I’m roasting in my office. 🙁

Thank goodness the machine room has aircon! 🙂

Last night I went off to Wadham college with Paul and his american girlfriend Jenn (who is flying back to South Carolina tomorrow) to see the open air production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”

As 400 year old comedies go it was quite fun. However, it shows its age.

I know that many people would call it sacrilege to say this, but to me it seemed very primitive as stories go. Also, due to the way English pronunciation has changed since 1600 most of the comedy (which are puns) don’t now work. Also, a great deal of the references the play uses for extra comedic value which would have been obvious to an observer of the time fall flat and go unnoticed.

It would be like taking a satire about the early 1970’s Heath Conservative government set on a around the world racing yacht and playing it to a bunch of today’s generation. However good the writing and the comedic references to the captain of the yacht it would fall flat as none of the audience would get the link. (Mr Heath was an enthusiastic captain of a yacht. His yacht, Morning Cloud was well known at the time but is lost in history now.)

In my opinion, Shakespeare is over hyped. It was good and ground breaking at the time but it is of its time.

Today, Rachel, Graham and little Christopher came visiting. They came so that I may show them all the camera shops in Oxford so they could play with digital cameras.

After some tea and some chatter, we got into town at about midday. We visited Morton’s baguette shop in Broad Street for lunch (which was enjoyed by all) before popping off to first Jessop’s the Dixons and finally Morris Photographic.

Jessop’s, as expected, was useless. We stayed in the shop for about 2 minutes if that. Dixons, however, was a different matter. They had the Olympus E10 and E-20p cameras in stock. At £900 and £1300 then with 20% off they were good value. OK, they don’t have replacable lenses but they do have a proper optical through the lens viewfinder. Anyway,, after looking at these cameras it was decided to look at what Morris Photographic had on offer and to have a think.

Morris Photographic tried to push a full £1400 (+£300 lens) Olympus. The salesman was pushy and condescending and didn’t really understand what Graham was saying.

After escaping there we trotted off to Christchurch meadow where we say watching tourists comically fail to punt and discussed digital cameras. The upshot of which was that we went back to Dixons and Rachel bought the E-20p (using Graham’s money).

We came home, played with camera, ordered and ate delivered pizza from Domino’s and drank tea. After this debauchery, they went home.

This evening I’ve played an album I have for the first time in a little while and was surprised (again) by how powerful emotions were dragged up from the time I first got the music and used to play it over and over again…

It was over 20 years ago when I had my first (unrequited) love. The woman was called Vincenza Perkins and was in the 5th form when I was in the upper 6th. I adored her greatly but was too shy to ask her out.. well, not until it was too late and she was going out with someone else anyway.

To cut a long story short, I really fell for this woman and spent many, many evenings lovelorn listening to Jean-Michel Jarre’s Magnetic Fields, especially part four as it was in a minor key and the second part seemed very forlorn, it resonated with my feelings.

Tonight, yes, over 20 years after this disasterous and very painful experience, all those emotions and feelings came back when I played that same music again. It’s very surprising that mere music can do this. But it’s such a bitter-sweet pain and just as intense as it ever was. It’s a scar which will never heal, no doubt.

Well, what have I done in the last week?

Hmm, let’s see…

Socially, I’ve been to a BBQ on Saturday evening. It was Katie’s birthday
bash. Lots of nice food and good conversation. Friday night’s happy hour
was fun too, talking with John, Paul, Kat and her boyfriend.

Work’s been mostly setting up the teacher and 6th form student openday stuff.
It’s always an “interesting” experience as academics are hopeless at organising
things or doing things which might actually get students to want to come
here. Anyway, after much work by myself, one of the secretaries and a very
little help from the adademic in charge, something was thrown together. This
morning I took it all apart again.

I’ve bought 3 DVD’s in the past week. Two when getting Katie’s present on
Thursday, 2 for £20 in WHSmiths, Scooby-doo and Spiderman. OK, so Scooby-doo’s
not the world’s best film but it’s a lot better than I expected it to be.

Saturday brought the buying of the Goodies DVD. Much fun watching 1970’s
british slapstick humour it was too. Though, the Ecky-thump episode was nowhere
near as fun as i remember it and the DVD didn’t have the episode “Bun-fight
at the OK Tea-rooms” which I always thought of as a classic. Somehow I can
see why they’re now not shown on telly as there are quite a few things which
wouldn’t be concidered P.C. these days. Then again, they take the micky out
of all minorities (and majorities) equally. There’s a suprisingly forthright
homosexual subtext which I had never noticed before. It’s constantly made
out that Tim Brooke-Taylor’s character is gay but it doesn’t phase Grahame
Garden nor Bill Oddie. In fact they play on it. I thought that rather strikingly
daring, even for today’s telly. Some may think their treatment of coloured
people a little un-PC in some episodes, however, if you look at things as
a whole, they’re treated no differently than French, Italians, Germans, Scots,
or indeed any other people you can label. ie. the programme uses characatures
or everyone equally disrespectfully, so in that sense it’s totally non-racist.

