I've only just regained interest in what I am doing. For a good couple of months I was thinking about quttin' and getting one of those mythological Proper Jobs, but that would have been foolish, so I was simply miserable instead. I'm reminded of the first semester as an undergrad, where I loathed the whole uni "experience" and went so far as to sign the form saying "I quit suckas", but I got drunk and thought better of it, and proceeded to be a grumpy git for a further three years. Moan moan moan! Didn't turn out so bad, I suppose; I got a first (a master's first, at that) and have a guaranteed income for the next 20 months, unlike those fools who got a 2:1 and are now earning £60k working as management consultants. Those guys think earning a £10k bonus is rewarding, they think I'm white and nerdy, I read books on stochastic calculus, hell yeah I'm white and nerdy, etc

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 10:36:33 GMT

I was in the air over England yesterday during the storms and it was terrifying! I had been in Budapest for a "conference" and Captain Bigglesworth decided to try and land at Manchester despite the air traffic control advising him not to do so due to the 38-knot crosswind. 38kt is the legal maximum in non-emergency situations, and crosswinds are dangerous as they imply the existence of a "shear layer" between winds pointing in different directions which sucks the air off the wings. Of course as soon as we crossed the shear layer we lost all lift and dropped like a stone for a couple of seconds until Douglas Bader up front aborted the landing and powered back up to cruising altitude. Had he hit the shear layer a minute later he wouldn't have had the altitude to abort and so we would have smacked into the ground. As it was we regained power a few hundred feet off the ground but I honestly thought we were going to hit the ground and I've never been so scared in my life. Fifteen tense minutes later we landed at Teeside and got a taxi back to Sheffield, transverse HGVs nonwithstanding.

So we can't bring toothpaste into the cabin as we'd only try and blow the plane up, but it's perfectly safe to have reckless egotists try and beat the laws of physics!

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 09:07:28 GMT

What a delightful Christmas one had! Well, sort-of. Leaving Sheffield for Ayr via Train never used to be a pleasant experience but they've finally finished redeveloping the train station - replete with "The Cutting Edge" moving outdoor water feature - and it's pretty swanky down there. Furthermore I didn't leave my gifts on the train at Glasgow Central this time, which was an expensive mistake last year. Christmas itself was the usual non-event, although I got to see my brother once more, who is currently back from doing some of his Chemistry degree in Barcelona. After that we had both sets of parents and siblings over to see in the New Year, which was pretty awesome, although by the end of it I just wanted everyone out of the house as the noise and stench were something else!

We have also bought a couple of leather reclining chairs from icky-urgh (Ikea), which are nice to sit in, and a new bed, which has a layer of memory foam on top of pocket springs and latex so it is super comfy. We paid £700 for it, and it was apparently meant to sell for £1,700 but as it was ex-display and yadda yadda. I honestly think they meant to sell it for £700 the entire time but they did a DFS and had a "sale" price that was anything but.

It really is comfy. Can't get the cats off of it!

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:58:15 GMT

DVDs are an exercise in frustration. Aside from costing more than a Chelsea footballer, you have to spend the best part of a lifetime extracting them from their "DO NOT STEAL" protective casing like an enraged scallop from the sea-bed, only not as tasty. Further horrors await when you place the treasured disc into your DVD player, you must endure an epoch of "DO NOT STEAL" messages you can't skip before you get to a menu that breaks the play button on the front of the player so you have to spend ages digging behind the sofa HONEY WHERE'S THE DVD REMOTE fucking cats DARLING HAVE YOU SEEN IT honestly I'm going to duct-tape the thing to the side of the chair YOU'VE MOVED IT oh FOUND IT why is it not working HAVE YOU GOT ANY TRIPLE-A etc! Pressing "play" should play the goddamn movie, not launch into the "Esperanto - Suomi - Nippon - Al-Arabiyyah" menu of loathing and despair.

