Random life update

[pozorvlak]

• My supervisor, who's been away in Barcelona for the last month, dropped in for a flying visit last weekend. We had two mammoth three-hour meetings in two days, which was excellent in that I now have lots of stuff to work on and some idea of how to fix up things that were broken, but utterly knackering. Momentum has been lost a bit (hence the Fine Structure stuff). Thesis currently stands at 64 pages.


• My office-mate Martin's stag night was on Saturday, which was good fun. It was the first stag night that almost all of us had been on, and it was fairly quiet - pub meal, trip to off-license to stock up for later, second pub, burger van, back to Gareth's flat for Wii games and more beer, argument with the jobsworth in the McDonald's drive-through who refused to serve us on the grounds that we weren't in a car, more Wii, decide at about 3am that I'm tired and should go home when I finish this drink, sit back in comfy sofa, look at watch again, discover to my horror that it's now 5.30am. One guy seemed determined to serve as our personal Bad Idea Bear, and kept making suggestions like "Let's play a drinking game!", or "let's all order drinks with stupid names!", or "let's get flaming sambucas!". The rest of us mostly kept him in check, though.
  
  My trouble is that I drink quickly - not just alcohol, any liquid - so even if I alternate alcohol and water I still take in quite a lot over the course of a long evening. And Martin kept palming his unwanted drinks off on me :-( Consequently, my head's was in less than wonderful state for most of Sunday. Hangovers get a lot worse as you get older, I've noticed.


• I've been doing more hillwalking. As of a few weeks ago (when Philipp and Bart and I did a moderately epic six-hill hike up by Glen Shee, in beautiful conditions), I have climbed a quarter of the 3000ft mountains in Scotland; as of Saturday, I've climbed all the hills in Sections 1 and 2 of Munro's Tables (out of, er, seventeen sections). Munro-count currently stands at 79 out of 284. Annoyingly, I've now done almost all the ones reachable by public transport, and I'm fast running out of hills that can be reached in a day from Glasgow.


• The rock-climbing's continuing to be fun. I went to the wall yesterday, and even with my hangover I was climbing stuff I couldn't have managed a few months ago, and I think my technique is getting better. I've got fairly good upper-body strength, so the temptation is to pull myself up the wall with my arms: this is apparently bad technique, as it tires you out faster than if you use your legs, so I'm trying to force myself to push up with my legs more. My other problem is that I don't anticipate enough: I'll get into a position and only then think about my next move, rather than planning two or three moves ahead. This is, again, much more tiring. Incidentally, I could never have anticipated how important balance is for climbing.
  
  The thing I like about climbing, I think, is how mentally absorbing it is: you're testing your mind and your body at the same time.


• wormwood_pearl came climbing with us on Thursday, and seemed to enjoy herself. Hopefully she'll come along more in the future. An attempt to interest her in hillwalking last year was a bit of a disaster: though the weather was fine on the actual day, it had been raining heavily the day before, and the ground was waterlogged, so walking through it was less than fun.


• I somehow managed to put my phone through the washing machine. Fortunately, I have an old Nokia 3310 kicking around to serve as a backup for just this eventuality, and most of my numbers were on the SIM card, which was undamaged; unfortunately, not all the numbers were. The upshot is, if you've given me your number in the last year, I probably don't have it any more.


• I bought a second-hand laptop from my flatmate Alan, who has a laptop problem in the way that other men have drinking or gambling problems. Poor old delirium's getting a bit battered, with her speakers failing to work half the time. And I had various bits of Windows-only software lying around that I wanted to be able to use, so acquiring a Windows machine seemed like a reasonable idea. And being able to reduce Alan's brokeness was a bonus, too. I've been running Linux predominantly since around 2002, and pretty much exclusively since 2004, so it's weird owning a Windows machine again in all sorts of ways. I've updated it, run malware scans, set secure passwords and created a non-admin account for everyday use, but it still feels rather like unprotected sex, only without the fun parts.


• If I'm being entirely honest with myself, though, the real reason I wanted a Windows machine was so I could play Portal, which (for those of you who don't already know) is a lovely 3D puzzle game in which you can shoot "portals" onto most flat surfaces, creating a teleporter between your two portals. There's an excellent trailer for the game, which gives you a good idea of the game mechanics; someone's also written a 2D Flash version. But the best thing about the game, I think, is the atmosphere, which is surprisingly creepy and effective. The occasional voiceovers from the insane HAL 9000-style computer are beautifully blackly comic.
  
