Journal Entries
I love the sound...
Posted Jun 6, 2003
...of chainsaws in the morning 
No, really - especially after so little sleep! I actually went to bed three times last night: once nice and early, cos I was so knackered; once quite late, cos I'd failed to get to sleep; and once at 5AM, as a kind of last attempt. 
At 10AM I woke up from a dream about chainsaws to realise there was somebody loudly revving an engine somewhere nearby. Only after it had been going for 10 minutes did I look out my window and realise that it was, in fact, someone with a chainsaw barely 20 feet from my open window. 
Insomnia never used to be a problem for me - it was always something I watched my sister suffering from with the greatest of sympathy, and was glad to be free of myself. But lately I've been getting more and more frequent bouts of it, 'cos I can't get my head straight. 
I'm just not sure what it is I'm aiming at any more; where I'm trying to get to; who I want to be. It's kind of daft, I know, but I just wish I had some grand purpose; some great ambition that I could justify what I do as steps towards; that I could concentrate my effort on achieving, step by step. 
But life doesn't work like that - or mine doesn't, anyway - so there's not much point worrying about it really. So I suppose I'll just have to struggle on with the obvious necessities. Ah well, things to do, people to see... 
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Latest reply: Jun 6, 2003
Yerhcgh! What a journey!
Posted May 29, 2003
Yesterday (or, more precisely, the day *before* yesterday 
), I came home after going home for the long weekend [yes, I have 2 homes 
student life's weird like that...]
Normally, this is a 2-and-a-half hour train journey - or half an hour extra if you take the connections they suggest rather than 
ing for the ones before. But this time was different...
Firstly, I decided to see Lifson one last time 
(and her new laptop! 
) before I went, and get the train from there. This meant stretching the definition of my ticket by one stop, cos they were going through Hampden Park on the way *in*, not the way out, but who's gonna notice? So I packed my stuff up, and headed for the 
stop. Inevitably, I saw the bus I wanted passing half a street away. Thus, I ended up on the wrong bus, and after chatting to old dears while it detoured round Old Town, I got off at [in retrospect] the wrong stop. 
I spent the next half hour or so working out where I was, and which roads would lead anywhere other than back on themselves. I arrived, hot, at Lifon's house - remember, I had a weekend's worth of stuff with me, made all the heavier 'cos I was wearing less of it. But still, I had some 
, said hello to her laptop
, and goodbye to her
, and, eventually set off for the station.
Now, I arrived at Hampden Park station at about the time there was *supposed* to be a train to Eastbourne. Whether it had just left, or whether it didn't exist, I never figured out, but it wasn't there. 
One turned up within a few minutes, but that was something of a mixed blessing...
You see, this meant I'd missed the 15:30 Eastbourne to London train I'd been intending to catch, and had to sit (on the 'wrong' side of the ticket barriers) for 20 minutes for the next one. Somewhere along the line, while I was reading my book in the ancient British Rail rolling stock they use round there, we ended up being delayed. Oh, good. 
I got off at Clapham Junction, found my way to the right platform, only to find that platform 6 was closed, giving twice as many trains to use platform 5. Hmm... By this time, although I'd *aimed* to be travelling just after lunch time, I'd somehow managed to hit rush hour.
Incredibly hot, and feeling rather out of it, I staggered around the crowded underpass of the station, bought some overpriced snacks, and managed to happen upon the next train to Reading. Laden as I was, and hot and tired, I had to stand for the first couple of stops, while the stream of businesspeople thinned out. 
I never did work out whether the people sitting near me had known each other before being on that train, texting their partners as they went, but they got off at the wonderfully named 'Martins Heron'. At which point I realised 
the train was running late!
So by the time I arrived at the station with perhaps the least appropriate name of any in Britain - Earley - it was about 19:15. Which means that from Hampden Park to Earley took me very nearly 4 hours, of hot, crowded, outdated (and condemned as unsafe, if IIRC) British, privatised trains.
Well, I just had time to say hello to my housemates before disappearing off again to the 'Reading Film Theatre' to see a reasonably clever but nothing special French film called 'He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not' (or something; in no way related to its French title, anyway, which was '[something] La Folie... Pas du Tout' I think). 
Well, anyway, that's quite enough of my ramblings - I hope I haven't caused any serious timewastage because somebody actually read through all that. It just seemed like something worth recording somewher, you know? Or maybe you don't...
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Latest reply: May 29, 2003
Money, money, money...
Posted May 18, 2003
...it's not 
funny
[OK, so this is just one big rambling rant, but its good to get things off your chest every now and then, isn't it? And I do mean what I (try to) say here - have a read, and see what it makes *you* think...]
