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Come closer child, for I have many things to talk about.

How not to travel, pt. 2

Last Saturday I was on the wing again heading back here to a surprisingly sunny York. Here was me thinking that since I’d just dodged April the 1st everything would be alright. How wrong I was.

To start with, there weren’t any trains leaving Hengelo. I already knew this because they hadn’t been leaving all week, due to works on the line. However it did mean getting up earlier than I would otherwise have to and this never bodes well on a travel day. But, my loving parents drove me to Deventer, dropped me off and waved my train out to the horizon (which is always far in Holland).

At this point I was excited - my girlfriend who I hadn’t seen for an entire half week would be meeting me at Schiphol, where if everything went well we’d have well over an hour to spend together before parting ways for a further week and a half (only five days left as I type this). Note the if in that sentence.

My train arrived on time. Her train arrived on time. Everything’s ok, right? Not when I went to get my bags checked in. Since my flight had been assigned to the dungeon that is gate D6, I was told that I would have to be there twenty minutes earlier than I was previously told. How they can move times forwards when people still have to arrive for check-in I have no idea, but it was upsetting to me to have our hour eaten into like this.

We made the most of it though, enjoying lunch together, before I passed through passport control as close to the boarding time as I dared (I still had to go through security at the gate). I arrived at D(ungeon)6. There wasn’t a queue. I went through security. The place was empty.

I sauntered up to exit F, sat down in one of the many empty seats, sent a text message to say that leaving early was pointless while displaying my loathing for KLM and my affection for the recipient, then grabbed a book and started reading. A full twenty minutes later (does that number seem familiar?) the small number of passengers that had gathered were informed that the flight was ready for boarding, with two buses waiting outside the revolving door to whisk us away to England. Er, the plane.

We rapidly filled the first bus, myself included, and waited for the driver to start our magical journey across that place where the aircraft roam free. And we waited.

A few minutes later a KLM employee came onto the bus and used the intercom to tell us that there was a “technical problem” and that boarding was temporarily cancelled.

Whoop-dee fucking doo.

Long and uneventful story short, “technical” is a euphemism for clerical, and missing some bits of paper made the flight an hour and a half longer.

Murphy’s law is simple. If it can go wrong, it will. Many people don’t know what the implications of this statement are, however. For example, the law also implies, “If things are already going wrong, they will get worse.” On the upside, the plane didn’t develop a real technical fault and crash into the ground in a ball of flame.

I arrived in Manchester at about five o’ clock, now a little weary. My luggage was all there, always a good thing. I started the long, walkway-assisted stroll to the railway station that’s annexed to the airport, hunted around in my bags for my return ticket, and was mildly surprised to see my train standing ready. I hopped on, stuffed my suitcase in a rack, found an unreserved seat, opened my book again and waited for the train to leave. Fifteen minutes later, spot on the scheduled time, the doors closed and we rolled to Manchester Picadilly.

Which is where we waited for a few minutes. The train filled up. Then came the announcement:

“Hello and a warm welcome on board this service to Middlesbrough. I’m afraid you won’t welcome this news however - due to a fatality on the line there is no connection between Staley Bridge and Garforth. As such we will need to divert via Middlesbrough and this service will be severely delayed. If you do not wish to take this train please leave now.”

And this is how I spent my Saturday afternoon being carted to Staley Bridge, where we picked up a ton of unhappy passengers, then went back to Manchester, then to Middlesbrough, all the way around the track, then to Garforth (all in all about forty miles further on), then backwards again towards York, where I presume the train continued back to Middlesbrough again. The delay was as long as the journey.

Very tired and very hungry I arrived at about half past ten in the evening. I said hello, slammed something into the microwave, ate the contents precisely six-minutes-plus-stirring-time later, then went to bed, and proceeded to procrastinate for four days solid.

The present

So where does four solid days of procrastination leave me? In a relatively clean room, with plentiful food from a relatively clean kitchen, with a little bit of ADA95 done and a body clock thwacked so hard that I can still think clearly (it’s quarter past five. In the morning). I have, in fact, seen sunlight recently, though I did forget what day it was.

