May2004Nerdiness31 May 2004, midmorning I scored 38.095238095238095% on the nerd test which is currently going around - http://ludicrousspeed.co.nr/nerdtest.html End of May31 May 2004 After initially planning a mass outing to Kingswood, we eventually spend Friday evening having dinner (stirfry) with Philip and Jo at our place. Also played one game of Give Me The Brain! which Philip won. Slept in on Saturday morning, then went to Outer Limits to pick up Adrianna. Helped Philip dismantle the old Compaq Pentium II that was in the back room - he's scrounging together parts to replace his stolen PC. Spent the afternoon washing dishes, tidying the house and reading comics. In the evening Neil came over for games. The evening got off to a surprisingly early start and we managed to fit in three games: FreeLoader (which Neil won), Agora (which MyrdemInggala won) and WitchTrial (which I won). We definitely need to play all three again now that we have a feel for the rules. Frisbee on Sunday was quite cool. Were missing some regulars but had a few more new people to make up for it. It was a long game (about an hour and a half) and we spend most of it playing five against six so by the end I was wasted. Spent most of the afternoon napping and absorbing nutrients. Finally got some more work done on Sigil on Sunday evening. Hopefully we'll have some parts up on the wiki for viewing and comment later this week. Eep!28 May 2004 Philip and Jo's flat got broken into this afternoon and they were pretty much cleaned out. :( I think Gnome summed it up best, "Bother!" Och, Ai!28 May 2004 Woot. Later part of week has been v. exciting. Monday evening was singing. Spent Tuesday evening cleaning the fish tank (thanks to MyrdemInggala for always doing a lot of the work; the tank now has a carbon filter rather than a sponge one but is smelling a bit funny so it may require further tweeking) and doing some work on Sigil. On Wednesday was invited to attend the ISMB/ECCB2004 conference in Scotland! I've finished signing up for the conference today and now just need to book plane tickets and accomodation. I'll hopefully arrange to stop by London on the way past. Other good news from Wednesday is that the amount I got payed for the work on the ASTI web site was more than I expected (woot!) and I got a nice new folder in the deal as well. Wednesday also saw the eruption of a miniature flame war on the SCA list over the timetable for heavy combat at the shire birthday event. Thankfully everyone had quietened down a bit by Thursday morning (possibly as a result of soothing phone calls). Wednesday night was Ars Magica. Campaign is slowly gathering momentum again. We're in Valnastium (sp?) attempting to get directions to the covenant of Journey's End in order to help Johan (Duncan's mage character) with some ghosts he's been having problems with. Valnastium is a good place to get involved in Order politics too - it being the Jerbiton domus magus. Last night we went to over to Jason and Colleen's place to play Magic - MyrdemInggala is keen to learn to play after her card sorting stint at Outer Limits. Only had one game although it was pretty long. MyrdemInggala eventually won (damn that Call to the Grave!). On the work front I'm busy designing a versioning system for heirarchical information (ontologies in our case). Looks like the project is going to be an interesting challenge. We were meant to be watching talks from a recent conference at work today but the internet is acting up so it's been postponed to Tuesday. Did get to listen to one interesting talk by Craig Venter on the Sorcerer and Sorcerer II projects. Hoping to spend this evening relaxing at home doing nothing. Have another games evening planned for Saturday night. Japanese Story, Illuminati24 May 2004 Had Kevin and Neil over for dinner and Illuminati on Friday. Neil and I screwed each other's chances of winning in a massive two way spending spree which left the way open for Kevin to sneak in a victory (using two privileged attacks). I got a phone call shortly before leaving work on Friday to say that I would finally get paid for the work I did on the ASTI website and poster late last year. Hooray! This will cover the trip up to Icon nicely. :) Spend Saturday morning running around town. Went to the optometrist. Picked up breakfast for MyrdemInggala and I from Raith(e?) Gourmet. Bought parts for a new modem cable to replace the missing one from my digital camera. Also bought a bad Leonard Cohen CD (Blerg!), some coal for the fish tank filter and a the first part of a birthday present for Stacey (an antique needle case). Followed the mornings shopping with more shopping at Canal Walk in the afternoon where we bought Stacey a pot plant and a chinese brush-painted sign with her name on it. The chinese guy who painted the sign does really amazing work. I'm toying with the idea of attempting to commision a larger painting. Stacey's party was pretty cool and everyone dressed up nicely for the 1920s theme. Of course the older crowd :) faded, so the party wound down quite early. Lots of new people at frisbee on Sunday. Also my first time playing at the new location. It was nice to have lots of people and play on a sheltered field. It seems that my knee is slowly getting better too (touch wood) - it even survived a desparate dive in the end zone. Spent Sunday afternoon attempting to see "Japanese Story". First went to the Waterfront (where we had fish and chips) but it wasn't on there. Then went to Cavendish (where we hung around having coffee, looking at books and discussing Sigil for two hours). Eventually saw the six o'clock show. Incredibly boring. An art movie with nothing to say. Do not go see this movie. Rather go see Van Helsing or Troy. BNF, XML Schemas and Darkwolf21 May 2004 Currently writing up some specifications for an ontology editing language (using BNF, Backus-Naur Form) and its changelog format (using XML Schemas). Will hopefully finish today and get down to the actual coding next week. Watched Darkwolf last night. Very B-grade, with lots of bad CG and gratuitous shots of naked woman, but fun. Better paced than Troy. Looking forward to Cheapass games with Kevin and Neil this evening. Optometrists appointment and Stacey's birthday on Saturday. Week Wrap-up20 May 2004 Things which have happened since the last entry:
Doh!13 May 2004 Well, I just spend two hours try to figure out why my Gnome 2.6 stuff was suddenly broken and finally (after returning to Gnome 2.4) I discovered that I had firewalled localhost connections! Doh! Van Helsing, Mom in Hospital12 May 2004 My mom was in hospital for reconstructive surgery now that she's recovered from her masectomy at the end of last year. I stopped by the Panorama Medi-Clinic after work to see how she was doing. She was a bit groggy, having only come out of theatre about three hours before, but otherwise fine. I got lost a bit on the drive there and then discovered that the only entrance near the visitors' parking was the staff entrance. Afterwards raced off to pick up MyrdemInggala for movies. On the whole VanHelsing was pretty bad. Everything seemed borrowed from other films and the result was held together by a single small piece of chewing gum. On the upside booked tickets for Troy next week. Finished off the evening with Nandos and then tea at my place. Got in to work late after stopping by BargainBooks in Rondebosch to get MyrdemInggala Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Spent the rest of the day playing around with PmWiki, reading up on using Python's distutils to create Python source distributions and chatting to Mark on IRC about compose keys. ComposeKeys are cool. Also played around with PyGame a bit more. Maybe I'll write something using it soon, but tomorrow I have work to do. |