Home of the Dutch Gecko

I just wrote a bunch of stuff here and then my browser crashed. Fuck this shit.

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.

It looks like it’s past five am again. Not to worry, it’s now Saturday morning, and nothing happens on Saturdays. It’s all just a question of getting some sleep.

Thing is that several things are keeping me away from sleep right now, and one of them is sleep. It’s a linux command, that neatly counts out the number of seconds, minutes, hours or days you specify. This one is meant to be waiting five minutes, before changing the wallpaper. At the moment it’s averaging about 45 seconds. It’s one of those little niggling things that seem to happen so often in linux, yet appear completely unrepairable.

It just changed again.

On the upside, the script appears to be changing the wallpaper at random, which it isn’t actually supposed to do, but I wanted that functionality anyway so it saves me coding it in later.

One alternative would be to use usleep, or microsleep (completely unrelated to the bodily phenomenon), but that involves counting to 300 000 really really fast, and I’m not sure if the PC would appreciate that too much.

What the hell, that was less than ten seconds.

I got my exam results today, and they were pleasant enough. I marginally failed Introduction to Digital Design, which is not an issue since its sequel module, Digital and Analogue Design, is going rather well, so that’s something to look forward to in the summer. The other results were very pleasant, which is a good feeling after all the mess of last year. The fact that I failed what is basically the electronics module though is possibly a very strong hint that I’ve placed my interests incorrectly.

There have been, uh, other things keeping me awake the last couple of weeks too, but they won’t be discussed here

Good night.

Hmm, I’m tired. It’s only quarter to nine, but it’s been a long day. I have a little mini-presentation to do on Wednesday and I just can’t be bothered (as usual). I did get some stuff done on Sunday - in line with fixing my memory, I ran the wonderful memtest for a few hours. In accordance with Murphy’s law, it showed absolutely no errors. In the meantime, I did fun and productive stuff, like putting a speaker stand together, tidying some crap out of the way, and actually reading a bit of a book. Clever me!

Today I found myself in quite an odd situation, even if it was only for a split second. I was heading off home, and was walking through the new biology building, since my bike is parked quite close to its main entrance. This entrance takes the form of a revolving door. It’s of the hand-pushing variety, which is all fair and well, since it’s quite small, and the direction of travel is made more than obvious via push pads and large handle/bannister things. Anyways, as I walked through the open-plan main hall, I noticed that a conference was being held, as is often the case. The receptionist had put up her wonderful “Please use the revolving door. This sign exists in case you’re stupid enough to attempt to open the fire door next to it, clearly labelled For Emergency Use Only.” OK, so the second sentence isn’t actually on the sign.

The fact that this sign exists shows how difficult it is for conference delegates to handle the extreme stress caused by being present on a university campus, even if the biology department is tucked away in a corner. It came as no surprise to me then that, as I left the revolving door, meeting the cold breeze of the outside world, a man in a grey suit attempted to walk into the side of the revolving door that I had just come out of. Newton’s laws will stand in no businessman’s way when he is in a centre of tertiary education.

I, of course, was still attempting to exit the now fast-moving round case of squishy doom, but was faced by a man without fear. I had two choices: attempt to escape around the man, or make a second journey through the door and look like more of an ass than the fearless figure in front of me already was. I continued part way around the outside arc of the door, and escaped at what would normally be named the “entrance” to the machine. Leaping quickly, I avoided being crushed by the second sector, approaching rapidly from behind. I felt the rush of compressed air leaving the narrowest of gaps blowing into my neck. Slyly catching my breath and moving swiftly off, I hear the poor creature mutter “Thanks.” Presumably he thought I’d held the door open for him.

The first term of my second first year is complete. Another ten week block of terrible stress and oodles of hard work. Ok, so maybe I was laying it on a little rich there.

It’s been good, I guess. The course makes more sense. There’s less of the “I don’t like this module I wish I was asleep” feeling. I’ve met a whole bunch of crazy new people. I’ve learned some crazy new stuff. I’ve moved house - again.

Quite a few changes. Yet it all seems so familiar - I guess it’s just the first year all over again.

I’m back in the nether-Netherlands, enjoying the whole family thing. My sister’s being nice so far, though this could be down to her revived counter-strike addiction. I’ve been tucking into revision like a good boy, but ICM is still worrying me. Nothing like sets and matrices to get the adrenaline rushing!

I’ve been trying to kick the insomnia habit, but my body seems to be keen on resisting any change. I’ve got a hell of a timetable next term so I’m going to have to fix things, but for some reason falling asleep is not an option until 2AM at the earliest. Of course, I’ve probably broken my previous progress by staying up this late now, but I theoretically have little to do tomorrow. And this is fun. Really. Blogging can be fun.

OK so I wrote all of that last week and never got round to sticking it on the site. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, and that your holidays are going well. I’m going to hit the “Publish” button and do something else.

I need to test to see if my advert blocks are appearing correctly, so here’s a post. With an advert.
Now that wasn’t so hard was it?

Well that works perfectly, so I guess I’ll stick a little text in here. Might as well include some real content eh?

I’m in York. It’s winter. The geese have left. Well, the dumb ones. The smart ones hang around and feed off the scraps they are given by the students.

A whole load of stuff has happened over the summer and I didn’t tell many people because I’m like that. Electronics is out - things were going badly, and the exams confirmed that. I’m now doing Computer Science (or Computer Systems and Software Engineering if you listen to the admissions department), and it’s going surprisingly well. If you want to learn esoteric programming languages, York is the place to be. Scheme will blow your mind, not to mention being thoroughly useless after the first year.

Life’s been good, course is easy (for now). The website switched to a new server, and I was a lazy shite but knew that it was about time to redesign the thing. So I didn’t, obviously. Instead, I made websites for other people:

• James College, where I lived last year
• Ennef, my mother’s own venture into language teaching and translation
• Question of Balance, for a friendly guy down the road. He’s made a few alterations to it though, and the code isn’t valid any more. Not my fault, I swear.

And now it’s time to do my own. I’m trying to make this theme as elegant as possible, and hopefully I’ll be able to package it up and make it available for download. It looks ugly just now, I know. That’s because it needs images, and images need photoshop, and installing photoshop requires me to get off my arse. One day, I promise.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what all the extra hints at galleries and photos around the site are for, it’s because I found one sweet photo management plugin. It’s gonna rock.