Also am I the only one who spends most of the DVD increasing the volume? I start the disc off at a slightly-louder-than-telly intensity before finishing on a +40 SUPER-MAX BASS BOOST setting, so when the player is turned off the ten o'clock news theme foghorns its horrible way through my skull, into my cats' intestines and all over the floor. Do they master the sound in such a way as to fade out through the "feature presentation"? The only feature I wish to present is a raised middle finger to the twerp who thought that forcing people who've given you money to sit through "DO NOT STEAL" messages is a brilliant idea, when all the people who are merrily downloading it don't see the messages and so DO steal!

(shut up about copyright "theft" nerds)

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 07:32:37 GMT

I was at a conference for the past seven days. It was in Mallorca. It was paid for entirely by taxpayers. I hope you suckers enjoyed paying for forty nerds to get drunk in the blazing Mediterranean sunshine while you deluded yourself into thinking that being sat at a desk filling in forms counts as an achievement.

Next junkets: Hungary in January, Zurich in July, and there are trips to Melbourne and Venezuela planned. The one in Hungary is espescially awesome as it's funded by the British Council (taxpayers) and includes a bar tab that is impossible to destroy.

I like this "research" lark!

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 08:00:42 GMT

I have been helping out at SoHO 18 for the past week. Boy astroseismologists are weird people!

Also WE'RE GETTING CATS! We're getting them from a rescue centre, and they're only about five months old, and so cute! Becky's calling hers "Socks" while mine's being called "Mandu" (Cat-Mandu, geddit?). They're sister and brother and we have to get them speyed pronto, to avoid teraterous kittens. Awesome!

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 07:33:08 GMT

We moved house, from a nice yet tiny place in Ranmoor (posh) to a shit yet massive place in Crookes (average to bad). Three times the space for £25pcm less is pretty bonus. However we have gone from zero leaks to three and we only found this out last night, when the heavens opened and spewed forth several gallons of fluid in the form of rain upon my house. The window in the attic bedroom in which we sleep is fucked, the window in the front room is OK but the lintel above it leaks (fortunately the curtains caught the splashes that would've otherwise ruined the keyboard) and the back door isn't tightly sealed so that leaks. This means I have to compose a nasty letter to the estate agency, asking them to fix the leaks and also to remove the fucking knackered freezer that we asked them to remove as part of the conditions of let!

To be honest apart from the leaks this place is awesome, it's a bit run-down to be sure but it has gallons of storage space. Seriously the front room alone is bigger than the bedroom, living room, office and bathroom we had in the last place and the kitchen being the same size means the two bedrooms, bathroom, corridors, cupboards and cellar can cope with our excess rubbish. I love it. I've even hung blinds from IKEA on the walls. Get me Tyler!

Wed, 31 May 2006 07:25:13 GMT

Have you ever noticed that, when you make a cup of tea for someone, they always comment on how it's "good tea"? While it's nice to have one's teamaking skills appreciated, the concept of "good tea" leaves open the possibility of there existing "bad tea". Specifically, there is the possibility of someone who can fuck up the tea-making process.

What kind of person can screw up a cuppa? Let's look at the tea-making process in detail, to see what kind of person it takes to befoul some Earl Grey.

Boil kettle. Anyone who can't PLUG A KETTLE INTO THE FUCKING WALL AND TURN IT ON CORRECTLY is a moron. Putting water in the kettle is Advanced Teamaking and beginners have their kettles pre-filled.
Locate tea. Posh people use loose tealeaves, middle-class people use tealeaves garnered from dissected Tetley bags, and poor people don't exist. Even the most drooling wage-slave is able to purchase a bumper pack of Netto Tea, which consists of half a plantation vacuum-packed to perfection, tea-pickers and all.
Waiting five minutes for the kettle to boil. Anyone who fails at this stage, which consists of staring into the back garden thinking about "bees and wasps and mushrooms and nettles and oh look at that robin! and oh! that's a beautiful duck! What a magnificent oak!" for five minutes, really should shoot themselves.
Adding the water to the tea. This is the most technically challenging part of the process, as one has to pick up a litre or so of boiling water and add a small amount of it to a cup, or possibly a teapot, in which ceramic icon lies tealeaves, bagged or no. If you are unused to the kettle, teapot or cup there is a clear and present danger of spillage, but only if you're special.
Milk and sugar. It is really hard to mess up the addition of sucrose to the mix, as you need to adopt a statuesque immobility for five minutes to reduce the tea to Lyle's Golden Syrup. Milk is, conversely, difficult to add correctly: too little and it looks like the grease left in a roasting tin once the chicken's been removed, whilst adding too much makes the tea look like someone with a really bad bottle tan. And you get some eejits who use anything other than blue milk, thinking that removing the tasteful lipids will prevent their belly swelling up like a pregnant beluga. Twats.

