Sunday 28th December 2003
Song: Space - You And Me Versus The World
Hey now *clap clap*
Me and you *clap* against the world *clap clap*
Look up there *clap* in the sky now *clap clap*
See the stars *clap* well they're shining just for us *clap*
I think that's actually a snare not a clap but nevermind :) I quite like Space, they amuse me greatly. I saw 'em at Barfly last year some time, where they played nearly all new songs, which was partly annoying. But in a way nice, since their album STILL hasn't been released. It's apparently now scheduled for March. As far as I know, they got screwed over by their label and such. They're now on a new label that I can't remember the name of, and seem happier, single out in Feb, album out in March... I'm looking forward to it! :)
I wasn't a very happy bunny lately. But I think it's all sorted now. I should hopefully be able to go back to eating well again. :D You can be pretty sure that if I'm either particularly happy or sad, it's her to blame. :)
My sleep pattern's entirely fucked up. I need to start going to bed earlier. I went to bed some time after 3am last night/this morning. I was still awake at 4. I didn't really have anything on my mind, I just really couldn't get to sleep. Subsequently I woke up around 1am, which is quite nice, but I don't want to get in a habbit of sleeping 4 - 1.
Christmas wasn't all that bad in the end. I think I'd over done the pessimistic mental preparation. I am glad it's over, but it wasn't quite as bad as I'd expected though. I didn't get any particularly amazing presents, but since I didn't want anything at all, I guess it's not all that bad...
*fade to black*
Thursday 25th December 2003
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second - 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them - Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
Merry christmas!
Wednesday 24th December 2003
Song: LeAnn Rhymes - Can't Fight The Moonlight
I've had a very weird morning, a lot of falling asleep and waking up, a lot of missed Straylight Run, and a few fucked up dreams but alas, I'm up now... and really wanna play basketball with someone.
The last two nights at either 11pm or midnight, I've had some Frosties at Clare's recommendation. I think I may be adventurous and have some for breakfast today.
Oh, Mary, you forgot one of the more festive songs to put on your CD...
It's Christmas eve and I've only wrapped two fucking presents
It's Christmas eve and I've only wrapped two fucking presents
And I hate, hate, hate your guts
I hate, hate, hate your guts
And I'll never talk to you again
(Unless your dad will suck me off)
I'll never talk to you again
(Unless your mum will touch my cock)
I'll never talk to you again
Ejaculate into a sock
I'll never talk to you again
I'll never talk to you again
- Blink 182 - Happy Holidays You Bastard
This reminds me... it's Christmas eve, and I've actually wrapped no fucking presents.
I'd like to take this time to mention Becca. I have not the foggiest idea who she may be, but her site entertained me greatly and so thought I'd mention it. Her comments can be seen on the last update of mine. She apparently got here from Lisa's site, but Lisa seemed to have no idea who she was either. If you read this Becca, please do let us all know! :)
Started writing about skirts last night, and plan on adding more to it tonight. I'll see how it goes, hopefully I'll be happy enough with it in a day or two to put it on here.
I've noticed something lately... something's wrong. I sit here listening to Christina Aguilera and LeAnn Rhymes, and my brother seems to be playing Gavin Rosdale and Evanescence. It's not meant to be that way round.
Oh, I saw the Good Charlotte video for "Hold On" again yesterday, 'cept my mum was with me this time... I wish I'd changed the channel once I saw what it was now. :\
Oh, and on that topic, still not heard any reliable news about my old friend... can only assume he survived the jump and has since died, as that's what most of the stories seem to say, they just don't all tie in with each other tight enough to be certain.
I'm gonna go now and go downstairs, and contemplate the Frosties idea. I'm home alone for a few hours, so I aim to be able to clearly hear my music from the kitchen. My room's at the back of the house upstairs, kitchen's downstairs at the front... lets see how it goes! :D
Saturday 20th December 2003
Song: Straylight Run - Mistakes We Knew We Were Making
1 month 8 days! :D
1 month 8 days! :D
I've had a nice 11 hour sleep, and generally feel a lot better than yesterday. Serious points from yesterday remain, but alas... what can you do?
I obtained a free hat last night with which I was pleased :)
Oh, £20 for anyone who can give me the lyrics to "Holding On" and "Dignity And Money" by Straylight Run :D
For some reason my Emulate3Buttons randomly turns itself off... if anyone can let me know of a way to re-enable it without restarting X, please let me know.
I'm bored, and cold... I need to put a t-shirt on, but alas, they're all the way on the other side of my room.
Oh, I just found some more Straylight Run lyrics! yay
I'm gonna go now, mope around the house, hurt my fingers on my guitar for a bit, then maybe collapse in front of the TV and watch Blink 182 to make me chuckle.
Bye!
Friday 19th December 2003
Song: Audio Learning Center - The Shell
Stupid fucking seven minute queues
Stupid fucking indecision to get on a bus
Stupid fucking GTK
Stupid fucking public transport
Stupid fucking high buildings and solid ground
Stupid fucking teenage hormones
Stupid fucking lack of information
Stupid fucking contradicting and equally unreliable stories
Stupid fucking selfish people
Stupid fucking uninformed Virgin staff
Stupid fucking F
Stupid fucking alarm clocks
Stupid fucking bus drivers
Stupid fucking repitition
Happy holidays everybody!
