Cas is currently

It’s been a month since we moved into Meadow Towers and with every passing day it feels more and more like ‘home’. I hadn’t realised quite how settled I felt here till the other week, when I came back from the hospital, and just felt… at home. That’s the only way I can describe it.

I really can’t emphasize enough the importance to me of having my own space. Sheer bliss. We have pretty much all the furniture in place now – just waiting on a table on which to put the TV (and dvd, video, and freeview box) and we’re done! My room is now 95% complete with the addition of the last set of bookshelves; it’s just waiting on me to sort out the under bed storage and I will be totally done. Till I decide to rearrange the furniture that is. Moose is taking a little longer to get everything sorted out, but she’s getting there. It’s amazing how the immanent arrival of visitors from Armenia can suddenly focus your activities on finally getting fully unpacked!

There is now wireless broadband in the flat, so I can surf wherever the mood takes me – even in the bath! (if, you know, my laptop wasn’t worth so much money). It was surprisingly difficult to get the router configured properly. Broadband companies are missing out on a trick there – Tiscali said they’re perfectly happy for the service to be on a network (one of the reasons we chose them), but that they wouldn’t give any technical support to get it set up.

Who, seriously, in this day an age, would be content with just one USB DSL modem? If you’re getting broadband, the chances are there is going to be more than one computer in the family = arguments = the need for a router. In my own family, come Christmas when we all congregate down at the Homestead, there are four computers, all of which their owners are highly desirous of connecting to the Internet. Not just desirous, in fact, need to connect.

As for getting the thing to go wireless… The XP platform has been out for a while now. You’d think the manufacturers of a router/gateway would be capable of making it plug-and-play… Then again, it did only cost £50 from Tesco’s, so I suppose I shouldn’t grumble too much. Just don’t get me (or Moose) started on the instructions being on a CD-ROM, with the first instruction being ‘make sure everything is totally turned off, then connect it all, and then start up the computer’. Poor Moose’s laptop – it’s not a happy bunny at the moment anyway, and it didn’t know what had hit it when we were trying to get it all working. I lost count of the number of times it had to be restarted.

But it’s all working now. If there are any broadband companies out there listening, why don’t you set up a package that comes with a nice router included, or at least include customer support so when we’re trying to get your settings (fiendishly hard to find in the first place) into a third party router that does things in a completely different fashion, we don’t want to burst into tears? ^*1*

This wasn’t meant to be a rant about the trials and tribulations of getting the flat all connected, but hey! I had fun either way. In other news, in the last couple of weeks I have seen:

• Cinderella Man – the non-boxing bits were really rather good. The boxing bits had me hiding behind the CC. I really don’t like violence, and it was… graphically shot. Much better than the American buzz had lead me to belive.
  Four penguins, though I won’t be getting it on DVD as I really did not like being forced to watch two men beat each other into bloody pulps.
• Land of the Dead – actually less gruesome than Cinderella Man! Just one intestine shot that had me averting my gaze. I enjoyed it. Wouldn’t want to see it again, but glad I saw it.
  Three penguins.
• Serenity. Oh. My God. You have to see this film, even if you aren’t a fan of the Firefly series (and if you aren’t a fan of the series, what’s wrong with you?). The first half seemed like an extended TV episode (no real focus), but still Whedon at his best. The second half though, as soon as they had their ‘mission’… Spine tinglingly good! Funny, scary, moving. I am not ashamed to admit that the ending had me sniffing and holding back tears. My one niggle? Whedon crumbled under studio pressure and had sound in space. In the series, when things explode in space, you get no sound other than the music soundtrack (as, you know, the laws of physics dicate!), which is perfect. The composer knew his stuff and the music implied things going ‘Kaboom! Kablooey!’ just perfectly. But in the big space battle, things were going Kaboom! Kablooey! all over the place. Grrr.
  Four and a half penguins. It just missed on the five penguins, mainly due to the lack of tightness in direction and the slightly soggy first half. Go and watch it. Now. Then get the series out on DVD and watch that again. Tell your friends to go and see the film – we want it to be enough of a success that Whedon gets to make 2 and 3 in the trilogy he has planned.
• Wallace and Grommit and the Curse of the Were Rabbit – sheer genius. So very, very funny. Worthy of an oscar. You know those annoying people at the back of the cinema who just keep laughing out loud? That was me and Moose. I just couldn’t help it – so funny! And I want one of the little bunny rabbits. Worth going to see if only to see the short before the film starts, featuring the Madagascar Penguins… I haven’t laughed so much in one cinema outing since I don’t know when. I want to give this one five penguins, but something is holding me back. Not quite sure what it is, but, nope.
  Four and a half penguins.

