h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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.

Welcome back...

Durham Uni isn't the only place with new timetable software, believe me. My school ALSO got some, and guess what happened? That's right, system incompatibility or whatever, and Kaput! They did manage to get the lessons sorted out, but in my case I had to cross reference my lessons with the blocks, and then find that lesson in each block to find out where my lesson was, and who was teaching it...

I haven't got the new Discworld yet, for two main reasons...1) I'm supposed to be reading my English texts (read Dr Faustus, read half of King Lear, and need to read the second half of The Spire (by William Golding) by Thursday (That's right; after reading and hating "Lord of the Flies" by Golding last year, I get to study ANOTHER Golding book this year)); 2) I might use my prize money on it - nice school giving book money to me.... Is it any good? In his more recent Night Watch/Monstrous Regiment style, or back to his older, funnier stuff?

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this academic year as much as I currently am...and don't suffer "isn't this question actually very stupid?" overload, like mine does when I hear philisophical questions....

Listening to Tertiary Phase at the moment?

Listening to Tertiary Phase on Tuesdays, yes.

Going Postal isn't _quite_ so much a 'straight' narrative as Monstrous Regiment was, but it isn't that much of a return to earlier days either. It satirises corporate crime quite a lot, but some aspects of it are still pretty serious. I enjoyed it lots; it possibly helps that I read Private Eye.

My old secondary generally used to get the Sixth Form timetables out on time; they did this, one year, by doing some years, like the ones ending in exams, first, and taking about a week to get timetables out to Year 8. I, of course, was in Year 8 that year.

The stock philosophical answer to your question is, 'What do you mean by "stupid"?' Anyway, good luck with the texts. I haven't read any of those, so I can't really comment on them further... My own response to my most boring A-Level text was ridicule; I managed to amuse the English Dept. with 'Jane Austin's "Erra"', my own demonstration of how the text could have been made more interesting. Of course, I probably had more free time than you have, at least when I wasn't in the grip of a three-way essay onslaught.

Welcome back! That Voynich thing sounds interesting. I'd never heard of it.

And ya gotta love research that results in a "Frogguy alphabet"

Hi, Hellbound. Sorry about the delay in replying; hopefully you spotted the note in my tagline.

I'm not sure whether the book I read on the Voynich manuscript (The Voynich Manuscript, by Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill, published by Orion, ISBN 075285996X) is easily available in the US; Amazon's US site says it's not yet released, which I take to imply that a US release is expected. But anyway, to judge from your last post you've evidently tracked some stuff down online. (The book doesn't actually mention Frogguy; in fact, a lot of it consists of digressions do do with what the manuscript may mean and where it may come from.)

There are several books on the MS available through Amazon US. The subject is interesting but I probably won't buy any books. There seems to be quite a bit of info available on line plus several lines of Voynich fonts!