Relaxation

Damn, I don't think I've ever relaxed this hard. I keep catching myself trying really hard to make good use of my off-time. I think that somewhat defeats the point of it being off-time ;)

I have been playing a lot of Slime Forest - 83 katakana, 51 hiragana, 132 kanji down... a couple thousand more kanji to go - writing random bits of fiction, reading webcomics (I finally read the back archive of QC - that was a mighty task*) and generally chilling. I think L would have killed me out of envy by now if it wasn't for the fact that I'm also doing all the housework. That and she brought friends over yesterday, and I'd baked a cake which was conveniently fresh from the oven when they arrived. I think Dee was slightly jealous.

* - but one I'd highly recommend if you've ever been tempted to start a webcomic; not only is Jeff's character writing excellent, watching how fast his art improves is also very encouraging.

I even have a backup plan for financial stability, if A isn't able to start paying me as soon as we'd like. I've signed up with an agency which finds freelance tutoring work for Oxbridge graduates. I knew there's be an advantage to this aside from 'B.A. (Cantab)'. Although that itself is actually pretty cool.

Not much else to report, really. There's a lot of celebratory dinners and suchlike over the next few weeks. I look forward to free Trinity-party food. Hopefully there will be breadcrumb ice-cream.

High Dynamic Range

The weather outside is beautiful. The leaves are a beautiful emerald green where they catch the sun, the shadows are dark and cool... I want a new camera. *hee*

I am thinking Canon Powershot S3 IS. There's a newer iteration of the series, the S5, with higher resolution and a bigger LCD screen, but it's quite a bit more expensive at ~£400 rather than ~£270. The S3 also compares respectably the Powershot Pro 1, which was a £1,000+ level prosumer camera from 2 years ago. (Note to self: fix desktop computer today. Getting very tired of having to use charmap every time I need a pound sign)

The S3 can't do RAW images off-the-shelf, but there's a firmware hack to enable it. It has AVI recording (640 x 480, 30 fps) and continuous shooting at full resolution at 2.3 fps. These are all nice things, mentioned in this rather good review. As a bonus, MMC have an adapter for the S3 that allows it to be used with any standard trinocular microscope; that'll be handy when/if I want to go into real micro-photography. I'd like to try doing darkfield photography of little invertebrates - they can be very beautiful.

So this will be my next present for myself, although I have no idea when there will be money for it. I'm relaxing for a week or two before I have a chat with A at which we'll probably decide my start time with him - which obviously will determine my first pay day... but I'm determined to take this time to unwind properly, and not stress too much about the summer.

L and I are thinking of visiting a bungalow we saw advertised for rent in Bar Hill. It would be nice to have a detached property, rather than an apartment... not that it's likely to still be free by ~September, when we move out of here. Something else might be, though.

I am off into town to enjoy the sunshine and do some shopping. There's a lot of housework that fell behind while I was studying. ^^;

If you are interested in learning Japanese, this game is a really effective (and ever so appropriate) way to get started learning kana.

And on the seventh day He shall rest...

The last exam finished six hours ago. I'm happy that I did a good job on all four papers. I know I could have done better under different circumstances, but that's okay. I did the best I could, which is kinda new to me.

So the question forms in my mind. What to do next?

There are literally dozens of projects lying around that I conceived over the last two weeks or so of revision, creating spasmodically to relieve mental tension. I should look back over them, make a table or something... rate them all on their merits and work out what ['what' in the plural. this word has no plural in English. hmph] to do first.

Incidental bizarre web site of the day; http://www.quantonics.com/. I think it's a cult. We shall see if saying this gets me trolled. ;)

So I think my first line of attack for hobbies are going to be physics, photography, music, and D&D. Let's see which one takes off fastest tomorrow.

But for now, I am going for a long overdue good night's sleep.

Status

Study continues - not as well as hoped, but possibly better than expected. After a month and a half of revision I actually feel fairly comfortable regarding about half of the material on the exams, so hopefully in another ten days I'll be comfortable with the rest? :|

The papers are May 29th/May 30th/June 1st/June 2nd... 12 hours of exams in 4 days. Why oh why they can't put some breaks between the things, I have no idea. I'm beginning to wonder if my fingers are up to writing for three hours straight like that - I haven't really done more than a few minutes of handwriting in the last two years. I don't really have much time to practice now either, although I'll probably do one or two exam-style essays this week just to check how long an hour is in 'writing time'...