So there we have it: complimenting someone for making "good tea" is simply a backhanded way of acknowledging the fact that that someone is not, in fact, a dribbling mongol.

Also, note the similarity between the "waiting" phase and the look people have when they're waiting for a web page to load. The same lifeless, inanimate stare, waiting for technology, only resolved when the kettle clicks off or the web browser gives up and displays a "This page can not be found" error. I wonder how much productivity is lost to the techno-wait every day.

Wed, 03 May 2006 07:23:22 GMT

I've had influenza since Wednesday last. It was deeply unpleasant. It's a necrotising disease of the respiratory tract so I still have awful breath from all the dead bits of trachea and bronchus I keep coughing up. My temperature is now less than 41 and my head no longer feels like Gene Hoglan's doing blast beats in it, however I still have the brain-fog and the Nose of Snot.

We had to change the bedsheets as I was sweating so much. I felt freezing but I made myself guzzle water to keep the fluids up and the sweat was pouring out of every pore, it was disgusting. You know those hairs on the underside of your forearm, where angsty teens are prone to cut? How when that part of the body is immersed in fluid those hairs stick to the skin and mat, causing an effect not unlike millipede roadkill? I did that all by myself.

I picked it up at the tutorial I had last Monday. I'm only in today as I'm slightly infectious still and want to pass it on to some of the kids who attend my Wednesday indoctrination sessions. I seriously doubt I'll be able to last that long.

Christ I would have to get ill over the only long weekend Becky and I have off together in ages. I'm gutted.

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 09:11:43 GMT

Another gig this weekend, some bright spark decided that having a bunch of students play at their wedding was a good idea. It went awesomely! There was a bit of a hitch (pun) at the start, the Marriot screwed up the song for the First Dance and the bride looked gey unhappy, turns out that the groom gave the wrong CD to the hotel and divorce almost ensued! Fortunately we were able to save the day with Just The Way You Are, which I like as it's nice and slow and (most importantly) in a key with less than five accidentals. The rest of the gig went to plan, all the Old Dears were loving it and once everyone else had had a few more £3 pints they did too. Highlight was the father of the bride asking us "Would you like a drink, or is that a silly question?" "No it's an awesome question" hooray! What an expensive round that was!

Even had to do two encores, finished with the horribly triplet-ridden In The Mood, featuring on tenor sax doing the low notes of the solo none other than ME, so I earned that applause at the end. I've never had a hundred-odd people applaud me for anything like that before, still makes me smile thinking about it! Once that was over with and the van loaded with about twenty grand's worth of kit we left the Happy Couple to their nuptials, after getting the cheque from them of course. They're off to Morocco today, hope they have fun.

It was really weird as they were from Becky's geography yeargroup, I've always assosciated marriage with folk older than me, seeing young twentysomethings proudly sporting rings was quite alarming! Not as alarming as the colonic movements induced by the Lamb Jalfrezi I had for dinner last night though, oooh!

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:21:48 GMT

HAPPY LOVE DAY NERDS

Yes, in celebration of Hallmark's desire for continuted growth in shareholder value, the corporate Viagra of "humans buying shit they don't need in pink" once more rears its disgusting head. For days it has been impossible to go into town without being assaulted by never-ending visuals of gifts for the One You Love™, to Show You Care and all that bollocks, in pink. Why pink I don't know, if you've ever watched the Discovery Channel you'll know that hearts are strangely colourless, potato-shaped meaty objects with horrible red blood vessels snaking their cholestorolised way to distant organs, carrying their precious cargo of oxygenated blood to your leg muscles so you can walk into a Gift Shop and buy something pink.

