I got a package from Dabs today:
You'd think I must have ordered something pretty big, right? Think again:
That's a desktop microphone and a USB sound card. If they'd packaged them correctly they could have just posted them through the letterbox!
Thankfully this isn't as bad as Dez's package from Scan which filled a box about that size with mostly bubble wrap, the payload being a 2GB SD card. But it still defies common sense.
At home (Cowplain, Hampshire) my family has been getting milk delivered to the doorstep in 1-pint glass bottles basically forever. I don't remember a time when we usually bought milk from a shop/supermarket along with the rest of our food, though we have done it on occasion (usually on a Sunday, when Friday's milk wasn't quite enough for the whole weekend and Monday morning before the milkman comes). Despite that, in the 4 or so years I've been living in Swansea (actually 5 years, but I was in Germany for the 3rd) I've bought my milk in plastic bottles of 2 or 4 litres from a shop.
This year, for a change, I'm living in what might be considered a household of more than one person, so we buy milk for 4 or 5 people at once. That needs to happen a couple of times a week, but it's a bit inconvenient to go shopping for 5 that frequently (we've only actually had two communal shopping trips since I moved in at the start of the month). Moreover, I really hate throwing away a 6 litre plastic bottle every week; glass bottles from the milkman, which get collected and reused, don't consume (much) oil in their manufacture and don't go into landfill, so are far more environmentally friendly. So I decided to set up milk deliveries. Observing our milk consumption before that point I decided we'd need about 3 pints on Monday and Wednesday and 5 on Friday (to cover the weekend). And the consensus was to get semi-skimmed. So on Friday morning a couple of weeks ago five pints of milk appeared on the doorstep.
Five pints of skimmed milk.
Well, sometimes that happens. The milkman might not have had 5 pints of semi-skimmed available when he got to my house. (Usually though you manage to get a pint or two of the right kind and the rest of something else.) So I put up with it, and we used the milk over the weekend.
On Monday, there appeared on the doorstep three pints of skimmed milk. And again on Wednesday, and another five pints on Friday. There was still a pint or two left over from Friday when we got Monday's milk, partly because skimmed isn't as nice as semi-skimmed so we didn't use as much, but also because it was starting to go off, despite being kept in the fridge and its best before date being Wednesday. (I've always thought skimmed milk tastes like it's started to go off even before you get it.) I checked the order on two occasions to make sure the order was actually for semi-skimmed (annoyingly you can't actually view your existing order on the Dairy Crest website) but still we kept getting skimmed, and it went off before it was supposed to.
This Monday I got the bill. Pricing on the Dairy Crest website for ordinary milk is "at current prices". Now I found out that it costs 58p per pint, about twice as much as getting it from Tesco. I expected it would be more expensive since they have to deliver it, but for stuff that doesn't taste nice and goes off prematurely so we end up throwing half of it away, that's just not acceptable. So today I cancelled the order.
So this little experiment lasted about two and a half weeks, and was thoroughly unsatisfactory. A crying shame. Surely the milkmen in Uplands can't be that much less competent than the ones in Cowplain?
From the outside, the type systems of languages like Haskell and ML tend to look like a sort of archaic ecstatic religious rite. The bleeding mendicants pause as they shuffle past, sing a verse in praise of the purifying pain of strong typing, then prod themselves with pointy sticks and progress along their lonely road.
Bryan O’Sullivan, commenting on his own quotation of Yaron Minsky. I’ve heard people complain about Haskell’s type system as being too strict, but once you figure out how to get things to type check, you can actually use it like a miniature theorem prover. Which is, essentially, what it is.
Oh yeah, and it’s my birthday today.
My full results have finally turned up on the uni intranet. Highlights: 6 modules (70 credits) from level 3 and 4 modules (40 credits) from level 2 at >70%, weighted average 67.7%. Soooo close to a first :(
I think bad time management cost me the grade. I should have done some work towards the project and/or the report for a School of European Languages module over Easter, but was lazy and didn’t. Then a couple of weeks later I had deadlines for both on the same day; I chose to work on the dissertation (which was obviously more important as it’s worth 20 credits vs. half the mark for a 10 credit module), but if I’d picked the report, the mark wouldn’t have been capped at 40% and the weighted average would have been over 68%. Then a couple more percentage points on another module (most likely TPL, Software Lab, or German General Language III) would have got another 10 credits at >70%, which would have got me a first on the preponderance principle (within 2% of a classification boundary, if you have at least 120 credits above the boundary you get the higher classification).
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.
But ahhh, to write nounlessly is to live anew, not to be tied to thinking concretely, not to be anchored, not to be grounded, but rather to lift off and fly, as if previously to write was just to crawl, penned in, hemmed in, restricted.
And I might add, like an Oasis song, to say everything and yet say nothing. (The traditional way to express this is to call it “abstract nonsense“; the book Abstract and Concrete Categories: The Joy of Cats has this cute limerick which captures the feeling:
There’s a tiresome young man from Bay Shore.
When his fiancée said, “I adore
The beautiful sea,”
He said, “I agree,
It’s pretty, but what is it for?”)
Journal time: I came back from a week back home in Hampshire today, after going with my brother to the Muse concert at Wembley on Sunday. (Woo! That was brilliant!) We also went to a Spanish restaurant for Dad’s birthday, which was pretty tasty.
Our degree results came out yesterday, but I wasn’t around to get them, so I’m having to hold my breath until Monday.
The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.
— Paul Graham. Microsoft is dead, apparently. It certainly no longer taints my computer — I wiped Windows in favour of Ubuntu Feisty last week. The change affected my life so little that I never got round to blogging about it.
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.
Here are this semester’s exam results:
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.