Home of the Dutch Gecko

It’s probably not worthy of international news, but some of you may be aware that York is currently very, very wet. It simply hasn’t stopped raining once in at least 24 hours. My poor girlfriend is heading back home today and the weather is not welcome news at all. Thankfully she’s taking the bus to the airport - there are no more trains leaving in that direction.

I walked the half mile to her house this morning to help her pack her last things and wish her farewell, and was thoroughly drenched by the time I got there. If my clothes are literally dripping wet when I get inside, I tend to get a little downhearted.

Not wishing to make the journey back on foot, I waited with her for her taxi, and asked the driver if he would be driving past my home, which is the normal route. “No way. It’s totally flooded.” So it was hugs and kisses right there and another trek through the torrents in an effort (believe me, it was a lot of effort) to get back to a dry house.

One of the trickiest parts of the walk was crossing one particular road which floods a little too easily. By this time there was no tarmac left to see, and instead of mucking around I just walked straight through. I couldn’t get any more wet. Once on the other side, a miracle happened - a car driver on my side of the road realised I was stood next to a particularly deep patch, and that he was about to cover me head to toe in road-gunk, and then slowed down. Have you ever seen a car slow down to avoid soaking pedestrians? I was stunned. I raised my hand, defined as the traditional method of thanks in traffic situations, and the driver raised his. I sincerely hope he saw my wide smile underneath my waterproof hood.

Update
Some more news and videos from the BBC:

• Summary of the day
• In video form
• Some stunning amateur footage
• And a number of helicopter rescues in Sheffield

Hmm, two decades. I dunno, seems like a while to me. Luckily I’ve been busy enough to keep me away from this site, so at least I’m over the initial shock now. But still… I’m twenty! What do I do?

It seems the best thing to do is blog, and write Ada. Well, not any more, since the assessment is now truly finished and I won’t need to touch the language again until the third year, when we use it for programming a real-time system. Yup, we do all sorts here…

So, Ada was done, I took a well-earned weekend FragSoc break with my housemates, and then I started the next piece of work - doing a literature survey. I finished it today. I still don’t know what a literature survey is. But in any case when I’ve fixed my linux partition I’ll be putting both code and drivel on this site for all to enjoy.

Of course, any project that takes more than three days must go hand in hand with some awesome procrastination, and Ada didn’t disappoint. I have two photos and the very small beginnings of a PHP-based CMS which I plan to one day install on a snazzy VPS like SliceHost, along with a new snazzy domain to keep me happy. If you want to make me a very happy man, either buy me a few years’ worth of that stuff or give me a job that’ll let me pay it off. And gives me enough spare time to finish the PHP.

Stuff that is awesome:

1. Mountain Dew, especially the new cherry flavour
2. Ubuntu 7.04
3. Procrastination
4. Laid back guitar music

Stuff that is not awesome:

1. Exams
2. Broken headphones
3. Procrastination
4. Untidy room