It’s the sun!

January 7th, 2008

I wish… Too cold and windy at the moment, even for me.

I tuned into BBC Radio 1 early this morning, and was very surprised to hear Debussy’s Clair de Lune. But, listening for a while, it slowly morphed into other music. A very good ambient music show by Rob da Bank. I think I’ll rip it for future listening.

Here’s a tracklisting:

 Rob da Bank and Friends 07 01 2008 - ‘The Sound of Silence’

2.00 am
Boards of Canada – ‘Over The Horizon Radar’ (Warp)
Claude Debussy – ‘Clair De Lune’
Claude Debussy played by Boston Symphony Orchestra – ‘Prelude A L’Apres-midi d’un Faune’
Brian Eno – ‘Another Green World’
Brian Eno & Harold Budd – ‘Wind In Lonely Fences’
Ryuichi Sakamoto – ‘Dawn’
Erik Satie – ‘Gymnopedies, No 1’
Vangelis – ‘Albedo 0.39’
Tangerine Dream – ‘Sequent C’
Dr Timothy Leary – ‘The Incredible Lightness Ov Being Molecular’
Penguin Café – ‘Telephone & Rubber Band’
Ry Cooder – ‘Theme From Southern Comfort’
Boards of Canada – ‘Heard From Telegraph Lines’
Aphex Twin – ‘On’
The Orb – ‘Falkenbruck’
Dub Tractor – ‘Untitled’
Future Sound of London – ‘Papua New Guinea’
Global Communications – ‘1431’
Coldcut – ‘Autumn Leaves’ Irresistible Force Mix
Air – ‘Alone In Kyoto’
Alan Howarth & John Carpenter - ‘Romero & The President’

3.00 am
Thomas Newman – ‘Any Other Name’
Autechre – ‘Nine’
U-ziq – ‘Sick Porter’
John Cage (performed by Glen Freeman) – ‘Inlets 1977’
Biosphere – ‘Dissolving Clouds’
Cocteau Twins – ‘Cheery Funk’ - Seefeel Mix
Seefeel – ‘Imperial’
PVH – ‘White’
Starseed Transmissions – ‘Metamorphic Illumination’
Sigur Ros – ‘Takk’
Tangerine Dream – ‘The Dream Is Always The Same’
Pass Into Silence – ‘Hanabatake’
Aphex Twin – ‘#3’
David Bowie – ‘Moss Garden’
John Fahey – ‘Sharks’
Bark Psychosis – ‘Pendulum Man’
Kraftwerk – ‘Kometenmelodie’
Harold Budd – ‘The Kiss’
Boards of Canada – ‘Zoetrope’
Peter Gabriel – ‘At Night’

Have a day

December 26th, 2007


or two to be with family.

This year is the first I can remember when Grandma has not been at the table. Depressing. You wonder if she really knows who you are at times.

Christmasses are now getting quite samey, the presents get less exciting and more like socks. (I really got a pack of socks this year!)

But, some surprises do exist, I particularly liked the DVD I received this year.

Rhythmbox on OpenBSD

December 24th, 2007

I’ve been looking for a good media player to use with my OpenBSD desktop.

I personally like lightweight players that are focused towards dynamic playlist creation (eg: play all of one genre at once)

Rhythmbox is a great piece of software that should fit these requirements.

Getting it onto OpenBSD was difficult - the existing port was in a non-functioning state. After porting totem-pl-playlist and updating the rhythmbox port, it was in a compilable state. Playing about with lib requirements got me to a point where I could actually play tracks.

The downside is that performance is horrible, I don’t know whether it’s because the audio subsystem on OpenBSD is just rubbish, or because of gstreamer, or rhythmbox itself.

As I type this, every newline and backspace causes a slight break in play of the song. Changing desktop workspaces or windows is much worse.

Annoying to the point it isn’t unusable.

VLC is an alternative, although it doesn’t have the nice library features, it does have a good performance. The issue there is that it plays at the wrong sample rate - all the songs are too high pitched!

I really don’t want to use Arts or esound, but it may be unavoidable to fix the performance issues.

Speechless

December 18th, 2007

Every time I want to write something serious on here, either ranting publicly or privately, I’m usually either walking or riding home, when I actually get home, I can no longer put my private soliloquies to words and write down my thoughts. It’s so annoying.

I suppose I should recap recent events, our team came 3rd in Nitex :D of 7 teams competing, 3 finished.  It was a nice evening for a walk, dry, but a bit breezy on the hills. We arrived back at 6am, the birdsong had just started as we were on the home straight. The last section of the walk was the worst of the lot, most of the paths were deeply eroded and filled with water from the morning’s rain. It was literally like walking down rivers, not the nicest finish to the hike.

