Rants and ramblings of a lecturer
Congratulations to all those that graduated yesterday.
If you missed out on buying a copy of the department photo, don’t worry they’re available from my photobox gallery
There’s this year and last year’s photos on there, and I’ll be putting up a Big Bob special soon too.
Richard
I’m currently writing a “must bring these things” letter for our new intake, so that they can bring along the right stuff on the Outward bound weekend, and found myself including the phrase “Always know where your towel is!” Then I started thinking that a lot of these undergrads will not even understand where the phrase comes from, so in the hope of educating the next generation I am posting this here:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value— you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you—daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence, a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”
And I did actually use a HHGTTG quote on my data structures and algorithms exam this year too.
Well, I met Lowri over lunch at The Anchor Inn, Oldbury-on-Severn. In about a week, Lowri is off on the Four Borders Expedition, which is the British Universities Kayak Expedition 2007.
A couple of months ago, I had a desperate plea from Lowri, informing me that she’d killed her laptop, and was going to need one for the expedition… could I find a way to provide one.
So last weekend I finally was able to deliver a refurbished Panasonic Toughbook CF-28, which I bought from Icex. When I first asked my Head of Department if he could provide money for a machine – he said no, as he thought it was going to be fairly expensive, but after I did some desperate searching around, I found this one at a price which he could afford.
Hopefully, she’ll find it difficult to destroy this machine, and we’ll get some really good reports back about this once-in-a-lifetime trip.
Best of luck Lowri, and come back in one piece.
Apparently, according to the AQA examination board, you should learn about the dead outer layers of skin protecting the living layers underneath, in order to answer the question on a GCSE Physics examination paper.
There’s a story on The Register about this here – be sure to read the comments, there’s an especially good one suggesting answers to the mentioned questions.
And we wonder why we’re having to do so much remedial teaching to our first year entrants.
Reading Risks Digest this morning I came across a link to an article comparing a 1986 Mac Plus and a 2007 AMD Dual core. The question posed was how has the massive increase in computing power has changed the speed at which the most commonly performed tasks are performed.
“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry…”– Henry Petroski
Of course, some of you might already have guessed the outcome, and some might not agree with the tests as presented, but the fact is that the tests actually look pretty fair when you consider what most office workers do with their PCs.
Anyway you can read the article for yourself here on hubpages
I’ve been beating CS259 about this sort of thing for more years than I care to remember, but it’s always good to have someone else putting it all so succinctly.
Take it away Josiah Cole
(thanks Claire)
When can I get some?
I’m on the lookout for a laptop for Lowri Davies at the moment. She is a student here, currently on industrial year, and a Kayaker -she’s not bad at it either – European womens freestyle champion as well as being British champion. She’s been selected for the British Universities Expedition this year, which is to the Altai Mountains – called the Four Borders Expedition
Lowri has asked me if I can provide a laptop for them to blog whilst on expedition, as their last one died whilst she was in Uganda, and they’ve gone and spent all the money already.
I’ve managed to scrounge a palmtop machine which could be used for blogging as long as they provide memory cards, and can find ways to connect it to upload the data on a regular basis, but it would be really nice to be able to provide her with some form of Panasonic Toughbook, as those things are supposed to be indestructible.
Is anyone out there willing to chip in a tenner or more towards one of these refurbished models? (I’m looking at the CF27 of £200 at the moment, plus a wireless network card and some more RAM) At the very least it’ll enable us to jealously watch her progress as they work their way around the rivers of Mongolia and the surrounding region.
Toughbook at SterlingXS
If there is enough interest I’ll put up a paypal address for you to contribute to, and we’ll buy one for her.
My GSX1100F powerscreen passed it’s MOT today, so I’ve just taxed it on-line. I must say that appears to be a government IT system that appears to work – I just typed in the reference number from the registration form, and it found the fact that the bike is insured and that the MOT has been done, and all I had to do was provide a credit card to pay the bill, and my new tax disc is in the post.
Now I’ve really got to do more mileage on it this year than I did last year.
It’s a fairly hot number – decimalists may prefer 13256278887989457651018865901401704640
Actually it’s really old news, but I’ve not had a takedown notice for a while… Of course, if I do get a takedown notice similar to the ones that have been issued, then it’ll contain the URL of this page, which incidentally is http://pcbo.dcs.aber.ac.uk/blog/2007/05/22/09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0/
and that of course, has the number in it, so I can reasonably post about it as it’s the title of a web page that was taken down.
The genie has been out of the bottle for a while now. When will these people realise that we want to be able to use things that we pay for in ways that they haven’t thought of yet. We don’t like DRM, because it stops us from using Macs and Linux boxes, not to mention my old Amigas. Their bully boy tactics just irritate the savvy punters, and are they not usually the early adopters – the ones that pay the premiums to prove the new tech before the prices come down to consumer level?
There’s some rather nice designs for shirts with it on at Cafe Press
And don’t forget to get your very own number at Freedom to tinker