Got married:
Went on honeymoon:
Did some knitting:
Uploaded some books to Project Gutenberg:
and heard that I passed the two professional exams that I sat in April. I’m now one-third of the way towards being fully qualified!
More details on all of these (except the exams) to follow.
We had a fantastic day and I’ll post more details, stories and pictures when we get back from honeymoon.
In the first lecture I attended on probability at university, the lecturer tried an experiment with us to show us how badly human beings understand and estimate probability. He asked us to do one of two things, toss a coin 50 times and write down the results or write down a series of results that could have come from tossing a coin 50 times. Meanwhile, he left the room for 10 minutes. When he returned, he asked people to show him their results and, in every case, he could tell from looking at the written results whether the person had actually tossed a coin or whether they had just written down some results.
The reason for this is that Nature is far more random than people think it is. For example, a coin landing on the same side 5 times in a row during 50 tosses is actually quite likely. However, this looks ‘wrong’ to people so they would never write this down as a possible series of results (unless they’ve encountered this experiment before!).
Similarly, people tend to notice and remember things that reinforce their world-view, the difference between the glass being half-empty and the glass being half-full.
The reason that I mention all of this is that I’m trying to convince myself that I haven’t been experiencing a run of unusually bad luck recently. Firstly, using the results of the first experiment, just because it feels like an unusually long run of bad things, doesn’t mean that it’s in anyway significant and things will probably balance themselves out in the end. Secondly, because bad things have been happening, I’m more likely to notice the bad things and dismiss good things as irrelevant when they do happen.
I should point out that nothing seriously bad has happened. I more appear to be the living embodiment of Murphy’s Law, in that anything that can go wrong has. Now, some of these things are in some way my fault, like getting on the wrong train and being 40 minutes late meeting Steven after work; some of them are at least partially Steven’s fault, like the car battery being flat so that I had to bring my wedding dress home from central London by public transport and some of them are just things that happened, like sitting on chewing gum on my way to a course last Monday morning.
I had decided this weekend that I was going to stop complaining about the world being out to get me and just get on with life while waiting for these things to stop happening.
Then I tried to get into work early this morning.
First, I got on a train, which travelled to the next station where it stopped and an announcement was made that it was going to be held indefinitely since a passenger had been taken ill. So I got off the train. As I made my way along the platform to switch to the Docklands Light Railway instead, they suddenly announced that the train was leaving, shut the doors and left. Undeterred, I decided to stick with my plan to take the DLR since there had been various other problems with mainline trains this morning. I get to the DLR station, get on a train, it leaves and three stations down the line they announce that the station I want to go to has been closed because of a security alert, the train will be stopping at a station that is still a couple of miles from where I need to get to and that I should change at Canary Wharf to get the Underground. So, I change at Canary Wharf, can’t get on the first Underground train that comes because there’s no space but get on the second one without having to wait too long. That travels almost all the way to the next station where it is announced that there are going to be severe delays to the journey because of a passenger being taken ill on another train.
Now, I realise that Londoners like to complain about transport and I’m certainly proving no exception to the stereotype but I live 6 miles from the office and what is usually a 45 minute trip took 2 hours. I could have walked it in that time.
The only rational explanation is that the world really is out to get me and until someone can convince me otherwise I’m going to go hide under a rock.
Apologies to everyone who subscribes to the RSS feed for this blog and was recently spammed with what appeared to be 90-odd new posts only to discover that they were actually old posts. Also, apologies to anyone whose links were broken by the recent disappearance and re-appearance of this blog.
The 10-year old PC running our webserver died last week and, true to my usual nature, I managed to make things a lot worse before I managed to make them better. (Trying to recover files from a dead server should not result in having to re-install the operating system on your desktop PC but somehow I managed it that way.) Also true to form, there were no backups to recover from and it was only after recovering most of the blog via cached versions from internet search engines that I discovered that I probably could get the files off the dead server.
Lessons learned from this experience:
So, everything is now back up and running, although not quite exactly the way it was so I’m afraid any old links are probably still broken.
Normal posting should resume shortly with lots of knitting project updates to come!
…that you should be allowed to go back and re-take. Like my decision to go to I Knit this evening.
Just think, if I hadn’t gone I wouldn’t be appearing in a video clip on national TV tomorrow knitting a beige cardigan to show how hip and cool knitting is these days. Or pouting with rock-chick attitude at the camera while drumming with large knitting needles to the beat of a pop song by a band that I’ve never heard of.
And, no, I’m not telling you where and when this travesty will be airing; I have some pride left (I think).
The good news is that I think my Katarina cardigan is now finished bar the casting off and weaving in of ends so there should be pictures of the finished item over the weekend!
It’s been a strange week this week. It started last weekend looking like this:
with me studying for my upcoming exams while working on my Katarina cardigan and eating biscuits.
It was then followed by a bad stomach bug that resulting in me spending 5 days on the sofa watching Buffy DVDs. (6 series in 5 days combined with exam and wedding stress has resulted in some very bizarre dreams about demons that I’d have been able to vanquish easily if only I had finished coding our wedding website.)
There was some good during the week though (other than the Buffy-watching). There was the day that I spent watching a fox sleep in the sunshine on top of our garage roof:
And just to prove that that really is a fox, here’s a badly-enlarged section of the photo.
We still don’t know how he gets up and down from there but he’s becoming a regular.
