England and Warwick! It's not as cold as I expected it to be, thanks to all the fog, but I haven't seen the sun in the 48 hours since I got back. I also missed the first half of my very first lecture, but that was because the plastics factory near us caught fire, stopping the bus service and jamming the roads in every direction, turning the 5 minutes we usually take to get to uni into a 45 minute wait -- or a 30 minute walk, if we'd known. Oh well. Went swimming with Dan; hopefully the beginning of a four-days-a-week habit we've planned. Going to London for the customary January-sales shopping spree this weekend, so I better stop now and get that assignment due Monday done :-)
Incidentally, anybody who goes to Warwick uni will probably find this funny, not to mention eerily familiar.

The wonder that is Memepool has supplied me with the neverending stories of Sam the goat. Hint: Sam dies a lot.
In case you haven't yet seen Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring yet, go do so now. And then come back, and you can visit the fan site of Orlando Bloom, who plays Legolas. The site requires "IE5, 800x600 resolution, and an optional drool bucket".

Okay, so this is a little bizarre: according to astronomers, the average colour of the universe is "light turquoise". Wasn't it Death, from the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett, who first revealed that the universe is "duck egg blue"?

End of week 1, term 2, year 2. Finished my assignment on time, so yay, and also managed to visit London for a January sales shopping spree, double yay! TopShop (and most of Oxford street) continues to disappoint, while Camden Market and Old Compton Street excelled themselves. I love Camden market, the clothes are plentiful and varied, the prices are good, and they give you discounts in January because only nutters go shopping at an outdoor market in the middle of winter, so sales are slow :-)

One of my lecturers has apparently produced this EDSAC simulator. A long-running transatlantic argument continues over who really invented -- or who built -- the first real computer. Most people agree, however, that EDSAC -- the first stored-program computer -- is a contender. Now you too can get output from this great machine on simulated rolls of paper tape! Joy. I like this more than I care to admit.

The suitably random Brainsluice brought forth the joys of FireHydrant.Org. This is more proof of my theory that for every noun in the world, there is someone with a fetish for it. If you can think of a disproof, I'm open to suggestions.

I went looking for a map of the world (to prove that Pakistan wouldn't really be in trouble from fallout if it decided to nuke India, if you must know; only if it was dumb enough to bomb Northern India) and found a few good sites for maps.

I was doing some web stuff using the evil-but-useful MSDN developer's library. It's got basically everything you need to know to get DHTML etc. to work in IE, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Of course, I was also doing my assignment, so I have a slew of links to various Prolog resources. Prolog is an SML-type, turn-your-brain-inside-out-before-starting language, but it does produce pleasingly tiny programs (like, 10 lines) which do surprisingly complicated things (like navigate a graph).

Having often wondered myself, I found an amusing list of suggestions for what the "XP" stands for in Windows XP. I found "eXtra Payment" particularly convincing. (Microsoft says it stands for eXPerience; who do they think they're kidding?)

I remembered about, searched for (and obviously found, thanks Google!) the utterly fantastic iBrator. If Apple insists on producing iProducts, this will only get more amusing. Incidentally, how sexy is the new iMac? Why don't PC makers come out with stuff that looks this pretty?

Further random browsing revealed that, yes, there is a Castle Transylvania, in Transylvania, complete with blood and bats motif and run by a Count. Of course, it's a tourist resort now... or so they say.

Look everyone, it's plastic surgery hour! Meanwhile, further disturbing photos of the king of pop led me to find the weird picture archive (human section) which gets a very firm PG-13 rating, not to mention a "gross" rating, but also a "horrifying fascination" rating.

I've been spending a lot of time on eBay.co.uk looking for one of these, or one very like it. I'll let you know if I win any auctions :-)

Also, I finally found a decent guide to UNIX for all those commands I still don't know how to do.

It's Sunday, and I should be working, so it's time for a blog update! It's all very technical this week...

The Rio Riot is now the MP3 player you really want, with 20GB of MP3s in a very sexy container.

My assignment this week involves using the Ediburgh Concurrency Workbench. In common with the languages used for many of my assignments, CWB is evil.

A recent e-mail spurred me finally to look up the difference between a dolphin and a porpoise. Hint: dolphins are the cute ones, and people who like porpoises think "Flipper" was a dumb movie.

I was much amused to discover that US companies were hired by China to refit the presidential jet for $10 million, and the companies threw in hundreds of listening devices free of charge. I love stories about spying, it's so 1980s.

The Pogo personal organizer now available from Carphone Warehouse looks very sexy, but calls cost 10p a minute minimum, and there's an £8 monthly line rental. However, as the ZDnet review pointed out, the technology behind it is very sexy, if mainly proprietary: the web access gateway takes ordinary HTML pages and translates the fonts, modifies the colours, compresses the data, and actually shrinks the whole page down so it looks normal on the pretty tiny screen, which is quite a cool concept.

Finally, black holes may not exist after all. Instead, we have funky-sounding gravastars, which look a lot like black holes but, importantly, don't violate any of the rules of physics and don't require the existence of a "singularity" -- a concept which always gave me trouble, to be honest. Apparently Einstein always thought black holes were a silly concept, which in my book is a good reason to be sceptical.

Second finally, I also won my first eBay auction! An original-edition Handspring Visor for a bargainous £67, mainly because it's black instead of sexy translucent blue :-/ It should arrive this week.

Finally finally, be warned: TREES KILL!

A word about my weakness... I'm totally addicted to bass.

Apparently one of my lecturers, Alexandre Tiskin is evil. Be warned.

That is all.

A pretty good article from BBC News about the Tories changing their attitude to homosexuality. Now, I'm obviously all for the party dropping the gays-are-evil stance, but I wonder what effect this will have. Will the Tories gain more voters than they lose this way? Undoubtedly some people will leave over this: where will they go? Disturbingly, the answer is contained in the article itself in a quote from Steven Norris (former party vice-chairman, apparently): "Apart from the British National Party, I don't think there is a party that is excitable about people's personal sexuality." Maybe we need the Tories to keep losing by hanging on to their right-wing stances, if only to make sure that people who have scarily right-wing ideas never become members of a party that can win.

Partly because it's funny, and partly to motivate him to update the damn thing, I'd like to point you to Chez's homepage. What's that, you say? You didn't know he had one? Well, that's kind of the point. Of particular note:

Deep thoughts by children is hilarious, if only because I didn't realise children were such sarcastic bastards

The guide to college is amusing mainly for its descriptions of the subjects of philosophy and sociology, and why it recommends them. Sociologists can flame me, and also kiss my ass.

And because 3 is a better number, you can also check out science terms explained.