Net­wor­king is not the most fun of things to do on your Sun­day after­noon. After having tried repea­tedly on Satur­day night to con­nect my com­pu­ter (now that I have retur­ned home from uni­ver­sity) to my cable broad­band inter­net and fai­ling, on Sun­day mor­ning we rang the ISP to sort things out. We have two com­pu­ters and no #wor­king# rou­ter (we had Bel­kin you see, this means it dies after six months) – we simply wan­ted to switch cables bet­ween com­pu­ters and modems as a tem­po­rary solu­tion. Three sepa­rate phone calls to the ISP later and still no luck – we could get the modem and the Win­dows 98 com­pu­ter tal­king and con­nec­ting suf­fi­ciently, but the XP device would simply not co-operate – even after regis­te­ring the phy­si­cal address with the ISP. 

We gave in and went to PC World, for­ked out £70 on a Linksys rou­ter and came home and ins­ta­lled it. Works like a charm and took 10 minu­tes to ins­tall as oppo­sed to the two hour Bel­kin screw up that wouldn’t even ins­tall the requi­red soft­ware on my computer.

It’s nice to be back at home. 

Thin Lizzy is pla­ying Whis­key in the Jar.

Find the new desk­top here:
DESKTOP

Note:
iPod update com­plete.
Mozi­lla Fire­fox (beas­ted up with plu­gins)
Trans­pa­rent PNG in top right

HERE
This has been very help­ful. I mean very. Remo­ves the ugly grey bor­der around the png image files.

This is a late night entry I am adding. The clock is near to stri­king 1 a.m. I am alone, but with my door slightly ajar, so that if anyone may come past, they can wan­der in and say hello. Peo­ple tend to do this during the day, but when everyone’s asleep my chan­ces of seeing human life are mode­rate to slim. 

Today has been a rather un-enigmatic day, few things have hap­pe­ned that excel in my mind. I awoke at the mun­dane hour of nine to the plea­sant resoun­ding of my phone alarm, shortly follo­wed by my com­pu­ter alarm (the back up). As the ener­ge­tic lethar­gic I am, I jum­ped out of bed, tur­ned off the clocks and went back to a day time snooze. To be plea­santly awo­ken by my girl­friend an hour later. 

Prior to my two o’clock semi­nar con­cer­ning my design pro­ject, I deci­ded to go through the course notes for the Mathe­ma­tics lec­ture I had mis­sed on Mon­day. It cove­red, “Par­tial Dif­fe­ren­tial Equa­tions”. I re-wrote the notes in a hope to unders­tand them; fai­ling mise­rably. I have vague blurry con­cepts swir­ling in my head – sepa­rate the varia­bles, sol­ves the dif­fe­ren­tial equa­tions, apply the boun­dary con­di­tions, fall down the rab­bit hole, flow in a plane, Laplace’s equa­tion. While hurriedly dashing through the nume­ri­cal ram­blings, my girl­friend made me an egg sand­wich. Sadly I rea­li­zed I had to dash out to a semi­nar group mee­ting – a pre-meeting to our sche­du­led semi­nar. She hurried the egg, coo­led it and crac­ked it, it wasn’t boi­led and in a ven­ge­ful act deci­ded to spread itself all over the floor and sink. The thought was nice though. 

As I sprin­ted, in a wal­king fashion, to this mee­ting, I was taken back by an almighty half price pos­ter sale in the student’s union – something I must imme­dia­tely capi­ta­lize on. In I gallo­ped and purcha­sed for my delec­ta­ble self one enor­mous matrix pos­ter, 2m in width. £3.50 was the asking price – a bar­gain. This hunky tube now weighed me down, I had to return to my home place to depo­sit it. All in all, I ended up twenty minu­tes late to my mee­ting, hol­ding two fresh pork pies that I quickly nuzz­led on before my team mates could eye my pre­sence. The follo­wing three hours were awash with witty retorts and engi­nee­ring dra­wings in an attempt to com­plete our fai­ling pis­ton pro­ject which we should be manu­fac­tu­ring in five weeks time.

The design is a Pers­pex casing, with Pers­pex caps, an alu­mi­nium cen­tre cam and con­nec­ting rod, nylon pis­ton and steel pis­ton tube. We will stick it all together using adhe­si­ves and screws and then apply pres­su­red gas through an appro­priate inlet. It will go up and down very fast and cause rotary motion. Or that’s the theory we deri­ved from the afo­re­men­tio­ned spe­ci­fi­ca­tion. We shall see.

This eve­ning I have spent three or so hours com­ple­ting my other team’s “car seat report” con­sis­ting of roughly 8000 words. It was a mag­na­ni­mous task on my part that took fore­ver. I strug­gled to rework refe­ren­ces, reword poor English, write a suf­fi­cient conc­lu­sion and wait for final reports to come in from outl­ying team mem­bers who are never on time.

Then I pla­yed some No Limit Texas Hold ‘em poker, herein I inc­rea­sed my money six fold, which was plea­sant. Nothing great simply because it was play inter­net money of value sma­ller than mono­poly money. But still, it’s bet­ter than nothing I sup­pose.
Now it’s quar­ter past one and a group of louts have exi­ted the union and are pro­cee­ding to shout loudly in the square across from my room. Ah the peri­lous joys of stu­dent life.

Yes, this mas­ter work of red fury and anger has pre­sen­ted itself to you. Sit, pon­der and exc­laim while you still have your voice. Now I must get back to my regu­lar life. Toorah.