And the Winner Is...

Cool little "in pictures story" on the making of an Oscar statuette. They're pewter, plated with bronze, then nickel, then silver and finally 24 carat gold, thus neatly encompassing all three podium medals and er, nickel, because it's handy.

There Are Only 10 Types of People in the World. Those Who Understand Binary and Those Who Don't.

Finland Finland Finland

Quote of the moment:
Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I want to be,
Pony trekking or camping, or just watching TV.
Finland, Finland, Finland, it's the country for me.

You're so near to Russia, so far from Japan,
Quite a long way from Cairo, lots of miles from Vietnam.

Sadly only one of those was also in Eurovision.

In other news, I (plus Rhodri, Matt, Ruth and at least 50 more civil engineers who went to Come Play too) had my penultimate exam yesterday and since there are two weeks til the next one there was a small outing to the union. Being in the pub all afternoon too might have had something to do with this...

OK Computer

Quote of the moment:
Distraction in the Time of Cruciality - a Podgy title.

Distraction for love... improvable. Laziness maybe? Cruciality for Cholera's nice though. Shame today's title (by me) was such an obvious one. My computing exam really was OK though. By OK, I mean I'm pretty sure I passed, which means by my current standard of performance I was on fire. After the guy in front of me left early I span his chair around with my feet and chillaxed with the feet up. Best way to do exams, I think. Maybe I should request it from now on.

Cutting to the chafe chase, a big debate was sparked last night. Tight boxers vs Loose. I favour the latter, but I included an "Other" option for those who think ladies love grey... Y-fronts.

Gonads and Strife

Which is the best type of underwear for blokes? Loose Boxers Tight Boxers Other Current Results

Eurgh

Quote of the moment:
"We have the cheapest bed and breakfast in town, and we have more bars" - Cardiff Police spokesman on policing plans for the FA Cup. #

Today was just... eurgh. Am ill. Been taking sporadic naps and doing pointless revision because it's not really sinking in at all. Got exams Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Boding well.

News Team, Assemble!

Quote of the moment:
"Taxi drivers will begin giving out free condoms in a bid to reduce the number of sexually transmitted infections. More than 5,000 free condoms in "discreet" envelopes have been given to drivers from Dragon Taxis in Cardiff." - BBC News Article. What about free sickbags?


New photos are up on my MSN Space, of Monopoly and the field trip. In other even more revolutionary news, I've finally seen Anchorman and know why guns has been accepted into the general vernacular. In other other news, I ventured into the pallet-rowed still-boxed emporium that is Lidl for the first time today and emerged with a foot of 2 inch thick german sausage.

Kent-ward Ho

Quote of the moment:
"why the hell are you writing in irish will?" - My dear sister. The small one, that is.

Life, why you mock me? Why my H key?

In other news, I'm now in Kent which is amazingly soggy for somewhere with a hosepipe ban. It's all about the aquifers though. My degree has finally started to become useful: I can act superior to my mother about aquifers. Hurrah for that.

Mmmkay?

Quote of the moment:


Postsecret won "weblog of the year" at the 2006 bloggies. Hurrah for that. Also hurrah for the countryside. Didn't realise how much I missed it til I went on the fieldtrip last week. More on that later, when I work out how to publish pictures without the connecter lead for my camera/get back to uni where I left it.

For now (and probably most excitingly), the highlight of the week was Tuesday night, when ten of us hit the emptiness of central Shrewsbury. Apparently we got surrounded by police when we left after we were threatened by a solitary sufferer of short-man syndrome. My memory stops, however, before my videoed Travolta impressions, bluetoothed around next day, which were only eclipsed by my group-mate and (so he said the next day) drinking partner/competitor Gareth. While I was slumped on the common room floor pretending to be a starfish (again, apparently), he wandered into the canteen kitchen looking for some food. Since the only storage unlocked was the freezer he started trying to cook, then wandered off to bed leaving about 50 sausages to gently char, somehow not setting off the fire alarm. That's not all though: wearin boots out in the first place was a dodgy enough decision, but obeying the "remove boots here" sign and leaving them just inside the door of the kitchen deserves a round of applause.

Leek Pancakes

Quote of the moment:
"Popular children's show Rainbow is to return, 14 years after it was taken off TV screens." - BBC News.

