Adam Biltcliffe is a genius.

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Wooo! Back fom Althing at last. As predicted, I was very late and only just got back from Edinburgh where I stayed last night. I am now an elected member of DF Committee! I also considered going for DF representative on Woodcraft General Council but I thought that I would perfer DF Committee.

Also, on Friday, St Andrews got some good news:

From:	Ben Nicholson Esquire
To:	David Miller
Subject:	Pepper Victory!
Message:	Rectorial Results

ROUND 1
Total Vote: 1534 Spoiled: 5 Total Valid Vote:1529
Quota: 765

Osawa 72
Passmore 330
P epper 650
Ramsay 427
Wooton 50

No one makes quota: Osawa and Wooton are redistributed

ROUND 2
Total Vote: 1534 Spoiled: 50 Total Valid Vote: 1484
Quota: 742

Passmore 330 + 19 = 349
Pepper 650 + 28 = 678
Ramsay 427 + 30 = 457

No one makes quota: Passmore is redistributed

ROUND 3
Total Vote: 1534 Spoiled: 167 Total Valid Vote: 1367
Quota: 684

Pepper 678 + 172 = 850
Ramsay 457 + 60 = 517

Pepper makes Quota. Simon Pepper is duly elected.

Also:

Subject:   	Len is cakeless FOR A YEAR

Hi All,

For those that do not know Len has agreed to go without cake for a year (by
way of a bet for charity) if we can get 365 pounds pledged by way of
sponsorship for "International Care and Relief" a charity that funds
educational for young people in Africa. So far we have 200 pounds.

He will commence his abstinence as soon as we have 365 pounds (to send
in advance). I am collecting the cash. This is a severe test of his resolve. If
he fails he will donate 100 pounds for each failure for every slice to which
he succumbs (upto a maximum of 400 pounds)

I am the judge (Lesley in my absence) of what constitutes a cake and it is
defined as
a) something that has cake or tart in the name
b) meringues and related items (includes baked Alaska)
c) anything with fresh cream (e.g. eclairs) that isn't ice cream or milkshake
or savoury dishes
d) includes lefsa
e) sweet muffins are cake (savoury ones are not)
Biscuits, marshmellows and chocolate are allowed but jaffa cakes are
CAKES. Sponsorship form is in the tearoom.

Charles

So, now I just have to work out what I am doing today (since I left my diary at Althing) and prepare for class test number two on Thursday.

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These guys have some cool tracks available for download from their site.

Also, I am going to Althing tomorrow and probably won’t be back (unless I am very very lucky with trains) until Monday.

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Well, I’m taking a break from revision for my Algebra & Analyis class test tomorrow to give you some linkage for the day.

For a start, Stanford University are now offering an iTunes service for free, offering lectures, news, books and more. Also today, knit your own DNA helix, although unfortunately it will be the wrong way round.

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Through TUAW I found the astronomy picture of the day widget. This of course led me to more widgets. My two favourites being BBC Weather and Radio 4. Also Outfoxed looks like a cool extension to Firefox, which uses friends networks to rate sites. I’ve not tested it yet (as it doesn’t run on Mac at the moment) but it looks like a good idea.

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Well for a start it was (come to think of it, still is) one of those mornings when it’s so dark that you think that everyone in your house is just messing with you and have changed all your clocks back so the alarms go off at 4am. It was dark. Very dark.

Then I realised, once getting out of the shower that my other alarm clock (the emergency “get out of bed now, you are going to be late!” one) had been going off for 10 minutes, annoying my flatmates.

Next, I got outside and realised it was raining. Lots. A giant raindrop dripped right into the sandwich I’d made for breakfast too.

Finally, I get to the maths institute and I realise that this week is not even. This means that my first lecture is not until 11am. The phys/math library isn’t even open yet!

But, I’m staying cheerful, I have an MT2002 class test on Friday and an MT3501 tutorial this afternoon so this gives me lots of time to prepare for them. Lots of time…

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I’m not sure whether it is evident from my blogging style, but what I tend to do is to find the cool links that I’m going to use in my blog then leave Firefox open with them in tabs until they reach critical mass, then blog them. At the moment though, I seem to have been accessing a lot of JavaScript and Flash pages which seems to slow down Firefox a lot. According to Activity Monitor it is using 74MB of real memory using 2 hours of CPU time in 21 threads. Also (according to ps aux) it has been running since Wednesday at 10pm. So, to sumarise the above, it’s time to blog.