After the last paper I plan to spend the first week of June doing very little at all... meditate, draw, write, and generally unwind. I'm looking forward to that. I think it's much more beneficial to look forward to the post-exam relaxation than to stress too much over the exams ;)

Meditation and right-brain thinking...

I went to a meditation workshop this evening led by Vessantara, one of the FWBO's more senior teachers. Interestingly the meditation itself was fairly simple, but several of the comments he made in response to questions were very interesting.

He discussed how we have a tendency to label things rather than experiencing them - what he called a 'labour-saving habit', because it leaves us more time to think about whatever terribly important thing is currently on our mind. That's nothing novel in itself, but when he pointed out that it partly explains why time seems to go by faster as we get older, I found that much more interesting.

He also described the value of boredom - something he says he invariably feels at the beginning of a solitary retreat. He said one can see boredom as an obstacle, or one can see it as an indication that one isn't paying attention properly. If you really engage with your experience, you rapidly find things about it that are interesting. That point caught my attention sharply, because it's something I'd begun to notice during my recent attempts to revise the less interesting parts of my course. Having it put into words will I think help to remind me that the material isn't really boring - but choosing to be bored with it certainly won't make it memorable.

On a more directly meditation-related front, he mentioned that one can go a step beyond a 'kind and gentle chiding' attitude to discursive thoughts during meditation; one can actively celebrate the moment of awareness when you realise you were distracted. It's as if a spark of self-awareness reignited amongst the smouldering daydreams. (That purple prose, by the way, is my own, and not in any way Vessantara's fault)

All in all, quite a fun evening. I'd attend the second workshop this Thursday, but I've been offered free Wagamama's with Laura and some friends, and I can't honestly pass that up... :)

In other news, I quit smoking (again). Last time I let myself have 'just one' after a few months without and it led to starting all over. This time, stubbornness will prevail.

Visas and so forth

We're in the middle of completing the final form involved in Laura's permanent residency application. The main requirement this time is to demonstrate that we've been cohabiting as a married couple for the past two years - something which I wish I'd known sooner would be required, since we don't get much correspondence addressed to us jointly. (This is student accommodation in my name, hence all the bills are sent to me only.) We've had to resort to requesting letters from organisations we've interacted with, confirming that they know us to be living together here... quite a lot of palava, but hopefully it will all be over soon.

L is so clearly happy with her new job (she's got an apprenticeship as a piercer with a shop in Cambridge). It's really great to see her so positive and upbeat. I think the opportunity to socialise (with someone other than me) is doing wonders for her. Between that and our ongoing courses at the Buddhist Centre, we're both feeling a lot more content with ourselves. We're starting the full-year Buddhism course next week - something I'm still vaguely astonished with myself to be devoting time to. Nonetheless, I can't deny that meditating regularly has been having positive effects on me, and Buddhist philosophy - once you get past the popular misconceptions about it - is really pretty interesting.

Revision is ongoing, still not as much as perhaps I would like, but definitely better than none at all. I'm running another modafinil experiment which, if it turns out well, should give me a few extra days' effective study time over the next few weeks. It seems to be going alright so far.

I have been playing with StyleXP - unfortunately I have thus far to find a style I like more than the default one. Perhaps I'll just design one of my own - my tastes don't tend to overlap much with those of others. I've also finally got around to learning the keyboard shortcuts for Firefox, and haven't really touched IE for a few days now, which I feel absurdly pleased with.

New game idea is brewing, but I recognise the danger of this while I'm supposed to be studying, so I'm just going to write down what has come to me so far and ignore it until post exams. ;)

Life goes on

It's been a while again, hasn't it... after Laura's mum left on the 15th, I've been busy revising and also holding a belated birthday trip and meal for Laura. We went to see Return to the Forbidden Planet at the ADC theatre, which was really quite good fun, and much enjoyed I think by L who knew the music better than I did. Then yesterday I cooked up chicken enchiladas (which is L's favourite meal) to her mum's recipe (a photocopy of which she'd sneakily passed to me after she arrived) and the two of us ate far too many of them along with a Mexican side dish and watched the Season One finale of ST:Enterprise. I'm told it was a good birthday.

