This Entry took Fourteen Edits to Get Right

[davidn]

As fewer people than I’m hoping will have already noticed, recently I’ve changed from updating my journal with the regularity of, for example, changing my T-shirt, and begun to update with the regularity of changing the colour of my T-shirt. Yes, it’s been fully three weeks now, my LJ has remained with a post about Computer Science at the top, and I am still wearing a black shirt with a Chinese message, the meaning of which I’m only dimly aware. The reason for this is that Whitney visited me during the last fortnight to remind me that there was still life outside the five minute route between my room and the Junior Honours Lab.

Because quite a lot happened in those two weeks, I anticipate that this is going to be rather a long entry. The amount I write depends on how far my interest in this outweighs my interest in going to bed, but I remember that danii_ellie managed one that was upwards of 3,000 words not so long ago and that seems a limit to aim for.

DDR (You have permission to skip this bit)

During my escape from St Andrews three weekends ago, I stopped in Dundee to find the Japanese DDR machine (Extreme) that was hidden somewhere in the city. I had found the address online and had quite a while to waste before my bus arrived. The address turned out to be easy to find, but finding the machine inside was not - it ended up being at the top of a tall dark tower through a mirror-lined labyrinth that reminded me more than a little of the Crystal Maze. The song selection wasn’t quite as great as I remembered, but I did manage to (barely) pass a 9 that I’d never seen before, so I think my ability might be rising.

The place (HYND Amusements) also had an alternative Bemani game by the name of “EZ2 Dancer”, which I had a quick go at on the way out. It involves only three pads on the ground but two sensors for the hands as well, and this makes things rather more complex as I discovered when I confidently attempted a level 7 song and failed miserably. The whole feeling of having to flail my arms in front of me as well as spasmodically thrash my feet around to arrows seemed exponentially more humiliating than DDR could ever be, so I retreated hastily from the establishment.

Start reading.

I made my way back to the Megabus stop, musing that Megabus seemed like some sort of secret black market transportation system because of having to find an alternative stop. They might have bothered to put some benches around the stop, though. When the bus eventually arrived, close to quarter of an hour late, all feelings of secrecy vanished when I saw that it was bright blue and yellow. That’s rather conspicuous in the brown and grey Dundee badlands. So I stumbled home to Inverurie and collapsed in to my unmade bed in my tip of a room to spend a night before meeting Whitney again. More on my room later.

When I eventually got to meet Whitney, I was unfortunately late at the airport because I had been checking the arrival times on Teletext and they seemed to have forgotten to update her one until ten minutes before it was due to land. Because of the small time I had left, I went as far as to drive at almost an acceptable normal speed to the airport, made a couple of laps of the full car park, found a space, and dashed through the freezing cold combined hail, rain and snow to get to the gate. I arrived there just before Whitney phoned her parents in the belief that I’d abandoned her at the smallest airport in the world.

After that bad start, her break picked up, though. My parents had neatened my bedroom amazingly, it looked like a hotel room when we got back - they do so much for both of us. A couple of days later, we drove down to St Andrews having convinced my mother in to letting us borrow the Fiesta for the fortnight, and even though it was the first time that I’d driven down to St Andrews alone it went without any problems at all. Double roundabouts are just very ordinary roundabouts with more roundabouts at the end.

Now that I’ve finally come to sit and write about what’s happened since I last updated, I’m finding that it’s very difficult to remember anything at all. The highlight, quite apart from having Whitney almost to myself for the whole fortnight, was that I didn’t have to eat Melville food, and instead we survived mostly on a diet of bagels, soup and pasta cooked in the kitchens. And we didn’t set the fire alarm off once. How can it be that difficult for other people? Come to think of it, Melville hasn’t had a fire alarm in about a month now, which I think is something of a record. I was terrified of having to wake Whitney up and guide her out during the night.

This paragraph is about work. Stop reading.

As much as I would have liked it to, the stream of work being given to me didn’t stop during that fortnight, and the main problem was the second Logic practical. This entailed having to implement a priority queue in PVS, an obscure specification language that none of the class had been fully taught about or had any idea how to use. Searches on the Internet revealed that no manual or command list seemed to exist for it, so we arranged for Tom the lecturer to come up and give us some help. Even that wasn’t of much use, though, despite him merrily insisting that once you’ve found the knack to PVS it’s fun to use. It made him seem like a sort of excessively tattooed, bald-headed Mary Poppins.

Eventually I did make some sort of effort towards it, eventually submitting one and a half answers out of a possible three along with a text file saying how I had no idea how to do the rest.

OK, it’s safe again.

Whitney did meet a few of the people I know down in St Andrews and up in Inverurie, but not many as I have never been terribly good at organising things. I even feel like I’m doing people a great inconvenience by typing to them and causing an IM window to pop up on their computer. She even saw the interior of the lab one evening, though, and was bored to near death by the experience.

