Ying Tong Iddle I Po

OMFG — What a hangover!

In other news I have a webcam which points into our living room. How much not to POST PIX PLZ!!!!one!

We’re currently playing the Hackers drinking game. Rules:

• Each mention of computer jargon: 1 finger
• Each misuse of technobabble: 2 fingers
• ‘Elite’ == ‘down shot’
• Skating == ‘madness’!

For Christmas I got as part of my big pressie from mes parents a lovely good quality set of cookware. I just did the first non trivial thing in it today and it is an absolute dream. I don’t need to drag the instruments round the pan to stir, just a light flick of the wrist nicely turns everything over wihtout a tool. Similarly if you pour a liquid into it, it is so non-stick one is treated to an impromptu ‘droplet run’ like Terminator 2. Admittedly today’s creation was only pizza but it felt nice to de-virgin the pans.

In addition to this Jennie invested in a couple of really good knives and they really are a joy to work with. Lightly stroking vegetables leads to a board full of finely chopped goodness before you even realise.

The really nice thing is that you can wang them in the oven so I imagine some tarte tatin will be apt-geting^Wemerging soon.

Right — LaTeX has apt-get’d itself so time for some thesis…

Update: After I’ve removed the nth cup of coffee my Model M has seen in its life…

Well it appears I’m hosting a NYE party at ours. Party starts at eight-ish or a bit earlier depending on when people arrive, will most likely be here all day. I’ll be lightly catering (rustling up some things out of the fridge a la Ready Steady Cook) so eat lightly beforehand.

PBAB and some equally light snacks :).

Once again Christmas is over and I’ve remembered that I have nothing planned for New Year. Oh well.

In other news I got both a Robosapien/Robosapien hacking book andthe entire … is born series on DVD.

Any Ubuntu guys who read this care to tell me how I can enable gfxboot? It appears doing a dist-updgrade nicely removes usplash but doesn’t seem to configure gfxboot. I’ve had a partition tracking Dapper for a while now for experimentation but, surprisingly, the most annoying thing is the ~30 seconds of blank screen I get before X starts.

Would you say I’m a cynic, a realist or just intolerant?

Obviously I think I’m a realist but then I have such a low opinion of society generally[1] that I’m unlikely to swing any other way.

[1] Especially the bits that make the simple complicated and ignore the real issues, like Dawson’s Creek and The OC. My god I hate American television and the very special breed of euphamistic language it breeds.

Right, I’ve tiddled with the Lights! Camera! Improv! poster a bit making the text stand out a bit more, following the spot-colour-like theme I had going on with the Whose ICE… poster and changing the review quotes so it doesn’t look like we only ever had two favourable reviews.

I got a test render of the first poster I’ve done with Blender done last night. I had a bit of a play with it today and chose a slightly better camera angle. The text is still not perfect (I need to audition some fonts) but the 3D stuff is probably done now. This is the first non-trivial thing I’ve done with Blender that I’ve actually felt like showing people (gosh, I am proud :)). So here it is:

In case anyone is interested, here is a poster for the other show we’re doing next term:

From , a philosophical debate.

The essence is the question ‘if a teleporter creates a complete copy of you, is that copy you and it is alive’. Most of the arguments for ‘no’ are the usual poor definitions of ‘you’ or poor definitions of ‘alive’. Interstingly the only problems arise if you assume there is some non-phyical attribute about oneself that makes you different from a complete copy (call it ’soul’ or whatever).

It just seems terribly obvious to me that the solution is to just accept the soul doesn’t exist (since it doesn’t need to and still match my view of reality) and then the problem just goes away. Why are humans so bad at just noticing that certain concepts are totally unecessary and things are simpler if you just let them be false?