A Bug's Life

I've not posted for ages - I must have been saving up lots of exciting things to talk about, eh? Well, not quite.

Term is now over, and I don't go back to work until February (barring a few days of exam invigilation). major_clanger is also on holiday, but he's lying in bed with a bad back looking rather undignified. I'm getting flashbacks to how I must have looked when I had back trouble, and why people looked at me oddly... Still, I get to be nice a dutiful wife and pop out to the Co-op to buy cheese to make him sandwiches. I've not opened a pack of Edam in years - it's really quite difficult!

Thursday had a lot of things happen on it.
In the last Java lecture, the tutor was explaining about passing specific parameters when creating a new subclass object, and had to come up with a suitable figure for a Secretary object's typing speed in words per minute. "Let's say, 512." He's been thinking in binary for too long...

In the evening I went to a Recombination committee meeting. They're the 2007 Unicon/British Roleplaying Society/HarmUni filk con, based in Cambridge, and I went along as a previous Unicon liaison person. (And it all looks like it will be jolly good fun, and you all should join immediately if not later!) On the way I had a poignant moment at the corner of Gilbert Road and Carlton Way, as I sipped my last sip of Vanilla Diet Coke. The Anglia Ruskin Student Union shop had just sold their last bottle, luckily to me, and I hadn't found any other stocks. So I stood at the corner of the road, and sipped my Coke, and contemplated the sheer delightful loveliness of it. (And the next day I found five more bottles in the Nip-In Grocers on Mill Road! Yay!)

After the committee meeting many of us went to a pub for dinner, which was absolutely stuffed full of geeks! It was great, and I had a good wallow and discussed integers and how liquid crystals are like chocolate finger biscuits and sat quietly while talk of ARM compilers flew right over my head. I stayed much longer than I had planned but that was okay, as major_clanger was at a dinner night with work and would be back late. Except that he wasn't! There had been a mix up and there was no room for him at the inn! So there he was, sitting sadly at home, and there I was, not making a fool of myself at all by insisting that I used to know what PuTTY stood for to the bloke that wrote it, who reckoned it didn't actually stand for anything... (You get a very high quality of geek in this pub)

The walk home was long and cold, I must have done 6 miles that day. It was a bit rowdy in town; usually I put on my "Piss Off, I'm a Londoner" game face and stomp through it. One chap suggested that instead of happy slapping me, he could just steal my hat - I ignored him and thought it wasn't too high a risk as it's not the sort of thing he'd risk going to prison for. The next gang of lads were singing a song that went: "She's worth going to prison fooooor - sheeee's worth going to prison foooor" which, um, didn't reassure me no end.

But I got home, and now I ought to finish my Christmas cards before the last post. Ta ta!