Every time I go into town lately, it depresses me. I don't know what it is exactly that I notice each time, but the sheer exploitation of capitalism is all too obvious once you start thinking about it.
Everywhere you go there's adverts for credit cards [read: spend more money than you actually have]; there's millions of shops selling mobile phones [yes, they're useful, but who actually gets hundreds of pounds of value out of always having the latest model?]; there's signs everywhere telling you what "you'll love" to spend all your money on... I was amused to pass a 'sports' store the other day which had a line of trainers in the window labelled "Buy One, Get One Free": you mean I can buy a whole *pair* of shoes for £100 now? Bargain! 
The shops in Reading are particularly unimaginative as well - for such a relatively big place, I mean. The general rule is that if you name any big national chain, it will probably have at least two stores in Reading: one on the main road, and one inside the Oracle shopping centre. They'll probably be bigger than average as well, but without actually selling any more variety than usual. Try looking for, say, a second-hand bookshop, though, and you might be lucky enough to find a small one hanging on for dear life in the town's most obscure backstreet.
The sad thing is, there are actually three other, smaller, shopping malls in Reading, but two of them are so empty that most people probably aren't aware of their existence, and the other is constantly reinventing itself to remove all traces of character. It used to be called "The Butts Centre", apparently - a wonderful name, if you ask me - but now its the "Broad Street Mall". They've redeveloped its upstairs foodcourt twice in the couple of years I've been here, and this time they're abandoning sandwich shops in favour of Burger King and Spud-u-Like [which I can't help associating with Harry Enfield's Slobs, who called their daughter Spudulika ]. Meanwhile, one of the covered alleyways has an entrance right opposite the Oracle, which has been deserted for some time - but now, rather than regenerating it and encouraging interesting shops, they're knocking down that end of it to build a "Sainsbury's Central Store". That'll be as opposed to the "Slightly Off-centre Sainsbury's" 500 yards away, then - and no doubt a factor in Kwik Save closing down: hooray for consumer choice!
But what makes this all really depressing is that Reading also suffers from a very visible number of beggars and homeless people [no surprise when you realise how artificially high the housing prices are]. And as a student in this wonderful "free and democratic" country of ours, I can do nothing about it, because although not all that poor in general, I have a huge debt and can treat neither myself nor anybody else to any significant sum of money.
Over the last few weeks, I've had to spend money on the dullest of things: pants; renewing my passport; a summer duvet; train tickets; buying lunch when I'm in town... And then I come home and read headlines about poor put-upon multinational megacorporations "protecting their interests" by patenting our lives and then suing us for trying to live them, and it makes me feel 
. But what can be done? The governments wouldn't last five minutes if they pissed the companies off too much; no one consumer can break the spell of the PR machines; and no one company can change the direction of an industry. Wherever you tried to push, there'd just be a whole world's worth of resistance from the rest of the ingrained system of capitalism. 
But maybe there is *some* hope. Music-sharing, for instance, is here to stay - a triumph of what people want technology to do for them, rather than how companies want technology to make money for them. And no, I don't think artists will suffer: the main casualty will be sales of singles, which I've always found an anomaly anyway: you can listen to them on the radio, and get an album if you like them. Now, you can download them, too. Big deal. When I went to see Wheatus live, they *told* us to pirate their music - they didn't want the pennies the media conglomerates gave them, they wanted people to come to their gigs. If the companies want to sell us music, they've got to give us something for our money - make the product something we want to own. As long as CDs come with innovative and satisfying covers, artwork, inlays and extras, I'll keep buying them - maybe not at full price, but I *am* a student...
And funnily enough, I've realised that that is exactly the answer to something that's been bugging me for ages: what's so great about DVDs? I mean, how come people will pay £10 or more for some classic movie on DVD, who wouldn't have dreamt of paying £5 for a VHS copy? And how come there is a market for magazines about DVDs - not about films, but about DVDs? And the most extreme example came in an interview I saw with one of the stars of the new X-Men movie. They said they did all their own stunts because people would be able to tell "now that they can pause it on their DVDs" - I mean, , you couldn't do *that* on VHS tapes, could you? 
But the point is that people have been sold DVDs as a *concept* in a way that never happened with VHS. Yeah, DVDs can have "extras", and "digitally remastered surround sound" and all the rest of it, but at the end of the day, people buy them because there's something quite about owning a DVD. They're not buying the movie, they're buying the package.
I'm not entirely sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, to be honest. I'm just worried that the whole world will carry on grinding round in circles until it self-destructs. I imagine all-out capitalism will give way eventually, just like tribalism and feudalism in the past. In fact I think maybe we're in the position of Asimov's "Foundation" galaxy: if as a society we make just the right choices now, we can at least minimise the suffering and time before something better takes its place. What those choices are, I'm not entirely sure, but looking around, I don't think we're doing very well at making them right now. 
