Sound and Fury

This is so cool!

I got confirmation that my accommodation for next year is sorted. Which is nice. Also both “correspondence” and “accommodation” were spelt correctly in this one.

I have got into the habit of getting up at lunch time. This is a bad thing because it means I’m never tired until 2 in the morning… Oh well. I’ll get back into the habit of getting up at a reasonable time…

Since I’ve graduated now, I think I can put my essays on line for the benefit of humanity. Err… So I have submitted them to Helium… They will take a while to appear.

The world would be a better place if more things could be taught. If every schoolchild had classes in pride in their heritage, desire to do well and be a member of society, curiosity about the world outside and common sense, then those schoolchildren would be worldbeaters. Every single one.

The point is that people have to realise that these things are not taught. You cannot sit pupils down and  make them want to be a member of society. Educators and syllabus setters have to understand this. The most important things you learn at school are learnt indirectly.

This is a theme I will expand upon more when I have more time and a lower blood alcohol level…

I got an offer of accommodation from bristol today; Relief.

There were 2 spelling errors in a single sentence in the email from the accommodation office. PLEASE QUOTE YOUR STUDENT NUMBER IN ALL CORESPONDANCE WITH THE ACCOMODATION OFFICE.These are not uncommon errors, surely these are exactly the kind of thing that the ACCOMMODATION OFFICE would notice; Anger

I want some chicken; Hunger.

So I’m pleased that I won’t be homeless come October. I like it.

So I’ve been fiddling round with Ubuntu a bit. I’ve added a whole bunch of useless crap to my top panel thing. CPU monitor, network traffic monitor, it shows me the weather, there’s a sticky note widget thing. It’s great. Pimp my desktop. I only did it because I had two of the same thing for some reason and then I deleted the entire top panel and had to recreate it. So I decided to knock it up a notch. Bam!

Now that my desktop is pimped, I feel so much nerdier. It’s been a good day…

Have I mentioned that Gasm should be a tog?

Why does my spell-checker recognise that “decaffeinated” is a word, but red-squigglies “caffeinated”?

I have yet to reorganise this blog as yet. Also, I haven’t posted anything in a while. The reason is I’ve been busy. Well, I haven’t really I’ve been playing on my 360 and going out.

I’ve been to the cinema a few times and so I’m going to do some little review things!

Mr Brooks

Another sneak preview, another film I would never have gone to see otherwise. Another surprisingly good film. Despite Kevin Costner, Mr Brooks is a pretty solid film. The premiss is that Mr Earl Brooks (Costner) is addicted to killing people. He is also the owner of a successful box factory and he loves his family very much. Oh and then he meets someone who wants to go with him when he goes a-killing. Cue tension, suspense and a very very very loud gunfight in a flickery neon lit corridor. My favourite moment was when the police lady get catapulted out of the van.

Evan Almighty

I was not expecting anything much from this film and in that regard it didn’t disappoint. Wholly underwhelming in its “meh” quotient. That might be a double negative or something. Wait… What I mean is that this film is superlatively average. There are some neat touches and some funny moments, but overall the story isn’t that great, some of the jokes fall flat (the “evan falling off things” montage is a case in point). Best thing about this film? Morgan Freeman. Obviously. Steve Oedekerk wrote the screenplay. And Kung Pow is one of my favourite films… If I’d known this I would have been more excited by the film. So it was lucky I didn’t find that out until after the film…

So… I have also seen Transformers and The Simpsons movie. I will probably review them at some later stage.

I’m currently reading Moby Dick. Its really odd. I’m nearly 200 pages in and they haven’t even spotted a whale yet… It is good though. I like it. Interesting fact; Moby is called Moby because he is related to Herman Melville. Cool huh?

I just won my first game of Go (9×9) against GnuGo (3.7, on its default settings) I was quite pleased with myself. I like CGoban once I got the hang of using it… Go is another thing I have taken up recently. I bought some stones online and I have a book I picked up somewhere too. It’s a lot of fun. And it’s much harder for computers than chess is. I think that’s because the board area is much bigger (normally a 19×19 grid rather than a 8×8 grid) and the number of legal moves is much much higher.

Month old Leonidas chocolates still taste damn good. I don’t think chocolate really goes off…

I need to find what the various bits of the stylesheet for this theme do so I can mess about with it. I basically just want to change the colours up a bit and mess with the box widths. I will at some stage soon get to grips with the thing. But for now I’m working on my prime number program thing.

Oh, I changed the name of the thing too.

Respect might be a bit of a strong word for it…

Basically, I spent far too long today trying to get a Python program to check whether a number was divisible by any number on a list of numbers and then to use this to add to a list of primes. I could do it, but it was very inelegant and I couldn’t find a neat way to get the program to skip to the next number if it found a divisor. My program now works, but it is pretty clunky and not very neat. I am sure there is a much better way to do it.

Still, I am getting the hang of writing Python, which was the point of the exercise. And now onwards to bigger and better things… Having the list print to a file, cutting out unnecessary computational steps (ie, stopping when it finds no divisors up to half the size of the number in question…) and so on.

Or I could go back to my original project which was to create an array of numbers and their prime factors.

Well, when I first thought of learning Python I wanted to make a program that computed digits of pi. But that seemed to involve too much maths and not really that much programming proper. I might do it one day, still…

I was on holiday.

In Italy.

It was hot. So hot that grapes were ready for picking a month early. Bonanza for sweet wine fanciers I reckon. Also forest fires are really cool if you’re far enough away that they aren’t dangerous and you don’t own any real estate in the area…

Oh yeah and I graduated.

Actually interesting posts will resume… tomorrow/soon/never. (delete as applicable.)