Archive for November, 2008

I went down to the library today to get some stuff done. Today’s topic was Structural Analysis and Solid Mechanics in general, and energy methods and matrix stiffness analysis in particular.

Matrix stiffness analysis is a way for working out the forces and displacement of an element using its stiffness, and it’s pretty much a bitch to do. You have a bunch of stuff and this big scary matrix, and it’s just annoying. When we were being taught the module, the lecturer barely had a clue how to do it himself. In fact, when he did example questions up on the board I seem to remember him getting it spectacularly wrong several times. I’m pretty sure there was the odd question he just couldn’t do, as well.

Apparently someone went to see him the other day with a question from a past exam, and he couldn’t do it. Basically, we’re screwed. I’m just hoping a question on fatigue comes up, because it’s a lot easier (20 marks for manipulating some logs? Yes please!)

Whilst I was in the library, I was sat across from a couple of third-year girls and once they saw what I was doing they started to remember the nightmare… Apparently the second year is actually harder than the third in some respects, which is weird. Didn’t really get much work done for a while once we started chatting (until someone asked us to be quiet. In the library? Crazy talk!), but did get some handy hints for the third year, with regards picking projects and modules and stuff like that.

Working in the library; all well and good, until you reach a critical mass of procrastination. Once you start talking to people, it’s hard to go back to work…

Not that I’ll remember the handy hints, anyway, cos I’ve just been offered a job. As of September I’m gonna be doing proper engineeringy stuff, in the real world, for money. Just need to pass the exams first, and preferably well enough to let me continue with the MEng course.

Ah crap.

Posted by Dickie in Procrastination, Random | 8 Comments

So I’m trying to revise something, and need to go through some powerpoint slides, from some lectures. I don’t have the printed notes, so I got the file from Blackboard. It has animations and stuff, so I googled a way to strip them all out in one.

I came across this instead, and it amused me. I’m half tempted to send it to a handful of lecturers because they could really benefit from it. Especially the one who takes this module.

Last year, we had to give a presentation as part of one of our modules, and it was this lecturer who marked mine. This lecturer just dumps everything he says on the slides, and reads from that. Making him largely irrelevant. He criticised my presentation because there wasnt much written on some of the slides…

Death by Powerpoint. I really wish more people knew how to present properly. They just use it because it’s there, it doesnt actually add anything to their talk. If anything it detracts, because you just read the screen instead. Another bugbear: handouts that are just slide printouts. That’s just laziness.

I’m meant to be revising accountancy (well, more vision than revision). I’d rather be outside in the sun. Sigh.

Posted by Dickie in Procrastination, Random | 9 Comments

So I’ve spent the last few hours working on, alternately, design and maths coursework.

Design coursework doesn’t confuse me at all. I’ve got little bits here and there to tidy up, a report to write, and a drawing to print, and then it’s Done.

Maths does. I’ve just got back from the IT room after spending since about half 9 trying to get a bit of Matlab code to work, which is meant to solve the Heat Equation using an implicit finite difference method. I’ve got it working with an explicit method, and that’s all hunky dory, but adapting that code for the implicit method is just confusing. It’s only giving a solution on one row of the matrix; that row being the inital value being fed into the script! The rest of the matrix is just zero, which is less than useful.

At one point I commented out about half of the code, to work out what those lines were meant to be doing. No change, whatsoever. Don’t you hate it when that happens?

Pretty much all of us in the IT room were trying to crack that thing (well, actually most had given up by the time I left), and all of us had the same problem. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

Basically, this is a lesson to not dick about with code if you only have a vague idea what it’s meant to do, and have what can be generously described as a “limited” knowledge of the language…

I guess its the same sort of result you’d get if you gave a car to a caveman and told him to make it go. He wouldn’t even know what the damn thing is meant to do, let alone how to make it do it. I imagine he’d just look at it, and maybe bash it with a stick, and then eventually get bored and walk off.