I can’t think of anything else I’ve done of any note so I’ll shut up.

Friday was a rather woozly day after the two previous nights with not as much sleep as my body required.

I did manage, with the help of someone I met at the IT support staff conference the before, to get the new replacement iMac (which got delivered 30 minutes after the order was faxed!) fully on the network with full automounter and NIS authentication. Even home directories on NFS worked. Previously I’ve tried to do this in the past and failed with MacOS X 10..2.x. However, it seems that later updates of 10.2 have fixed a great deal of the problems with interoperability.

Friday evening was the department undergraduate finalists’ party. Seeing as I took some photos last year I got asked to do it again. The result can be viewed at http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~steve/pictures/party03/ if you’re interested.

Seeing as I was rather pooped I didn’t go on to Wolfson College Bop and went home instead. I was in bed well before 10pm.

Saturday morning I had to get up at the normal time, ie. 7:30am. It was off to Sainsbury’s first for the weekly shop before going off to my old school’s summer reunion thingy. I’d arranged to meet one of the other reprobates who had been in the computer club at lunchtime.

After leaving home at about 10am I finally got to Kimbolton at about 11:45am. Having finally managed to find a place which had some phone signal I got in touch with Will Mumford about meeting up. He said that he got off work at midday and would meet me in the New Sun Inn at about half twelve. So, I went and had some lunch in the Inn. Erm, it was rather expensive, £6.50 for scampi and chips!!!!

Anyway, I waited and waited and no Will could be seen. So, at 1pm I decided to pop over to the castle (the school is based in Kimbolton Castle and its grounds). Typically, just as I got about 100 yards up the drive I got both a text message and a phone call from Will (yes, I’d got a signal!) asking where I was. He was just coming in through the gatehouse.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I did see a few of my contemporaries there, but no-where near as many as I expected. Still it was fun.

I left the school at about a quarter past four and decided to travel down my old usual route to Bedford, the B660, past where I used to live, Pertenhall. Following a slight nostalgic tripas far as Bedford I decided to see how my old stamping ground in Houghton Conquest was getting on. More building on infill land was basically what I found.

Seeing as it was only about 5pm-ish I thought I’d pop along the road towards Ampthill and drop by the old ruins of Houghton House. I was glad I’d decided to take my camera with me as it’s quite a photogenic place. I took about 60 pictures including about 20 ready to stitch together into a panarama of the Great Ouse valley from King’s Wood, past Cardington airship hangers, across Bedford and over to the chimnies and clay pits of Stewartby with the Midland Mainline railways sweeping through the scenery. All I have to do now is find some software to stitch them together.

I left there at about 6pm, stopped off quickly at Millbrook railway bridge, where I used to take railway pictures after cycling there in about 1980, took a couple of pictures and then travelled home.

I finally got home at about 7:45pm, slumped in my chair and soon went to bed.

Today, I’m just been getting the pictures formatted and the meadow in the back garden grazed by my electric mower.

Thankfully, my tummy upset stopped plaguing me by the time of the dinner at Le Petite Blanc last night.

I had a fun time with good food. (I was glad I chose items from the A La Carté menu though as the portions on the set menu were a bit on the small side.)

This morning I’m feeling really tired. I think I shall go and get a machine coffee now to wake myself up.

Last
night, the night before the social dinner event I’m going to tonight at Le
Petite Blanc for which I’ve already paid over £30 I get a stomach bug.

I was awake ’til about 4:30am feeling as if I was blowing up like a balloon and feeling every peristaltic action. Wonderful!

So, today I’m feeling shattered, my abdomen still feels like a balloon, I’m
very slightly nausious and I keep getting hot flushes. Not exactly the best
way to be feeling before going to a restaurant with nightlife following it.

Sod’s law, isn’t it?

Well, what’s happened in the last week?

Well, the Grand Prix was ok, I s’pose.

My bike didn’t get its chain guard even though it has arrived and does look as if it will fit. The next attempt will be Wednesday.

The appointment to see a bootleg verson of “The Core” on thrusday didn’t happen.

