Easy like Sunday morning

Apathy has set in with my corrections. Have only a few big things left to do, but feels a bit overwhelming, and overwhelming has now progressed to "oh I really can't be bothered."

Am going to try and think about my corrections today, but am also planning on writing a short story as part of my 101 things in a 1001 days challenge. Although I started one a while ago, it kind of lost its way; I think one which just came to me when I woke up yesterday morning has some legs, and I even have a title in mind, again, which just came to me.

But is it any good? Time will tell.

Also need to sit down and sort through things in my room today. Moving out is a while off yet, but need to start lightening the load that I'll be taking with me. Charity shops and eBay will be taking a lot from me over the next few months I think!

What does Sunday hold for you?

"Wordy" Wednesday - Rabbit

This is not going to turn into a blog where I just post links to cool things on Youtube... Well, I'm not actively looking to turn this into that kind of thing!

Instead of a Wordless Wednesday, as I've done a few times in the past, this video is quite wordy - in fact there are words all over the place.

Oh, and it's also (in my opinion) a little disturbing. In a good way.

Very poor choice of words

Sigh. Still over a month until The Dark Knight comes out in the UK...

Sigh...

Two Weeks?! Really?

Kind of surprising to me that it is over two weeks since I last wrote on here (not quite sure why noisms hasn't been writing either). Lots of this and that been happening, so I'll try and fill you in a bit.

(if you're interested that is - if you're reading this then perhaps you are)

Have started work on the corrections for my thesis. Has been going quite well all in all. Had to spend last week at home because the office was getting painted (except that never happened, the painters never turned up, and this being the University of Liverpool no-one is surprised); I got a lot of done in terms of planning my corrections, but not much in the way of actual corrections. Was this because I had ordered the first three seasons of The X-Files on DVD (they were very cheap)?

Maybe.

This week I've got a lot more done; finished most of the corrections in two chapters, updated all of the diagrams that needed changing, and corrected typos and grammar problems that I'd noticed in three other chapters. I spent yesterday working from home, and actually got quite a bit done; I was reworking one of the chapters, and when you get into it you can really let yourself go in thinking about how and why you decided to arrange things the way you did. It's crazy! Everything seemed so straightforward before, but now things are looking so much better in this chapter. It's quite cool to be working on it.

What else? Not having much luck on the job front. Haven't seen anything in the last week or so that I fancy; although I am starting to look further afield and trying to think of things that I could do that are slightly out of my area but I might be suitable for. Am also looking for a holiday this summer - the big debate at the moment is whether or not to consider going abroad as I need to renew my passport. Saw a return flight to Dublin for 2 pence including taxes which was a bit of a bargain. Am looking a bit further afield as well, but waiting to hear back on a few things.

Downloaded Firefox 3 for my laptop yesterday. Shiny. Not sure how the RSS feed stuff works yet - for some reason, despite mastering LaTeX, Maple, understanding the basics of webpage design and so on, I just can't quite figure out how to get RSS feeds to work... Want to set up and configure Thunderbird soon too, get myself ready for the day when I'm kicked out of the office and have to rely on my setup.

And that's about it. Read a few good books. One was Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" which you can download and read for free under a Creative Commons licence; it's a good near-future thriller with some interesting points about the rights of individuals during times of crisis, and along the way I learned some pretty useful things about the digital world we live in now.

More soon, am trying to get back into a regular updating pattern.

That's It?

I had the viva for my thesis yesterday, and passed.

There was no parade, nor was there a party, an award, a presentation of the key to the city or a clip of me on the evening news.

Not that I was expecting any of that, but I was expecting something. Feels like a bit of an anticlimax. I mean, yes, sure, I've passed my viva and that's great, it really is - but it feels like there should be something more after three and a half years of work.

It's possible that I'm still just too exhausted from spending three hours standing and talking and doing stuff on the blackboard to really appreciate the significance of it all and bask in the knowledge that I have my PhD...

(or will do when I complete my corrections in the next few months and then attend a graduation ceremony in December)

I am happy that it went well! I should be writing a little more frequently in the coming weeks and months now that the pressure is off: my next big challenge is to find a job...

More soon.

Wordless Wednesday

Those Damned British Badgers

Stop the presses. British soldiers can "categorically state that [they] have not released man-eating badgers" into Basra.

SAS Staff Sergeant or Man Eating Badger? You decide.

