Archive for September, 2006

Memage

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

From beenabadbunny:

01. Do we know each other outside of LJ?
02. What’s your philosophy on life?
03. Would you have my back in a fight?
04. Would you keep a secret from me if you thought it was in my best interest?
05. What is your favorite memory of us?
06. Would you give me a kidney?
07. Tell me one odd/interesting fact about you:
08. Would you take care of me when I’m sick?
09. Can we get together and make a cake?
10. Have you heard any rumours of me lately?
11. Do you/have you talk(ed) crap about me?
12. Do you think I’m a good person?
13. Would you drive across country with me?
14. Do you think I’m attractive?
15. If you could change anything about me, would you?
16. What do you wear to sleep?
17. Would you come over for no reason just to hang out?
18. Would you go on a date with me if I asked you?
19. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together?
20. Will you repost this so I can fill it out for you?

Posted in Meme, Social | No Comments »

Housewarming success

Monday, September 25th, 2006

What a busy weekend. On Saturday Jennie and I hosted our housewarming. Thanks to all those that attended. I cooked for everyone, which gave me the slightest flavour of how stressful it would actually be if I were working as a cook in a kitchen preparing meals to order. It was immensely satisfying though. For those that couldn’t attend, you missed the chance to get a curry cooked for you to order a la real Indian restaurants. I think it turned out OK, with the curries certainly looking like takeaways nicely nestled in their foil containers.

After the cooking… the oral sex! Well actually just large amounts of drunkeness and discovering that all that was cool and left to drink was wine and all that was left to drink from was a half-pint tankard. As one might imagine I got quite pickled. I must easily have had an entire bottle to myself.

On Sunday I had a wine hangover which left me in bed for most of the day. Yet another reminder that I am not as young as I once was :).

Posted in Jennie, Life, Social | No Comments »

Housewarming reminder

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006

Just a reminder that my ‘choose your own curry’ housewarming is tonight from 7pm.

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Mad mathmos

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

Today’s crazy paper from the arXive is An Algebraic Proof for Goldbach’s Conjecture [PDF]. Goldbach’s Conjecture states, roughly, that any even number > 4 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.

Now I must admit to not even understanding his notation in equation 1 (he appears to either be raising things to the power of 0 or using a superscript without defining his notation) but we can state with 99.9999% certainty that it is bollocks because:

  1. it is written in Word;
  2. it is an elementary (algebraic) proof of a well known problem. Should such a proof exist, and should it be possible to express it in 6 pages, I’m sure one of the many people who in an idle moment sit down with a bit of paper would have found a similar solution in the past 250-ish years;
  3. there are no references;
  4. it is almost incomprehensible in a bad way (rather than just being too complex for mortal minds);
  5. it is written in Word[1].

Nonetheless it is worth reading if only for the 0.00001% chance it is not bollocks. Also you can have a chuckle at mathematical Chinglish. Normally I wouldn’t poke fun at the language of a pre-print since a) many people are not native writers and b) I’ve made similar howlers myself but normally pre-prints get glanced at by someone fairly experienced at least once. Mathematical language is so precise there is little excuse for oddness when using well known conventions (’summarization’ instead of ’summary’ ?).

[1] Worth mentioning twice.

Update: Equation 1 makes the most sense if he is raising things to the power of zero. I think it is a terribly clumsy way of expressing the fundamental theorem of arithmetic.

Posted in Academic, Funny | No Comments »

Housewarming

Sunday, September 17th, 2006

Hello everyone. Jennie and I think we’ve finally moved in enough to annoucne a housewarming party at our new house. So you are all cordially invited to a housewarming from 7pm 23rd September 2006 at our new place:

92 Hazelwood Close,
Cambridge,
CB4 3SP.

There will be some sort of food (perhaps even curry if I get evrything together) but please BYOB if you want drinkies. Also reply if you are intending to come so I get some idea of numbers.

Posted in Life, Social | No Comments »

Language woe

Friday, September 15th, 2006

Two things have been annoying me this week. One is lua, or more precisely its garbage collection method, or more precisely the way it garbage collects file handles. Conceptually when a file handle is opened by lua it is associated with a closure that will take care of closing it afterwards. All very fine and dandy from a GC PoV but it is annoying if you want to pass it a file handle via the C API that you want to take care of yourself Thank-You-Very-Much-Mr-Lua. In theory I just need to find out how to associate it with a closure that does what I want (in this case nothing) but buggered if I can find out how. The source to lua is somewhat entropy-rich :). For the moment I’ve hacked in a test to see if there is a closure before calling it which at least silently swallows the null pointer dereference but it feels dirty.

The second annoying thing is that Visual C++ 2005 doesn’t seem to be able to handle variables of type __m128 in templates. Or in fact in pretty much anything ‘clever’ (e.g. unions[1]). Another reason to be wary of templates methinks.

[1] The writing of a cross-platform native CPU vector-type handling library is mercifully not my problem but the guy whose problem it is (who wrote a couple for some games studios) delights in telling me how crap the compiler support is :).

Posted in Rants, Technology, work | No Comments »

Personality meme

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

So I’m pretty much a well-rounded bloke then :).

You are neither a subdued loner nor a jovial chatterbox. You enjoy time with others but also time alone. You are generally calm and composed, reacting moderately well to situations that most people would describe as stressful. As a practical person you like to think in plain and simple terms. Others describe you as down-to-earth, practical, and conservative. People see you as tough, critical, and uncompromising and you have less concern with others’ needs than with your own. You are reasonably reliable, organized, and self-controlled.

This report compares you to other men between the ages of 21 and 40 in United Kingdom. It analyses you based on each of the five broad personality domains of the Five-Factor Model (Goldberg, L R. 1999), and the six sub domains at each level.

Read on for a pretty barchart.

(more…)

Posted in Meme, Social | No Comments »

New study

Sunday, September 10th, 2006

After unpacking goodness knows how many boxes and sorting out bookcases full of books I think I’ve got my study in order. One of the nice things about our new house is that we have a spare room that can be my study. Read on below for some lovely photos.

(more…)

Posted in Life, Technology | No Comments »

Sniffly

Saturday, September 9th, 2006

I’m currently suffering from both a cold and a sore side as anyone who has seen me in the past few days will have invariably been moaned at about. Thankfully the side is getting better but I’m still all bunged up and feeling ‘orrible.

On the up side I’m finally making some progress with unpacking and our new washing machine arrived yesterday so I get to play with an exciting silver beast of an appliance. It was my first time plumbing in a washing machine so I’ve been able to add one more notch to the ‘training to be a Dad’ post :). So far there hasn’t been a flood so I imagine I’ve not cocked it up too badly.

Of course since the Internet connection came back I’ve mostly been seeing the back of Jennie’s head and World of Warcraft so unpacking is progressing slowly :).

Posted in Life | No Comments »

TV license people in being shit shocker.

Wednesday, September 6th, 2006

From the TV licensing website:

If you have already moved, or you are just about to, you need to notify us to ensure you are correctly licensed. This is because your TV Licence covers you at a specified address, not just you as an individual, so when you move, it doesn’t automatically move with you.

I’ve already moved (I was just about to this weekend) so silly me I thought that I’d use the afore-mentioned website to change my details. I was, after entering all the appropriate information[1], presented with the following:

90 days!

So obviously the TV licensing people think ‘about to’ == ‘3 months before’. Gits!

[1] Including the interesting first-name of ‘Rj’. It appears that the ‘initials’ form box on the website is connected to the ‘forename’ field in their database.

Update: Looks like this could be a combination of ambiguous language and poor error reporting. See LJ comments.

Posted in Life, Rants | No Comments »