I doubt many of you will have noticed a new addition, tucked in down the bottom of the sidebar, but I love it. Click on the link to see a map of where the last twenty visitors for the blog came from. Had someone from Alaska this morning!

Oh, before I forget – you have to ask Moose about Rabbit Surfing. Trust me. Funny. Just wish there was pictographic evidence to share.

Cas is currently

We have broadband in the house! Still not totally happy, because it requires sitting on the floor with the laptop on a box in the lounge (one modem, two users, no phone socket in my room = awkwardness till we can get a router), but much better than the alternative of going to the library or the lab to check email and stuff.

Anyway, some late-night linkage. (Late night as in time that I posted it, not content. Dirty minded people. Tut tut.)

Intelligent Design fun:
Flying Spaghetti Monster Broach.
Science and Religion can coexist.

Things that have made Cas’ geek-senses tingle:
www.ning.com. Not had a chance for a proper play, but looks fun.
synchroedit.com. Ditto this. Fun?
www.writeboard.com. And again, geek-Cas-fun.
Wikipedians write for Esquire.
LibraryThing.
Governance, Scaling and Anonymity in Wikipedia.
Top 10 Web Design mistakes.
* A Grammar Note to Web Writers. (Yes, I am aware that this is a case of do as I say, not do as I do).

Just general sillyness and things that made me go huh?:
Europe needs more robots.
Proposed Indian law would make the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit criminals.
School goes ‘totally’ digital. Half of me is going ‘yay! I want to go to school here’, the other half of me is going ‘um… this is wrong’.

Things that made me go grrrrrrrrrrrr:
SMS Bible – OK, I’m not Christian, and the thought of txt-speek bible verses is insulting me. Then again, I might just be being over sensitive.
Attack of the NYT. A few months back, the NYT announced their stupid plan to make people subscribe to some of their columns (how mid 1990’s). I wasn’t expecting much of a problem, because it seemed to effect columns I didn’t read much. Then I try to view some articles on the IHT today, and what happens? I get greeted with the linked screen (screenshot later if I can be bothered). Irritating. Very very irritating.

That’s it.

Cas is currently

I’ve been meaning to blog this for ages now since it was sent to me, but… neh.

Better late than never, take a look-see at what one of my internet minions (JB) has found: So You Wanna Build A Rocket?.

He also found this which has earned him my undying devotion (at least until tomorrow morning when something else that amuses me more comes along).

I do like having minions.

If anyone else would like to be a minion, all you have to do is find a funny or something news-worthy, or just generally odd that you think deserves to be on the blog, and email me the link. My contact details can be found somewhere on the blog (consider it a challenge: if you can’t find the email address, you aren’t worthy of being a minion).

Spooky’s Minion contribution – Penguin Jokes.

DISCLAIMER:
Being a minion grants you no rights what so ever.
Be emailing a link you are giving permission for the blog-owner (ie me, Cas), to mock you and your choice of links mercilessly , or not, as the mood takes me.
By emailing a link you automatically agreeing to become a minion. There is no esacpe.
Once a minion, always a minion. Mwhahaha.

Cas is currently

Happiness is being able to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and not having to take your keys with you.

Happiness is being able to leave your washing up on the draining board to drain before it gets put away.

Happiness is a double bed ^*1*

Happiness, in general, is being moved into the flat properly. The kitchen is fully unpacked, as is my bedroom and bathroom. The living room is as unpacked as it is going to be till we can afford a sofa. I got all jiggy with a screwdriver yesterday and assembled two double beds.
Time taken? 1hr 30 for one, 30 min for the other.
Blisters? Burst the big one on my palm that I got on Sunday from doing the bookshelves.
Not having to sleep with a pillow under your hips to cushion them from the floor? Priceless. ^*2*

(Click for notes and some explanatory comments).

Cas is currently though that smilie doesn’t do justice to the sheer quantity of bone-deep exhaustion I am currently experiencing.

Hello everybody!

If you keep up with Moose’s blog, you will be aware that we moved into our shiny new flat this weekend. If you don’t keep up with Moose’s blog, why not, and you might like to know that we moved into our shiny new flat this weekend.

What this means is that I only have internet when I am in the lab at the moment. I am not sure if this is going to curtail, or increase my blogging, but it will be changing things a bit. We expect to have internet in the house soon, but who knows? This whole grown-up, being responsible stuff is vastly over rated and less fun than it looks!

Looking back over the archives ^*1* I noticed that I have blogged very little, verging on nothing, about the trials and tribulations of the past month. There is one glancing mention of house hunting, but that’s pretty much it. Seeing as how I’ve blogged about pretty much every other major ^*2* event in my life, even if only in passing, this could be considered odd.