That said, I’ve worked out what my code is meant to do, and I kind of know how to do it, but just not enough to actually make Matlab do it. So I’m officially smarter than a Caveman!

Not saying much though, is it?

Anyway, I should go finish stuff! I’m probably not gonna sleep tonight. It’s gonna take me a couple of hours to finish design, then ages to finish maths, and then tomorrow morning I’ve got to meet the other members of my group for design to finish some stuff off and hand it in, so there’s probably no point sleeping, even if I get chance.

Actually, I’m looking forward to that meeting. One of them left me alone, logged on to his uni user account earlier (cos i needed to do battle with the Demon Plotter of Death, and AutoCAD doesnt seem to like to work on my user account. Bizarre, I know). Changed his desktop to say “NASCAR is for gays” (yeah, a form of motorsport I don’t like!), put a nice pink colour scheme on all the windows, and so on. Amused me highly. It’s not big, it’s not clever, and it’s probably highly immature (oh god, that word again…), but who cares?

Posted by Dickie in Procrastination, Random, Sleep, Stuff | 9 Comments

So I have a new toy.

The helicopter, that is. The phone’s just there for scale (although that’s new too).

It’s pretty damn hard to control at first, but I’m getting better. My housemates must wonder what the hell I’m up to though when I’m playing with it. What with the whirring of the motors (think dentist’s drill and you’re not far off), and the noise of me jumping around the room to avoid the damn thing and then to collect it after the inevitable crash.

Good for smiles, bad for productivity.

Posted by Dickie in Procrastination, Random, Sleep | 5 Comments

I’ve had Winamp on shuffle for the last few days, because I couldn’t be bothered picking an album to listen to the other day and I just haven’t changed it since then. It’s a good way of getting myself to listen to something different - I download acquire music quite a bit and just never listen to it, or listen to it once then forget about it. I’ve heard quite a few things that I’ve thought “ooh, this is really good”, which is nice. Anyway something I’ve noticed is that Free is coming up a lot. I’m not sure if this is just perceived or whatever, and it’s not as if I have significantly more Free than anything else. So I’ve decided the the Pixies in my Computer like Free.

The Pixies in my Computer clearly have taste.

On a similarly musical note, I’m looking for some new headphones at the moment because mine are pretty broken (the cans have kinda fallen off the headband, and I’m fed up of reattaching them). Thing is though that it’s really hard to decide which ones are any good just from the internet; you really need to hear them. But if I go down the road to Maplin and ask to listen to them, that’s no use either because they won’t have been broken in yet.

I’ve been poking around on the net and I think I might go for a set of Beyerdynamic DT231s. But then, I could go for another set of Sennheisers… I think not actually - my current ones (different type, admittedly) have only lasted about 14 months, which is fairly poor. But then I don’t know they Beyers will fare any better… Ah, the choices!

Anyway, got back to Cardiff the other day. Mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s nice to be back because I do appreciate the independance thing. But then on the other hand, I’m not exactly reined in at home. I stay up as late as I want (and get up as late as I want), I go out when I want, I do what I want. Much the same as here then, but with the advantage of having food made and washing done for me.

And, if I get bored here, I tend to sit in my room and think “hmm, I’m bored”. At home, theres usually someone about (even if its just the dog) to entertain me. Hmm.

Also, being back at Uni reminds me that I have a bunch of coursework due in the next few weeks, as well as a load of exams. And I still don’t have a job for next year, so I need to be doing that and chasing people. I think I’m gonna try to head down to the library tomorrow to finish an application and to revise without distraction. I’ve tried to work in my room, but it’s so much easier to do something else, anything else. Like watch all of the first series of Monkey Dust on DVD…

I’m loving the weather at the moment though. I hate in winter when it’s only light for about 15 minutes each day. It’s just so much nicer when you leave the house in the morning (I’m awake in the morning sometimes) and it’s nice and bright, instead of it being dark and dreary. Feels so much more pleasant.

