Mathematics is all Greek to me.

My intention of paying attention in lectures this year (rather than sleeping, songwriting or drawing little graphs of how bored I am) isn't going well so far. I don't know how I survived having three lectures in the morning followed by three hours of practical a day during my first year. I'm now back to having a string of three lectures on some mornings, but with no 9am starts ever.

The first of these was with Ishbel Duncan, who is fine but does talk about Star Trek rather a lot. The next was by Colin Allison, who told us Knock Knock jokes. The third lecture deserves more than a quick description.

Its name is "Machines and Computation", I think, and it was taught not by a professor but by a mathematics post-graduate with an Australian accent. The hour consisted of him flailing his hands around and writing formulae and proof by inductions on the board faster than a hummingbird beats its wings. I thought I would understand at least some of it, having done some of the same thing in the course that I failed in school three years ago, but the entire class were completely dumbfounded as to what any of the Greek characters or upside down letters on the board meant. Also, he keeps describing proofs as "cute", which isn't the word I would use. I'd use "cute" to describe something small, pink and fluffy with large blue eyes - not reams of mathematical gibberish.

The anticipated fire alarm didn't go off last night, meaning it may be tomorrow, the day after that, or any other time within the next four weeks. I don't know why I'm so afraid of it this time - it may be because I'm used to the new-found quietness of my corridor, with the absence of golfers.

Yesterday I managed to install about 1MB worth of trojans and spyware on my computer. Quite an achievement having been clean of them for two years. A little dog kept appearing in the system tray, which was rather frightening. But thanks to Windows System Restore, AVG, Spybot, HijackThis, msconfig, just deleting things manually, and countless other things, I think I am once again back to normal.