Those Naughty, Naughty Athletes

Blimey, the athletics world is really going down the pisser, isn't it? This last 12 months, not only have we had Marion Jones being convicted for lying about her use of performance enhancing drugs; we have also seen Tim Montgomery get a 46-month prison sentence for check fraud and Dwain Chambers launch a High Court appeal to have his lifelong ban for doping overturned in the name of Unfair Restriction of Trade.

The last one is easily the most interesting. The name Dwain Chambers probably won't mean much to people outside the UK, but his story is an interesting and instructive one. Once mooted as a possible candidate for the fastest man in the world and Britain's best sprinter by a long shot, a few years ago he was found to have been taking practically every drug in the book, from THG to HGH to insulin, and banned for two years by the World Anti Doping Agency - but for life by the British Olympic Association. He's now fighting to have the latter ruling overturned by mounting a legal challenge and claiming that the British Olympic Association is unlawfully restricting his ability to make money as a professional athlete.

Dwain Chambers. Cheating.

The nerve of the man is incredible, but what's even worse is that he seems to think that, by dishing the dirt on the methods used by drugs cheats, he should be allowed off the hook. It's almost like he's been watching Goodfellas and thinks he can pull a Ray Liotta - then maybe get on a cushy deal with a witness protection scheme. (Although it's fair to say he wouldn't be able to get into the Olympics then...) In any case, I'm always dubious about people asking for "second chances" in situations like this; I think when someone is genuinely contrite they tend to slink off into shameful oblivion, not clamour for another bite at the cherry. If anything, to do what Chambers is doing is to rub his crime in the face of other, honest athletes all over again.

I wonder if athletics will ever be able to resurrect its image after the hammer blows it has been getting in recent years. Worse than the cheating of people like Chambers and Marion Jones is the cynical lying which they practiced for so long. Jones especially used to be strident in her condemnation of drugs cheats, while she was committing the same crimes all along. The hypocrisy almost feels worse than the act itself.

Anyway, it's difficult to imagine a kid waiting for the Olympics this time around and the chance to watch a true great like Carl Lewis or Michael Johnson in action. Instead the overwhelming feeling will be, I think, "When's it going to come out that the gold medalist has been rubbing himself all over with testosterone cream?"

A Strange and Portentous Article

There was a very weird article on the BBC website today, discussing Hillary Clinton's "exit strategy" from the Democratic candidate race. Go ahead, take a look. See if, when you get about halfway down, to the Bad Tidings sub-section, you find it as strange as I do.

I mean, what? Are we really living in a world where journalists are analysing Hillary Clinton's withdrawal from the race and seriously suggesting that she won't listen to senior democratic figures who are white males (Al Gore, Harry Reid) nor black males (James Clyburn) telling her to quit, but she might listen to white women about it? That really seems to be the inference we're supposed to draw: society in America (or, at least, society within the Democratic party) is now so stratified that women won't even listen to men for advice any more and white people won't listen to black people.

This is a white woman

It's... I'm not sure what the word is, but it's definitely something. My suspicion is that political journalists have become so used to analysing Clinton's support in terms of white women and Obama's in terms of African-Americans that they've managed to enter a sort of collective alternate reality where such things really are important. I can't seriously imagine that it really is the case that Hillary Clinton would only accept being told to quit if it came from a white woman. I refuse to believe that anybody would take such things even subconsciously into consideration, and I find it worrying that journalists are entertaining the notion that they might.

These are not white women

Journalists are silly people, you know. They really are. The more news I read, the more often I come to this conclusion.

Thursday Thirteen

Thirteen Pieces Of Software I'm Installing On My New Laptop

1). OpenOffice - because Microsoft Office doesn't cut it anymore.
2). Adobe Acrobat Reader - the version it came with was quite out of date.
3). DivX - a codec, but an important one!
4). Adobe Premiere Elements 2 - how can I be an auteur without video editing software?
5). Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 - because the camera never lies...
6). Darwinia - because everyone needs a fun game to play.
7). Civilization IV - well, a game or two...
8). Firefox - once you've tried Firefox, you never want to go back to Internet Explorer.
9). Inform 7 - I'm planning my first interactive novella!
10). SNES Emulator - OK, so maybe I need more than one or two games...
11). AVG Internet Security 8.0 - better safe than sorry.
12). A TeX editor - looking around for one at the moment; important for me to be able to keep writing maths professionally.
13). AudibleManager - so I can finally take the original Ricky Gervais podcasts home with me!

More soon.