Anyway, back to exams… Considering their proximity I think I should probably be starting to get a bit more concerned/stressed/whatever. That said, I never get stressed by the damn things. I’d do so much better if I did…

This post is probably already sub-par, and I can’t really think of anything else to write. Except that I should probably go to sleep soon, or something. I’ve heard that’s what people do at night, but to be honest I think it’s just an elaborate hoax. You can’t believe everything you read on the net, after all…

Posted by Dickie in Music, Procrastination, Sleep, Stuff, Time | 3 Comments

First, a continuation of the last entry: Holy Crap that was a good race. I got up at 4am (after an hour’s sleep. Ahem) to watch it (thus missing all the nauseating pre-race buildup, yesss!) and the didn’t feel at all tired watching it, cos of all the excitement. If the rest of the season is half as good as that race, I’ll be happy.

Anyway… I should’ve written this entry a while ago, but I had a bunch of other stuff to do at the time and by the time I didn’t have to do that stuff any more, I forgot I was going to write this. Oops.

So a while back, a Derren Brown show called The System was broadcast on C4. The premise of the show was that he’d worked out a 100% foolproof way for someone to win on the horses. The first part of the programme is concerned with how he gave tips anonymously to this (extremely irritating) woman, and how they were right each time. She gets confidence in The System, to the point where he persuades her to place one final bet for as much money as she can get together, on whichever horse he predicts will win the race. Theres some experiment/tricky bits he does as well, outside of the horse thing, to convey ideas about probability, for instance tossing a fair coin 10 times in a row and getting heads each time. He says that “the key to understanding this [trick], is the key to understanding the system”. Which really is a big hint…

After the woman places the last bet, Brown tells us how the system works. Basically, it’s a pyramid scheme; you start with a big group of people, split them into n groups (where there are n horses running in the same race), and assign each group a horse. You then tell each group that you “predict” that horse will win the race. After that, take the winning group and do it again, and again, and again. Until you end up with one person who happened to be in all the winning groups and has therefore seen a string of correct “predictions”. The person who you tell to get as much money together to place it on (effectively) a random horse…

I’ve probably summed the programme up badly, but the idea of it wasn’t to prove that there is or is not a system for winning at the horses. The idea was to basically show up faith.

The woman in the film (and by extension, the viewer, since we only see her perspective of events) assumes that there really is a system; that Derren Brown really can predict which horse will win a given race. But that’s because we can only see part of the story - we only see the one in 8000 who happens to get lucky at each level of the pyramid. The point is that to have faith in something, whether it be homeopathic remedies, religion, or in this case a system for winning at the horses, requires a certain amount of ignoring the bigger picture. The point Derren Brown is trying to get across is that just because we perceive something to be so, that doesn’t necessarily mean that our perception is correct.

The example given in the show is that of homeopathic medicine (the sort of thing where the medicines basically consist of water), but it applies to any sort of religious faith. One of the (many) things that annoys me about religion (or faith, or whatever you want to call it) is exactly this point. To believe in a religion - doesnt matter which one - requires you to blindly accept certain things. Whether that be a story of creation, a certain moral code, or simply the notion of a God, its the same thing. And that sort of blind acceptance is at best foolish, at worst downright dangerous.

As so deftly explained by xkcd (and thats quite coincidental, cos I started this post before that cartoon was published), the core of science is the notion that ideas - any ideas - are tested by experiment. You shouldn’t accept facts just because someone says they are true, or because they were written down in a book thousands of years ago. It’s so irritating when you have an argument about religion with, say, a Christian, and every response they come up with is prefaced with the phrase “well, the Bible says…”. I don’t want to know what the Bible says, I want to know what you say!

OK, excluding extremists (who are just nuts), it all seems slightly innocent for some people to be religious, doesn’t it? If it brings comfort to them, if it gets them through the day, surely thats fine? Well no, it isnt. The very core of a religious viewpoint is this ability to accept without question; to do without thinking. It leads to flawed logic, to arbitrary judgements, to conflict. If more people accepted a more “scientific” frame of mind, the world would be a better place.

