2001: A GEEK ODYSSEY

Thu, Jun 28

<00:49> Technofetishism. Crunching distributed.net's RC5 keys on an old 486-33/8MB laptop. Net with willow via plip. There's a complete distro on that old AST now that it has willow's former hard drive. Just for the record, AST does about 30 kkeys/s while willow's munching at about 600k.

Spent several afternoons at my parents' new summer place, no cottage yet though, so there's a lot of work. A nice lakeside property near Rantasalmi, half an hour's drive from here. Listening to the silence is pretty cool.

Today, read a physics philosophy book by Enqvist. Nice reading, though not very much new to me. He explained caerfully how the 'seemingly conflicting' ideas of holism and reductionism are in fact the same thing (via emergent effects), I had never thought there was any difference.. maybe these things are obvious at this level of a physics career. Anyway. Time to get ready for a trip to Kuopio and the Hog Feast. ;-P

Tue, Jun 19

<02:24> Just had my evening walk and a vegeburger at Gardi's. In fact spent almost two hours outdoors, as I got stuck in a discussion with Andrew and Tom, debating religions as usual. On my way back to town from the walk, a group of three guys were passing by, suddenly one of them asked me about my hat (kind of old men's cap) and wanted to buy it. I thought I could make some money, having paid only 5 FIM for it, but they only had £ 1.50 altogether. But as the guy literally started begging, I could not help. I'm not a hat person anyway. ^_^

Mon, Jun 18

<03:49> ARGV[]. Though wearing a kilt may be a neat way to sneak into a female-only college, wearing it there can also be hazardous to your privacy. But what the heck. Based on this night, I will probably materialize at New Hall events during next year too. The house dome is probably the best dance venue I've ever been to, and the industrial basement had wicked 1-D acoustics. (OK, the basement was really drum n' bass but I couldn't help picking the industrial overtones, perhaps my boots had the effect of amplifying those elements.) The only bad side about this night was that I couldn't truly concentrate on the music with all those women around. Damn n' Blast.

Sun, Jun 17

<00:09> Well perhaps today wasn't ideal for punting either. Damn shame. Looks like there won't be a Finnish punting event this term. With the typical British weather, we had a sauna instead and proceeded to Per Erik Svinhufvud for liquified barley, then on to Eraina for I Can't Believe It's Pizza, then on to The Mitre for some fluid dynamics which kept on behaving under Bernoulli's equation later at Lauri's place, some strange black liquid that most non-Finns would jettison as toxic waste, quite reminiscent of the X-files quasi-petrol and oh, btw /me needs to see Evolution ASAP, it should be pHun.

Fri, Jun 15

<07:57> Got the year's academic results on Thursday, it was so bad that I had to jump off a high place. However, a piece of elastic rope prevented my pathetic 2.1 head from being crushed into a Newtonian fluid. This happened at Creation, an all night rave event which started just after I heard fscking number. Timing was great, though, as I would easily forget inane things like numbers while clubbing in the midst of beautiful people. [considering how little I worked (on physics, not overall) this year, even a 2.1 is a sheer miracle.]

In fact, anything below 100% is a disappointment but that does not necessarily mean unhappiness. The Sun's booting up another nice day, who need sleep now?

<09:30> Ah, I should mention the Univ. Botanical Garden which I visited on Thursday afternoon. A thoroughly relaxing, meditative experience. Trees reminiscent of Finnish forest varieties, and all the exotic plants we read in books about, like a 5.5 meter high agave and the specimens next to the sign 'do not feed the plants'. I am pretty sure the bungee had soem relatively permanent effects on me. Closing my eyes I see rectangular fractal patterns, though that is fading away. More obvious physical changes are a funny feeling in the guts (maybe due to eating & drinking funny) and something in the throat (feels like a lump on the right whenever I speak). Dunno if two exclamations of 'perkele!' during the bouncing stage had something to do with this. Anyway, here are two appropriate quotes from Mr. Tyler Durden:

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

"Self-improvement is masturbation. Self-destruction is the answer."

<10:04> Oh, one more point: I'm not saying the old air force base where Creation took place in the middle of nowhere (and darkness was upon the face of the deep) was not über-industrially cool. ^_^

Thu, Jun 14

<02:05> Getting warmer. Went to see the Bumps with Lauri; Lotta was there rowing for Pembroke ]|[. Pseudo-FMD again, with potential problems tomorrow at Creation, should be a decent raving event (at least it's away from Cambridge).

Only one week to go @Cam, hacking bluesci. Learning a fair bit more of PHP and MySQL. It's hard to convince a non-geek how much fun it is to hack in the night (especially when the day's walking has drained some physical strength, not feeling going out), but it is. ^_^

Mon, Jun 11

<00:49> After a corporate meeting, I got a bit more work with the new bluesci engine than I'd expected, but it's fun learning and using PHP/MySQL (again :-). PHPFirstPost looks good so far, the code is lighter and more sane than the previously used ThatWare (what an appalling name for software ;-).

Sat, Jun 9

<00:09> Sauna, pub, chinese takeaway, more fluids. An ex tempore night thanks to Ilkka. Not too late/drunk which is good. Something we should do more often.

Fri, Jun 8

<02:20> Just finished watching Fight Club off my machine. Surely it was not the best viewing experience, but surprisingly good. Almost had forgotten how great the film was, and the music. Another thing is that it's closer to a week since the exams finished and I haven't done much of anything really productive, but hey, it's my holiday until early July when I start work at CERN. I may fix up bluesci though, but I've decided not to do any major rewrites now, since there's a lot of functional stuff already. Besides there's nothing wrong with PHP even if there are fancy things like Zope around. I could spend these few weeks learning new languages (that includes French but maybe I'll leave it till I'm there and forced to learn ^_^) or alternatively enjoy life and get something done. Thank you.

Tue, Jun 5

<13:46> Web standards woes.. just cleaned up my personal pages' frame subsystem and noticed that the border=0 in a <frameset> tag that I need in order not to have a border between the two menus on the right, is not in the standards. However, in Mozilla and Opera (supposedly well standards compliant) this is the only way to do what I want. Another annoying thing is, I was told that the R is missing from my name on the main page under IE 5.5, though the page validates correctly. Sorry to say, but this is a bug in IE so there's no way I can fix that :-(

<18:10> Something I've felt before this term, but now seems most appropriate: Life must not be bad if my worst worries are (a) pseudo FMD symptoms i.e. hay fever and blistered feet from long walks, (b) someone not paying what they owe me so I have to make do without that digital camera, and (c) not knowing what to do after graduation because there are so many fascinating possibilities. ^_^

Sun, Jun 3

<01:38> Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world that you can't contain it... oh, fsck that American Beauty quote and get on with updating with your diary. So today the exams finished, probably the best exam I've done in Cambridge, but fluid mechanics went on even afterwards. Of course this has nothing to do with the consumption of intoxicating fluids in silly amounts, but punting on the Cam. Our original plan was shortened as the weather was not very nice, two hours was enough after which it was time for sauna. Then Eraina, a couple of pubs, Caius bar (nice place for a college bar, btw), and just now finished off at my place, talking about EU politics. A strange debate which came to something of a conclusion that the problems Britain is having with the EU are because of the crap political system in Britain. (leaving out the obvious of how stubborn the British are about everything they have).