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Latest reply: May 18, 2003
You gotta love student houses!
Posted May 13, 2003
Mm-mm mmmm
We had the fire brigade round earlier! They sent two whole fire engines to look at the cupboard under our stairs! We've been getting odd smells under there for a while now, on and off, but today we got smoke, too!
Off goes the power - and the gas, to be sure - and round come the firemen. We were kind of expecting them to just come round on 
or something, cos it wasn't actually an emergency: we dialled the station, not 999, and its only round the corner from here! They had a camera-box that they looked through so they could see what was hot (there was this guy standing there going "it's that black box there: its gone up by 3 degrees while I've been watching") but basically they just told us our electrics had overloaded and fried themselves.
It was 16:10 or something, so there was little chance of getting a fix from a normal daytime electrician - and they wanted to see their £550 upfront anyway! So we sat around waiting for our landlord to get back next door. One of my housemates bought some candles while he was in town, in case, and we prepared ourselves for a cold, dark night [with genius timing, we had *thunderstorms* !] Being Computer Science students, we were all a bit at a loss with no power - although one of my housemates did manage to write a weblog entry by battery power, because our whole broadband currently runs off his laptop! [http://www.revengeful-lobster.com]
Well, the landlord got back, and we borrowed some electricity (down a load of extension cabling) to power our fridge, while he rang "some people I know" But after some amusement at cooking in the dark, a bloke did indeed come round, grovel about under there - and 
put in a temporary fix till he has time to get all the parts and stuff. Lights! Heating [gas, but of course electrically controlled]! Computers!
Well, 
very much mr landlord! Now all that needs doing is the freezer [dead], Adam [the 
; likes , oats...], the front door [the lock isn't actually attached at the moment - we just kind of lodge it in place and it locks well enough: sorry 
], the cooker ['s self-ignition button], the hole in the ceiling where the rain gets in [in the bedroom that was converted from a pseudo-garage just in time for us to move in], the grouting in the bathroom [which lets the shower-water leak onto the top of the cooker], the 
s [and suspicions of wasps (family in-joke )], my housemate's bed [he sat on it; it broke; he's moved his mattress to the floor] - oh, and for no very good reason our landlord's got the water bill we need to ask for a refund from...I wonder if the house I live in next year will be better or worse. There's a definite grottiness to this place (especially the kitchen), but I've heard of a lot worse. And the landlord's perfectly benevolent, he just has a habit of putting things off, getting them done cheaply, and generally not taking looking after this place as seriously as his job. He does have a young kid, too, which apparently keeps him up at night, so I can't bring myself to feel too 
at him. But I'm not even sure how I'm going to *find* somewhere to live next year, cos all my housemates are going back to halls [except the one who's commuting to work-placement from home, and the one who's going to Germany and Japan...]. It's looking increasingly like answering adverts and hoping it turns out well - so I may or may not get a good choice of houses / landlords...
On the more positive side, I got my final year project sorted: I get to play with a digital camera! Ahem, I mean "Its a study of object tracking in computer vision" Hopefully, I'll get to make lots of scary comparisons between computer algorithms and psychology, which could be kind of fun.
Oh yeah, and I had a *may bug* in my room the other day: scary! I thought it was a huge moth at first, but it folded up into a kind of giant beetle with a pointy tail, and we had to coax it out of my lamp-shade. Then I took it outside and it tried to fly back in just as I shut the door!
Anyway, enough rambling: nobody ever reads my journal anyway, and I should really get some 
...
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Latest reply: May 13, 2003
A journey of the mind...
Posted Apr 26, 2003
Sometimes, bits of my life are so different, it's like they're completely different lives. And every now and then, I have to cross from one to another, and everything feels strange and foreign. It's one of the reasons I like walking: if I take time to get from one place to another, my mind can take the time to get from one part of me to another.
A few weeks ago, I was extremely stressed about my exams - and for a while thought I was doomed to failure. But I didn't give up, and in the end I think I probably "got away with it" - although I daren't be sure till the results come out. And as soon as I finished, it was like walking from a prison cell to a prairie: before, every little thing bothered me; after, nothing seemed to matter. I knew it couldn't last, that there really were things I'd have to sort out, but that didn't matter either.
And I spent those next couple of days travelling, in my mind - I relaxed here in Reading, and got ready to relax back in Eastbourne, too. And I spent a week, just on holiday from everything, pretty much without a care in the world. And boy, I'd been needing that holiday!
And then yesterday, I made the journey back again - physically and mentally. I was in rather a hurry all evening before I caught the train, and had time for only rushed goodbyes - suddenly, time mattered again, I had things to do, places to be. And so I spent almost 3 hours on trains, leaving behind the holiday, and heading toward a new term, and new challenges.