Friday 12th December 2003
Song: Straylight Run - It's everybody's fault, but mine
"You wanted to be left alone
You wanted someone to say
'Boy I'm always here for you'
But you can't have it both ways"
- John Nolan
Hurm
Ooh, filling in this is reminding me of the conversation the other day about guestbook hijacking... :)
Got a letter from Uni today (Addressed to our old address) about course fees... they seem to think I owe them over £1,000... I wasn't too impressed.
Still not developed any ideas on the moan about society... may start tonight actually. I'll see how it goes.
Hrm, I've really not had a lot to say lately. Was tempted to moan about the fucker at the traffic lights in Surbiton who pissed me off hugely, or the bus driver who doesn't know the name of roads that his bus stops at and/or found it impossible to respond to my simple questions. What is it with people who work with the public? *shakes head*
Gotta mention something here about naval floss' importance in today's economy.
I'm gonna end it here and find some guestbooks to hijack... if you see your guestbook suddenly loads my website, you'll know that it works ;D
Wednesday 10th December 2003
Song: Rival Schools - High Acetate
I decided to get into the Christmas spirit... I gave tux a hat.
Unfortunately nothing written about crossdressers yet.
This update actually has no purpose at all.
I've spent all day sitting here trying to get my pooter back to how it was before "the incident". I think I may go in a bit and watch a DVD or something.
I didn't wake up until gone mid-day today, which was nice. I suspect that going to bed at gone 3am helped this.
I've become a bit of a perfectionist lately with uni stuff... it's actually getting very annoying. I got 92% on that thing mentioned the other day, and I wasn't happy about the 8% that I lost, and I got a B for my report on firewalls which I'm also not happy with. The reason I'm not happy is not because I think it was unfairly marked or whatever, but that I could do better. Oh, and don't even get me started on my 10 minute presentation... but that one wasn't my fault. :(
Uhm, I'm bored... Bye! :)
Monday 8th December 2003
Right... I've had a VERY annoying week. Last weekend, as I believe I said, I managed to bugger up my CDROM drive. Since then, my computer was being very random, in that it just froze without good reason. (I am aware that may seem "normal" to many people... *snickers*) This was very random, and I could see no consistency in it, which I needed in order to diagnose the problem. As it slowly got worse, I noticed a trend... it didn't come out of standby. Every morning when I got up, my computer was dead. Anyway... to cut a long story short, I spent most of my waking hours Saturday and Sunday trying to find this bloody problem. It was quite phenomically geeky of me. I ate and drank less, hardly left my room, and didn't want any guests, heh. I was far too determined to find it. I did manage to find a way of creating the error on demand. This had the unfortunate downside of taking a few hours each time. By the evening of Saturday, I'd completely had enough... the problem was getting worse, and was still giving me no clues as to it's origin. I ended up leaving it for a bit and went to lay on my bed. I ended up falling asleep, but that's irrelevant. I then resumed it a few hours later, only to learn that it hadn't automagically sprung to life :(
Sunday was generally not any more succesful. Early evening Sunday though, proved to be the most useful. I put my (replacement) linux hard drive into my windows machine, and it sprung to life, in all it's pretty blue glory. Given how pissed off with it I was, and how it was looking more and more like the IDE bus on my motherboard, and not the hard drive itself (I managed to recreate the problem with 2 hard drives, and a CD drive... even when the CD drive was empty). I took a dive... a not very big job, but I had NO energy left to do it with... I moved everything, except the motherboard, CPU and RAM from my linux machine, to my windows machine (this involved 2 network cards, a sound card, a graphics card, two hard drives, a CD writer, and a power supply). Despite it taking longer, I did it all in stages, to be sure that after adding each drive, it was still working.
Thankfully, it worked, and I now have my linux machine back again. I need to buy a new motherboard. However... I also REALLY need to get Windows running ASAP, as I have imminent programming assignment due, and I've still not solved the evil satanic problem mentioned before.
The conclusion: I can only guess... but I think that when my CD drive died last weekend, it must've somehow buggered up the IDE bus that it was connected to (bearing in mind the drive was totally dead... It wouldn't even eject the disk). This in turn knackered my hard drive. The reason it was so hard to find this problem, was that two things had gone wrong. So each time I thought I found it, but then something else went wrong... this was why.
Thanks to Tor for at least trying to come up with ideas :)
Hopefully I'll get some more interesting updates done soon... Next few days are gonna be spent getting my computer back to how I like it though, so gimme a few days. Inspiration for such updates is also good. Had a nice chat with Mary last night about crossdressers and gays. Also had a nice chat with Sonia not so long ago about how by her being too scared to go to her fictitious 24/7 stationary shop at 1am, she's doing her bit to reduce street crime for future generations... These sorts of conversations inspire interesting updates. Prepare yourself for a full on moan about how society mistreats crossdressers, and homosexuals for no good reason what-so-ever... Coming soon!
