I only had four hours sleep last night and I’m wide awake. Always helpful I guess.

I added a new friend to this thing. Friend is probably overstating things slightly but she qualifies as being the only person I know who uses LiveJournal and is posting (since someone else can’t get enough internet access :( ).

I want to make this entry reasonably long so those pictures aren’t the first thing people see when the page loads.

Best way to do that is lots of one sentence paragraphs.

I’m cold. And according to LiveJournal cold is a mood.

It’s the finale of ICs Arts Fest tonight. Florence is dancing in the Dance Company and Arman, Anne-Marie, Phill and Deepti are dancing in the dance club demo. And then there is apparently a (free) party in the Union bar. I’ll go but I’m not sure how long I stay. Depends how many people I know are there.

14 nights to go I think.

It’s nearly two o’clock. I should sleep. Even considering the 18 hours I had yesterday. I havetotidy up first though, the cleaner will be in tomorrow (how stupid is that). The cleaner arrives at 10:00am though and I hate having to get up so early.

Why do some localisations use backticks instead of single quotes? ’ is a single quote. ` is a backtick. Backticks have specific meanings in some situations (admitedly most people won’t come across these situations but still). Grrr.

For some reason I have a PageRank of 2. God knows how. I can’t even find a link here in Google.

Odd coincidence. Or perhaps not, perhaps it’s planned. One of the ads is in English but pointing to a Finnish domain.

My paragraphs are getting shorter.

Oooh, ooh, ooh, SUDC on Sunday. For those not in the know, SUDC is the Southern Universities Dancesport Championships. Everyone calls it SUDA though (Southern Universities Dancesport Association is the group that run the comp; it’s easier to say). We (Hanna and myself) are dancing in the Team Match for IC (probably C-team Waltz), Intermediate Ballroom (Waltz, Quickstep, Viennese Waltz) and Novice Latin (Cha cha cha and Jive). By the way our Latin officially sucks. But it’s Novice so who cares. I would have preferred to enter Intermediate just so I could dance Paso Doble but we didn’t have time to get the three routines we needed.

Speaking of which (well not really but I’m trying to pretend this has structure), the London Ball is a wonderful excuse to try and show Julia more dancing :) Maybe she could dance with Marcus…

I’m currently on LiveJournal’s website (obviously) and I noticed the pages are BML pages. I’m sure I read somewhere on the site what BML was but the first thing I thought just now was “Bob’s Markup Language”. Oh well.

What you just read, or about to read, or may well ignore is the first chapter of a story of mine I might just finish eventually.

I just added this website (http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk) to my UDS (http://www.universitydancesport.com) profile. They have a PR5 domain and they have the damn thing frame their website. They really need to sort it. But of course since Caroline is in control it won’t happen. I’m thinking of proposing the website is added to the IVDA constitution. Probably not good to complain now there is a chance of someone from over there reading this. On the other hand how bad would it be to piss people off? They can’t do anything anymore (although I’m not sure what John’s would be to negativity about Caroline).

This is babbling I know. But it’s therapeutic I told you.

I need to add fake tan.

I wonder what Julia will think of fake tan. Does she know it smells? Not badly or strongly, just persistently.

Google for instance have wonderful text processing skills. And their spell checker actually learns. Although the human side leaves a little to be desired.

This neatly brings me to one of the reasons I’m posting this (as hinted at two entries ago). I recently started a new website, http://www.condoms-cheap.co.uk which sells things (I’ll leave it up to your imagination to guess what. Again I’m, not sure who I’m telling exactly since the only person reading this knows about it anyway). And it has very few inbound links(ah, I get to explain how Google works; something the person in question might not know about). When I say very few I sort of mean none. As in it has some but they aren’t in search engines yet. And since this page is not in a search engine this won’t really help much.

Google gives a page a rating called PageRank. This is defined recursively and is confusing to think about from the middle (and since it’s recursive everything is the middle - bear with me). When a page links to another page, Google counts it as a “vote” for that page. So pages with more votes have a higher PageRank. However the votes from a page with a high PageRank are worth more. Not sure where to go from there but I hope it was educational.

