Home of the Dutch Gecko

Two down! (counts on fingers) Ten to go!

This has, in short, been an awesome term. Even the nasty bit at the start with the rows of desks and scribbling like a fanatic and keeping an eye on the clock couldn’t detract from the greatness that the past ten weeks have been. Classes were interesting - all of them. The work was hard but not excessive. I could put my arm around someone in lectures, and she would put her arm around me. Our friends did some crazy stuff towards the end of term as the (sexual) tension rose to an all-time high. I won’t even tell you what they did because you wouldn’t believe me.

There’s always a pleasure-pain balance to uphold though, and after such a good term I’d need some highly condensed bad luck to make up for it. As such, on Saturday night I found myself unable to check in online for my flight home, thereby forcing me into an earlier train. As these things go, the trains were not travelling all the way to Manchester Airport as they usually do and I needed to hop on the shuttle bus. This of course makes the journey longer so more time is needed. The combined extensions put me neatly in a timetabling black hole, thereby pushing me even earlier. Add a taxi journey and lo and behold I was getting up at 7:30AM on Sunday morning to catch a 2:00PM flight.

This hardly seemed fair though - one morning to get up early in return for a whole load of sleepless nights and other fun. So… what could be more fun than to throw in some bad weather? On a travel day? Sure why not! Gale force winds plus a serious amount of snow and hail quickly shut Schiphol down at midday and I was left in a long queue of unhappy people. Luckily the Manchester - Schiphol flight is never that busy, and everyone was distributed evenly amongst the two remaining flights that day. I was assigned the 19:25. Five hours of precious sleeping time were torn from me in an instant as I picked up my luggage to head back to the check-in desk. According to the usual rules that accompany these arrangements my name had mysteriously not been automatically switched over and I was given a few minutes to stand looking worried as the attendant made some rapid calls to some people who were meant to have the Sunday off. Five minutes and some genuine nerves later I was told that everything was now in order. I had a boarding ticket, a free lunch ticket and was two bags lighter, so off I headed to find some seats to pitch a proverbial tent.

I gave myself an hour’s reading time before heading in to the food court to buy £6.50 worth of travel food (easier done than said), which I proceeded to eat as slowly as possible. When that was done I wandered around a bit, then decided to head through security. The usual, nothing happened. Got to the other side, admired the now bright weather, and headed off in search of an empty gate to read again.

This is how I spent my entire afternoon, hopping from gate to gate as they filled up with travellers, watching them all board and leave in a timely fashion.

As night set in, I realised my terrible mistake - there was only one restaurant air-side. And it was awful. I sat down at a small table with a greasy fish accompanied by some greasy chips and some green mush that was apparently peas, and glumly proceeded to munch. At times like this I wonder whether air sickness actually exists or if it’s down to the food people are served before they leave.

Making ample use of the free drinks refills to remove the bad tastes from my mouth I headed back off for a brief walk up and down the terminal. I saw the impending disaster unfold before my eyes: the snow had resumed falling, and to add insult to injury there was a feisty lightning storm showing off it’s bolts. An entire day of perfect weather and now this.

I dutifully awaited boarding time, watching the lightning pass over and the snow get worse. But surely just snow wouldn’t be a problem, right? You just clear the stuff as it comes, right?

Boarding begins at 7 o’ clock, a little behind schedule but what can you expect. Taxiing a plane in this weather can’t be much fun at all. It’s a small flight so everybody gets in and settled down pretty quickly, and waits for the safety message to start. And waits. And waits. It’s around this point that I notice there’s startlingly little activity going on outside.

About half an hour after everyone was on board the captain (in broken English) announces the inevitable. The runway was shut, even though the snow had stopped, and it was going to take a while to clear the snow off an entire landing site. So, while we were plied with drinks and sandwiches I continued to sit and read, as I had done the entire day.

A full two hours later a truck came by to cover the plane in ice-melting goop, thus ruining what little view I had. I continued to read, the guy next to me continued to read, nothing happened.

Another half hour and the pilot announces that it’s finally our turn. Hurrah! The safety message starts, everyone puts their buckle on and we trundle out into the snow. Take-off was of the violently accelerated kind, with some mild bumps as we got through the cloud cover.

The flight itself was pretty speedy - less than fifty minutes with all the wind up our ass. The landing was nervewracking - high winds and the snow was back, but it went well eventually and we taxi’d back in fine condition.

So now it was about midnight… which meant all the trains had stopped. This isn’t so useful when you live on the opposite side of a small country from your international airport. So after looking really tired at a customer service desk I nabbed myself a cheap deal at an airport hotel, with breakfast included, and stood outside in the snow waiting for the shuttle bus to arrive.

And I waited.

It did arrive, but one time from the timetable had been skipped, which was a letdown since my hands were now blue. I clambered on board and barely prevented myself from falling asleep right there as we were carted off to the wonderful Ibis hotel. A few minutes longer whilst waving my boarding pass around and I had a key and was down sixty euros. Up I went to the third floor, down the long, long corridor, and into the best mixture of four-star and prison I could imagine. I dumped my stuff on the floor, brushed my teeth, put my contact lenses in a cup (since I didn’t have my little case - I just use one in York and one in Hengelo to save me forgetting to take it with me) and lobbed myself onto one of the two beds (free upgrade!).

I enjoyed a small breakfast the next day, then shuttled back to the airport to grab the next train out of there. I wanted to go home. And now I am.

Once again I find myself up into the early hours “working” on stuff that was meant to be completed in a lab. Tonight it’s creating a prototype electronic die. The design was pretty much complete, and I merely needed to create a JEDEC file for use in a Programmable Logic Device. This involves the use of an excellent (I wish HTML included <sarcasm> tags) piece of software called Viewlogic Powerview, which I’d love to give you a link to but both the company and product names are so incredibly generic that Google gives me nothing. Nice marketing.

Powerview is awful. The interface was clearly made using some kind of interface creator software. In turn, this software was clearly developed in the early 60s to run on valve computers and was designed by a team of “highly” trained monkeys with a management team consisting entirely of porpoises. Communication was probably minimal.

Forget everything you know about user interfaces. This thing provides everything that you are familiar with, and then changes it a tiny bit. Want to close that file menu? You have to press escape, you can’t click on it again. Want to quit? Oh right, use the red square (seriously, a red square), not the file menu like in every other piece of software ever.

And now, I know that unix has always been heavily dependent on the famed third mouse button, but Powerview takes it to new levels. Middle mouse used to mean paste. Here it’s everything. If you want to add something, it has to be the middle mouse. You go through the tedious menu to reach your component list, select one with the left button, and then have to place it using middle. This despite left not being able to perform anything at that point, as helpfully pointed out by the status bar which exclaims that “LEFTMOUSE is not bound.” Want to put in an identical component? Tough, gotta click in that component list again. No, not middle dummy, left.

And so I plough on through the clunky clicky hell, constantly switching between keyboard and mouse as if they were a divorced couple and I the family pet. Close that window, open that one. Wrong shortcut key. No that command doesn’t have a shortcut, despite the obvious letter not being in use. No you missed the bound on that button, you selected the window instead, here’s an error message to inform you of your grave mistake. Middle mouse middle mouse middle mouse no how dare you use the scrollwheel just use the button you imbecile.

This software makes me feel stupid and I hate it.