Revision is going tolerably well. Tomorrow I will be having lunch with Aubrey to discuss what I'll be doing after my exams and whether or not he will be paying me to do it. I'm pretty optimistic that he will, something which I find immensely reassuring and is helping me not to stress over said exams.

While reading up on cytochrome c I encountered this FAQ, which looks really quite thorough and well written, and I shall be reading properly later. It never hurts to have more ammunition for the inevitable occasional conversation with a creationist. ;)

Diary 09-03-07

It's been a little while since I updated, so I put 'blog' on my to-do list for today, not least since this allows me to put off other things on my to-do list while still feeling productive. Hey, it still beats playing kdice (an addiction which I seem to have cut down to a manageable level of an hour or so per day).

The term is nearly over and the lecture courses are all winding down - there's a couple more Genes sessions to go and then it's terribly quiet until the exams. Well, aside from voluntary talks of course (I'm going to a Pharmacology tea-club talk this afternoon for example...)

Today looks likely to be quite busy though - the PSU on my desktop packed in (almost certainly - the symptoms are nearly identical to the previous PSU failure) so I've had a new one shipped from Dabs (20 quid for a 480W PSU - I love DabsValue) which arrived today. First task is to get that fitted, then I can upload the Tattoo Crazy website that Laura and I have been working on. I'm fairly proud of it, it looks nice and swishy ;)

I submitted an idea ('Manifold Blistering') to the Orion's Arm mailing list and got a pleasingly positive initial response, plus the promise of a review from a physicist who contributes there, so I'm rather chuffed with that. OA appeals to me on various levels, despite the fact that I rather dislike the idea of qualitative Singularities, which smell unavoidably of techno-mysticism. Nonetheless they generally try quite hard to be plausible and do really quite a good job, at least from the perspective of someone with my complete lack of hard physics training.

I'm waiting for a grant cheque to clear into my bank account so I can finalise various plans related to L's birthday which have been in limbo since approximately December. Nonetheless I think they'll be worth the wait. She's 25 so I'm determined to make the occasion memorable (if belated, thanks to her Mum's visit - they're off in the Celtic Fringe right now).

I've been meditating rather more regularly and it seems to be having a definite positive effect on my ability to concentrate (on things other than meditating). I'm quite pleased and surprised by this.

I was reading through some of my notes from Forum 2006 in Oxford and was reminded of Nick Baylis, Cambridge's resident Happy Psychologist. I didn't realise at the time, but in hindsight his attitude and approach are nearly identical to those I've been picking up from studying Buddhism. I wonder why he never mentions the connection (he can't really fail to be aware of it).

I've nearly finished working my way through the Hitchhiker's Guide omnibus - I read the first book ages ago, but never got around to following the series through. I have to say (risking a serious chewing-out from my dad) that I'm not especially impressed with the first three books; they're funny but not extraordinarily so. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, on the other hand, is brilliant, and oozes feel-good in a way that I find quite amenable right now.

At any rate, that's quite enough blogging - time to grab some of last night's cottage pie and bust open the computer.

NTL

Sometime around October last year, NTL decided to start charging an additional fee for the privilege of paying them by cheque. That rather annoyed me - I invariably forget to keep track of direct debits - but I acquiesced and set up the thing. They failed to draw the debit in November, and then decided to charge a £10 late payment fee when I didn't psychically realise this and send them a cheque anyway. I called them and cleared that up, and then didn't receive any further communications from them in December or January, so assumed everything was OK... until a couple of days ago, when I received a bill for all three months and a nasty letter threatening to cut off my service. Oh, and another late charge.

Was it wrong of me to assume that since they hadn't said anything, things were working properly? :

I called them again and got the second late charge cleared, and sent them a cheque for the rest of the amount - as well as restarting the direct debit - but yesterday my cable modem died and hasn't come back. So after today's lectures I shall be back on the phone to them. If it wasn't for the fact that they've been so nice about free speed upgrades in the past, I'd be close to shouting point by now...

This is a very whingy post, mostly because I have anxiety issues about telephone calls and this situation is forcing me to make lots of them. While technically I'm sure this is good for me, it's still a pain in the gluteus.