Basically, religion = bad. When I’m in charge, it’ll be classified as a mental illness…

Posted by Dickie in Motorsport, Procrastination, Random, Religion, YouTube | 3 Comments

Good idea: Going to bed at midnight.
Bad idea: Starting to play games at midnight.

Good idea: Going to bed once finished playing games.
Bad idea: Browsing YouTube instead.

Good idea: Going to bed now.
Bad idea: Writing this…

I have a book sat by the side of my bed that’s tempting me to read it instead of, like, y’know, sleeping. You know you’re bad when you procrastinate about sleeping.

I fail at Life :-(

Posted by Dickie in Procrastination, Sleep, YouTube | 6 Comments

I’m trying to work out why anyone could think this is anything other than a horrendously bad idea.

It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see on The Peter Serafinowicz Show…

Posted by Dickie in Procrastination, Random, YouTube | No Comments

1. Bad Sleeping patterns.
So, so messed up at the moment.

2. Scratching…
…my eczema.

3. Air drumming.
It doesnt look good.

4. Air drumming in the car.
And it’s not safe, either.

5. Leaving my washing till the last minute.
I have a heap of stuff I need to wash now but I’m probably gonna have to do 2 loads, cos it probably won’t fit in one. And I probably won’t have space to dry it all. Crap, I just remembered meant to do that today, actually. Oh well.

Wow, I bet you REALLY wanted to know that…

6. Boring people by talking about racing.
Heh: I can see you’re bored, but I still keep talking about it.

7. Making bad jokes.
Sometimes, I say things, and I can see people start to hate me - dodgy puns especially have this effect. It’s a wonderful achievement.

As an aside, there’s a slim subset of the population who find those sort of jokes amusing. These are the best type of people, I feel.

8. Speaking without thinking.
I sometimes swear too much without thinking. I tend to throw around (friendly!) insults a lot. I’m somewhat opinionated, and throw my opinion around a lot. This behaviour can offend some people. These people are the worst type of people, I feel.

9. Your Mom.
I’m joking…

…she pays too well for me to seriously consider stopping.(This probably comes under No. 7)

10. Procrastination.
Speaking of which, I need to get back to a lab report…

(of these, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 dont need to change. Only 1,2,5 and 10 do.)

Mundane post, sorry.

As an aside, don’t you hate it when someone says something to you, and a few hours later you come up with a brilliantly witty response? I did that the other day - I was lying in bed and this perfect one-liner just flashed into my mind. I was amused and annoyed by myself in equal quantities. Oh well.

Posted by Dickie in Procrastination, Random, Rant, Sleep | 4 Comments

So I just had to top up my phone. I won’t name the network, but lets call them Yellow. Usually when I top up, I just use their website and do it all online. Takes a couple of minutes, and saves me getting up off my lazy arse. Anyway, apparently the site is closed at the moment for maintenance(!), so I called up to do it that way.

Anyone who uses Ora-, I mean Yellow, PAYG knows that they’ve just redone all their phone menus with a different, friendlier-sounding person. And that’s fine, but I think they’ve tried to re-do it all to make it sound like you’re actually dealing with a real person. Some of the things she “says” are exactly the same things that ill-educated dolts say to try to sound polite. Like, after I enter my details, and how much to top up, “I’ll just put that through for you…”. Okay, fair enough, but do you have to then, 3 seconds later, say “I’m just putting that through for you”, just to fill the silence? As if I’m sat with the phone to my ear, thinking “damn, what am I actually doing here?” and need reminding that something is happening? NONONO!

Finally, when it’s all done, does it have to say “By the way, did you know you can also use our website to top your phone up?”…

AAARRRGGGHHH!

Actually, one of the less painful phone menu things that I’ve used. Some of the ones I’ve used at work are just.. urgh.

Anyway, I need to finish drawing a flow net. Joy!

Posted by Dickie in Procrastination, Random, Rant, Technology | 5 Comments