Not that I was alone for the whole journey, oddly: an old friend of mine, from secondary school, ended up on the same train as me. He was having a rather unsatisfactory time, in that he'd just lost his wallet - and the people he was supposed to be with - at Gatwick Airport. But it was weird enough for me just to see him at all: I bumped into him, and also into another friend who I knew better but have seen even less recently, while I was going to and fro in Eastbourne. The whole experience of seeing such old friends always throws me, somehow...
I arrived at Earley station [yes, very funny...] around 8:30PM, I guess. Dark, anyway, and the smell of recent rain gave the air a cold, damp feel, which I couldn't decide whether was pleasant or not. I had no idea whether anyone would be at my student house when I arrived, so I let myself in and called out hello into the empty silence. I was in fact the first one back, and had to work out how to turn the gas on (in the dark under the stairs) and relight the boiler.
Of course, we'd all used up our food before we left, and I couldn't have carried anything on the train, so there was absolutely nothing to eat in the house. But I'd expected that, and went hungrily down the road and bought a takeaway pizza, along with some milk and a banana so I could steal somebody's leftover cornflakes in the morning. I plugged the clean, empty fridge back in, ate my fill, and went up to listen to John Peel while I unpacked.
After a night of intense dreams, I got up slowly in the strange empty house. My most urgent task was to acquire some food, "lunch" and dinner. I had planned to stock up on heavy, long-lasting things from an internet supermarket, but never having used one before it hadn't occurred to me that the earliest they were likely to deliver would be tomorrow. And what I really had no idea of, is that you generally have to book a "delivery slot", and since this can be done in advance, there may not be one for a few days! Well, I managed in the end, running up a scary £50 bill including 3 litres of olive oil (which I plan on selling to housemates), 18 litres of orange juice, a kilo of pasta, a kilo of rice, half a kilo of noodles... you get the idea!
To my mild surprise, one of my housemates turned up this afternoon - unsure whether he was here to stay or just for a few hours, since his parents only live a few miles away anyway. I started chatting away to him, relieved to have some real human contact again, but I think he had things he was trying to get on with. He's gone out for the evening now - in fact he'll probably reel in drunk before all that long. I decided I felt more like getting on with bits and pieces of "being organised".
I started by buying some fruit and veg from a "local shop", so that I could actually make some semblance of dinner with the cous cous I've got in my cupboard. The delivery won't come till 4-6PM tomorrow, so I've got to make do with bits and pieces and not get up too early and get too hungry!
The next big task I set myself was constructing a timetable for this term from the three departments I'm studying under. After half an hour cursing Psychology for still not publishing one (I mean, what do they think we're gonna do, go in at 9AM just in case!?), I got out the list of options I've chosen and found that I don't actually *have* any Psychology this term. In fact, I've only actually got two modules this term, plus whatever project I end up doing.
The project thing is really quite hopeless: I get to choose between Psychology (whose deadline passed long ago), Computer Science (who haven't even announced the details yet) and Cybernetics (whose deadline is, stupidly, this Wibble!). Talking to my housemate, I realised that this leaves anyone sensible enough to concentrate on their exams before the holiday only two days to work out what they're going to spend the next year working on - for about 1/3 of their degree mark! As for CS, I chanced a glance at their website, and found that this year's project list is in fact available - and the file seems to have been there a couple of days already! No details about the process involved in general yet, but you'd think they'd have e-mailed me to let me ponder the "Staff Proposals", wouldn't you?
Later on, I spent an hour talking to Lifson about the inevitable decline - and forthcoming death - of her grandad. [see her journal: F79289?thread=270040] In some ways, I know all too well how she must be feeling, since my gran's been slowly slipping away for a couple of years now. And in some ways, I still struggle with what to think & do about it...
An e-mail from an old friend held more hope, but just as much confusion - and I am equally at a loss for what advice to give him.
And to add one more bizarreness, the mum of one of my housemates rang up in an attempt to contact him because she was receiving text messages but couldn't read them. So I had to get my mobile and read off a number from its memory - not complicated, I know, but it all kind of adds to the weirdness of my day.
I'm not feeling very sleepy, although its late - I guess I could get on with one of the many things that I've got to get on with: forms, decisions, sortings. I think I'll leave playing with my "new" 5&1/4 inch disc drive till another day - I want to see if I can get it to read my brothers' old BBC micro disks before they decay beyond rescue...
Oh, and as well as over-complex finances, a dodgy freezer, and leaking ceilings, there have apparently now been sightings of a rodent in the house. Oh, goody!
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Latest reply: Apr 26, 2003
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