I occaisionally stop with the self delusion, and remember that I haven’t really finished my degree yet. I’ve got a presentation on Thursday, and for a presentation, ideas generally gravitate towards Powerpoint slides. But in the Economist on Friday I saw an advert for a book critical of Powerpoint, and I’ve just stumbled across a rather clever summary of the report. I’ve seen other critiques of powerpoint presentations, where the outcome was slightly more important than my forthcoming talk. Take some Boeing engineers, saying that tile penetration on a Space Shuttle is possible, but that the test data only goes up to 3 cubic inches, whereas the piece that struck the Columbia was 1,920 cubic inches. Yet they presented it in such a poor way that the audience thought that there was no danger from tile penetration. In a similar manner, but before powerpoint came along, the Challenger space shuttle was fatally launched due to bad information design - when the O-ring information was rearranged into the extrapolated graph, it showed it was almost certain the disaster would occur.

So hopefully a bad presentation on Thursday won’t kill anyone, but I’m looking for diffent ideas than a bullet-point list of things I did for my project.

So Thursday afternoon was spent at the Natural History Museum, due to the growing sense of guilt at never having been there before. The highlight was definitely the photo exhibition outside - if I ever needed a reason to both go abroad and have an expensive camera, then that would be it. If you happen to live near London, or more likely, if you happen to have spent years of your life just round the corner from it, I’d recommend you spend half an hour looking round. A two-hour flyby visit of the rest of the museum was fairly pedestrian, but I guess I’m just not awed by most of it, after having spent a lifetime watching documentaries already.

Thursday evening saw some Jazz in the union, which became steadily more wavering and unfocussed as the night went on. Or perhaps that was just me. Gary seemed to be getting mildly irritated, as the rest of his housemates (the full-time ones I mean) tried their best to piss him off and stop him from going to bed.

Friday started slowly (ahem), and some work was eventually started on Project Brightstar (gasp, I hear you say; well, those of you who know what it is). Got to do some work on getting the PEAR DB libraries, and get into the habit of doing some CVS shenanigans though. A bit of C&C Generals, and (almost) some exercise in the local park, only thwarted by some back pain issues. Then a meal out for Larry’s birthday, and a bit of drinking and dancing at Walkabout.

Today has mainly involved sleeping, and that’s fine by me. A fry-up, a trip to the laundrette, and now some talk about Brightstar with Gary.

And that, as they say, is that. Well, barring a presentation next week, and the eternal possibility of a viva the week after, I’m finished. Now where did I leave those beers… Ah, yes, in the fridge. Each time over the last few weeks I’ve felt like having some beers, I took some more cans from the cupboard and put them in the fridge. There’s a fair old collection waiting for me to get home…

And congratulations, or perhaps commiserations, kudos or whatever to Sam, who correctly identified yesterday’s post as the sound of my printer, and he also knew that it was an HP DeskJet from the sound it made. Really, really scarey, Sam; you’re a freak.

Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiiit. Vssssssssssht. Hurumph. (Pause.) Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iit. Vrrrrn - iit….(suspicious pause….) VVVrrrrn - iiiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiit. Vrrrrn - iiiit….

Heh.

Just a quicky, since I’m supposed to be working. Dan has entered the world of weblogging, but you guys don’t get to see the posts that were in it why he was developing it. As he mentions, Dan often has a "unique take on English spelling and grammar", so there were fishy tales of ‘more testy carp’. Still, I’m quietly pleased that I’ve got one up on Mr Sharpe, and yes, my ‘help’ with Dan’s weblog was many restricted to me puritanically ranting about his HTML code not meeting my standards (watch out if anyone ever retorts ‘but it validates!!’ - that’s only a start. Mwa ha ha ha ha.).

That’ll do, since I’ve now written more words here than in my project today. Hmmm.

I heard this on the TV while I was doing the washing up earlier.

"In the UK, women spend an average 35 hours a week doing housework, whereas men only spend 5. What I want to know is, why are women so slow at it?"

Hehe. On another tack, I laugh every day at Calvin and Hobbes, which I get delivered by email. There’s two ways of looking at it - for me, it used to be a cartoon about a kid (Calvin) and his pet tiger (Hobbes), which pretends to be a teddy bear whenever adults are around. Now I reckon it’s about a mentally disturbed kid (Calvin) and his attempts to project his alter-ego or somesuch onto a teddy bear (Hobbes). Still, it’s really funny, and the three-weeks of strips detailing Calvin’s time-travelling attempts to avoid homework have been really great. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with even vaguely the same sense of humour as me. That, along with Dilbert and Peanuts, keep me smiling.