ImperialViolet

Well, (setting the scene), I'm sitting in a small hotel room in Guildford on a very comfortable red seat with my laptop on my lap.

The aforementioned red chair looks a little out of place in the room because, although you could swing a cat in it, it would hit it's head on all the walls. Thus in a room where space is at a premium it seems a little wasteful to put this seat in it.

But it is a comfy seat. Even compared to the seats at work it's pretty good and that's saying something because the seats at work are special geek seats which cost about £500 and have more nobs and levers than some aircraft flight decks on the underside. (The underside of the chair, not the flight decks).

I'm also listening to music (I should have mentioned that before). It's music that I found lying about the network at work. I love listening through other people's music sometimes because you can pick out some real gems. Think about the number of different CDs in an average record shop and how few of those you've ever heard. Collaborative filtering is the only way to find any good non-mainstream stuff since radio stations are hopeless. (and the RIAA shutdown all the Internet radio stations).

At the moment the track is The Strokes - Last Nite (sic). Now The Strokes aren't really very non-mainstream but I don't listen to enough of them anyway.

However, the last track was cool and by a artist/group called Royksopp, who I've never heard of and that's the fun of it. (There should be two dots above the o in that name, but I'm not feeling brave enough to put a non-Latin1 code point in tonight).

The night life (for me) is pretty dire here, though. I'm the only person of my age group living in Guildford and working at Lionhead so I can't really go out. (I not really the sort to go out alone and try to hook up with someone). Which is a shame because Guildford is a University town and looks like having a great night life.

It's not too bad though. I don't get in from work until about 6:45 and by the time I've gone out to fetch dinner and watched some TV it's about 8:00, and I've enough to read.

And I'm coming home for the weekend. Catching the train at 5:45 and getting in to Cheltenham at 8:30 where father is driving me to a party Have another party on Sunday and I catch the train again at 6:45 Monday morning for work. No rest for the wicked!

Then I've another two weeks before heading home. Where I have to pick out book prizes, go see people at the Playhouse, get exam results and then fly off to Korea.

(The school prizes are always in the form of money off books at the book shop in Gloucester. You have to go in and order the books (paying any extra) and then you have to wait 6 weeks to actually get the book at the prize evening. So the trick is to find books that you want - but don't want enough to be bothered about not actually having them for 6 weeks. And they've got to be non-fiction books really.)

And this year I've got to pick out three (Maths, Biology and Service to the School). Though the books don't have to be related to the subject.

Since I don't have an internet connection at the hotel I tend to read stuff at work and save any longer stuff on my laptop for later reading. Thus leads to a lack of good links I'm afraid. Do a google search for Markus Kahn though. His homepage at cam.ac.uk is well worth reading.

I did get that 802.11b connection going, but the access point isn't configured to forward packets unfortunately. The SNMP private community has been changed and it's probably a little rude to reconfigure someone else's AP anyway.

Assertion: mailing lists which are archived should put the URL for a given message in its header

If the above where true I could point you at a neat little post on ll1. But it isn't and I cannot look up the URL so you'll have to do without

TBL says that a quantum computer can be implimented on a UTM and the quantum bit is just a speed thing. However, there are quantum effects which are non-deterministic and so cannot be done on a UTM.

TBL also says I should read up on Goldstein randomness. (not sure about the spelling there).