The downside to doing nothing is that it does give me plenty of time to miss people. Doesn’t matter, only five days.

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.

Yep, I’m fiddling again. You may already have noticed the addition of a fuzzy border, hope you like it. Right now I’m working on prettying the title up without resorting to images, which is a fun game of smack-the-incompatible-browser-in-the-kneecaps. I’m not happy with the way it’s turning out so far so I’ll probably change everything later anyway. I wrote a WordPress plugin just for the occasion, which I just might release to the general populace if it behaves and doesn’t break stuff for others.

Life is good. My sleeping pattern is destroyed. I am a fish. Good night.

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.

I did two things today: got a girlfriend and got a haircut.

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.

I win.

It’s late and I’m waiting for my music playlist to finish, so here’s a nice follow up from the last entry. Or something.

Currently completed off list:
Revision cleaned off floor (and promptly replaced with other crap), the random chair has been removed, the battery has been ordered (but has not yet arrived), I have sold one pair of speakers (still loads of stuff to go), I have done a little guitar practise, I have a double duvet now, and I have done some photoshop.

That means that the following have not yet been carried out:
Haircut. God damn I need one. RAM doesn’t work yet, room is still a mess with stuff lying around, the layout has not changed (and probably won’t, on second thoughts), I don’t (quite) have a girlfriend, I have read absolutely nothing, the yoghurt went off, no movies have been selected, the printer is still dead, the perspex is still uncut, the microphone is still flat on the desk, the website has not advanced much, I haven’t learned any new cooking recipes, I still have a lot of chocolate (to share with future girlfriend?), my wardrobe has not expanded, my mouse has not increased in mass, the speaker has not been raised up a foot, and I am still lazing.

That second paragraph is somewhat thicker than the first.

On the plus side, Tesco sells dried, ready-to-eat papaya in a bag. Yum. Playlist is over, time for bed at the wholesome hour of 4AM. Good night.

Exams suck. No really, they do. Though everything seemed to float by pretty smoothly this year (as opposed to the incredible feeling of “oh shit” last year), nothing could make me feel more relieved than getting back to a normal student rhythm. Modules this term are actually looking pretty interesting, with even the maths appearing doable at first sight.

With the frightening regularity of it all, a new feeling is entering the fray - I feel like a sack of tatties (that’s potatoes to you southerners). I’ve ceased doing anything, with the height of activity being hoovering the house on Sunday - after waking up in the afternoon of course. There’s been a shocking lack of photography on my behalf, and there’s loads of other stuff to do as well. Even simple things. I need a haircut, but the hairdresser I went to has closed up. All I need is a new hairdresser. I haven’t looked yet.

I do make plans. Making plans doesn’t require any effort, and so seems a safe bet. I am going to (really I really am) play around with my PC tomorrow to get the memory working properly, and rearrange some of the hardware inside. I am going to clean all the revision off the floor. I have stuff in my room that needs to be tucked away properly. I might rearrange the room. There’s a random chair here that I don’t use and can go elsewhere. I have an old cheap-as-chips laptop here that needs a battery. Appallingly, I have a love interest that I need to pursue (dear god I hope she doesn’t read my site). I have books and magazines to read. I have stuff to sell. I need to practise the guitar some more. I need to finish the yoghurt before it goes off. I need to pick some movies in advance that I’m going to watch on the way back home, now that the MP4 player actually works. I might have to consider getting a new printer, since the yellow seems to have stopped working forever. I have some perspex that needs to be cut (PC again). I need to get bedding for a double bed (not directly related to love interest). I need a desktop microphone stand. I need to do some real maintenance to this website, and get some graphics going. I have a photoshop project that I need to finish. I need to check out some recipes which I should try making. I have a lot of chocolate that needs eating. I should get some new t-shirts. I need to make my mouse heavier. I need to put a speaker stand together to get the speaker at the right height. And, quite simply, I need to throw some stuff out, like my lazy ass attitude.

So, tomorrow (well, later today), I’m going to be nice and geeky, and on Thursday, try to be nice and romantic.

Yup, I need to be myself again.