Friday afternoon was the department BBQ. Well, I say department but it was really only set up by the postgrads who run the Friday “Happy Hour.” It was based at St.Edmund (Teddy) Hall boathouse on the river. It was a lovely warm and sunny day with enough of a breeze to make it very pleasant. The food was iffy but the company was good. On the whole it was a good afternoon. When I got home I realised that I’d got a little toasted in the sunshine.

Today I finally managed to wash my car and then give it a good waxing. It’s now looking nice and shiny.. well, it was until it started raining.

Over the last couple of days my big PC has been attacking me. I’ve just installed a couple of new fans and a more beefy power supply. Unfortunately, during my experiments trying to determine what the best way of cooling the case would be I managed to get one fan to slice into my left little finger knuckle and the case side slid through my hand and sliced into the side of my right-middle finger. I dunno how it did that as that part of the case isn’t really even sharp.

This afternoon at about 4pm I got a phone call from work. A pipe had burst on the top floor of the building almost directly above our main computer rooms. Let’s say that it has proved that Macintoshes are not as waterproof as their namesake coats. There is a rather soggy iMac which I think is probably drowned. Thankfully, no water went into the machine room. Still, the A0 printer which students were using to prepare for tomorrow’s mini-conference within the department is our of action as the room its in has no power. I can see some panicing happening.

So, what exciting things have I been up to since my last update?

Well, there’s been a little bit of moral support for 3rd years who were awaiting their results. I’ve done the annual department photograph. I’ve been to the pub on Friday night.

Other than this, I stuffed parts into my work machine (euclid) yesterday so that it now has ha;f a gig of memory and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive. Both the memory and the DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive were left-over parts from one of the research groups.

In the afternoon, after doing my normal shopping and getting an optical output cap for the DVD player, I popped off to the UCI High Wycombe cinema to see X-Men 2 (or as it should be titled, X2). It wasn’t such a bad film, better than the first. OK, it wasn’t a classic but it was fun.

I did want to cut the grass and wash the car today, but it’s a bit too hot for that. So, I’ve been reading and trying to get further in Unreal II.

I’m now about to watch the grand prix. I wonder if it’ll be interesting.

Properly,
I think I should start this entry by saying what I did at the tail end of
last week. Namely, a bit of shopping on Thursday evening (including buying
The Animatrix DVD) followed by Buffy and angel. Friday evening was spent
partly at happy hour and partly packing for Saturday’s journey to Liverpool…

Which brings us to Saturday morning. It was a 6:30am start. This is, of course,
far too early to start a Saturday. Half way through showering I hear a knock
on my front door. it was Tom (xencat) who had turned up rather earlier than
I’d expected, so I settled him down in front of the TV with the HiFi set
to full surround sound and stuff the Animatrix on the DVD while I went back
upstairs and finished getting ready.

We left the house at about 7:30, trundled up to Tescos to get goodies for
the barbecue later in the day and discussed bicycles. From there is was a
quick garage stop to give my car a breakfast of Super Unleaded before heading
off to Liverpool.

The journey up wasn’t too bad. Not that much traffic and no hold-ups to really
meantion. We stopped off north of Birmingham for a comfort break and to grab
some not very fast food in the Burger King before toddling off again. We
finally made Lindsey’s house at about 11:30.

Most of the afternoon was spent either trying desparately to get their barbecues
to make any heat and  cooking. Still, the company was nice. After returning
from a little amble around a local park I made some chocolate stuffed bananas
on the BBQ and all seemed to enjoy them even though they weren’t very hot.

The evening was spent in a local pub with some mor eof Lindsey’s friends.
Unfortunately, Lindsey got a headache and most of us were far too tired to
stay late or stay up and talk, so it was a pretty early night in the end,
and i didn’t need the pajamas either. Unfortunately, I had drunk rather too
much cola, so most of the night was spent running to the loo, so I didn’t
get a great deal of sleep.

Sunday dawned.. or rather it squidged, as it was a bit wet. By midday, Steph
and Mel had left (after replacing a flat tyre) so Lindsey, Tom and myself
went off into Liverpool to shop. Typically, as we came out of the car park,
the heavens opened. Thankfully, I had my big Saab umbrella, so only Lindsey’s
shoulder and the bottoms of my trouser legs actually got wet.

After some lunch and Tom having a massive spending spree in HMV (hey, that
rhymes!) we drove back to Lindsey’s place, we dropped her off and then I
drove home.

Having got home at about 5:30pm I collapsed in an arm chair and failed to move all night, well other than to go to bed.

Today, I have no IQ whatsoever. i think I should have stayed in bed.