I am NOT SWISS and I DON'T SOUND SWISS either!

i've just spent the afternoon finally updating my uni website. it's been pretty much the same since the first year when i stuck some links together and wrote some embarrassingly earnest text with them. the only thing i ever changed was the background and that just got worse and worse ;-) and by now most of the links were out of date, but i couldn't be bothered to fix it. i kept starting and then giving up. it's still crap, but better crap :-) and it's pink :-D

but i'm not going to put in a link to it cause i said i wouldn't so there :-) i'm sure anyone who really cared could find it if they wanted, but as i said, it's crap so you really don't care... i just did it cause i couldn't bear the state it was in before and i couldn't make myself go back to the default 'hello world this user has not edited this page'...

Labels: uni

i'm actually beginning not to mind the english lit course so much. we're such a small group that we're getting to know each other and i'm meeting new people :-) cool. i'm meeting lots of new people this term :-) i think the 6 months working in england have made me slightly less shy. hurray!

i'm glad it's in english, i'm not so confident expressing myself in german. never was, but now it's even worse than usual, not having spoken german for 6 months... and being the only native english speaker on the course (the lecturer is swiss) also gives me confidence. although i hate trying to pronounce all the greek names, we're doing the odyssee... i know, it's technically not english literature ;-) but we're looking at the 'morphology of the folktale' and the odyssee's pretty much the oldest example of a western folktale. next week we move on to chaucer's canterbury tales... what fun :-|

thank goodness for proplus, there's no way i could have stayed awake today without it. i haven't got to sleep before 4 in the morning for the last three nights (and it's not even cause i've been partying the nights away, i just haven't been able to get to sleep) and the night before it was at least 2 o'clock cause tim and his girlfriend were snogging loudly in the next room till then... meh. but it turns out that 2 proplus combined with a red bull and a cup of tea are just the thing to drive away sleepiness ;-)

Labels: uni

1. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
2. Got into the gene pool while the lifeguard wasn't watching.
3. A room temperature IQ.
4. Got a full 6-pack, but lacks the plastic thingy to hold it all together.
5. A gross ignoramus--144 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus.
6. A photographic memory but with the lens cover glued on.
7. A prime candidate for natural deselection.
8. Bright as Alaska in December.
9. One-celled organisms out score him in IQ tests.
10. Donated his body to science before he was done using it.
11. Fell out of the family tree.
12. Gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn't coming.
13. Has two brains; one is lost and the other is out looking for it.
14. He is so dense, light bends around him.
15. If brains were taxed, he'd get a rebate.
16. If he were any more stupid, he'd have to be watered twice a week.
17. If you give him a penny for his thoughts, you'd get change.
18. If you stand close enough to him, you can hear the ocean.
19. It's hard to believe that he beat out 1,000,000 other sperm.
20. One neuron short of a synapse.
21. Some drink from the fountain of knowledge; he only gargled.
22. Takes him 2 hours to watch 60 minutes.
23. Wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.

Labels: chuckles

i dragged myself out of bed, bought a load of red bull and practically crawled to uni only to find the message 'compiler design cancelled due to illness, rescheduled thursday 8-10'. how inconsiderate! so now i've spent an hour sitting in front of a computer about 90% asleep instead of at home in bed 100% asleep... meh.

Labels: arrgghh, uni

this is annoying: my volleyball team here has got the link to my blog, so they might actually read this, so i have to thinkl twice about the way i put things so as not to insult them too much... ;-)

we lost last night. the atmosphere on court was just not right. honestly, you can't say it was great just because when it was going well and we were winning everyone was upbeat and making a noise. that's natural! but the moment anyone made a mistake they'd start beating themselves up and it really made a difference. i couldn't believe the timeouts: everyone was going on about how they were doing really badly, they couldn't do this, that wasn't working and how we were playing really badly. BOLLOCKS! we didn't play really badly. yes, we could've done quite a bit better and yes, we did play badly some of the time, but the game was not such that we should be utterly ashamed of ourselves as some people proclaimed we should... and the whole thing where they go on and on (and on...) about certain people who decided not to turn up cause there were six of us which is theoretically enough, but if we could only have made substitutions it would have gone so much better... also, they said 'if only we had had a substitute we could have taken christine off in the first set, it wasn't fair to her, she was so unlucky (read 'she wasn't playing very well'), it would have been much less traumatic for her if she could have gone off...' again: CRAP! she played fine. so what if some things went wrong, no-one gets it right everytime and the rest of us didn't play any better than she did anyway... it was her first full game. i think she did great :-)

oops, i guess i've ranted a bit. hope i don't get kicked out for criticising ;-) aw crap, it's annoying knowing they might read this, i can't write half the stuff i want to... meh