Then you think of the stress involved in finding a new place to live, and all that entails, at the same time as trying to write a thesis, and to wrangle archaeologists from all over the globe into cooperating on a project, and you might start to get an idea of why I chose not to talk about it.

Frankly, I never even want to hear the words “estate agent”, “to let”, “semi-furnished”, “lease”, or anything vaguely related to the house-hunting process ever ever again.

I am sure that, in a few weeks/months/when it comes time to move again, I will look back and say “it couldn’t have been that bad”. The body has a remarkably bad memory when it comes to pain and stress – kinda like how my mother describes childbirth. You know academically it hurts like hell, but you underestimate quite how much hell hurts.

Even now, just two days later with half my boxes still to unpack, I am starting to doubt the amount of stress I was in.

Then I look at my lack of fingernails (I had managed to break the habit, but the stress just got too much), the fact that I lost my voice at the weekend (a sure sign of stress in me), and my general inability to form coherent thought, and go “no, it really was that bad”.

I will save you a long detailed post of everything we went through – it was bad enough going through it once, and anyway Moose has promised to do the duty on that score.

What I will say though is this: the CC has been an absolute brick. With barely a murmur of complaint, he’s carted 20+ boxes and assorted bags etc up and down more flights of stairs than I am sure he cares to remember; treated us to pizza and mate; and generally been content to camp on the floor till we can find furniture. Definitely above and beyond the call of duty. A very good egg, that Cute Canadian.

I can’t be bothered to work out a good archiving system to keep track of things I find whilst browsing in the lab, so here are two posts I found this morning that I want to share:
Why Web 2.0 Matters, Round Two – Danah talking sense again. Spooky asked me the other day what this whole Web 2.0 mlarky was, and I had no coherent answer for him. This will go someway toward explaining things I think.
WFME – the Games People Play. Just made me smile is all.

Cas is currently

Today is a sad day here in Southampton, for Jeff has left us, to return back to the sprawling sprawl that is Greater London. The end of the year is here for us academics, and because the uni accommodation office couldn’t organize the proverbial, we are all being kicked out of our uni run flats a week before our dissertations are due in. This in turn has led to pretty much everyone scattering back to their loving families. By the end of the week it will just be the Raven Master, River Queen, the Cute Canadian, Moose, and myself left to keep the flame of archaeology/computing/osteology/history/study-of-dead-things burning bright.

It’s not quite time to do my whole “wrapping up the year” post, mainly because as far as I am concerned, I don’t want it to be over, but I will say that it has been immense fun, and that I am going to miss everyone so much.

I did try to find a decent picture of Jeff, but there isn’t any. He has this freakish skill of being able to avoid the camera at the last possible moment – in every single picture I have of him, he is either hiding behind his hands or a pint. Took this one at the pub last night and as it contains both a pint and Jeff hiding behind his hands, it is pretty much the quintessential Jeff Picture.

I have no idea why, but I am going to miss the boy. *sigh* I hate saying goodbye to people.

(In good and entirely unrelated news, I have worked out how to get ‘live bookmarks’ from Firefox into Vienna. It’s simply a matter of opening the bookmarks in the sidebar, getting the url from the info page, and pasting into Vienna. In my defence, Safari displays it’s bookmarks differently, I’d forgotten about Firefox’s sidebar functionality, and I have had a few other things on my mind lately. Let’s not complain how long it took me to get to the party, rather rejoice that I got here at all. )

Cas is currently

At the request of The Brainy Snail, here’s another blog post.^*1*. Everyone be nice to The Brainy Snail; she is a little unsure about this whole blogging topic. Apparently mine is the first blog she has been brave enough to read! I am honoured, though not totally sure if starting with me is the best way to go.

Anyways, I’m not allowed to talk about her any more, so on with the post.

The observant among you might have noticed a slight change to the style of the blog. I am still on my eternal quest for a layout I can be happy with for more than three days straight. As always, feedback please 🙂

Moose, the Latvian Lovely, and myself took ourselves off to the pub last night for the Latvian Lovely’s leaving do. The plan was to play a few games of pool, have a couple of drinks, and have a laugh. Moose and the LL both swore that they were very very bad at pool.

Well, we got to the pub and there were no tables free. To cut a long argument short, needless to say it ended up with me, the youngest of the three of us, having to act all mature and claim a table from the drunken old men. Damn people’s misguided perception of me being the confident one!

Once we started playing though, it turns out that Moose has more teeth than your average Great White. The girl is a pool-playing demon. Either that or she sacrificed her firstborn to the Pool Gods to have skills for the evening. I, on the other hand, seem only able to play pool when being distracted by the Cute Canadian.

And… Thanks to JB, I have a way to end this post.


Now, I back to the land of wiki must go I. Toodles.