Journal Entries
Fancy hearing cake, rather than hearing about timetables.
Posted Oct 9, 2004
Another year has begun at the University of Durham, and, true to form, the bureaucrats of Old Shire Hall have made things extra exciting by adopting some new timetabling software. Naturally, this has sent the entire system into meltdown, with the timetable being finalised about eight hours before lectures started. (An internal e-mail assures us that the University was using commercial software; goodness knows what would have happened if they'd written their own.) I seem to have got off lightly, and thus far haven't had any problems -- although two of my lecturers are now trying to get lectures moved from the dark corners of the Science Site to the more familiar environs of Elvet Riverside. Pity the freshers, who signed on to modules while all this was going on -- as if the queues weren't bad enough. At least the rest of us signed on to modules last term.
I had a nice, relaxing Summer; I read some interesting books (Wittgenstein's Poker, about a legendary meeting between the philosophers Wittgenstein and Popper, and The Voynich Manuscript, about one of the most mysterious books in existence, being particularly good -- along with Terry Pratchett's latest), and spent enough time not watching Azumanga Daioh (of which the first DVD has now been released in the U.K. -- great stuff, but what does 'Fancy hearing cake' mean?) to get my current opus ready for upload to A3076571. Hopefully I shall be spending enough time not worrying about the material conditional to finish Final Fantasy VI and write an Entry on that. This year's modules look interesting, although the Logic questions look as though they could eat up a lot of my time: 'What do we mean by "if"?'; '"To be is to be the value of a variable." Discuss.' And since I'm living out this year, and living quite a way from Durham (taking advantage of the fact that I have relatives in Sunderland), I'm going to be spending an awful lot of time on buses.
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Latest reply: Oct 9, 2004
The time of trials is over, but I'm dazed, horizontal, and surrounded by fruit salad.
Posted Jun 2, 2004
Or at least I was earlier.
So the exams are finally over. I think I did okay overall; certainly better than I expected in today's History of Science exam, since there were questions available that suited my specialities quite well. I've been assured by a fellow philosopher that I did read the cultural relativism question in the Ethics and Values exam correctly, and even in Early Greek Philosophy (in which I was a touch disadvantaged; the lecturer was present only during the first term, so he compressed the entire module into that term, putting on an extra lecture per week -- which I couldn't attend because it clashed with one of my other lectures, so I just had to get the course notes off the University network) I think I did reasonably.
The weather is beautiful. Also rather hot. Unfortunately, a combination of heat, humidity, walking to and from a fairly distant exam hall, and standing around waiting for dinner appears to have taken its toll; it had been a long time since I'd last fainted, and possibly my ability to predict the onset of dizziness was waning. Alas, my susceptibility clearly remains -- and whereas on previous occasions I'd always fallen over on the spot, on this one a sudden and unexpected rush of dizziness while I was carrying a piece of chicken on a plate caused me to stagger, semi-conscious, into a table covered in bowls of fruit salad. Fortunately there are some very kind and understanding people in College. At any rate, Entry-writing has had to be pushed back a touch due to recovery time and the burden of unexpected extra laundry, but now I shall have lots of free time in which to get the FF7 rewrite Entry sorted out, so it _will_ be coming soon -- unless, of course, something else goes wrong.
Further rambling, then. I've finally got around to watching the first DVD of Serial Experiments Lain, which sits firmly in the 'intriguing but difficult' category of anime -- even more so than Boogiepop Phantom, and maybe as much as Eva, since it doesn't really have a shallow end. It's a very interesting show in terms of the cultural observations it's trying to make, althhough its narrative style tends to encourage a feeling of detachment, which could be seen as a weakness.
I've now managed to watch the final volume of Noir, which is just as dramatic as I expected. I also now have the sixth volume of the Excel Saga manga; unfortunately the supplier I used had run out of copies of the other volumes I'm lacking, so I have to wait for them to be ordered from the U.S.
Life.
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Latest reply: Jun 2, 2004
Rambling, again, in a bid to take my mind off tomorrow...
Posted May 17, 2004
Actually, the Ethics and Values exam seems quite likely to be the one I least need to worry about; and having had life-defining exams last year(A2), and the year before that (AS), and the year before that (GCSE), with annual non-life-defining exams before those, it's got to the stage where I regard the prospect of yet another round of exams with more weariness than fear. Besides, the first year exams don't count towards the final grades, and with a pass mark of 40% for the year -- including summative essays -- it's reportedly almost impossible to fail; but naturally I'd like to achieve rather more than 40%. Papers covered in my finest terribly-neat-yet-so-small-that-nobody-else-can-read-it handwriting are strewn over my bed; I'm by this time of night too tired to look over them again; everything else in my life -- h2g2 Entry writing included -- has been swept at least partially aside by revision; despite official 'exam quiet' my corridor can still be pretty noisy at times (thank goodness for earphones); and last night I had someone banging on my door wanting a chat about the Ethics and Values module and asking me whether there was any way in which it could be deontologically permissible for him to rape my next-door neighbour. (There isn't; Kant was explicit about not using people as means, rather than as ends, and I'm not aware of any applicable loopholes in any other deontological theory either.)
This year's E3 has been interesting to read about; I shall be fascinated to see how the Nintendo DS develops, and to what extent developers do manage to innovate. I've been around long enough to be often cynical about 'revolutionary' ideas, but I'm also of the opinion that interface design is not always given the attention it deserves -- it's ironic that the main mark of a good interface is its being intuitive enough not to be noticed -- and I think the DS's approach could prove very effective in overcoming the traditional limitations of console and handheld interfaces.
I have downloaded the trailer of the new GC Zelda
, and watched it with the obligatory mixture of Platonic love
and utter lust
.
I didn't enjoy the E3 Advent Children trailer as much as I'd expected, mainly because of the voiceover; even allowing for my predispositions as one firmly (if not often vocally) on the sub side of the eternal sub/dub controversy in anime fandom, the commentary tried too hard to be dramatic, and I much preferred listening to the Japanese vocals on the previous trailer, even though I could interpret only odd words and phrases. Plus, this trailer uses the pronunciation 'je-no'va' (with a long 'o'), so the debate isn't settled after all. (If I only knew where I could see the name written in kana I could find out the vowel length; Japanese phonetic script is very specific about that.) Anyway, the trailer raised plenty of tantalising questions, and the film continues to look gorgeous.
The final volume of 'Noir' -- http://www.advfilms.co.uk/noir/index.html -- was released in the U.K. today, but I haven't found time to watch any of it yet; it'll have to wait until after the exam. There are still several volumes of the Excel Saga manga I intend to order, too, but I daren't have very many distractions around during the next three weeks. For anyone else intending to purcase Noir Vol. 7, be warned: the inlay booklet contains spoilers.
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Latest reply: May 17, 2004
The wonders of modern technology
Posted May 8, 2004
There are some things that one can do without at the best of times, and particularly with exams coming up. Among these is experiencing a power cut while in the shower, then finding that even when the power has come back on the network conections in one's area of college have stopped working. The college engineer/hero managed to restore them to functionality, discovering in the process that at some stage the lock on the cupboard containing the server had been changed so that none of the keys on his keyring could unlock it.
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Latest reply: May 8, 2004
Sasser strikes!
Posted May 2, 2004
My first time as the victim of an internet virus; luckily it seems to have been fully disinfected now. (Fingers crossed.)
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Latest reply: May 2, 2004
RFJS__ - trying to write an unreadable book, finding proofreading tricky
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