During the weekend in the middle of the fortnight, Whitney and I ventured out to Cambridge via train to meet Philip, a friend that she had met in Oxford when she was over last year. Now that I come to think of it, it was only the second train journey that I'd ever made in Britain, and it went very well despite what everyone says about the trains in this country. In fact, the worst part was when we were sitting opposite some loud men from Newcastle who decided to watch a film on a loud portable DVD player and disturb everyone else in the carriage. They left a Daily Sport behind when they got off. I had a quick glance through it - I had heard the Daily Sport was a bit trashy, but I was overwhelmed by the sheer breast count.

Philip's family was very welcoming, though a minor thing that unsettled me was the way that Philip kept various weapons around the house - he had about seven swords in his room, a crossbow and miniature trebuchet in the kitchen, and a ballista in the attic. The first day was spent wandering around Cambridge in the blazing sun which had come from nowhere, followed by meeting the people from Philip's forum and playing the card game equivalent of Mornington Crescent with them.

As for the second day of the weekend, we walked around some fields nearby. It was at this point that I started calling Philip "Stuart" for no apparent reason - usually I either remember people's names or I don't, but why the name in my mind suddenly changed I'm not sure. A day later, we got back up to Scotland again safely despite the huge number of transfers we needed to make on the way.

One excursion that will no doubt stick in all our memories was the “family day out” to the Megabowl in Dundee, with Whitney and I in the front and quadralien, allly_cs and e_to_the_ipi in the back. The trip took upwards of an hour of driving round in ever decreasing circles towards the Stack complex. This was largely my fault, as when I printed out the map I’d forgotten that my printer had no black ink in it and that as a result we would not have the advantage of any street names. However, I eventually stopped to look at the map myself, then by navigating via curves and the stars we eventually reached it. I took it optimistically, thinking it would have been a disaster only if I hadn’t eventually got there, and the whole experience has completely put Whitney off having children.

When the Easter break eventually arrived, Whitney and Jamie and I piled in to the car accompanied by our possessions, thanks to some amazing Tetris-like packing of the car done by Whitney. I’m not sure how it all fitted in to a Ford Fiesta. The trip up was largely uneventful apart from a pheasant almost dying, and we kept ourselves amused by singing selections from Avenue Q and Fitness to Practice.

Our engagement is the current big news in Inverurie, it seems, and a large number of gifts have arrived. Many of these have been household items, making the whole thing seem much more real and frightening - we’ll be living together next year!

Whitney came along to the brief Easter service on the Bass, which I think made her a little uncomfortable - maybe mostly because of the rain and cold, and the people she didn’t know coming up to congratulate her. At least it was in a language she understood, unlike when I was taken to synagogue. More congratulations came when many of my parents’ friends came round that evening, but after a few glasses of wine conversation returned to normal, such as how Mark knocked himself out while putting on his trousers.

Oh, time to do my song downloads. Back in a while.

Hello, Microsoft Word. Very well, thank you. Anyway, the morning after that evening I sadly had to drive Whitney to the airport and say goodbye, about three times thanks to the queue that winds in and out of plants at departures. After that I went and sat in the car for a while, then decided to take my mind off it by busying myself with other things.

I decided to tidy my room. This is a task that had not been attempted since September 2002, and my room had become the dumping ground for a large amount of things no longer needed by people. Unless they wanted to borrow a Terry Pratchett book, of course - if that was the case, they tended to take it out then return it upside-down in the wrong order on the shelf missing its cover, if at all. I went some way towards battling the junk, but there’s a long way to go yet - some parts of the desk are at least visible now. I think I’m going to have to throw a lot of things in to the basement rather than out, which seems like cheating a little.

Another approach suggested by Whitney is selling things on Ebay - if people will pay upwards of a thousand dollars for ghosts in jars and Windows XP New Folders, then it’s quite likely that items of dubious value such as the Stormtrooper Mouse (useless) will go for reasonable prices if collectors/idiots see them.

Today, rather than continue with the tidying task, I completed King’s Quest 2 (VGA remake) in its entirety. It’s only the second point and click adventure that I’ve ever completed without resorting to a guide at any point (the first being Simon 2) and I’m rather proud of that. I do, however, have three weeks to make a train junction simulation, four to complete my project software, and five to write the documentation for it. Will I make it? Find out next month.

Comments

[plette.livejournal.com]

Welcome back!

Oh, and if you want to discourage Whitney from having children even further, tell her that large babies run in your family and that you were 10 pounds when born and took 16 hours of labour. Chris has scared me to death with such tales and he's already musing about how he'll undo this psychological damage should we ever decide to have kids.

[humphrey-clarke.livejournal.com]

The original Kings Quest games involved so many cases of sudden death that I had to give up, you couldnt seem to walk from one side of the screen to the other without dying horribly, usually by drowning in a seemingly innoculous puddle.

[davidn]

Saving on every screen is definitely wise. The most unlikely way I died was when I examined a rock only for it to explode and kill me.

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

That "family outing" was incredible. We should do it again some time :D. Anyway, good to see you updating again.