We had snow today. Hurrah! Midway through Soil Mechanics our lecturer suddenly said "Oh, it's snowing!" and couldn't get quiet for the rest of the lecture because of people talking about getting home in the snow. By the time we got outside, of course, it had stopped.

I got home from pancakes tonight to find that the kitchen was full of my flatmates and associated hangers on being cooked pancakes by Claire and Jenny from next door. How awesome! I was pressured into having one to prove the rude comments by the others wrong, but I got the first one made from the second batch of batter and it was awesome.

In other news, the same lecturer told us that a load of (mostly) castles are offering free entry tomorrow because it's St David's day. Hopefully leek will be predominate in tomorrow's supper. Mmmm leek. Sadly Cardiff Castle isn't one of them. Spoilsports.

Crunched

Quote of the moment:
"It's time to kick ass or chew bubblegum. And I'm all outta gum." - Duke Nukem.

Exams: wipeout, as expected. Totally flunked the pure maths module (Engineering Analysis), failed Fluid Mechanics, missed out in Mechanics by 1% (but apparently loads of people failed Mechanics and it may be moderated up) and my grade for PDP (utter waste of time politically correct module) is a fail, although I'm fairly sure it wasn't calculated correctly (at least if the weightings we were given at the start of term were correct). Only ones I've supposedly passed are Drawing/Computing and Materials Science. Next time I might try practising doing the maths questions. Always useful. Just to keep things in perspective, however:



Talking of political correctness, there was a story in the grandmaternal Telegraph yesterday about the failure of 48% of children to achieve all of 7 targets set for them. Two of the targets: being "sensitive" to others' backgrounds and cultures (cough cough POLITICALLY CORRECT BULLSHIT cough cough) and, also compulsory, being able to write a letter to Father Christmas. Being made to write a letter to a Christian saint, traditionally part of a Christian (or Xtian) religious festival, is obviously very sensitive to others' backgrounds and cultures.

Bedtime. Rowing crunch time at 10.30am tomorrow.

Withdrawal Symptoms

Quote of the moment:

Cardiff + Cartoons...

Our student newspaper was the first publication in Britain to show the infamous Muhammed cartoons, but there's been a disappointing lack of crowds burning down the union...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4689442.stm

I withdrew the post on the paper's withdrawal. There's still been no attempt to burn down the union. Tis a shame, for it's amazing ugly.

Felt utterly foul getting up for labs at 9am, but I made it (a few minutes late) and I've been alright since getting back at lunchtime. Nothing til 1pm tomorrow. Hurrah!

The Road Map to War

Quote of the moment:
...
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

- Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est. The UK death toll in Iraq has now reached 100 in just under 3 years. To be perfectly honest, that's a lot less than it could be. The IRA killed 33 soldiers in a single blast in 1979. A woman going postal killed 6 ex-colleagues today.

I went on a bit of a shopping spree today... we were meant to have a 3 hour (yes, THREE HOUR) lecture on "Soil Mechanics" this afternoon but the lecturer hadn't turned up after half an hour, so everyone left and I went into town to look for something "80's cartoon character"-ish. I failed to find anything obvious, but I did get 3 tshirts from Primark (not shoes, Rob m8), U2's The Best of 1980-1990 from HMV (£7) and, from Fopp for £3 each, The Thrills' Lets Bottle Bohemia and Tom Macrae's new album (that I wasn't aware existed) All Maps Welcome:



Awesome cover art. Jealous, Podgy m8? First listening was ok, the second was better. Really need to try it without talking on MSN at the same time, but the omens are good...

And He Smote upon the Door Again a Second Time

Quote of the moment:



The new semester started well. I was on time for my first lecture. Score! Engineering Analysis 2 was following straight on and had no introduction. It was as dull as ever and delivered unnecessarily fast, so that we finished 10 minutes early but were scrambling to keep up with filling in the blanks on the lecture notes. The Computing module involves no learning of any language this year, we just play with "Maple" and something else, which are apparently as bewilderingly multifunctioned as AutoCad, which we were using last term.

The introduction to our labs sessions this term was a bit doom and gloom filled: we have to do "short reports" in a lab book as we do the experiment for 7 out of the 10 sessions, but for sessions 5, 7 and 9 we have to do "long reports" to be handed in the next week. They're apparently supposed to be 10 to 15 pages long.