First off aparently there is a slight speed increase if you switch to graphite from blue theme in OSX (not tested yet). MAKE blog supplies two of my favourites for this week in the form of how to do some idiotic things and some real portable internet.

Finally I spent a very long time this week in Maple doing my MT2002 assignment. Although I did find out some interesting things about Ramanujan’s number, 1729, other than it being the smallest number expressable as the sum of two positive integers cubed. Plus I found a very geeky page with lots of maths trivia.

And as one very last thing there is Google’s latest toy sets, which is way fun.

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After waaaay too many hours hours spent in Maple, I decided that I needed a break and decided to find out which Discworld character I am most like.

Which Discworld Character are you like (with pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

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Well, it seems that my database server still sucks. Also, GMail changed its name to Google Mail today due to some UK company who owns the Gmail trademark So anyway, a bunch of links…

Duck tape bag, flying toasters for all and a Grandaddy video made on an Apple II.

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I went to Edinburgh on Friday to the Solid Steel night at the Bongo Club. To be honest I was a little disappointed, although mainly because I was in the mood for some drum ‘n’ bass and what I got was a funk/soul set then a band called Pest, then finally some d’n'b. Pest were quite cool and I think I’ll probably end up buying one of their records, but it wasn’t really what I was up for on Friday night. Next time is December 4^th.

Before that I was at a joint economics/statistics guest lecture entitled Comparing Bayesian and frequentist prediction techniques which turned out to be pretty incomprehensible. I was sitting next to Professor Buckland and expressed my confusion to him afterwards. He said that he was struggling to keep up in parts, which made me feel a little better.

Of course, no blog entry would be complete without a load of links, so here goes…

First off, a cool USB powered Linux box, geeky free music and have you ever wondered what hyperbolic space looks like in crochet? I didn’t think so.

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I was just reading the MAKE blog and clicked a link to get to this flickr page which demonstrates a feature I was totally unaware of. I’m now sorely tempted to start using it…

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For a start, BoingBoing have an interesting article about innovation in an unusual area, some cool free music, an easy way to rip DVDs on Mac OS X and finally, the most stunning of all of Apple’s news yesterday.

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So I finally managed to get an Ethernet DSL modem, then had to configure the crazy PPPOE settings on my router to get PPPoA to work on the modem. This was non-obvious.

Dr Jupp was on good form yesterday:

… so that was in a Rudyard Kipling book, “How the rhino got it’s skin”, you know… he took off his skin to wash it then found some cake. So, he eats the cake and then puts his skin back on. But, of course, it was very itchy, so he scratched and his skin got baggy. Thus rhinos have loose, wrinkly skin. Of couse, this is not an examinable part of Stochastic Modelling…

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I finally have internet in my house now, yay! Anyway, I wasted no time finding things. My new toy is Google’s brand new feed reader. Which looks pretty nifty. If you are like me and have been reading your feeds in Thunderbird, then you might want to read about how to export to OPML.

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Well, I finished fixing the weather on the AstroSoc website and while I was at it I learnt enough JavaScript to get by. In case anyone else wants to use the BBC’s weather information, the following function may be useful:

function get_bbc_date(){
  var now = new Date();
  var hour = now.getHours();
  var month = now.getMonth();
  var day = now.getDate();
  var year = now.getYear();

  month = Number(month + 1);

  var right_format = /^\d$/;
  day = String(day);
  var result = day.match(right_format);

  if (result != null) {
    day = 0 + day;
  };

  month = String(month);
  result = month.match(right_format);

  if (result != null) {
    month = 0 + month;
  };

  hour = String(Number(hour-2));
  result = hour.match(right_format);

  if (result != null) {
    hour = 0 + hour;
  };

  year = String(year-100);
  result = year.match(right_format);

  if (result != null) {
    year = 0 + year;
  };

  return(year + month + day + hour);
};

Along with:


var url = "http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/charts/uk/uk_cloudrain_";
bbcdate = get_bbc_date();
url = url + bbcdate + ".jpg";
document.write(" document.write(url);
document.write("\"/>“);

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