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Poor, poor form. But at least I can do something at the train station after missing the train. That said theres some fairly hefty rain falling, which is making me fear for my Notebook’s safety, somewhat. Never mind, plough on. I’m currently listening to the new Sigur Ros album, and have to say it’s fairly stunning. Rather unlike their previous efforts in a lot of ways, but really good nonetheless. I particularly like “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur” (means “within me a lunatic sings”). One of those songs which is just pure, unadulterated joy. OK, so there was just an announcement over the station PA telling everyone to be careful because the platform might be wet. Honestly, if you can’t work that one out by yourself… Anyway, stuff. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve been working lately, which is the cause of the lack of blogging. To be honest a lot of the time I’ve not really had anything to say. And then when I have had stuff to say, I’ve just not been awake enough to say it. Pretty frustrating, to be honest. I enjoy working in some ways. Gets me out of the house, gets me money, etc. That said lots of things about this job annoy me, and I really can’t wait to start a “proper” job in September. It might not be immediately clear what I mean by that, but it’s one of the things on my to-do list as far as this thing is concerned. Actually I started writing about it the other day, but… C’est la vie. I was back in Cardiff last week for reasons previously mentioned. Something that annoyed me about that actually is that for the first time I sat the exam, revision was something I didn’t particularly like doing and the material didn’t make all that much sense to me. This time round, I really enjoyed revising (it was like doing a more useful sudoku, if that makes sense), and had no trouble motivating myself. Of course part of that is possibly down to there being no second chances this time, but I dont think it was completely down to that. Irritating. Anyway, Cardiff. I drove there, and it’s the first time that I’ve really driven round there (I drove there once a couple of years ago, but that doesnt count for several reasons). As I was driving around the city, I realised that it felt really alien, as if I hadn’t been there before and didn’t know it that well. Probably because it felt completely different seeing and feeling it from the car. On familiar roads you get used to how they feel; where the bumps are, the texture of the road, how things work etc. It kinda felt nicer from the driver’s seat than it does from the pavement, but thats more down to the quality of the paving in Cardiff… Wow, I’m rambling now. So yeah, as well as that alienness there was also a proper recognition of the place, as you’d expect considering the fact that I’ve (mostly) lived there for a couple of years now. Driving around, seeing lots of different places brought back some of the memories from the last couple of years. Sort of “oh, I remember doing such and such here”. It was nice, if a little weird when combined with the unfamiliarity I was feeling. Still doesn’t feel like home though. When I’m on the motorway and I see a sign for The Midlands, it just feels like “That way be home”. Don’t feel that when I see a sign for Cardiff. Train o’Clock. Bye Posted by Dickie :: 8 Comments
Tunnel of Love by Dire Straits is the best song ever. Fact. I’ve been through a slight non-blogging phase lately. A few reasons for that. I’ve either wanted to write about something, but not wanted my writings on that something to be available freely on the Internet; or I’ve not had anything to write about; or I’ve wanted to write about things on which I’m more than happy for my writings to be freely available, but I’ve not been able to articulate what I’ve wanted to a sufficiently high standard that I could get my point across well. In summary: Moping, Unimagination and Laziness. Another reason is that I’ve been working for the last week, which is really rather tiring. I’m sure theres something wrong with the fact that I seem to work harder over my summer vacations than I do over the rest of the year, but there you go. I realised the other day that I’ve not had a completely free summer since about 2002. Weird. Working’s been pretty good to me though, to be honest. For those who don’t know, I work in a bank as a cashier. I first did it when I was 16, and looking back now at how I was then and now it’s probably one of the best things I’ve done, for a bunch of reasons. Mostly because the job I do is essentially a proper job that proper people do, rather than a “student” job (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way towards other stuff btw). I’ve worked with all sorts of people from my age upto 60-odd - and obviously dealt with a nice array of customers - and I think it’s whats largely responsible for turning the shy, nervy 16 year-old I was into the slightly less shy, chilled-out 20 year-old I am now. Theres a few of the customers in the branch I’m in at the moment who can’t work out how to use the front door. This isnt important, but I just felt you ought to know. This is probably the last year I’ll be working in the bank. Next year I’ll be doing proper work, and who knows what I’ll be doing the year after. I’m considering doing an MSc after I graduate, and I was thinking about what sort of course I want to do. Research or taught? What area? Do I wanna do it somewhere other than Cardiff? Lots of choices. I was also thinking about my car the other day. I’ve just got mine back on the road (first time I can drive regularly for a couple of years), and I was thinking of getting a different car in a few months. And then I looked at insurance. It’s frustrating, because I can afford some pretty decent cars, but the insurance is… Well I probably could afford it, but I’m not paying £2500-£5000 for it (admittedly the larger quote was for a Fiat Coupe. With the 20v turbo engine…). Ho hum. Might just keep what I’ve got. I’ve also been thinking about racing a lot lately. Actually, since the British Grand Prix a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about Lewis Hamilton an awful lot. I’m probably gonna write another entry about that though, so I wont say much for now, other than: wow. Tempted to pay to do a race weekend of some sort in the next year. I was thinking either karting, or possibly car racing in something like a Caterham. I’m almost definitely going to race when I’m in full-time work, because it’s something I love. Then, I’ll probably go karting to start with (cheaper…), but for a one-off I’m tempted to jump in the deep end. We’ll see. Bleh, I’m tired. Should probably sleep. This has been a really awful entry, but as I’ve typed it (and think I should publish something), it’s going up. Sorry. P.S. Theres also a few sites I keep meaning to add to the Blogroll. I’ll get round to it at some point, probably. Posted by Dickie :: 1 Comment