Valentine's Day

I went to listen to Aubrey talking to Pugwash (the bioethics society) on Monday. For all that I've heard the arguments before, it was entertaining as always - if you've never heard him explain the reasons for doing something about aging, I recommend going along if there's a talk near you.

kdice has been absorbing far too much of my time recently (especially considering that I seem to be very bad at it - I'm Transhumanist there). It's making me all the more interested in the idea of writing some web-enabled games of my own - maybe with more skill and less chance than kdice. Once I've finished my Part II project (sometime in May) I'm going to reward myself by getting a dedicated server set up (probably with these guys) so if I still haven't acquired a sense of urgency about revision by then, that's likely to be when I actually have a chance to do some real game design.

Speaking of said Part II project, I would like to say "Aaaaargh! Maths hard!" and then make no further comment for now... it's been a couple of weeks and I'm still learning the underlying maths I'll need to get started. ^^; I haven't done any actual mathematics for about three years, so I'm not really surprised that I'm rusty, but I'm slightly alarmed that I'm this rusty.

Laura and I are going to spend this afternoon exploring two of the museums in Cambridge, the Archaeology & Anthropology Museum and the Sedgwick. This is our Valentine's Day outing... and a chance to reassert our geekiness ;)

As predicted, not a whole lot of updates are getting posted, but I thought I'd write something down rather than have people start celebrating my death prematurely.

I've been running a Tor node for a while now, because I think that freedom of speech and privacy are important issues which people take for granted too often. Recently I discovered all Tor exit nodes get blacklisted from an IRC network (naming no names) I wanted to visit, and what's more, they aren't willing to make exceptions... so for now I have bowed out and switched off exiting via my box. That annoys me though - once I have some cash I'll rent a dedicated server to set up as a proper Tor node.

One of my relatives has just discovered they have cancer, which makes me all the more hopeful that the recent news about dichloroacetate turns out to lead to a real therapy. I'm not getting my hopes up though - after all, there are peripheral cells in many tumours that aren't anaerobic.

More positively, my first Flash game is slowly (very slowly at the moment) approaching completion. There should be an update on that topic this coming weekend. I'll probably let Newgrounds host it for me...

First however I have to finish the talk on free will I'll be giving on Wednesday. I still haven't firmly decided where my own opinion lies. I wonder whether I have any choice in the matter...

Today we began our second attempt at a meditation course run by the Cambridge Buddhist Centre (having dropped out of the previous session). I was surprised by how much of a difference having a different teacher made. We've decided to commit to meditating once a day for the length of the course - we didn't manage to keep up a regular practice last time, which was part of why we gave up.

Thus far my New Year's resolutions are looking pretty good. I haven't smoked since 2006 and have done a fair amount of productive work, as well as learning how to use Flash. Yay. I think Flash may actually lower the effort required for game programming far enough that I could actually finish a game (instead of the more traditional idea -> design -> prototype code -> lose interest due to next idea cycle.)

I wiped out my bike on Saturday and have impressive road-rash on my right arm. At least the numb feeling in my little finger has finally gone away... I landed right on my funnybone and was vaguely wondering if I might have damaged the nerve, but it seems all's well. The bike's fine, of course. :

Student Loan comes in tomorrow (barring cockups on their part). Thank goodness. Our fridge packed up (also on Saturday) and isn't being replaced until next Monday, and we're now running very short of milk-money. (No milk -> no tea -> widespread chaos and homicides)

Tomorrow is also the first day of my Part II project - Bayesian methods for image-enhancement of MRI data - which I'm rather looking forward to. Computers + maths + biology = :)

Mmm, I still need to change the template for this page. It's growing on me, but rather like aspergillus.

Genesis

Well, I've finally decided to start a blog. I don't know whether I'll manage to update it again for a while, since I have a prepared essay to write and still haven't finished reading the Bayesian Methods book I was supposed to be studying throughout this holiday... but it will eventually come to life*.

For the sake of introductions (if you somehow arrived here without already knowing me) I'm Ben Zealley, and I'm currently a student at Cambridge University in the UK, where I'm studying biochemistry; aside from that I like run-on sentences, transhumanism, computer games (both playing and designing), philosophy and aesthetics.

The name of this blog is inspired by one of my favourite quotes:

"You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn." - David Zindell

* At which point, I'll change from this gruesome template... :