£2.40 for a fucking baguette??
It costs me that much to make my own lunches for a week!

I guess you can call it the "forgetting to bring your lunch to work" tax.

Speaking of tax, I made a bunch of money confusing teaching first year computer science students and The Man took 20% of it. What a dick!

Last night I found a big lump on Saucisse's side. He didn't seem so bothered but I took him to the vets hoping it was just constipation or something. Alas it is not. Saucisse has a lump which can't be removed because he is so very old (2 years ~4 months is practically ancient in hamster years). Nothing will be done until he stops being his usual friendly self though.

I think perhaps the writing is on the wall for our tiny furry friend.

I'm getting a new office on Tuesday, SWEET!
The people I work with at the moment don't really talk at all and there's no socialising so it'll be nice to work with people I know and actually do the same things that I do.
I'm looking forward to the move!

I'll also be going to Canterbury this week so will probably be gluttoning on delicious food at the taxpayer's expense.
FUNS!

Saucisse has new bedding and he was trying to cram it all into his mouth earlier.... so we took pictures!

( so cute! )

Seriously, the USA is hella backwards.
Who the fuck would willingly still use imperial measurements?

I've been looking at motors and trying to understand what torque is, and searching on google for torque has given me quite a few pages stating that the industry standard unit for measuring torque is foot-pounds.
Foot. Pounds.
The idea that someone would measure a distance in FEET and a pulling force in POUNDS and then combine them to form foot-pounds might be understandable in the dark ages, but in the 21st century?? What is wrong with people? I find the idea of foot pounds (or worse, ounce-inches!) so profoundly repellant it makes me want to barf all over the offending people out of sheer disgust.
FUCK THAT NOISE.
What is so wrong with using units that have actual meaning and can be converted between each other easily? How can anyone prefer to use some arbitary form of measurement based on nothing with no real form of conversions? How backwards and resistant to change must a country be to not adopt something that is so clearly better? For fuck's sake, modernisation: get some. Only Burma, Liberia and the USA haven't started using metric measures yet, and two of those places are shitty 3rd world countries. That's some great company America, well done for being shitty and backwards.

( PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT )
In other news: the ending of Deadwood is very dissapointing, and I had a sandwich for lunch which has made me feel a tad ill.

Wasting a little time on you tube before going to work this morning.
This is a cool(ish) opera version of that Dragostea din tei Numa Numa song. I think they could have done without the drum machine personally but hey.

http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/index.php?src=doc
Click on the Player/stage system tutorial.
Also: http://playerstage.sourceforge.net read the first item.


SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What kind of degenerate scumbag would hold a fire drill during a thunderstorm?
NOT COOL.

In other news the trip to Aber was lots of fun and I met new people and managed to socialise well. Pictures on Facebook for anyone who cares. There's lots of photos of the scenery around New Quay which was quite nice.

Because the method actually works quite well...

The rules:

1. Go to wikipedia and search "random article". The first article to come up is your band name.

2. Go to to quotationspage.com and search random quotations. The last 4 or 5 words of the very last quote on the page are your album title.

3. Go to http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days The third photo on the page is your album cover.

4. Put the three elements together in photoshop or something...

( cut for bigness )

Yesterday I learnt that "ahoy" is Czech for hello.
Awesome!

In other news I'm still at a robotics "summer camp" in Aberystwyth, which is cool but hard work. Also I moved house yesterday, I estimate this to be easily the easiest house move I've done so far. Later on today I will be going to New Quay for a boat tour. Good times!

I'm like totally in Aberystwyth now. It takes FOREVER to get here on the train...
the journey here has given me a killer headache, too much sunlight for me I think.

I remember back in 2005 I worked as a cleaner at uni for a month or so, cleaning rooms after conference delegates. Now I am a conference delegate, go me! Sadly that piece of work experience is now causing me strife. You see, when we changed beds after people moved out, we'd replace the sheets but never the duvet (or duvet cover) so people were sharing duvets without even realising. In Aberystwyth uni they have very similar sheets and duvets and I worry that they don't get cleaned after each person either :-S I know at home my duvet gets cleaned rarely but at least that's my crud and not someone else's. Ew.

As you may have noticed, i've been poking around my room and reading livejournal instead of writing a presentation about how great I am (which I have to give tomorrow, eep!). There will be much socialising with strangers in the near future too... SIGH.

Thanks to everyone who bought my old Larp stuff!

I have a new stufflust now:
http://shop.orange.co.uk/shop/show/handset/lg_ks360_black/detail/pay_as_you_go

I think you will agree, it is both the mutt's nuts AND the badger's nadgers.
If I ditch my old sim card I can get unlimited free texts and access to facebook from a mobile phone .... for £7.50 a year.

STUFFLUST.

In other stufflust news, I've bought myself some bright green crocs which should arrive next week sometime (hopefully). Apparently crocs make people look like a douchebag but I don't know exactly why. Alls I know is that they're BRIGHT FUCKING GREEN!!

I've found some more LARP stuff that I want to sell!

• A bag of leather, including a sleeveless sheepskin coat (the sleeves were used to make greaves which cthulouis now owns). The Shadovald demon kit is made from leather from this bag, I don't know what ShatLeg use that kit for now.
  £7 for both. Or £4 for the leather and £3 for the coat.
  Coat and leather sold to Paul!


• a roll of larpy string: 50p


• A bag of rivets. I think there is about 200 of these (I have no idea). Anyway these are rivets that you use with a hammer and are probably intended for leatherwork. They are kind of like these: http://www.germes-online.com/direct/dbimage/50175739/Rivet.jpg
  £2.50
  katherine or loz...
  


• A rivet gun with a few rivets (less than 20). The rivet gun is NOT compatible with the bag of rivets, it uses rivets like these: http://www.rocfast.co.uk/image/rivets_008.jpg
  £5. Sold to Victor!


• A tankard. £1.

For those of you who run larp systems, there's an airbrush + nozzle + compressor for sale at the moment on the (york) university small ads. It's £40 which I understand is actually quite cheap for such a thing.

I have a want.

http://www.techjapan.com/Article1010.html

I've uploaded pictures of my Canterbury holiday!
Canterbury is a lot like York but much smaller and there's far more French people on holiday.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=136078&id=222301639&l=78e0c9165d

Hopefully the link will work even if you don't have a facebook.



Also: house hunting is like the most stressful thing EVER.

I'm in Canterbury!
It turns out that I can log on to the Kent wireless using my york user account. The wireless network is also called EDUROAM. This is cool! It probably means that there are a whole bunch of UK universities who have networked login details so anyone travelling from one uni to another can still internet.

Just gave my presentation, it was horribly under prepared, I need to run through the beginning a whole lot more in my head.
Last night was Thai food instead of Indian, shock horror! Thursday is indian food.

I like my job!!

Well, I'm off to Canterbury soon.

I like that my job takes me on holidays and lets me be bought food and booze. Good times!
Tonight I can say with certainty that there will be curry, and it will probably be delicious. It'll definitely be paid for by someone else!

I hope there'll be opportunity for sight-seeing but I suspect the people I'm going with will treat it like the 3 day long meeting that it'll be.
Still, I get free food and all I have to do in return is be bored and give a presentation on Wednesday. Good times!