I Have Answers

Or at the very least I have the continuation of questions raised previously...

1). I'm leaving the whole passport issue until I hear about this job I've applied for. If I get an interview for a job and if this leads to employment then it's highly unlikely that I will have time for international travel between now and the end of the year. If on the other hand I don't get it then some jetset getaway may be exactly what I need to celebrate finishing my thesis.

2). The whole paper thing just bugged me, it really did. Seems like such bad luck, regardless of differing approaches that someone else should publish a paper on a subject I have covered just as I am about to submit my thesis. However, on reflection, they are two different accounts of the area and I'd like to agree with my supervisor that my approach is more readable than that of the authors of this paper... This could be because I came up with and wrote my chapter, but hey, that's just how it is.

3). I am looking forward to The Dark Knight much more than The Incredible Hulk. It's going to be a heck of a long summer of cinema: Iron Man, Speed Racer, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Incredible Hulk, Wall-E, The Dark Knight... Regardless of international travel plans, the Edinburgh International Film Festival is in June... They're not announcing their programme until early May, but I'm already trying to figure out whether or not the timing of the EIFF and the possible timing of my viva will allow me to head north of the border again.

4). Someone else has clicked yes on Spark now! According to Spark I am "more desirable than 61.34% of people" - my picture has been seen over 100 times, and out of those only 5 people in total have clicked yes... Spark and other applications like it are terrible. If only I wasn't strangely fascinated by it...

When thinking about the end of the world, some people worry about GM foods, the rise of the machines or zombie apocalypses. I, on the other hand, am becoming increasingly convinced that Facebook is going to play a large part in the end of civilisation.

In other news, progress on my last chapter is not going as well as I had hoped. I still think that I will finish my draft of it before I go to work for the Graduate School again next week, but I don't really see how I could finish it before Easter. That said, last week I was convinced that it would take me days and days to finish my previous chapter, and yet that was suddenly finished. Perhaps I just need to motivate myself better, stop procrastinating about notation and just get something written rather than stare at a blank page.

I have 70 things on my list of 101 things now; I'm not convinced that I will have all of these on my final list, and I might rejig them a bit. There seems to be an overlap between how I'm categorising some of them at the moment, so trying to straighten that out. Though I will mention them on here as I start and so on, I am going to start a separate blog to keep track of my progress. More on that in the next month (start date: Tuesday April 22nd 2008).

I'm off to play squash in a few minutes, so I'd best leave it here.

More soon, perhaps a Wordless Wednesday tomorrow.

I Have Questions

1). My passport is about to run out, and so obviously I need to get it renewed. The cost of a passport has gone up a lot since I got mine ten years ago (the added cost is not just due to inflation, apparently we're all safer now too), and I'm wondering when to get mine renewed... Is it worth waiting until I can call myself Dr zero_zero_one? It's just so expensive to get amendments and changes made, that for the sake of six months it might be worth not having a passport. But then that's dumb, what does it matter if my passport says Dr or not? Am I really saying that I am not going to travel internationally until after I graduate? (to clarify, my current passport expires in April, and on my current timescale it is conceivable that I might not graduate until December)

2). (this one is rhetorical) Why, oh why, after spending time doing research, coming up with the idea and then writing it out, finishing the chapter for my thesis, does someone go and publish a paper on what I have been doing? Chapter 6 of my thesis is called "Kauffman Polynomials of Pretzel Links"; today my supervisor popped his head around the door and said, "I looked through the latest 'Knot Theory journal' yesterday, and there's a paper called 'The Kauffman Polynomials of Pretzel Knots' in there..." The good news is that I've taken a different approach to their paper (and also my supervisor said that the paper in the journal wasn't very readable), but still... I was hoping to publish a paper off the back of that thesis chapter, and that might not be as likely now.

3). Is the trailer for The Incredible Hulk any good? I'm really on the fence with this... I just can't decide whether or not I like the look of the Hulk or not. It reminds me a lot of the Hulk in the 1970s/80s cartoon that I used to watch as a kid, and that's no bad thing. Something that I don't like is how the party line ever since it was announced has seemed to be to try and distance itself from Ang Lee's Hulk film (which was very good in my opinion, though different from what nearly everyone was expecting I think). That's quite a weird thing to do.

4). Why can't girls just tell me that they like me? OK, perhaps I should explain: a few weeks ago I was browsing through a friend's Facebook page, and came across a box with my profile picture in. It was for an application called "Spark", and basically two women had clicked on me as "someone they would date." Because I am in the "friends list" of someone who has Spark I am available for people to click yes or no on, and leave a reason as to why they would want to date me. Intrigued, I signed up for Spark to see what it was all about. But here's the thing: Spark doesn't tell you who has clicked on you and said yes unless you also click on that person and say that you like them. I.e., unless there is some kind of mutual attraction. I left it installed on my Facebook account (but with no boxes or rubbish in my profile) and in the last few weeks two people have clicked yes on me, one because I'm funny and one because I have a great personality. That's all very well and good ladies, but since I am neither psychic nor financially wealthy enough to employ the services of a private eye, what am I supposed to do about this? Seriously, what's wrong with asking if I want to do something some time, whoever you are?

Oh I see! I'm supposed to spend all my time on Spark, sifting through pictures of girls and clicking yes or no in the vain hope that I come across you.

Righto then, I'll get right on that.

More soon.

Back to basics

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My problem with when we started this blog a month back is that I was overthinking things, trying to write things that I was sure other people would want to read. That's a mistake I think, so I've decided to just try and write something that is on my mind, or about something that I have seen that I want to comment on.

Time to step it up a gear. Too many weeks without writing - well, I was away for one of them, but I don't know what noisms excuse is - and now I sit here having made an agreement with him that I will write something every weekday for the next few months, so that we build up a great swathe of interesting things.

He is supposed to do the same, so we'll see what happens.

We both became Facebook members in the last week or so. What a curious thing social networking via the internet is... That probably makes me sound slightly strange when I say that, but looking back when I started using the internet seven or eight years ago there really wasn't anything like Facebook or myspace out there. The internet (back then) was all about basically showcasing content of one form or another (and porn, let's not forget that) in some way.

Sure, you had your dating sites, and you had your forums that you were a member of, but there was nothing quite like the idea of what Facebook is. I'm still trying to decide if it is a good thing or not. For example, someone that I know, let's for politeness sake call them an acquaintance, added me as a friend. They don't have my phone number, they have my email but never write to me and I never write to them, they're just somebody that I have met. Whenever I see them we say hello and are polite, but they are by no means what I would think of as a friend.

In real life if you don't talk to someone for a while then you just naturally drift apart, but on Facebook it feels rude not to accept adds even if have no intention of talking to someone. Another site that I am a member of, but which is not social networking just a forum, has this concept of friends/contacts, and you have to accept people trying to add you as a friend. The difference there is that random people just try to add you as a result of a post you might make, without ever talking to you. In that situation I don't feel bad at all about not accepting a friend request.

With Facebook being what it is though - since these are people who in some sense know you - I don't know... Is it rude to decline someone wanting to add me if we are barely acquainted? In "real life" we are not friends. Why should I add them?

And yet I did.