(lapses into a Big James impression)

"DUDE! Where's your drink!"*

*Dude, I didnt do that much for my A-level coursework. Chemistry bombed anyway, but I think physics merited a C for less than that, and we have to do 3. The really good news is that I'm in group 7, and thus get to do my first one this week, and I have one left til after Easter to get in the way in the last week of lectures. Hurrah!

Youth and Young Manhood

Quote of the moment:
"I got asked for ID at the cinema last year... for a 15" - Little James.



Summer camp photos from the camp's website are now up on my MSN Space.

Environmental Fluid Mechanics this morning wasn't as bad as I expected. Who knows? I may even have passed!

Revision

Quote of the moment:
"There is nothing that can be in our way, for this is Jekub, that Laughs at Barriers, and says brrm-brrm."

- From the Book Of Nome, Jekub, Chap. 3, v. V

Right hip's been stiff all day from sleeping on that side after yesterday's fun. Been revising pure maths for my "Engineering Analysis" exam all day. It's in 6 parts, of which you have to chose 4 (each worth 25%):

• Differentiation
  


• Integration
  


• Matrices
  


• Series and sequences
  


• Complex numbers
  


• Stats and probability

I'll take the first two, plus matrices (probably) and either series or probability (can't really do the advanced bits of either).

Show Me the Muffins

Quote of the moment:
You had me at "Environmental Fluid Mechanics"

Or not. Test at 9am. Woke up about 4pm, having failed to get up for any of my 5 alarms starting at 8am. Woohoo. Nm, the exam result will apparently apply as a psuedo test score as well. Since I missed the latter half of last week as well, I have no idea if Claire went home this weekend, but if she did then I missed the home-baking lecture. Now there's a real tragedy.

(Update on the illness: issues with swallowing due to swollen glands. Woohoo.)

Red as a Cherry Tomato

Quote of the moment:
Mmmmm cherry tomatoes. Reminds me of your profile picture: red and shiny :p


Midget tomato, or tomato-coloured midget?

Glands are up, sporadic bouts of sweating and shivering, nicely developed hacking cough. Hooray for being ill.

Environmental Fluid Mechanics test at 9am. Bleurgh.

Strongbow & Ribena:Druids' Brew

Quote of the moment:
Get it down... you Zulu warrior! Get it down... you Zulu chief chief chief chief chief chief!...

Just come back from an awesome drunk party in K9. The plan was to head out to town somewhere, but we were having so much fun piling onto people's beds n stuff that that was abandoned. Some people did go out for the traditional post-night-out takeaway though. Mmmm chips. I stayed in and stuck to toast'n'jam. Not convinced it's healthier but it's certainly more economical. Unlike buying an Xmas tree in November and having it mauled on December 1st. Shame on you Little James. Tis all your fault.


Didn't finish my bridge project. Sod it. Serves me right. Hopefully will learn my lesson, but given the weight of historical evidence I doubt it. As Jules said at the LVI parents meeting, "He has a cavalier attitude to deadlines". Yeah baby. I'm a cavalier. At least that makes me an interesting failure, not a dull one. Anyway, I've secured 25 (of an available 30) of the necessary 40% to pass Drawing already, so sod it. I'll scrape through. 70% in my presentation baby, yeah! I can talk like the days will never go down behind the hills in the west, into darkness. How did it come to this, eh?! EH?!

A P-P-P-Presentation?

Quote of the moment:
"That was very good, apart from being 15 minutes long"

Oops. It was supposed to be 7-10 minutes. I still got 70% though :D

Straight onto the bridge design for this afternoon. Woohoo!

Daddy Darcy or Chips Muffins?

Quote of the moment:
"...from our correspondent Mark Darcy" - heard on Radio 4.

LOL. Cue mental image of Colin Firth in long black coat and big woolie scarf standing outside the houses of parliament with a microphone and a texan actress in her underwear sheltering from the snow inside his coat.


Come the f*** on, Bridget!

I then checked the BBC News site and arrived at an article written by Mohammed Allie!

I had a 3 hour session this morning on how to give a presentation. How exciting. I'm due for 3 hours of watching other peoples' presentations on Friday morning. Yay. On the plus side, Claire brought in homemade chocolate muffins today. Mmmm. I also went to an hour-long careers talk after lectures because it had a free buffet. Obviously the food was only available afterwards, to make sure the students stayed put. Mmmm, free food.