Labels: arrgghh, volleyball

i'm reading the architecture manual for intel's IA-32 processors :-) i love reading architecture manuals (no, seriously, i do!) they're really interesting :-) so i can read that for a few hours, then i've got to go home and get my stuff for volleyball.

we've got a match tonight :-) it seems we're quite short of people so i have to play, i.e. i can't be benched for the whole thing :-D as far as i can tell there are only six of us so we all have to play the whole lot. i hope peter (the boss man. oh dear i didn't find a baseball cap for him, he wanted one saying 'the boss' or 'the man' or something to wear while he's yelling at us from the sidelines) is there and that he'll referee, i'm completely out of practise. i'll second-ref

Labels: uni, volleyball

oh dear, this doesn't bode well for this term. although i guess i'll have a load of work to do once the term gets into swing. and hopefully the weather'll be nice so that i can go and laze around by the lake :-) it snowed last night, küsnacht was white when i (finally) got up. i overslept again, nearly missed the compiler design lecture and cause i was in such a hurry i forgot the piece of paper that said what room it was in. luckily the first one i stuck my head in and asked was the right one. i tried to check my schedule online but as usual the IT computers won't let me log on. it's really annoying! they only ever let me log on once every year or so (i am sooo not exagerating for once!!!). the ones in the main building are quite awful as well, but there i do usually manage to find one that takes pity on me. i don't know what i'd do if we didn't have our own (working!!! as in 'it lets me log on every time') systems up here in the ee department.

so, we have to write our own compiler. what fun. we can't even write an assembler program to read an integer from standard input, increment it and write it back to the command line... no, we're getting there, we just haven't found any proper documentation yet so we're trying random things. need to have a look at the architecture. i'm doing it with this random guy called pawel. but he looks nothing like pawel :-) short hair... not sure why i felt the need to write that, but it amused me... ah well

Labels: uni

it seems 'reliability of electronic equipment and systems' isn't difficult, just boring. ah well, as long as it's easy ;-)

i've just realised that the practical part of compiler design is on thursday mornings which clashes with the stupid 'technology, environment and environment' course that i have to take cause i objected to the even stupider 'company management' course (like i'm ever going to want to run a company) and the fact that the exam was on a saturday so i didn't take the exam and now i'm short of mtu points (mtu=mensch, technik, umwelt = human, technology, environment). gah!

my timetable's half empty. need to find something to do... i wonder if i can find some little simple project... nothing stressfull...

i've also got to choose some stupid course such as art or music or philosophy or history or law... not impressed. or languages. am very tempted to do technical english. can't see how that could be hard work and there's no way i'd fail it, even if i am welsh...

all these horrible decisions :-(

Labels: uni

got my first lecture in twenty minutes. reliability of electronic equipment and systems. meh. i think i'll probably dunp that one eventually, a friend did it last year and i think it was quite difficult. not for me then...

so anyway, i arrived safely. stephie's been bugging me the whole time, constantly wanting to play games with me. and then when i don't want to play anymore she says 'can i sit and watch you do whatever you're doing?' cute but annoying...

had a little bit of trouble speaking swiss german since i haven't done it for 6 months. have to concentrate really hard to get the words out. if someone speaks to me when i wasn't expecting it, i'm stumped, can't say anything in any language... hope that goes away soon

met tim's girlfriend yesterday. she seems quite nice.

gotta go get used to being bored to death again. hurray, at least tomorrow it's something interesting: compiler design :-)

Labels: uni

catching a coach to heathrow in an hour. just thought i'd say a quick goodbye to anyone in bristol reading this...

it's been great fun and i'm going to miss everyone. ok maybe not quite everyone but almost everyone ;-) but i'm back in the summer so don't worry :-)

see you!

my official leaving present from infineon (which i got on my last day, on friday) was this great effects pedal for my guitar (and i will post about all my leaving dos and everything, but right now i'm just doing tonight).

however the informal one i got today at lunchtime at the beaufort was a blow-up female sheep (with appropriate hole at the back) with a vibrator sellotaped to its belly (obviously, cause what on earth would i do with a female sheep...)

