I'll get you, James.

For a band that started an entire genre of music, Iron Maiden haven't really been mentioned much on my journal. I used to listen to them all the time in my sixth year of school (and got half the rest of the year in to them as well). After all, they were the ones that inspired Kai Hansen when he was in Helloween, then he went on to influence the whole of Europe. And Japan took a liking to him as well, for some reason, then added bagfuls of musical sugar to it and gave it back to the rest of the world, most of which didn't want it.

This evening I've acquired a headache, largely through trying to do James McKinna's first practical. The process involves entering numbers in to Excel by trial and error (most of the formulae can be worked out exactly, but one in particular has a result so high that Excel can't cope with it, so it can't be worked out directly). Doing the same task for different values six times is a task akin to brute-forcing the security on the CIA's central server, via the keyboard alone, while typing with your elbows. I was going to write a Java application to do the whole thing for me, but I downloaded the development kit and then realised that I've forgotten how to program in Java. This could be a fairly major obstacle in the year ahead.

Some builders have closed off the Bridge of Death (it leads in to the Maths building) and the corridor below it, so now instead of walking to two metres from the car park to the Honours lab I have to climb the stairs, go in to Physics, through the cafe, over the bridge to Maths, down the stairs, out the door to get the matter of inches away from where I was in the first place, and in the other door.

However, that won't bother me for long, because tomorrow I'm off to Edzell for computer science's Reading Party to "get some experience with giving presentations" - an excuse to bus us all off for a couple of days away. I'm going to be talking about computers versus the music industry, and why it deserves to be in the state it's in now. (I've already lifted a considerable bit from gr33bo's Sinner article on the subject ages ago - thanks for that.)

Actually, this post's given me an idea. Type "dancing robot" with your elbows (or just the one if you like) and post it as a reply back. Just if you haven't got anything better to do.