Tuesday 29th May 2007
Song: My Chemical Romance - I Don't Love You
Right, this site is now on Solaris... Hold tight folks, I don't know how well this will work. I have all the faith in Solaris, just not in myself being a Solaris admin (though I do have certificates to say I know what I'm doing... must put that on CV).
If you ever try to load it and it fails, do let me know!
Sunday 27th May 2007
Song: Scissor Sisters - Take Your Mama
I have computer woes. I use the suspend to disk thing every night when turning it off, so that in the morning it comes back on exactly as I left it. This morning when it loaded up, pidgin suddenly disappeared, then I clicked play on my MP3 player and it suddenly disappeared too. While confused as to what's going on, Beryl suddenly crashed too and my windows had no decorations. Then the computer had hung completely and I couldn't even move the mouse, and I couldn't SSH into it either. So I begrudgingly hit reset and it reboots and I immediately get a kernel panic and it won't boot. I sigh and reset again, and this time it reset itself as soon as it got to extracting the kernel image. So I turned it off and went out to Tesco.
I've tried running a boot disk on it, and it loaded but I got a ton of errors. I'm not sure if it's the RAM or CPU, but something's not playing ball. I've currently got memtest86+ running, and I'm hoping it'll find something. Not happy... Although with the money saved from living back with parents for a month, I could quite easily just get a new motherboard, CPU and RAM. Annoyingly I'd probably also need a PATA riser card, as everything's SATA these days. Bit annoying, but I have wanted an upgrade for a while now. Maybe it's time.
If anyone (Daniel, Tor?) has any idea what it might be and how to fix it, do tell. Apparently Linux has a module which you can load and give it a file telling it which bits of your RAM are broken, and the kernel will run and just not use those bits. I thought that was rather wonderful.
*edit*
Right, an update... memtest86+ ran twice and reported no errors. I'm now running cpuburn to see if giving my processor a run for it's money will throw up any errors... It seems so far like it's running fine. What other CPU testing things are there? I'm quite annoyed now, I don't know what's wrong. Could it be the motherboard?
Saturday 26th May 2007
Song: The Used - The Ripper
Oh, and I forgot to add. I'm now using a new MP3 player for my computer, and as such have once again got support for last.fm, so my profile should start updating again! Hurrah.
Saturday 26th May 2007
Song: The Used - Liar Liar (Burn In Hell)
So, The Used's new album is out. They have a new drummer, but otherwise it's the same old The Used that we all know and love. Obviously I am a little bit biased, but I was very impressed straight away when I first heard the album. I usually don't get like that with albums, I didn't really get that with The Used's second album to be honest... I found it lacked something magical that the first album had (and still to this day retains). This one though rocks as hard as the first as the first album in all the right places, but isn't afraid to pull back and do quieter songs where appropriate. I think they've finally found that happy medium whereas the first album was nearly all loud, fast, heavy and shouty; and the second album was just this awkward sound that wasn't really soft, but had lost the edge of the first album. Anyway... yes, go out and buy it, Steven says so.
There has been a wealth of woe lately which is a shame, but these things happen. I feel I'm finally at the point of leaving it all behind, but it does sadly mean I have to return home for all of June. My view on both of my parents has changed a lot since I moved out. I won't get into the details publicly here, but I feel I see them both very differently to how I did before I moved out. I would imagine that's fairly normal when you move out, really...
So, two exams left. Really, really can't be fucked anymore. It's got so bad. Work have said I can work full time through all of June, which is nice. I just wish I didn't have this nagging siren of exams constantly in the background.
Oh, so my car passed it's MOT. This was good news. I was quite worried it would fail on the emissions due to the broken idle. It turns out it actually did fail the emissions test two times, even without the idle playing up (which I'm sure is a very bad thing) but it passed on the third time. Apparently they're allowed up to three tests for it, so that was pretty lucky. I wonder if I'll still have the car by this time next year. My dad's wanted to scrap it for several years now, but it has soldiered on, so we'll see.
It's been so hot again these last few days. It's uncomfortably humid. Was nice last night though being out at gone midnight (I went to Asda. Fun) in a t-shirt and still feeling a bit warm.
Anyway, it's not 4:30am and I'm just rambling rubbish. I might do a slightly more substantive update in a few days, but then I might not. I feel this blog is going through a bit of a quiet period. I've just had too much going on lately.
Sunday 13th May 2007
Song: Queen - We Will Rock You
This is so brilliant. I feel more people need to be made aware of it.
Thursday 10th May 2007
Song: Tom McRae - Boy With The Bubblegun
Only three exams left of uni! Algorithms coursework demonstration, and poster presentation were completed yesterday. Here's my poster. Isn't it lovely?
The poster presentation I didn't feel nearly lived up to the hype they had built around it, but I did kind'a expect that to happen. I did get a chance to talk to a lot of people which was quite nice, especially as some of them I'll possibly never talk to again. Oddly one girl who I appeared to have befriended was a girl who didn't do a placement, and was in her first year when I was doing the teaching assistant thing in my second year. She struck up a conversation as we were leaving, and it began a bit like this:
"You used to teach us Java, init? You must be well good at it".
