File Under 'Miscellaneous'

Time for a long and rambling blog entry, I think. Term has started, so for the next 8 weeks, any blog entry I write will look like 'did physics; played frisbee; ate; slept'. That's pretty dull, so I'll just braindump now instead.

It's good to be back into the swing of uni after a ridiculously long holiday. I can't get anything done without some kind of routine, so I expect to get far more done in the next 8 weeks than in the previous three months. My new room is nice and large, but all the quirks of the rooms here are close at hand: the cold tap dispenses hot water periodically, the floor is nowhere near level (I think I'm sitting at the uphill end), and I can hear the cathedral bells quite clearly (at 9:40pm. Why are church bells ringing at 9:40pm?!).

Of course, such a scene of pastoral bliss couldn't last long, and it was quickly and cleanly spoilt by having to do lab work. Apart from the usual problem of doing a practical when having no clue about the theory behind it, we had to use computer programmes written by physicists. Perhaps using KDE has spoilt me, but using a programme that deliberately core dumps when the specified output file already exists wasn't a pleasant experience. Still, once the grunt work was done, the results were fairly interesting (calculating ages of globular clusters, since you asked).

On the KDE front, I haven't really done anything much. Competition judging is going on, but has turned up at exactly the wrong time for Malcolm Hunter and I (who are judging). Malcolm has been away, and I've started term. If anyone reading this has submitted an entry for the docs competition, we're doing our best to get the results as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.

Also, I copied my web stuff from my university space to fruitsalad.org. Anything that started with http://users.ox.ac.uk/~chri1802 can now be replaced with http://people.fruitsalad.org/phil. I'll move the stuff off the uni space when I get round to it.