Monday, 17th January, 2005

Back to School

Just a quick note: Teaching starts again today. That's not entirely true actually — teaching doesn't start until the 24th, but a few of us are going in to thrash through some ideas for what's going on this next semester. There's one or two projects with the students that I need to get myself involved in — on a technical level. Not my most favourite pastime, but should be good and fruitful nonetheless

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I noticed an odd thing last night — I seemed to show up in www.gravatar.com's list of highest referrers a few days ago. This is Not A Good Thing™ — their server must experience a huge drain on their bandwidth, so I'm either going to have to write some sort of caching script, or make a donation.

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One other quick note (to self): Cheese gives you dreams. Helping a friend finish off an entire Camenbert because "it needs finishing" gives you nightmares.

I did see that the other day Neil — there was a fair bit of discussion and what seemed to be a port of a Python (or Perl?) script over to PHP, but it seemed to be far too complicated ... over complicated, and more than what Other Neil had proposed. Maybe I should read more of it (I only skimmed, in fairness) — I was thinking though of a simple folder-based cache, much along the same lines as MagpieRSS uses to avoid overloading del.icio.us's servers

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reads a bit more

It would seem that Tom has enabled wide.gravatar.com — so the gravatars are distributed over several proxies. I'll change my script to use that instead, but I'd still like to write my own cache...

Two bloody floors

The lifts in the building I work are a continual source of frustration for me. There are nine floors in total, and the one I seem to spend the majority of my time on is the second — the main exit, and the only place I can have a cigarette.

There are several things about the lifts that annoy me (mostly their inability to come straight away when I press the button, and instead do an intricate dance around the top few floors before condescending to come down to where I am...), but today, my annoyance is directed at the other lift users.

The floors aren't very tall — the stairs that run up the building aren't particularly steep, yet I'm continually running into people who have got on the floor below me, and are going up two floors.

Two floors?! Are they that lazy/unfit?

Even me, with my (apparently unattractive) cigarette habit can sprint up six flights of stairs and not feel out of breath. In fact, I'm convinced a bit of exercise is good for the body.

I've noticed though, that it seems to be the students who are the main offenders in the Using The Lift When Walking Would Be Just As Easy game — maybe they're not eating properly. Maybe I shouldn't criticise

I did once, though, witness someone getting into the lift, and using it to go down one floor. That was the laziest thing I've ever seen...

Yes Kath pfft

Two bloody minutes

I had a close call earlier on today ... a car parking-related one. Not my usual "stuck behind some doddering idiot who checks out every floor at 10 miles an hour when the rest of us know there isn't a space until floor 15" malarky (although that did happen, natch), nah this time it was a "race for the ticket machine" adventure:

What with it being January and all that, I'm on a bit of a tight budget right now. And I had just enough money on me today to get petrol, and pay for the car park. The car park near where I work, is extortionate really, or more to the point, there isn't a gradual scale of a tarif — up to 5 hours is £2.90, over 5 hours is £5.80 — a bit crap really, if you ask me...

Anyway, I got into work at about 11 this morning, and I knew that the little (actually, he's rather fat) man who works the barrier to the Uni car park goes home at 4pm, so, cunning plan : Go get my car at 4pm, pay the 'under 5 hours' charge and leave FFR (who is my car ) in the Uni car park until I'm ready to go.

To be honest, it was about quarter past 11 when I got in, so, as I wandered over to the car park at 3.58pm, I figured I had plenty of time. This is me, wandering to the car park:

"la la la, la la la"

Except, when I checked my ticket, it said 11.06am So I had 8 minutes to get there. Which I figured was plenty of time still, but I didn't take into account the queue of 20 people all stuck behind some giggling bloody students who couldn't feed a five pound note into the machine

I, naturally enough, was fuming at the back of the queue. If they delayed me for more than 4 minutes now, it'd end up costing me twice as much to park today.

Hapy ending: The man in the brown suit and hat came out of his booth and fiddled with the machine, and I got my ticket paid for at 4.04pm, two minutes inside the time. God knows what I would have done otherwise.

Probably thrown (a) a strop, and (b) my handbag at the students.

Or something like that

Wow — OK, I admit, my stropping is negligible in comparison to that

Taking a bike would be something I might consider (taking into account the cost and stuff) — except, I travel 70 miles to work, so it's not really an option.

If I worked at Lancaster Uni, then I'd probably take the bus, or cycle.

(cue everyone who knows me rolling their eyes and muttering: "Yeah, Siobhan — of course you'd cycle. It's not like you use your car to go to the local shop to buy milk is it?"