Thursday 4th December 2003
Song: Straylight Run - A Slow Decent (live)
It's been a very interesting few weeks. 2 deaths, a mild heart attack, a serious car crash (involving police, fire engines and ambulances) and potentially a divorce in the making. None of them affected me directly, but I would've still preferred it if they hadn't happened. One of the deaths affected me the most, and I didn't even know the person who died, nor did I even know his name. Hrm...
Regardless of all this, the biggest problems I've been faced with lately have all been concerning the world of academia. I managed to knock up a CV and a false covering letter in some unknown, but seemingly small amount of time, when I feel it should've taken much longer. But I kind'a left it too late before starting. Hrm. Today I was faced with the problem of not being able to get in contact with the person I was meant to be doing my group presentation with. I waited for around 5 mins, the lecture hall had emptied... so I went and spoke to our workshop leader, who basically said I should do it alone (he said more than that with different outcomes for different situations but I wont get into that here...) so tonight I've been faced with having to prepare the whole thing, as well as trying to convince myself that it'll be ok... I also REALLY need to learn to talk slower. I have a great habbit of talking too fast and mumbling all my words together.
Oh, and I have a (still unsolved) fantastic programming problem. I couldn't figure it out... my programming lecturer was unable to solve it, as was her teaching assistant person, as was everyone else who I asked... I eventually found it by removing one line at a time until the problem went away... I wont explain it here, but I'm sure I will if/when I fix it.
Still not diagnosed my computer problem, though I now know it's not the kernel, CPU, RAM, or IDE cables... :(
Check out this. By looking at the people in the background it appears to have not been sped up at all, and entirely legitimate... which concerns me.
Wednesday 3rd December 2003
Song: Blink 182 - Obvious
Aah, the madness. I've just spent the last few hours trying to burn a CD. For those who don't know, I lost a CD ROM drive the other day, to a Mandrake disk (info here). It was quite annoying, but not a lot I could do. So anyway, I finally got around to getting a new one today. £25 from PC World... not my favourite place, but it was local and I thought it was a fair price for a 52x record, 24x rewrite, and 52x read CD drive.
So anyway, I get home, plug it in, once again have some inexplainable hardware problem which was resolved by unplugging my mouse, MP3 player cable, and both network cables. Anyway... so I got it in and it was fine. The next bit wasn't so super... none of the CD burning software had any knowledge of a CD writer. Under linux, CD writing requires a SCSI drive, this I knew before, but didn't know how to actually set up the SCSI emulation. With thanks to google pointing me at a nice, simple tutorial on how to set up my IDE drive to work as SCSI... I did mange to get it set up right (one reboot later). The next thing was actually getting a CD written. I first of all tried a VCD, thinking that VCDs are what I'll be making most of, so might as well get some practice in. To keep the frisbee production rate as low as possible, I decided to use my CDRW disk, so that I could format it, if/when something went wrong. It all went wrong from there... I knocked up a bin/cue for my test VCD with ease. I'd already installed the software for that earlier on. So next I go to put it into cdrdao, and wait for it to write the CD... it claimed to have worked, so I first tried to play the VCD on my computer... it failed. So I tried it on my DVD player for my TV. It also failed. I then played the bin/cue with a media player I have on here, and it worked fine. So I knew it was the burning that failed, and the data was fine.
I then thought I'd try a normal data disk... 'mkisofs' was promptly used, and I had a nice ISO ready for burning. It did eventually work... though only when recording at 4x, when the drive should support 24x. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why... and wasted a lot of time reading things and changing options. Eventually it dawned on me... the disk!
I then put in a normal CDR and set it to 52x, it didn't seem to want to go at that speed, but was gonna go at 24x, which by this point I was more than happy to accept.
So, all in all, it was a very boring few hours. Though at least it's done... Tor, if you're reading this, I'd like some help with constructing a bash script if you could assist me with this. Since CD writing currently requries 2 programs, and a lot of parameters that are going to be the same every time, I thought it'd be easier to make a script. The line I ended up using for, it was:
$ cdrecord -v dev=0,0,0 -speed=52 -dao cuefile=videocd.cue
With the exception of -v, they're all required, and also could all be the same each time, so I thought it'd be handy to make a script for this.
Other than that, I'm afraid I don't have much to say... Oooh, yes I do! I got 92% on a mid-semester test, for Problem Analysis and Design. It's not usually my style to proudly boast things like that. However, I was pleased in this case, because the lecturer for that class is the lady who was very reluctant to have me on the course thinking I'd missed too much and would struggle... I hope she took note of my score when marking them :)
I have a presentation to do on Friday. It's a group thing, we are in pairs... I do not know the name of the person I am working with, nor do I know a whole hell of a lot about the topic. The presentation is only 10 mins long, so I should be ok. However if I don't get a chance to see the guy tomorrow like we've planned due to any number of unforeseen circumstances, then I am... well, fucked really, aren't I?
Hrm... I need to go to bed now. Gotta be up quite early for SAD lecture. Woo!
Tuesday 2nd December 2003
Song: The Ataris - Eight Of Nine
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