'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Randomly bouncing around Youtube a while back I stumbled upon the Ballad of Map Cap'n Tom...



( Spoilers for the Ballad of Mad Cap'n Tom, and nostalgic ramblings )

The voteamabob once gain threw up the traditional pasta night games of Ticket to Ride and Dominion, so jonners99_uk did a bit more number-crunching and instead selected Scotland Yard and Galaxy Trucker as being the two games with the most first-choice votes. Perhaps the voteamabob app should take rankings into account when we eventually get round to writing it? Anyway, Sarah, Vicky and Martin played Scotland Yard with Matt leading them on a merry dance around London (and managing to get to the end without being caught!), while myself, Paddy, jonners99_uk and Beth played Galaxy Trucker.

We started off with a practice session to try and get to grips with the rules, then reset the scores and tried again for real. In the first round I think we all were on fairly even scores, but then it all went horribly wrong for the second round - the very first card Paddy drew was Epidemic which wiped out most of my crew (including my purple alien which I'd picked up to try and bolster my firepower). Then a few cards later we turned over a Slavers card, and without the alien I couldn't present enough firepower. So the slavers took the rest of my crew, and I was then out of the game with a crewless ship on all of 8 credits (having not managed to collect any cargo, and also having lost a chunk of my ship due to a pirate attack). The others made it through to the end with scores of 30-something credits, and we called it a night rather than add insult to injury with the third round.


On the way to pasta night I was listening to Radio 1's 10-minute takeover. The first track picked was Gorillaz's Feel Good Inc., and for a brief moment instead of being stuck in a queue on the Chichester bypass I was transported back to my degree at Sussex University all those years ago. In particular it reminded me of that common area tucked away at the top of the EDB building (now called Silverstone) - it had WiFi, power points, and was a good place to settle down with the laptop and bash away at a bit of coursework (when I wasn't playing Worms Blast or completing random LiveJournal memes). There used to be one of the many little cafés tucked away as well, and a computing cluster that was always deserted and so handy if I needed to be on the main uni network. Sussex was full of odd little common areas and cubby-holes - I found a good number of them (Mantell common room, Pevensey I, Pevensey II (I spent so much time there along with talismancer and ptristan that the porters joked about placing a "reserved" sign on one of the tables), Essex house, loads throughout Arts A/B and the Library, and of course the Pevensey Bridge) and I'm sure there's just as many elsewhere in the campus still waiting to be discovered (I never did find the ENG 1-3 tunnels that pewterfish once described).

It's odd how an apparently random snippet of music can remind me quite strongly of a given place and time.


I know I keep saying this and yet do nothing about it, but I do miss Sussex University and I do want to go back there and study again one day. Returning for a Masters or even a PhD is actually possible, and is not a completely bonkers idea. The trouble is I'm torn as to what to do as while Brighton is an amazing place to live and study in, I actually quite like Fareham and don't want to move away (and that's without contemplating moving to Cornwall...). Wait, that's not quite right - it's more I don't want to move away from the friends I've made in Fareham, and in particular church and housegroup. Two years ago I'd have happily moved, but over the past year-and-a-half I've finally set down roots here.

Perhaps I could commute to Sussex? Again, not totally bonkers although it would involve either a daily drive along the A27 past the bottlenecks of Chichester, Arundel, and Worthing, or instead the joys of Southern FailRail and an east/west change across Brighton station (which is just slow because the timetables don't line up). Actually, no, that's not an option thanks to the RMT's contempt for passengers - the train journey I could deal with (have 3DS, will game), the unreliability makes it completely impractical. Perhaps I could move a bit of the way along the coast and be within a reasonable travelling distance of both Fareham and Brighton?

Or I could even not go to Sussex and instead continue my studies at another university. Southampton and Portsmouth both have major universities, and those aren't the only ones within a reasonable distance of here. Except Sussex is a campus university, sitting in the South Downs and surrounded by the countryside, while Southampton and Portsmouth are city universities and that's just not quite the same.

In any case July's a bit late to be suddenly applying for a 2017 course. But for 2018... hmm...

Church today had a strong anti-war message (swords to plowshares and all that - Micah 4:3) - it being Remembrance Sunday, this isn't surprising. This might actually be the first Remembrance Sunday service I've ever been to and taken part in - oh, when I was young we would all go to St John's BBH every week but elemnar and I would disappear off to whatever the Sunday school was called back then (either in the church hall, or down the road at what was called the "Free Church"), while the grownups got on with the rest of the service. But over the years we ended up going to church less and less, and by the time I started university I'd stopped almost entirely except for Christmas/Easter.