She was pleasant enough though. I had spent the first hour or so looking at her and trying to work out if that was why I knew her, but too afraid to ask. She mostly just complained about her shoes and asked if I did my project in Java. It wasn't too deep. I then had a nice conversation with the lady from the placements office who arranged my a job at Sun and apparently also helped set up the job I now have. I feel she's secretly orchestrating my life without me knowing. We had a good ol' chat anyway, and then Stan turned up and pulled my hair. It was tied back. Oddly everyone laughed out loud as soon as he did it. I was unsure of why.
I think I might start tying my hair back more often. Because I didn't ever tie it back for so many years, and because I don't like change I always feel a bit funny whenever I have it tied back. Going to uni for the first time with it like that I expected everyone to comment, but all the staff who know me didn't comment, and pretty much all but one other student I think. Maybe I had over-hyped it in my head over the years.
In other news, after much trouble with shaving, I appear to have found the answer. Tesco's value economy, or whatever, shaving foam. It's wonderful. It cost about 50 pence and appears to leave me with very little irritation. I wonder if maybe all the other "good" things, moisturisers etc, in the more expensive shaving creams and foams were actually the problem. So I'm now just using that and moisturising separately. I've also started shaving more often, every day or other day, which I think has helped a lot. My neck's still a bit red, but it's much better than it used to be, and the spots are a reduced. Some where ingrown hairs, so I simply plucked them out which I think helped a lot. Sadly having very coarse dark hair does mean that even immediately after shaving there is visible stubble. Oh well, can't win 'em all. The reduced redness is certainly nice though.
Tuesday 8th May 2007
Song: My Chemical Romance - Disenchanted
I'm not a happy bunny... We're being booted out of this house, and have less than a month to go. It's all very short notice, and finding a new house that's close to the uni, within budget for four people and with three parking spaces isn't easy. The last three nights I had an average of six hours sleep per night, which is do-able but after a few days it starts to take its toll.
I woke up at 7:30 this morning as I had my final lecture of uni (and was up until 1:30am discussing house woes), I then must have fallen back to sleep immediately as I then woke up again at 8:35. Too late to get to uni, typically then I wasn't able to get back to sleep. So I got out of bed at 9am, and went to see what the latest on the house situation is. Not much had happened yet. Then my dad phoned, my MOT which was taking place has been cancelled. Not happy about that. The MOT runs out at the end of the month and anyone who's ever been in my car will probably be able to tell you it's not in the best condition in the world. So that's now rescheduled for next Thursday.
So ugh, I'm so tired. I'm so annoyed I missed the lecture, especially as I specifically emailed the lecturer to say that I would be in attendance last week.
There is woe.
Thursday 3rd May 2007
Song: Marilyn Manson - Coma Black
So, that's it now. It took 64 pages of writing, 128 pages of printing, and 1,820 lines of C++ code... But my final year project report has now been handed in. I woke up before 7am this morning and was in uni at about 8:30, determined to get it sorted out and handed in before the queues. In the end this effort was a bit of a waste of time as I officially wasn't able to get to get the paper I needed until 10am. However I did manage to persuade a member of staff and got it at about 9:10. So I walked hastily back to the library and began my first ever binding experience. It was a lot of fun actually.
So yes, there has been stress lately. Most of the past few days has been spent either working on it, procrastinating and thinking about it, or sitting in front of it with my head in my hands in despair. Today also I got my poster printed. It took them about 4 hours between me giving them the PDF and them having it on paper, which I think is quite remarkable as there had initially been worries that it wouldn't be done in time for the presentation on Wednesday.
So now, left for uni is one piece of coursework, a poster presentation, project demonstration, algorithms demonstration, and three exams. In list format that seems quite a lot, However... That bit of coursework is already 90% done; the poster is done; the work is done for both demonstrations so they're literally just a demo, hardly laborious. So really, it's just three exams, and then no more uni... ever. There will probably be some woe, despite how much I've complained about it.
We'll see.
Tuesday 1st May 2007
Song: Hoobastank - Too Little Too Late
So, it's no secret to anyone that I'm remarkably skinny. It's also never been unknown to me that I'm unhealthily underweight. What was a big surprise to me though, was that my BMI is less than Nicole Richie. This is immensely troubling, look how thin she is!
(Picture stolen from somewhere, sorry)
Looking at my body though, I don't think I look like I'm anorexic or anything, just a bit skinny. But there's lots of skinny people. I just can't understand why I weigh so little, for my height. I would appear to have an insanely high metabolism. I had dinner about 5:30pm and it's now 9pm and I am hungry again. It doesn't coincide terribly well with the fact that I typically struggle to eat a large (normal adult sized) meal. I don't know what it is, but I'm not sure I like it.
I'm never deathly ill because of it or anything too dramatic like that, so I'm not seeing it as a huge pressing issue. Also I more or less like my figure so I don't want any Weightgain 5000 or anything like that... I'm just a little worried that my BMI is so shockingly low that I make Nicole Richie look good.
Oh, haven't said the figure... my BMI is 17.1. If memory serves, Nicole's was 17.5, and 'healthy' is considered to be from 18.5 to 25.