I’m also finally going to be hopefully doing my Duke of Edinburgh’s Gold Award,  I went to a (county) meeting regarding it this weekend.

I’m going to have issues with fulfilling my Service and Phys Rec sections, Phys Rec will be fairly easy - Orienteering is allowed, I just need to research it some more and send some intro emails to the local clubs. Service will be the sticking point. I did help with the group’s Beaver section  until around the start of this year (poor memory here), my poor self-reasoning was that I wasn’t being treated as a young-leader. I felt nervous all the time around the beavers, especially when all the warranted leaders were out of the hall.In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been worried, Maureen is a very talented leader (even if Salem is a little disorganised). In hindsight, I regret my decision to leave without informing them much (can’t remember for certain), I think it would be difficult to rejoin the helper team, especially now because (little) Charlie has filled my role there. It might just be jealousy, but I don’t mind, she’s much better with children.

Enough ranting and putting myself down, I need to find something positive to think about myself. But that gets so much harder when I look.

I should stop self-contradicting, I do have things to be positive about - nitex went well, we didn’t get (too) lost, and I was wanted for Red Flare (although only 1 team will be put into it). I’m not wanted often. I should also be happy that I have good friends, after all, Ben invited me onto the GDoE expeditions.

Hell, this post has probably gone far too deep into my thoughts to be public, but I cba to split and privatise it.

STUFF

December 14th, 2007

Or the Science and Technology Club as it’s external name now is (until we get a better one :)) The first meeting covered what we’ll be doing, what we will call ourselves, and other stuff.

Discussion included ICT syllabuses, OpenStreetMap, (…remind me…), and geek music.

Tasks, to research what we enjoy :) and talk about it. Otherwise, the meetings will be a bit empty.

We still need a name, and more people to turn up, the actual turnout was lower than the amount of interest expressed.

I also discovered what happens to tables that get broken legs…

5 attendees.

All Night Long

December 5th, 2007

…or maybe I won’t post an update the next day.

Anyway, this is my post for December, to claim I have blogged almost every month since  Dec 04! (Although, much of it really isn’t worth reading)

What have I been up to? Researching what’s needed for a Gold Duke of Edinburgh’s award, looking at orienteering club websites, and also worrying about the impending Nitex competition - a 14 mile night (7pm-3amish) hike from a town just inside Kent to Croydon.

I even bothered to check possible routes for annoying parts:

 

I’ve also been messing about with some GIMP rendering tools, this is my new desktop background:

Neon Waves

There’s also a rather nice abstract Π image that I made for Alex’s birthday card, he’s not mentioned the error in it yet…

Neon Π

As always I have a todo list to complete, and tons of mock exams in preparation for the January AS modules. Phy1 went fairly well, as did the Maths(ish) - it helps if you complete all the questions that are set.

I often say that the world is oddly ‘loopy’ - people know other people in unexpected ways, all that six degrees of freedom stuff. (My facebook friend wheel sorta demonstrates that). Anyway, back in  Jan 06, I pondered what it would be like to work at BBC R&D, skip forward to Feb 06, and I spot a work experience placement there, skip further forward to Jun 06, and I’m on a week’s placement at BBC R&D, working under Steve Jolly. Skip further forward to last week, a physics lesson with Mr Bain, in the usual off-topic sciencey chat, the topic of holograms came up, he noted the BBC was working on them, and I mentioned I worked there with Steve. It turns out that  Mr Bain and Mr Jolly went to university together, (I won’t link to the photographic proof, but he may regret it being on the net since Stephen Mann linked me to it originally).

The STUFF club being planned sounds fun - it needs a good set of words to fit the acronym.

Oh and premonitions - another favourite topic of mine, I forgot to note that it happened again.  The corner of Butter Hill and Leechcroft Road has recently had a new bollard installed to stop cars driving onto the pavement of the narrow road. I walked past on my way home and thought to myself, “oh, that’s new, i wonder how long that will stay in perfect condition?”. I continued walking up Leechcroft Rd, as I got close to the junction with Burleigh Road, I saw a large road surfacing lorry coming towards me, it passed and continued to turn into Butter Hill. It hit the pillar as it was turning the tight corner, and almost got stuck. In the end, only the fresh paint on the pillar was removed. (Oh, and it proves ineffective - cars mount the pavement immediately after it, now, I’ll try and get photos soon!)