But anyway, this year's resolution is holding fast and I'm actually glad that I'm going to church again and getting involved with the church community. It's only taken me, what, 9 years to properly settle in Fareham! Ironically this has happened about the same time as a few work opportunities appeared further afield, one or two I'd have jumped at a year ago but today I'm looking at and thinking that I actually want to stay in this area. This has slightly scuppered the "masters/PhD at Sussex" plan as commuting from here to Falmer is not ideal, although not impossible (and moving a short distance along the coast is not out of the question...).

Speaking of university, one thing that caught my ear at today's service was one of the songs we sung: a variant of God is our Strength and Refuge. It sounded rather familiar, but I couldn't quite place it until the last verse with "Be still and know your creator" - "Be still and know" is Sussex University's motto, and is taken from Psalm 46. There you do, that's today's random trivia!

Current views on UK politics:

Tories: they suck for being in favour of the massive increase in tuition fees.

Lib Dems: they suck some more for going back on their pre-election pledge.

Labour: they don't just suck, they're a black hole for not only a) claiming that they would have done it differently despite introducing fees in the first place (and going back on the manifesto at the time which promised to not introduce fees), but more importantly b) using this as an excuse to badmouth the coalition rather than actually coming up with a sane alternative (which, y'know, might have resulted in the Lib Dems voting against this so they could vote for yours).

All three parties had a chance to come out of this on top (Tories by reducing the increase when it became clear public opinion was against them, Lib Dems by sticking to their guns and abstaining, even Labour by coming up with a sensible alternative), and all three of them blew it.

Well, it's quickly approaching the time when I need to have decided just what I'm going to do next year. Do a Master's or go to work, stay in Brighton or move elsewhere...

I'm actually having to make hard decisions about my future. So far it looks like stay here and do a MSc in computing or AI, but even there I need to decide just which flavour of MSc to do.

Ah well, time to throw applications at anything that's not moving fast enough (and some things that are).

Update on the power situation: someone discovered the reserve tank for the generator, and hooked that up. As of 12:28pm they have ~12 hours of runtime, and a tanker is apparently on the way.

They got it going with about 2 minutes of UPS power left. They cut it very fine.

I think I need to change the error threshold in the neural net I'm writing. After 7,548,600 iterations the error is 0.4069111311875221. I don't think it's going to reach 0.01 (the threshold I had set) in the near future (it's been running for over 16 hours). Time to change what the criteria for "problem solved" is.

In related news, Excel appears to only draw 32,000 points when told to create an X/Y scatter graph:
( Graph (1280x960, 55KB) )

Hmm, some large part of Sussex ITS has fallen over, and is refusing to let anyone log on to the network. This affects me a lot, as I did have a lab class now. Guess it's called off, as it's rather hard to program in Java without a computer.

(How am I typing this you ask? On my laptop, of course)

Today's achievement: zombifying pine

Which isn't much, when you realise that I abandoned today at about 11:30 due to a mixture of:

a) whatever server responsible for DHCP at the uni deciding that my laptop (and apparently three-quarters of other laptops) wasn't worthy enough to receive an IP address, thus making all my internet connections implode

b) my deciding to go and upload the deliverables for Software Engineering to some webspace, only to find that only one deliverable was where it should be, and that whoever put it there forgot to set the permissions correctly

c) attempting to sort out some emails, and in the process managing to wedge one pine session over PuTTY, another logon prompt, and then wait a minute for a third PuTTY shell to login to the Informatics unix server

And I later completely forgot about the Software Engineering meeting (sorry folks), and only found out about it when an e-mail went round asking where all the programmers were. Oops.

Oh, and on the way back I managed to walk through a curtain of snow. I saw it in front of me, and over about twice the width of a road it went no snow -- snow -- no snow. Followed later by a small amount of near-horizontal snow, in March, with the sun shining. Ah well, this is England.

Anyway, Nick happened to log into the unix server just now, and did a 'w' to see who was logged in. I then asked if you saw everyone's processes with 'ps', to which the response was him typing 'ps -aux'. Followed by a few screens of processes from several people (not all of whom were actually logged in), including my pine process. Rather impressive when you realise that when I logged out, the shell *should* have killed anything it had spawned. Well, that explains some of the messages I was seeing with another pine session. One kill -9 later, and the uni has one less pine process.