i was horrified (couldn't believe they'd actually do it). but it did provide superb entertainment for the whole evening. started out just the thought of it was providing huge hilarity for the whole group (marion, dave, julia (another aunt of mine), the polyp, karen, andy, laura, craig (an uncle, not julia's husband) and myself). but now everyone's come home for a look at it :-D they were quite disappointed at the size of it (the sheep), it's smaller than they expected. and the vibrator (which stuart untaped before we left the pub at lunchtime) doesn't go in the hole (too much information? sorry...). we put some batteries in and it turns in circles :-) marion tried to clean her ears and paul added some oranges for authenticity (it's bright blue, orange balls aren't going to make a difference). gotta go, the polyp and karen and andy are still here :-D

Labels: drinking

From a brochure of a car rental firm in Tokyo:

When passenger of foot beave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigor.

Labels: chuckles, jokes

i've just gone through my posts to see how many old drafts i haven't finished and there are quite a few of them. never finished the full sized version of the office christmas party, christmas and new year never got done, there's a long list of notes from about two weeks ago, i think that was quite a full week, and i was away in cardiff last week... and of course i didn't even complete the sunday night in dublin (dia bashed her leg, nearly broke it, remember...) let alone monday (jameson distillery...). haven't even got a draft for that though.

so anyway, i'm going to start with the most recent stuff and then... no actually i'll probably just write down whatever comes to mind (as usual, why am i bothering to write this, it's not as though there's ever much of a structure to my ramblings...)

now my mind's blank... (yes, more so than usual...)

going back chronologically...

had my second to last (9th) guitar lesson with charlie tonight. cause i'd been in cardiff most of last week i hadn't really practised much, but he was still pleased with me. i finally decided to call him on the whole 'you're so talented, the rest of my students are quite rubbish' thing, but he insists it true, that he's not just saying it cause it's a good way to motivate me. still don't believe him though ;-) he's not happy that i'm going back to switzerland, he'll lose his excuse for not helping put the kids to bed on monday nights :-)

was just leaving the house this morning when i heard the bed making odd squeaking noises in the boys' bedroom (no, this is not going to be rude!). went in to find they'd put the ladder from josh's new bed across between the two beds and josh was climbing up it almost two metres off the floor and caleb had done his trick of positioning a plastic box underneath so in case someone did fall off they'd be sure to get sliced to ribbons on the shards when it shattered (he did that to himself about a month ago, i obviously didn't write about it. his back looked awful, he nearly had to go to casualty (i think if his mum weren't a doctor he might have gone)). usually i leave them to whatever mischief they're up to when they're meant to be getting ready for school, after all marion and dave managed to cope before i arrived, they don't need me butting in just cause i'm here (what i'm saying is i'm not very diplomatic, so the kids are more likely to go berserk than calm down if i try to interfere...). but this did seem slightly dangerous (PG to my way of thinking: a parent should be made aware of it so they can decide whether or not it is in fact too dangerous (cause sometimes i seem to overreact to things, or at least marion doesn't think they're as dangerous as i do)). i went and tattled... dave's reaction did seem to say that he thought it looked quite dangerous as well (my way of saying they got yelled at). so i was quite glad that tom seemed to have forgotten all about it when we got picked up from our various activities tonight :-) telling tales tends not to help things, but sometimes you just have to...

sunday next. nothing much happened. church was good. trixie puked on my clean jacket. her teeth are quite sharp and she really enjoys using them. left big dents in my thumb ;-) the twins are incredibly fast now! kept trying to retrieve them and bring them back to ulrika but she didn't seem bothered so i gave up. then i went off to look for the polyp and trixie got there first. i had to pick her up cause she was blocking the doorway and causing a traffic jam (there are a lot of people at that church). so i brought her back to ulrika at which point she puked all down my arm...

gotta go, just spent ages chatting to my brother on msn and now marion's back from her prayer meeting so we can watch battlestar :-D for some reason tim suddenly seems to think he's the most sane member of the family (although it should probably be least insane). ah well, if it helps him to thnk that. although it's a difficult call... hmm, i wonder who it is. maybe we should have a vote on it when i get back

Labels: churchy stuff, kids - arrgghh

>8-0

can they &@*%! stop cancelling my flights!!! just got another 2 emails saying 'sorry, you're not going anywhere, haha!' grrr!!! have to rebook the flights for coming back in july. gah, where's a volleyball when you need to whack something!!!

Labels: arrgghh