According to my Mum, in any case. Made me lol for quite a while after she said that to me on the phone earlier today. Anyway, exams are almost over! I’ve almost certainly failed Friday’s though. The paper generally was troubling, but about 5 minutes before the end I realised that I’d done a fairly important part of the first question wrong. The question was basically work out the reactions for this (apologies for quality of drawing):
Working out the vertical reactions is easy, so I got that bit fine (frankly I deserve to be shot if I cocked that bit up, it’s AS-level stuff). But for the horizontal reaction, I got H=P. Which is just wrong, however way you look at it. I’d assumed my mistake was just an algebraic one (cancelling something by accident, or whatever). To work out the force, you assume the horizontal displacement at the supports is zero, and then you equate that with the partial derivative of the strain energy with respect to the force. You get a nice equation, do some whizzy maths stuff, and the force (hopefully!) drops out. One of the terms in the equation is the partial derivative of the moment with respect to force (H, in this case). My error, realised just before the end of the exam, was to differentiate wrt x… Of course, getting that bit wrong meant that my answers for the next bits are wrong too. For the first time in my exam-taking career, I was suitably pissed off that I wrote a note by the side of the mistake. “I realised with about 5 mins before the end of the exam that I should’ve differentiated wrt H, not x. This probably explains the silly answer on the next page…” Bugger. In other news… I think I’ve expressed my displeasure before with the fact that I’m gonna miss the Monaco Grand Prix next weekend, due to a field course. I’ve just come across this, which just annoys me even more. It’s one of the worst races of the season (because apparently it’s hard to overtake cars on a bumpy, twisty, narrow road at 150+mph…), but as a spectacle it’s fantastic, and it’s actually one of my favourites. Fast cars on essentially normal roads is not a sensible idea, for any sane person anyway, and watching the drivers there is just mind-bending: In the wet, it’s something else. I’m gonna get Mum to record it at home, but that means avoiding news for a week (and no-one texting me the result…). Utterly annoying. Posted by Dickie :: 10 Comments
I was just reading a report of lecture given the other week. It says that the lecturer is an expert “in the area of child abuse”, and that this is “one that not many people specialise in”. Well you’d hope not, really. Posted by Dickie :: 4 Comments
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 :: 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 :: 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 :: 9 Comments
If I try to do any work at my desk in my room, it doesn’t happen. I either gaze into space and listen to music, or watch a dvd, or play a game, or aimlessly browse the net, or something. But if I go down to the library, I manage to get loads done. I have most of the same distractions, cos I take my Eee and my MP3 player with me. So I can still end up wasting time listening to music and browsing the net aimlessly, but I just don’t. I even sit next to the window, looking out over the green grass (and the train line. Ahem), and theres plenty of distraction there as people walk past on their way to/from lectures, or looking at the pretty shapes in the clouds. But instead I ended up writing a load of notes on English law and the court systems (for my Civil Engineering degree. Crazy talk! Incidentally, this amused me somewhat. The idea of trial by combat being an acceptable way to decide the outcome of a trial is delightfully mad. Shame they repealed the law, would’ve made Paul McCarthy vs Heather Mills somewhat entertaining. She could’ve knocked him out with her peg leg. Anyway, I digress). Actually it’s not too much of a conundrum at all. My room-desk is just tiny. What with the monitors and speakers and keyboard and mouse and assorted desk-clutter, there’s really no room to work. Annoying. I mentioned the Eee there, and it’s a really brilliant little tool for revision. Cos of its size, it’s really easy to carry in to uni in the first place, and then when you’re there it takes up a tiny proportion of the space of the desk, so it’s not in the way at all. A proper-sized laptop would be too heavy/bulky to carry in (along with all my other revision materials), and would take up a huge amount of the desk. As it is, the Eee is just the right size for looking up notes or past papers from the intranet, or for looking stuff up on t’net when your notes make no bloody sense (Wikipedia ftw!). I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Best Gadget Evar! In other news, design coursework is proceeding nicely, and will be done in the next couple of days hopefully. Maths coursework is EVIL, and is probably going to take me as long as I’ve got (and probably a bit longer). Yesterday I did my first bit of ironing… well for years, really. My phone has just run out of credit, I need to go get food (yeh its late cos I got in from the library and started eating biscuits. Fail), and I didn’t get to sleep till 4am last night. Oops. I don’t know why anyone would care about most of that last paragraph (I don’t), but meh. Meh, I say! I’m already bored of the way this site looks. Theres a few things I like, a few things I don’t like, and a few things that are unforgivable. Theres also a few things I want to add to it anyway. I’ll probably change it when I have time/can be bothered (not soon then). 22 days till the end! (Excluding the field trip) Posted by Dickie :: 6 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 :: 5 Comments
Fantastic author, I can’t begin to list how many good books he’s written. The Rama and 2001-3001 series stand out though, and are well worth reading. As are his short stories. Actually, all his stories are well worth reading… “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” R.I.P. Arthur. Posted by Dickie :: 1 Comment
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