Meanwhile check out:

• http://video.google.com/
• http://catalogs.google.com/
• http://maps.google.com/

The first will be cool eventually but isn’t that impressive technologically. The second is absolutely stunning to be honest. The third is nice as a “proof of concept”. It will be better when the rest of the world exists. Now if they could include public transport in the system, scheduled flights and ferry services and keep it all up to date, they will definitely rule the world. Imagine being able to put in two addresses (not just cities but exact addresses) and it tell you exactly how to get from one to the other. Now that is what the information revolution should be about.

This is a continuation of the previous entry but I like the wonderful computer advice of “save often”.

Anyway today we had a half hour Viennese Waltz class. After a migraine I’m usually dazed and dizzy for a day. Spinning around for half an hour didn’t help. But we’re getting quite good now. If the judges see the first thirty seconds of us dancing we’ll be fine. After that we’re just too tired.

It is now 15 nights between now and the time and I see Julia again. Just over two weeks. Should be enough time for her present to arrive even if it is delayed… which I think it might be. Shame I completely failed to keep it secret from her.

I’ve also been thinking about the London Ball in relation to Julia. But I can’t articulate the thoughts so I’ll leave it there.

My hands are cold and it’s making typing hard.

I was walking with Sherwin and some Hong Kong Chinese girl from the beginner’s class today. I think her name was Theresa but I can’t be sure. Anyway I mentioned Julia to her (mainly because it was snowing really heavy. It wasn’t settling though (it has actually been snowing on and off for about four days now - no hint of it on the floor in London)) and she said she used to have a boyfriend in England but it didn’t work out. She then went on to add unexpected detail that caught me completely by surprise.

Which brings me neatly on to another point. I tend to judge people’s intelligence on their language ability. With a native language this works reasonably well. But there are so many people I know now who don’t have English as their first language it doesn’t work. But it doesn’t stop me being surprised when people are smarter than they sound.

This stupid spell checker keeps finding don’t and haven’t incorrect. I call it stupid because compared to the clever things that some people do with text and language processing, a spell checker is really simple. I bet it doesn’t even learn…

Well it’s been a long time since I posted anything. Partly because very few people read this and at least one complains :P Therefore I can’t guarantee that I will keep posting here regularly so you better like what you get.

Why exactly I’m posting now I’m not sure. Well that’s not true I have one reason but I’ll get to that later.

I had a migraine yesterday which was not good. It occurred right at the start of team practice which is even worse. To anyone who has never had a migraine (to anyone? Only one person is likely to read this but it’s therapeutic to assume lots read), please don’t assume it is “just a bad headache”. Search the internet for “migraine” and read about it.

Anyway the practical outcome of the migraine was that I had 18 hours sleep last night. I got in at 9pm, fell asleep. Woke up at midnight and got undressed then fell asleep again. I finally woke up at 3pm this afternoon. It’s amazing how bad having that much sleep can be.

For some reason I didn’t wake up today until 1pm. Which meant I missed my only lecture of the day but it’s not a big problem. I think I’ve finally caught up on all the sleep I’ve been missing.

Greg Egan is an amazing author. I’m currently reading “Diaspora” which basically seems to be a collection of ideas on philosophy, quantum mechanics, ethics, the nature of consciousness and cosmology all rolled up in a neat plot. At the moment he’s describing the experiences of these beings that suddenly have to cope with moving into a five dimensional universe and the emotional stress it causes…

Galaxia Plus is also coming along surprisingly well.

And I should also have my bag tonight! Which is lucky since I need my dance shoes before my class at 8:30…

Having something I can throw random thoughts at whenever I at a computer is probably a bad thing… especially considering how much I’m at my computer.

At the moment though I genuinely have some free time… I have to wait two minutes to see if the GP server will start itself automatically. Ooh look, the two minutes are up. And unfortunately it didn’t start… I’ll sort it eventually.

I just discovered I left my back at the IVDA techie meeting at Laurie’s. Not exactly a big problem if I get it back before my dance lesson on Tuesday (it has my dance shoes in it).

Speaking of IVDA some of the ideas they have are very ambitious and it will be an amazing day if it all works out.

It is now exactly two weeks until I go to Finland (well to the nearest few hours at least). Unfortunately I have too much going on in the mean time to think about it which is unfortunate. And the really weird thing is I have to keep reminding myself that sometime in between being busy and going to Finland, Christmas fits somehow…