  Sadly, Dream (I've stuck with the Sandman machine-naming convention) doesn't cope with it all that well: I've been getting audio stutter, and there seems to be a bug in the video driver which makes the machine bluescreen whenever I try to change the resolution. Upgrading the driver helped - it's stopped bluescreening when I Alt-Tab to another application :-) But Portal's coped a lot better than Half-Life 2, which appears to be missing half its textures: the game world's a semi-transparent mess of wireframes and magenta chessboards, which surely isn't intentional. I'll see if Google or the forums have any ideas. Edit: looks like this is a common problem. Possibly driver-related, but it looks like I should also verify my game cache files and possibly re-extract the game data.

I'm reminded of why I don't post much about my actual life. I can see why people might want to read about, say, if-statements in Smalltalk, but surely nobody cares about this stuff?

Comments

[bronxelf-ag001.livejournal.com]

I like hearing about this stuff.

[necaris.livejournal.com]

Me too!

[michiexile]

So do I!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'm always worried about boring people with navel-gazing, so it's good to know that you're interested.

I'm interested in the stuff you write, too, even if I don't always comment.

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

argument with the jobsworth in the McDonald's drive-through who refused to serve us on the grounds that we weren't in a car

I know that they don't like serving people on foot, although the drive-throughs I've seen have a separate hatch around the corner for that. I was able to get someone to serve me while I was on the motorbike, although I got some strange looks!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but why? It's not like we were interfering with the flow of traffic or scaring away other customers or anything. We (or rather my friends, I was just along as an observer) were hungry people wanting to exchange money for food. What does he gain from not serving us?

There was a sit-down restaurant part around the corner, but it was closed at that point.

[michiexile]

McD used to have a car window sticker bonus program - you set a round red sticker with the yellow M - size about an inch - in your front window, and get a pittance off'f your value menues.

A friend of mine got one to put on his bicycle - since he kept bicycling past this one drive-through, and kept buying his lunch there.

[michiexile]

I'm reminded of why I don't post much about my actual life. I can see why people might want to read about, say, if-statements in Smalltalk, but surely nobody cares about this stuff?

Psssssh. Yeah right. We eat everything up that you bother writing about. We're good that way.

Besides, it gives me some sort of procrastination from the grant application I'm supposed to be writing right now. Annoyingly, one of the books I -really- need to refer to doesn't seem to be present here at the library.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Ack! I hate it when that happens. Nothing on the web that will help?

Psssssh. Yeah right. We eat everything up that you bother writing about. We're good that way.
Thank you! :-)

[wholepint.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I could never have anticipated how important balance is for climbing

Oh yeah. This is always my problem. Well, that combined with not planning ahead far enough - I get to a point where I have to stop and think about the next bit, then I lose my balance. Ooops.

And yeah, I like hearing about all this too. :)

[shuripentu.livejournal.com]

Posting about, and reading other people's posts about, the mundane happenings of your/their daily lives is like mutual grooming: it's not strictly necessary, but it feels good and it helps strengthen social bonds.

Otherwise all I'd know about your life would be what I learn in a few hours every New Year's, and that would be sad. :)

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but the mundane happenings of my life are, well, mundane :-) If I could regularly start my posts with "It was when the second engine exploded that I knew I was in trouble" then I'd probably do so more :-)

[kake]

The hillwalking stuff isn't mundane! It's an obsessive completist long-term plan, and hence both interesting and unusual. You should write more about it.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Um, thanks :-)

Munro-bagging's a fairly big thing up here - well, maybe not big, but you meet quite a few people who are into it. Over a thousand people have collected the set and informed the SMC. Actually, it's a bit of a divisive issue among hillwalkers: some people think the stamp-collecting aspect detracts from the experience, and sensibly argue that a hill that's only 2998ft high might be much more interesting and characterful than one that's technically a Munro. Another argument is that baggers tend to climb hills by the easiest possible route, increasing erosion on that path; the ethos of mountaineering is generally to take the most challenging and elegant routes up that you can manage. I know one guy who says he'd deliberately avoid climbing all the Munros, possibly by turning back just shy of the top! Which I think is much sillier, to be honest.

I've been hillwalking off and on for most of my life: my parents were both into it, and took me on walking holidays in Wales when I was a teenager (and a couple in the Tatras and Krkonose when we lived in the Czech Republic). I got into Munro-bagging via my ex-flatmate Philipp, who's much more determined about it than I am. The good things about it are, to me:

• It gives you an extra incentive to get out of bed early on a Saturday morning when it's still dark and cold;
• It makes you keep going to new places, so you see more of Scotland;
• You're more likely to go out walking whatever the weather or conditions, so you gain more experience, which is invaluable for the day when the weather comes down unexpectedly

.

[shuripentu.livejournal.com]

Mundane things have more personal flavour. :)