Archive for the ‘confused’ Category

Parse error

Monday, June 25th, 2007

I just got an email from Virgin Media. The first part I noticed was:

it’ll cost 25p per minute to call from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect.

I immediately thought, “What on earth? Surely they don’t expect customers to stick around with such extortionate call charges.” Then I noticed the context, and realised that it possibly should have read:

it’ll cost 25p per minute to call it from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect.

The actual wording was fine, but the way I started parsing it made me interpret it in completely the wrong way. “It” in the actual wording means “our broadband helpline number”; but initially I parsed it as the dummy subject of an impersonal sentence, so I thought it was saying all calls from a Virgin home phone would have those charges. The altered wording adds an “it” referring to this helpline as the object of the embedded verb phrase, making my interpretation the only sensible one.

In the real world, I did two interesting things today. First, I went to the CS office to pick up my degree results: I was awarded a 2:1. I then went to talk to Dr Berger about applying for an MRes; this I have now finally done, as well as an EST bursary which would require going to Munich for a few months (no downsides there!). I mentioned the result, and he said it was disappointing, because the overall score was about 67%, only a couple of points off a first. Annoyingly, I won’t know for certain what pulled me down for some time because I was only told the overall classification, not marks for each module. Even the average I only know informally, because Uli told me. But the bad marks are apparently on the German side, so as a CS student I’m better than I look on paper.

Posted in confused, diary, language, news, uni | 2 Comments »

QOTD XII

Friday, June 1st, 2007

I’m here to shoot a pilot.

— Nobody, apparently. A director called Mike Figgis was supposed to have said it, but apparently the story was a hoax. But it still makes a funny example of what not to say to the security people at an airport.

Posted in confused, funny, language, QOTD | No Comments »

A spot of psychoanalysis

Friday, February 16th, 2007

Sean, your timing is spooky. You always seem to manage to blog about something just after I’ve been thinking about the same things!

I don’t recall ever being in a long-term comfort zone. Even when I was feeling ’comfortable’, it was because I was lazy and indulgent, not making the most of life, so I felt guilty. Is this a good thing? I certainly don’t feel good because of it.

I’m at quite an odd stage in my life right now. The monkey (or id) is telling me to settle down, make long term friends, find happiness. But the other part (in psychoanalytic terms, the ego) recognises that settling down at this stage is a kind of prison, so I know I can’t be truly happy that way.

Posted in confused, diary, philosophy, thinking aloud | No Comments »

Results

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Here are this semester’s exam results:

  • Functional Programming 2: 49%

  • Designing Algorithms: 62%

  • Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: 71%

AI was the one I spent the least amount of effort on, so getting a first in it is pretty surprising. Even more surprising though is the third for Funky 2, especially as I feel as if I’ve been eating and sleeping Haskell the last few months (my project involves it). Mind you, Dr Sharp (the director of teaching in the CS dept, and incidentally also the lecturer for that module) says that kind of mark, close to a boundary, might get revised upwards. And anyway, it was a truly evil exam :)

Incidentally, the piece of paper I picked up from the office had a mark on it for Computer Graphics 2, which I didn’t take (wasn’t even enrolled for it), and it didn’t have a mark for Funky 2. It took me about half an hour to sort this out, but apparently there was a glitch with Dr Sharp’s mail merge which gave the wrong module code and title, though the mark and the actual records were correct. He eventually printed me a new piece of paper with the correct words on it.

On a totally unrelated note, I just remembered something I found out over the holiday: apparently Prof Thimbleby used to go to the same church as my cousins.

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Oh, the irony

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

Mark Pilgrim’s recent rants about Creative Commons noncommercial licenses inspired me to read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, which is linked from said rant.

I found an HTML e-book version of it, which is apparently more or less identical to the version published in book form. Right down to the copyright notices. Yup, it even says “Copyright © Lawrence Lessig, 2004. All rights reserved.” It is of course his copyright, but the second part is incorrect, because the book is licensed under CC-BY-NC, which allows noncommercial distribution provided you give the author credit. So his right to restrict distribution is not entirely reserved. It gives the other boilerplate copyright messages as well: “no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored … or transmitted … without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book” (of course the CC license constitutes permission, so this clause has little effect and is rather misleading) and most laughable:


The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.


I’ve not read the book yet, but I gather it criticises the lack of creativity caused by the current draconian copyright regime and talks about alternatives, including CC. So the fact that it has a copyright notice of this sort strikes me as very, very bizarre.

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Life without a PDA

Friday, October 28th, 2005

About 4-5 days after arriving in Regensburg I finally remembered my PDA’s cradle was still stowed deep in my rucksack, and the thing itself was running out of charge, so I fished it out, plugged it in, and stuck the PDA in it. The green light that usually lights up when it’s charging spectacularly failed to light.

Looking around the back of the cradle, I noticed that the power cable was lolling halfway out of the socket, so I attempted to rectify this by pushing it back in. The socket promptly gave way. Oops, looks like it got damaged in transit.

So onto eBay I went, looking for a replacement. Getting one direct from Palm or Amazon.co.uk is guaranteed to cost 10 times what it costs to make the thing, and there are always people on eBay with spare cradles. I found one for sale in the UK for 1p, he says he can send it to me for a couple of quid more than the UK shipping price, so I place my bid and win the auction. 1p for a Palm cradle, not bad :)

I saw that other people in my hall have put their names on their letterboxes. I am told that even if the address on the package is right, they won’t deliver it unless the name on it matches the name on the letterbox. Being a busy (har har!) foreign student, and having in fact received a couple of letters addressed to me, and being skeptical that any modern postal service can really be that backward, I hadn’t thought this important enough to get round to putting my name on my letterbox.

Two weeks later, the cradle still hasn’t arrived. But in this instance I think the seller has sent the thing off and Deutsche Post haven’t delivered it. Why? Because I still hadn’t got round to putting my name on my letterbox. So this package, as well as my bank card (though, weirdly, not my PIN slip), have been returned to sender. Gah! How can any postal service really be that backward?

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Day 0, Tuesday 4 October: Cowplain to Regensburg via Gatwick & Munich

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

Got up at about 5 o’clock. Got to the station in Petersfield with about 15 mins to spare. Uneventful journey to Gatwick (1 change at Guildford) except that there wasn’t really anywhere on the train to put a big piece of luggage like my suitcase, so I had to leave it in the corridor by the bike rack where it narrowed the gangway somewhat, but not as much as it would have done in the middle of the passenger coach. (Too big and heavy to put overhead.)

(more…)

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