Any more ramblings? I don’t think so…

Route Planning

November 15th, 2007

Consider this, you have to travel by public transport from school, to a theatre in London. Which route is most a) fuel, b) cost, c) time efficient?

  • Hackbridge - Victoria, average train time 25mins, 3 intermediate stops. £4 return
  • East Croydon - Victoria, avg time 20mins, 1 intermediate stop. Single £3.80, £4.70 return (not possible to return to near home on same ticket) (+bus)
  • Wallington - Victoria, avg time 35mins, 10 intermediate stops, Single £3.80, £4.70 return (+bus)
  • East Croydon - Charing X 24min (32min + 1chg), 3 intermediate stops, single £3.80, £4.70 return. (+bus)

From Victoria:

  • Walk £0, around 20mins
  • Tube 70p (£1.40 return) 10mins?
  • Bus £0, around 20mins

From Charing X:

  • Walk £0, around 5mins

Taking the train from Hackbridge is the cheapest, this is due to the cheap day single tickets. (I hope the national rail site is correct about this)

Oyster cards can only be topped up in multiples of £5 at a time :(

Can I be bothered to decide which is really cheapest/quickest? Not at 1am in the morning. More on this tomorrow (or in a maths lesson, where I may add distance/velocity/cost analysis)

Preminitions

November 10th, 2007

Chatting to mum today, it seem’s there’s a history of seeing premonitions in the family. Apparently my great grandmother and herself both have had them.
Why is this important? The odd thing is that I also seem to get them weakly.

I cannot pinpoint all the examples, even though I’m sure I’ve had them at times (although that may just be slight cases of deja vu)
But, at other times, I’ve been spookily close.

Over summer camp, on the Tuesday, I got really upset and started thinking about my grandma - I managed to convince myself that something wasn’t right. I brushed it off fairly quickly - she has been in fairly good health. On return from the camp - I discovered that on that same Tuesday, my granddad had been diagnosed and admitted to hospital with kidney problems - and possible cancer. I knew something was wrong - or I could just be making a link out of a big coincidence.

And today, after the Surrey Assn bellringing training day, mum and myself decided to have a meal out in the Harvester on Sutton Common Road. After waiting the half-hour or so for a table to become free, we finally made our way to the table, as I was walking through, my mind jumped to the explorer group - without prior knowledge, I was looking for and ‘expecting’ to see one of them in the restaurant. The thought quickly left my mind as we ordered. On the way to the salad cart - I happened to glance to the right at a table, and rather unexpectedly saw 4 members of the explorer group (although not the one I had though about several minutes earlier). This it occured to me was odd, thinking about them, and then them appearing. It could probably be explained by spotting or hearing them in my subconcious upon entering the restaurant, and that triggering the thought of that person. Still it’s a very odd premonition.

Oh, the meal was rather rubbish, our waitress wasn’t very organised, and the food arrived after the table next to us (which ordered about 15mins later), and was just warm :(

These all have possible rational explinations - coincidence, or the subconcious noticing something. I wonder if I can spot any more premonitions that may float into my head…

Planning applications, or how to annoy a school

October 24th, 2007

Greenshaw is getting solar panels

And Carshalton Boys is getting a Judo hall

And, the sewage works at Beddington is now also a landfill

Edits:

EEEVIL

More recently, permission for a greenhouse

Interestingly, in the past, they were refused permission for the front fence, but they re-applied (presumably with different design) and got it.

Also interestingly, I can find no history of application for planning permission for any sports hall.

Evacuation, or, how to annoy a science department

October 10th, 2007

In two simple steps:

  1. Burn some phosphorus
  2. Try not to breathe it in, whilst telling the class, and the rest of the building to quickly evacuate.

There are more steps, but they only involve 20% of the science teachers/SLT.

News is news, good or bad

October 8th, 2007

Continuing my theme of random titles for posts completely unrelated :P

  • V=IR
  • P=IV
  • E=VQ
  • Q=It
  • a=Δv/t
  • F=ma
  • k.e.=1/2ms2
  • p=mv (momentum)
  • F=Δp/t (momentum)
  • Wavespeed=λf
  • w=mg
  • Δg=Δheight*w
  • p=F/A
  • w.d.=Fd
  • moment=dF
  • V1/T1 = V2/T2 (transformers)

Things travel slowly in the cold and dark. (LDR have high resistance in darkness, thermistors high res in cold)

Oars are pointy.

Randy Men Impregnate Very Ugly eX Girlfriends.

Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain.

