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I am mildly amused. For the last few weeks, I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of a certain IEC61508 (an international standard on functional safety). It's quite tricky, at least with my connections, to find a copy, and it's expensive to buy (~£750). It's going to be pretty key to my literature review, and I was starting to wonder if I should ask the department to buy a copy...
Well, the IET just invited me to review a draft of the new version of ... IEC 61508, because I'm a member of one of the relevant special-interest groups within their membership. Full text access, "please give us your comments and suggestions when you're done" style access.
Isn't it nice when things just work?
Last fencing session of this term tonight. The club may or may not keep running over summer break, but with so many of our members moving back home for the summer this weekend, it gets harder to justify. So, we got a little ... spirited here and there.
By 'we', of course I mean 'me and Ben'. We're both built like battleships (he's got the muscle, I've got the mass), we're both epeeists, and we enjoy a good fight. Tonight, we wired up and went at it properly, in a way that, while never unsafe, was extremely energetic and likely to attract the attention of the ref, had there been one.
About halfway through, Ben landed a nice hit on my lower abdomen. Due to my being in a really strange position at the time, I briefly tried to guard it with my foot before remembering what I was doing, and in that time the blade passed neatly through my sock. Blaze of momentary pain on my right shin, and a blade that travelled unsettlingly through the sock from front to inside-leg without doing any serious damage. It's just a graze, and more than anything I'm pissed off that the first proper wound I get from fencing in several years is entirely covered by my now-traditional combat trousers!
Now I need a new pair of long socks :)
Also, it's Download Day. Help Mozilla set a record for most downloads of a piece of software in 24 hours (*downloads*)
EDIT: Well that's freakin' hilarious. The Firefox 3 installer for linux requires a newer version of the GTK graphics toolkit than I have. This is the price of running 'old' linuxes, I guess (Slackware 10.2, current version is 12.1: it's about four years old). Have to see if I can find a package at some point.
Never one to disappoint, Nik has just made the evening, again.
We have a little magnetic timer stuck to our fridge, so we can tell how long things have been cooking / defrosting / etc. for. Today, Craig dismantled a couple of old hard disks he had lying around, and salvaged the magnets.
Long story short, we no longer have a magnetic timer, since Nik stuck it to the fridge with a neodymium hard-disk magnet for a little under a minute. We now have simply a timer. In that minute, the neodymium magnet has completely sucked the life out of the little ferric block that used to hold it on the fridge.
Kids, don't do magnets.
Well, that was entertaining.
Today, I found myself TAing the class all alone for a bit, since Matt was otherwise engaged, and then had a particularly complex question asked. I dove in head first, as I tend to, and spent a good ten minutes or so fiddling about, fixing it. At that point, I sat up and looked around, just to think about the problem some more. A hand went up, then another. Then one of the Greek guys raised two hands, and claimed precedence, based on numbers.
Oh, it's on now! :)
Someone else raised two hands, so I did so in response. The guy next to me threw his hands in the air in enthusiastic response, and it sort of snowballed from there. A Mexican wave swept round the class, skipping maybe three people in a class of forty. I think the guy walking past the door thought we were all nuts.
Those guys ask complicated questions, and a lot of them. Occasionally, they just don't get it, no matter how I explain it. Nonetheless, they're great fun.
Today, I went home and picked up my new debit card, replacing the one I lost last week. Hooray. Also, got Dom's front tyres replaced (tracking was out by 4mm, which was causing some rather odd tyre wear).
Now, of course, I'm trying to decide which post-Christmas mail-orders to submit in which order. Such is the way of things. New monitor, UPS for the server cupboard, UPS for my desktop and a new keyboard seem to be on the cards, then we wander off into the realm of the peculiar (hardware development tools, board-games and so on). Yay, capitalism.
Work on the new version of this website proceeds apace, as well. I now have a working global login system, and openid support is in the pipeline. Now, I should just put the blog back in...