Feel the Burn

I had forgotten just how exhausting two days of doing nothing at the Burn was. The reason that it's so tiring is that most people get about six hours of sleep during the whole weekend, with the rest of the time taken up by playing Monopoly, guitars, or anything connected to the projector. quadralien will no doubt be pleased that I demonstrated The Last Eichhof on it at one point, but when it came to put Zero Wing on I found my version of it didn't run. It's probably just as well - being computer scientists, we could have joined hands and recited it in unison.

The presentations this year seemed a lot more technically in-depth than last time, essentially meaning they were much more difficult to sit through. The one that I jointly gave, "The Junior Honours Project and Where It All Went Wrong", was one of the more well received, but it couldn't compare to a hysterical talk on Internet addiction, delivered deadpan by one of the new JH students. I may have terrible flashbacks of boards filled with 1337speak glossaries for days.

So with the Burn trip finished, my last year of university will soon be over as well. I know that sounds a bit premature, but it honestly felt like we had been there the previous week rather than a year ago, and if the next year goes as fast as that we'll be in the Real World™ before we know it.

ModPlug Unplugged

Just after my total number of song downloads had reached the 40,000 mark, Modplug Central has been smashed to bits by a hurricane and then erased entirely by a faulty hard drive. It's slightly bad news as I was planning to put a link to the experimental version of my music site in my next release. Still, I'd appreciate any comments that people may have on it if you can stand the utter pretentiousness of it all. Happily, none of the links work now, but the actual files are still up at the ModArchive.

Still, it could be worse - I've been following the amh_alarmlog maintained by e_to_the_ipi, and it made me realise how I hadn't yet noticed the absence of a fire alarm. I remember the frantic struggle out of bed whenever I was woken up by it, the shock of it going off behind my head, and waiting in the rain playing "Always look on the bright side of life" on my guitar while the firemen and engineers completed their slow tour of the building, only for it to go off again a couple more hours into the night. So I was thinking about how I'm free, and they're still living under the tyranny of that bit of red plastic.

I laughed for hours!