Small Pirates Die Fast (electron subshells)

Edit: Bumped up this post so I can add a new mnemonic. (also trimmed unrelated mysql stuff) Originally posted at: June 14, 2007 @ 11:46

All Quiet

October 2nd, 2007

Yes

It is

And busy

Very

Seen my msn screen name? Talk to me

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.325709768750656&lon=5.635299338929307&zoom=16&layers=B0F

Everything has a double meaning

September 25th, 2007

I’ve been wittering on recently about my MSN screen-name trilogy, the third in the series that was featured for a short time was that Everything has a double meaning, which means, quite literally, that the previous two of my screen-names have a double meaning - it may not be immediately obvious, or even at all, but there’s a meaning.

Much of what I write is structured to be over-generalised, I sometimes am completely random and abstract - usually those are the ones that I’m trying to confuse people, see if they can work out the sub-text.

Often what is left in the public posts of the blog is sanitised, for every public post I’ve written recently, there could be one or two private ones - to fill in more details that only I wish to remember, fill in more details about my state of mind - to depress me in the future maybe. I have such a poor memory for emotions and events, it’s useful sometimes.

Sometimes these private posts may contain my complete thought trail - usually which I have formulated when travelling on my own from place-to-place, its when I think the most. I will likely generalise the content of the thought and place it in some sort of weekly digest, but yeah - what you see is very little.

My challenge to the few readers of this blog is to find the sub-text, pull me up on it over MSN or via comments here - get inside my head some more.

Why am I doing this? No idea.

svn

September 22nd, 2007

svn is a cool thing, very useful. I hadn’t considered getting the blog’s source from svn, but I now do - it’ll ease the upgrade process in the future.

Simply 2 commands to upgrade - perfection!

I also need to work out how to install svn on the server for local source control - tracking my programming projects. A lighter-weight tool may be of more use, but a web-interface (either written by myself or grabbed from somewhere else) would be really cool - I want to be open source when my website is finally written.

Everything is mostly nothing

September 21st, 2007

Part 2 of my 3-part MSN screen-name oddness for this week.

When you get down to a veeeeery tiny scale, odd things start happening. Think about this:
If the nucleus of an atom was the size of a football, its electrons would be the size of peas, and orbiting 1/2 a mile away.

Now, that is quite unbelievable, most of every atom is literally empty space - yet how come everything isn’t see through, and I can’t just put my hand through a table.

The world is an odd place, when studying physics it’s good to ask these questions, but don’t become too absorbed - we live at a high scale - reality to us is what we have always known it as,  just because much of the stuff around us is 99% nothing, its nothing much to worry about.

Odd…

September 21st, 2007

…how things happen at the last minute.

…how they’re always prevented by something else.

…I always mess up.

…how it will resolve eventually.

…how much I regret my indecisiveness.

…how much I want to change yet can’t.

Music

September 20th, 2007

Listening to Huw Stephens’ Radio 1 show this evening, there’s some very good tracks from unsigned bands. One particularly happy, and slightly odd tune is Heartbeat by Kate Goes, very interesting use of squeaky toy noises. HMF by Brandon Steep was also quite good. I need to listen again to this show, some good stuff here.

Update: linkified music.

Edit: Miaoux Miaoux is very relaxing, too.

Status

September 18th, 2007

The sine wave has entered the negative state, continuing down.

Depressing

September 18th, 2007

I’ve discovered that someone who has been in hospital has suddenly worsened, they’re in a bad situation. I liked her, will always remember her, great person.

It’s depressing when people you know are literally on the brink, due to whatever cause.

Get well soon, I’m thinking.

Randomness is Beautiful

September 16th, 2007

has been on my MSN screen name for sometime. I’m rather disappointed that no-one asked my reasoning behind it.

Essentially, the universe is the result of random events. Nature and reality is beautiful, therefore randomness produces beauty.

This can be extended to think about pi. Pi is everyone’s favourite number, its one of those irrational numbers that goes on forever into random-decimal-ness. The prinicpal of an irrational number is odd - it is why it is called irrational. Everyone knows that pi is the relationship between the width of a circle and the length of the edge - a circle is a perfect shape, perfectly symmetrical.

Phi is also an irrational number - phi is the so-called golden ratio, lengths in the proportion of the golden ratio look good to us. Credit card designers used this when they chose a shape, the lengths are in proportion to the golden ratio to make them look good. People have also measured people’s facial features, discovering that faces most people consider beautiful have features spaced in relation to the golden ratio in some way. Again, the randomness of this irrational number is beautiful.

I could go on to say that the ’snow’ on tvs is beautiful, but I won’t go that far. It is quite calming to watch and listen to it - white noise is odd in that respect.

Anyway, enough of this random pondering, I have some work to do :(