There was also a lot of knitting done although sadly my food-deprived brain wasn’t really up to lace knitting and it somehow didn’t occur to me that I might want to take pictures of knitting projects as well as foxes. I do however have a very nearly complete cardigan with sewn-up seams and everything. My Katarina cardigan just needs the garter stitch shawl collar finished (which will hopefully get done at I Knit on Thursday) and the ends woven in and it will be ready to wear. I’m so pleased with it (and promise to post pictures soon); the sizing is perfect; the yarn is beautiful (although it sheds a lot) and it looks fantastic on. All I need now is for the weather to cool down enough for me to be able to wear it.
I also have almost the whole of the first of the Leyburn socks (again, pictures will follow). I just need to decide how long I want the leg to be. I’m torn because I usually wear my socks fairly short but that will leave me with lots of leftover yarn and since the yarn looks so good in this pattern I’m thinking I might just go ahead and knit them to the full length.
Apparently this fortnight has been about finding things that you can’t do without iTunes. First, there was “download stuff from Audible”, now the list includes “buy an iPhone”.
Well, technically you can buy an iPhone but since the first thing it asks you to do when you switch it on is connect it to iTunes there’s not much point to doing the first bit.
Somehow things didn’t seem so bad when software either ran on Windows or Mac or Linux but rarely ran on more than one of them. Now that there’s software that runs on both Windows and Mac, as a Linux user, I’m starting to feel like I’m on the outside looking in.
And, amazing as it may sound, I’m not one of those Linux users who runs it just so they can feel that way. I don’t run Linux so that I can look down on other people who have never heard of an init.d file or a kernel. I run it because I don’t have to pay for it, it runs on the old and not very powerful hardware that I have and, until recently, it did everything I needed it to do.
Now, it turns out that I have various options if I do want to buy an iPhone. I can use iTunes on Steven’s iMac to do the initial setup, much like I used it to download my Audible purchase, or, I can install and run WINE on my PC long enough for my PC to pretend that it’s running Windows, install iTunes and initialise the phone. Then I can hack the phone so that it can synchronise with an application that will run on Linux.
But, frankly, I just don’t want to. What I want is to buy the phone and use it without having to jump through any hoops (why do you need a computer to use a mobile phone anyway?). So, until I get over this bout of childish petulance, I won’t be buying an iPhone. I’ll just need to live vicariously through Steven’s instead.
Over the weekend I made my first and, for the foreseeable future, last purchase from Audible.co.uk.
It seemed like such a good idea; I was doing some work for Distributed Proofreaders and needed some background noise; I didn’t fancy listening to music and couldn’t find a film that I fancied either. I decided to purchase one of the Doctor Who audiobooks that had been recommended to me recently and listen to that instead.
I headed over to Audible, which had also been recommended to me, checked that my MP3 device (an iPod) was compatible, checked that I could access the free samples on the website and then selected the book I wanted (The Stone Rose, by Jaqueline Rayner, read by David Tennant). I signed up for an account and paid for the book.
Then the fun started.
It turns out that all Audible downloads are protected by a form of DRM (Digital Rights Management). This means that you need to use software supplied by Audible in order to “unlock” the files. Since they only supply software that will run on either Microsoft Windows or Apple operating systems, I had now purchased a file that I couldn’t even download to my PC since I use Ubuntu, which is a Linux-based system.
A bit of web-searching and hunting through the Audible support forum confirmed that when they said that all iPods were compatible with their audiobooks, what they actually meant was “all iPods whose owners use iTunes” which is not the same thing at all. In fact, the only way I managed to listen to my newly purchased audiobook at all was to download it via iTunes on Steven’s Mac and burn it to a CD. From there, I can now re-rip it and load it on my iPod if I want to listen to it while I’m on the move.
Suffice to say this is less than convenient and I won’t be doing it again.
DRM doesn’t stop piracy; it just pisses off people who want to use items they’ve purchased in they want that they want to use them rather than the way that the seller wants. There’s a further issue with Audible’s DRM in that they won’t publish audiobooks without DRM even when the book’s author and publisher want them to.
There is one silver lining though, while researching all this, I discovered that emusic (a site I’ve used before for non-DRM music downloads) now does audiobooks as well. I’m off to renew my subscription now.
Shopping for cake is supposed to be one of the best bits of planning a wedding and yesterday it absolutely lived up to the hype. Steven and I visited a cake shop to try some samples and chat about what we wanted (cupcakes!) and ended up placing our order and putting down a deposit, which means there is one more thing ticked off on the to-do list.
Then we came home and tried the samples they had given us. (The slices of cake were samples of their different sponges for the top tier cake that we’re going to have.) This was all really good cake and I’m just a little disappointed that I have to wait until November to have any more!
And, to make it even better, since Steven found out on Friday that he passed his final accountancy exam, we decided to open some champagne to celebrate.
You may be thinking that what is in those glasses doesn’t look a lot like champagne and you would be right. Those are glasses of Pimms Royale (1 part Pimms to 3 parts champagne) and they too were absolutely amazing. All in all, a very good day.
as Meatloaf used to sing but three out of three is definitely better!
I got my first set of actuarial exam results tonight and passed all three of the exams that I sat so I’m currently a very happy and excited Susan.
To top everything off the yarn arrived for my shawl and it is just as beautiful as I hoped it would be. It’s a gorgeous slinky 100% silk so feels fantastic without having a ‘halo’ or as much chance of me shedding over all the guests at the wedding as mohair or cashmere would. I can promise lots of pictures to follow!