In other news the boss is planning on sending me to Poland for a fortnight so I can "collaborate" with some guy during the summer, before I go to Majorca for a week to teach elementary Solar Physics to neonates at £50 an hour. Thank you, taxpayers!

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 09:33:19 GMT

I'm moving out! Anyone want a room in Sheffield so the landlord will let me absolve the tenancy? Walking to and from Crosspool every day has given me the thighs of an elephant and the shoe bill of an army of milipedes, the #51's far too unreliable for me to actually get so hi ho, hi ho, it's off to Crookes we go!

also, being the natural early riser that I am I have started working 8--4. this is handy as working 9--5 (shut up Dolly) meant lazing in bed for an hour which was a massive waste of time. It also means I can go home and play instruments without feeling too guilty. Trying to learn Clair De Lune on the piano right now, lovely tune it may be but it's in Db-major (apart from the C#-minor bits) which means it's a complete sod to play. That bit where the left hand goes into semiquavers is giving my carpal tunnel a syndrome.

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 08:18:26 GMT

Not only are my guts giving me seven levels of infernal pain I'm 22!

OLD!

On the other hand I should be a doctor by the time I'm 24. A doctor of love from URMOM

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 12:26:50 GMT

Hello friends!

I hope you are all OK, even the ones I haven't spoken to since 2003, in fact espescially those, as you don't clog up my MSN with myriad permutations of "hey how r u" every time I log in, and for that I'm thankful. I suppose I should go on about how I am adjusting to life as a postgrad in the University of Sheffield and its Applied Mathematics department. Well little ones it's going very well! All I do is read books and sit at computers, permanently guzzling coffee and occasionally engaging in moribund conversation with those unfortunate enough to have an office down the corridor, which is, as you know, my favourite way of timewasting and oh man it really is fantastic. Also, given the continuous theme of poverty on my friends page it would be slightly rude of me to point out that I get one thousand tax-free pounds dumped in my bank account every month, so I will not go on about it, although just think of me every time you pay VAT or national insurance, it will make you feel better knowing that I spend it on whisky and CDs.

And that's about it. I moved into a house here with a Hungarian and two Greek girls who are all six years older than me, one of them's even engaged. That's what's meant to happen before you're thirty, having a housemate married off, I'm nine years ahead of schedule! I have an office and several orifices in the Hicks Building, which is very nice if you enjoy sixties budget architecture and grim otherwise. I am getting one quarter of their "massive" new office in a week, with a bit of luck I'll even get a computer and a switchblade.

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 08:29:21 GMT

Programme:              Mathematics
Programme type:         Undergraduate
Status:                 Interrupted - to Graduate
Qualification aim:      M.Sci. Honours
Qualification awarded:  M.Sci. Honours First Class

awesome

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 08:19:57 GMT

I got a 17 for my project :o

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 15:06:03 GMT

Exam results are almost all in, although only almost all with respect to the null measure, which is a bit dubious. Quite a varied batch, so far: in Advanced Analytic Techniques I could only muster a 2:1 grade - a 14.7/20.0, my worst in Honours! - but for Hyperbolic Geometry I scraped a first by 0.1 of a grade and then for Financial Maths I ended up with a 19.3, which is my best result ever. I think the 19.3 and the 14.7 average out at 17, which is a first, so the badness of anal is somwhat anulled. All that is left to come in is my project mark, which will probably a middle-of-the-road 2:1 as I didn't spend nearly as much time on that bastard as I should have.

In any case my median Honours grade is going to be at least 17.4 and as long as the project doesn't drag the mean down to somewhere in [0, 16) I'm getting a first. I think I should get at least 14 for it, which is more than enough to leave the mean in [16,20] so I'm feeling rather pleased with myself, although I won't know for sure what degree class I'm going to get until Saturday. Can't get too cocky until then!

