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Following an interesting discussion on IRC just now, I am definitely not putting together a first-approximation design for a modular, hackable bra.
Open-source undergarments are almost certainly a bad idea. Still, there's the comfort aspect of being able to customise every variable to account for the fact that women are actually individuals, rather than cookie-cutter creatures in one size or another.
No. Not doing that at all.
*sighs* Back to work.
Additional: I have a hole the size of a quarter in the sole of my left boot. Tomorrow, it will rain as much as today, and today, my foot was soaked. The universe hates me.
So, end of day five, my target wordcount for today is 8330 and I find myself steaming gently along at 5550... Time to throw another crystal log on the fire, I think, and see what colour the smoke turns. Plot seems to be advancing, if glacially slowly, and I have a slightly better idea of how the next few days' wordcount is going to be used now, which is nice. Still, with a weekend like this, I refuse to let procrastination take all the blame.
Well, Friday, I went for lunch to go and write some words, but stopped through at IT Services along the way, where it transpired an effective core meltdown was underway. One of the LeNSE routers had gone down, and taken with it the campus internet connection. If that was the whole story, it wouldn't be so bad, but the router was popping up and down intermittently, and the responsible admin was nowhere to be found. Since our Networking Services team couldn't touch it (despite being very nearby and technically on Sussex property if I recall correctly, we don't own it, and LeNSE have their own service engineers), despite it causing all of our equipment a lot of trouble, the department was going a bit wrong. I ended up on chatting with a lot of frustrated people and firefighting (figuratively, not literally) for a bit to take the load off the helpdesk, and eventually we got some semblance of service running again. But that was lunchtime, wordcount zero.
Evenings are the other good time for me to write, but sadly, Nik has just got himself a copy of Disgaea 2. Very pretty game, eats attention span. Oops, wordcount zero.
Saturday was pretty cool: Mum's birthday, and she came to Brighton. More or less total distraction when added to my tendency to sleep in on weekends, so no wordcount then either. Very cool concert in the evening, though: Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky being the two composers I remember. I make no pretense at knowing anything whatsoever about classical music, but it was quite enjoyable :)
Sunday was alright: Sunday I managed 1988 words, and to pass Plot Point Two, so it's not all bad. What with the cooking of dinner, and everything else, though, I think I could have written more, but ... so it goes. I seem to write more every time I sit down to do so, which is promising. If I keep that up, I'll have no problem reaching the goal.
Incidental: I must ask Mike Wells what he was up to at about nine AM GMT Sunday morning. I snapped to full wakefulness, absolutely certain I'd just heard him shout my name not three metres away. Slight problem, he's in Colorado, about five thousand miles away. Hope it wasn't urgent...
The only reason I wonder is that my generation of my family has been known for mildly odd goings-on like this in the past. I hope nothing has happened to him :-/
I have held the opinion for some time that human group dynamics can be broken down to a basic financial exchange. Some individuals, the group leaders or specialists in the skills the group needs to succeed, are called upon to be great for a while, and often do so more than might be expected. These people give off an energy, that for the sake of argument (and agreeing with the title) we shall all Awesome. Thus, firefighters, soldiers, EMTs, doctors, all generate and expend Awesome in order to succeed well at their jobs, rather than merely performing to spec. The process is tiring, as a rule: generating and emitting Awesome takes a lot out of you, but it's worth it. Simply being around these people substantially bolsters a person's ability to do what they need to.
All people are able to do this, to emit this elemental pseudo-energy, and to the same degree: but different events seem to trigger it in different people. Some radiate when asked to speak to a group; others when their physical strength is called upon, still others when great feats of mind are required. I am none of these people. However, I radiate Awesome to a small degree when placed in certain like-minded groups: it's one of the reasons that I miss the Fencing Club out of term time, and also why I'm often quite subdued at work, in Engineering.
So, tonight at SWARM, I think I radiated a bit. And it was nice, because I haven't done it in a while, and it produces a bit of a high. I think we all enjoyed ourselves: from what I hear, people continued their enjoyment once I'd left (though I'd expect no less from that lot - my presence is appreciated but in no way required). Unfortunately, now I'm very tired.
I have a presentation to plan, as I'm sure I've told all of you twice by now. I'm going to need to hit Awesome levels rarely seen in me: to be charming, charismatic, informative and authoritative. Yeeeeess....... Well, to be honest, any two of those would be good. In order to hit these levels, I'll need time to charge, so I probably won't be a lot of fun over the next few days: apologies in advance.
On a slightly related note, I've found another reason to be annoyed at my supervisor. Not hate. You have to do a real lot to get me to hate you. Still, what with the presentation and a couple of other "little jobs" he's given me, my holidays have been pushed back really late this year. I leave for the USA in mid-September, when nearly everyone else is starting back at school. This will be inconvenient for the people I'm staying with, and for me (since I'll have to re-register with Sussex Uni remotely). It means I'll miss the Freshers' Fair, and a chance to make impressionable young students into fencers, or wargamers, or archers (depending on which stall I spend the most time on). It means I won't be able to help out ITS at a time when they're trying to integrate in excess of 3000 new students into the computing system.
And the great majority of that, excluding the actual holiday itself, annoys me.
Eventually found another of those neoprene bottle-holders: despite it appearing nowhere on their web-store, Millets had one (singular) of them. Weird.
We've just completed a fairly major hardware upgrade: the firewall has gone from a noisy, hot, bundle of wiring centred on an aged Athlon K6 to a small, cuboidal machine that runs near-silently (the loudest noise is the hard disk, which is highly disconcerting) and at pretty much room temperature. I promised the house this upgrade when I started on a PhD, and I've only just got round to fulfilling that promise. While the old box wasn't unreliable, it was hard to get going again after a power outage, and I have the sneaking suspicion it was going to fail fairly soon. Now it's not a problem.
Taking the network down for so long gave me the opportunity to rerun some cable, so the server cupboard is no longer a total mess. However, it also means that our IP address has changed. Consequently, glasshalfempty.co.uk doesn't point here at the moment, and no-one will be able to read this entry for a little while. Oh well. :)
So, once again it appears I have achieved the impossible.
Today, I went to Kingston to measure up for a network installation I'm doing for my brother's new house. On the way, we noticed that Black's was having a sale, so I popped in, mindful of my impending doom^Wtrip to the States. Found a rather nice neoprene bottle-holder that would clip nicely to my rucksack for a fiver. When I got home, I realised that two of them would be rather more useful, since otherwise I'll be tanking back up every ten minutes or so.
As it happens, the handy little device I bought does not exist. Never has. It is manufactured by Storm Shield Equipment, and has the serial number 09 3589 43. Storm Shield do not appear to have a website, despite selling a fairly large range of outdoor, camping and hiking equipment through Black's and Millets. Both of these venerable institutions disclaim all knowledge of such a device on their websites. Ebay, Amazon (this last a long shot, I'll admit)... Nothing.
I am forced to conclude that I did not, in fact, purchase this device today. Which puzzles me, and certainly won't stop me using it in Colorado.
Incidental: Nick is entirely at fault, but I must regardless pimp a somewhat awesome music video: Lemon Demon: Word Disassociation. Enjoy.