50 Minutes

I'm listening to a Robots in Disguise album called Disguise. I bought it sort of on a whim. It's rather better than I was expecting. Seems to me that their albums are more fun to listen to than than their singles.

I've been chopping chilli peppers.

I strongly suspect that the next time I go to take a whizz is going to Suck Rocks, Hard.
Christmas was fun, I've eaten enough turkey to stuff another turkey. The oven is now full of badly over|under cooked (don't know which yet, have to see how it comes out) biryani. Spent a few hours today wandering around Cardiff (Kaadiff for those who're too familiar with the accent) attempting to purchase videogames, literature, music and (mild) smut. Only really succeeded on the literature, games and smut - couldn't find anywhere selling most of the music I was looking for. I bought a copy of Pratchett's Making Money and spent about half of the (short) train journey back home giggling enough to worry everyone else in the carriage.

Pretty good day.

For the record:

The cutest thing in the universe wasn't all that difficult to find, actually.

Awesome on toast.

I just blew about 116 emails into various peoples' accounts - that's 29 apiece, for four people. All because I broke an SSH login and didn't notice quickly enough. Whoooops.

I can has employment! Yay!

Starting Monday, I'm going to be writing a whole pile of scripts for monitoring a company's web and database servers - all FreeBSD boxes at the moment apparently, though it's possible that that might change. Apparently the current issue du jour is the boxes running out of disk space in /var/ on a semi-regular basis as the logfiles grow, plus they want to know about things like whether or not the database tables are growing at roughly the right rate and so on. Should be fun.

Deadlines suck, narrrr

Title says it all, really.

Waiting for the (worms|flames)

So I've just written an absolutley monster-bastard-grade enormously long email to my coursework group, detailing just how awful every possible approach to our current situation would be. The subtext that I don't bother to mention in this particular email is that, hey, this isn't the only piece of coursework we have to do, and it isn't the only thing we'll have to take the time to study.

The other, slightly funnier, subtext is the identity of precisely who is going to end up having to put the extra work in - specifically, almost certainly me and one other member of our group. Which fact I'm sure is just going to look dandy when the examiners decide how many marks to award us for effective time management and effort delegation... especially since, right now, both of us have each contributed about twice as much time as anyone else in this group so far (bar one third member, who consistently works like Hell but, eh, isn't the best programmer on the planet - though by no means is he the worst, and he seems to be improving constantly and quickly).

So just for the moment, I think I'll sit here and listen to some cute German lady singing "99 Luft Ballons" and wait to see what fallout comes of this. Probably it'll take a while for this particular bombshell to go off, though. It was, after all, a pretty damn long email and hence should take a bit of time to read through.

Might as well get along with some of that other coursework while I wait. I really should be doing that more often that I do. ^_^

By the way, this is shaping up to be very helpful in order to be able to read mathematical notation aloud competently, as opposed to vocalising embarrasing sentences along the lines of "forall i in the natural numbers up to n, squiggle x subscript i equals loopy thing y subscript i".

Update: Naturally it seems that most of my group members are crazy and would love to dive head-first into taking the one path that happens to involve most work by a factor of about two. Great, I love these people. Presumably I should just ignore the feeling of panic lurching around in my gut. In my stomach, even the maternally-fornicatin' butterflies are throwing up right now.