Mon, 30 May 2005 11:35:09 GMT

I can't believe that the four years of which I was officially a student at the University of St Andrews are drawing to a close. My exams are all over (the last two were a bit ebola but I think my project was good and I did very well on Financial Maths so I should be on target for a first) and I'm back home in Ayr, counting the days to the thirteenth when the results are out, the twenty-first when I pick up a certificate saying "he gave us thousands and all he got was an MSci" and the twenty-fourth when it's the grad ball and I get incredibly drunk with the finest fourth year has to offer one last time. I'm already missing the place and by the middle of August I'll be dying to get back there, an option which is no longer open to me.

Oh well. Hopefully the time I'll spend becoming Doctor Douglas in Sheffield will be as much fun as St Andrews was.

Dr. Douglas. Jesus.

Wed, 25 May 2005 12:49:12 GMT

I JUST HAD MY LAST EXAM EVERIt went a bit rabies towards the end of the paper, but I think I'm pretty much guaranteed a first so I don't really care. Now I'm off to listen to loud music and hurl abuse at the registry before getting extremely drunk.

"Quand vous êtes fini avec des examens, on est heureux."

Mon, 23 May 2005 15:27:41 GMT

Time for a CD Review as I bought four in the past few days.

Death - Human

Death were one of those Floridian death metal bands that kick-started something horrible back in the late eighties. Their earlier albums were a bit patchy and then they came out with this. It's awesome. For something with such pace it's got really funky bass, extremely technical guitar playing that avoids descending into boring "look what I can do" self-indulgence and (by present-day standards, if nothing else) relatively un-harsh vocals - more Godflesh-esque shouting that the grunting recent death metal bands use. After listening to this it's obvious where the bands that appeared in the mid-nineties were influenced from.
Khanate - Khanate

Khanate are on Southern Lord and have Steve O'Malley [of SUNN O))) and Burning Witch] playing guitar. As such it's incredibly heavy and so slow it almost counts as ambient drone instead of metal. The album starts off with a couple of minutes of feedback (acoustic beats, physics nerds!) before launching into one of the dirtiest, slowest riffs ever recorded. Alan Dubin of Old Lady Drivers does the vocals and they're almost as painful to listen to as they must have been to record - ranging from voicebox-tearing screams to creepy whispering. Doom metal is a bit niche at the best of times and something this slow is probably even less marketable, which is a shame as it's the best way to piss off your neighbours.
The Desert Sessions - Volumes 9 & 10

Josh Homme gets about, doesn't he; if you've heard any of his previous bands like Kyuss or QOTSA then you should have a rough idea of what this is. Basically he gets a few of his musical buddz into a recording studio for a few days every so often and gets a CD out of it. In this case the guests included PJ Harvey, who's got a really good voice and the songs themselves are stunning. Some of the best straight-out rock tunes I've heard in a while are on here; opening couple Dead In Love and I Wanna Get WitChu are probably the best, although there's not a bad song on the album. I wonder how he manages it.
Thus Defiled - Weeping Holocaust Tears

I heard these guys on a Terrorizer CD a few years ago and only found out you could actually buy CDs of theirs recently. Oops. I bought this one as it had Of Shadow And Storm on it, which was what I originally heard and is a rather proggy piece of black metal with expertly-rendered guitar parts and hissy vocals, which is probably for the best as all black metal vocals ever suck. The album starts off with a synth piece - imagine Viking Crown with a budget - before giving you forty minutes of proggy, well-performed (if a little roughly produced) metal that includes a twenty-odd minute song. I like my epics, oh yes I does! It's easy to become samey, but these guys avoid falling into that trap. Despite one of the band members advocating genocide on the insert (very metal) it's a good CD.

Also I can't stop farting and they smell of death. This not be good.

Fri, 20 May 2005 16:05:13 GMT

That exam - Hyperbolic Geometry - was extremely aids. Fortunately everyone else thought it was the gay plague too, one guy even refused to answer the final question because of a slight ambiguity in the paper's definition of PSL₂(N), which is nowt but his loss.

One is taking the evening off by sitting in the pub making obscene remarks.

Thu, 19 May 2005 14:18:24 GMT

Exams!

Yes! It is that time of year again where my command of a body of knowledge that takes the best part of an entire pad of paper to distil is determined by measuring my ability to answer several random questions that cover around a tenth of the syllabus. Personally I think they're a terrible method of assessment, but in this day and age of people copy-and-pasting from the internet and having "issues" with public speaking the other ways of determining a suitable grade are untenable. Thank you Internet for giving us cheaters with intense social phobia who are ruining it for the rest of is!

What exactly do they mean by "I'd rather DIE than speak in public"? I'm not exactly Mister Confidence when it comes to giving a presentation but it's muchly more preferable to many, many things, including castration, being attacked by beavers, the smell of pickled onion Monster Munch and, yes, death itself. Would it help them get over their fear if I offered to kill them and desecrate their corpse with pickled onion Monster Munch?

One of the most notoriously annoying aspects of the examination process are TWITS WHO CAN'T REVISE WITHOUT TELLING YOU HOW MUCH WORK THEY'RE DOING. Work, work, work - it's all I do, apart from camping on MSN complaining about work, sitting in coffee shops complaining about work, spending half an hour complaining about work in my room and generally doing everything apart from actual revision. Cunts. They also insist on blaming the Internet for their procastination problems, where that's patently false - instead of reading up on things on Wikipedia or downloading theoretical physics papers from The ArChive they're reading about football or updating their internet profiles or forwarding a link to some HILARIOUS AND ENTIRELY ORIGINAL FLASH MOVIE INVOLVING FUCKING BADGERS and then have the tenacity to expect me to listen to them compain about it for seven days. These people would be more productive if they did something not involving being a whiny twat, and that includes inserting cocktail sticks smothered in chili sauce up their urethras.

Ahem. I had Financial Mathematics today, and I completely beasted that exam, smells like a first, I should know, I've had enough of those. Smug smug smug! His Royal Highness the Balding Prince William was in the same room too, partaking in a Geography examination, and he really is balding, got a lovely bald spot on the top of his head, although lovely isn't the word. He sounds like that old alcoholic from the Fast Show too: "Well... I was... verrrrry, very drunk, ya".

Quote of the year, heard twixt the Library and ITS: "You'd think the uni would be a bit more careful about the people they let in, seeing as the future King of England is here." I was tempted to try and sell them a Big Issue.

Sun, 08 May 2005 09:12:37 GMT

It's been a fun few days, and for once I am considerably upbeat, which makes a change from my usual state of morose indifference. On Thursday I had my last lecture EVER, after giving my last presentation ever on the same subject, Hyperbolic Geometry, the day before. Despite that module being really, really hard it's fantastically interesting, not only because some of the pictures are really pretty but it also describes The Real World™ much, much better than the geometry you learned in school, with its poxy angles-of-a-triangle-add-up-to-180-degrees nonsense. It's kinda sad to never be taught anything again, but I can't stay an undergrad for ever.

Once that was out of the way I went and saw DJ Format at King Tuts on Thursday. The support band (an actual band, with a drummer and bassist) were awesome, the guitarist was top-notch and sounded like Jimi Hendrix without the solos, I think they were called Little Barrie. In any case I enjoyed them. Then Format came on with his MCs (me at hip-hop, I'm letting the side down) and they were almost - almost! - as good as Monster Magnet live. If you get the chance go see them, hugely entertaining.

Then on Friday I went to the KK May Ball, apparently the biggest ball north of something. I was bouncering at it last year (and threw someone out for calling someone a "fucking black bastard") so I knew what to expect. Apparently it wasn't as good fun as the one last year but to be honest I was too drunk to care. The bar was free, as was the food, and they had Groove Armada DJing into the bargain. Awesome night out, one of the best I've had up here. Didn't get home until around half four, when it started getting light.

Yesterday was spent nursing my stomach and gorging myself on pizza. Today I am doing washing and theoretically studying for exams. Fact of the day: the crimes of "being in the company of Gypsies for one Month" and "obvious signs of Malice in a Child aged Seven to Fourteen years" used to be capital offences in the UK. Robert Kilroy-Silk would most approve!