| Friends-locked posts |
[Nov. 13th, 2008|12:38 am] |
I just signed in to LJ today, and my RSS reader was suddenly full of posts that I didn't recognise, dating back for ages.
Essentially, if you have made a friends-locked post since about May 2007 (possibly earlier), and are wondering why I have acted insensitively (ie as if I'd not read it) then there's a good chance this is because I *hadn't* read it.
There's also a chance that I had read it, but most likely at least a month after you wrote it. I expect this situation to continue, so if there's a post you think I should be reading, either prod me on MSN, or point it out to me via facebook/gmail.
Also, if anyone else has migrated to wordpress or whatever, please prod me, so I can update my feeds again.
David. |
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| Clarification |
[Nov. 11th, 2007|07:59 pm] |
This journal has been discontinued. I have also disabled commenting as anon, to avoid spam.
Go to http://alsuren.blogspot.com or http://alsuren.wordpress.com for all new posts. I've not decided which site to go with yet, so add me on facebook (David Laban, Cambridge), and read my imported notes. I will make sure that I import all posts from whichever site I pick in the end. |
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| clarification |
[May. 6th, 2007|07:58 pm] |
With the arrival of a credit card advert, my faith in livejournal has finally departed.
I was expecting it to happen a lot sooner after the take-over, but maybe I just didn't notice how it was going downhill, because I never really used LJ in internet explorer until recently.
A few items of book-keeping need to be done before I really migrate which I need some help with.
1) Could someone with a paid account, please get http://alsuren.blogspot.com/atom.xml added as a livejournal feed, and tell me about it so that I tell people about it. That way, people can still get updates on their friends list when I post.
2) If anyone knows anything about blogspot, could they please tell me what they use as a friends-page equivalent? I will still check my LJ friends page, but getting all my friends in one list would certainly be nice. |
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| Live[journal] on hold |
[May. 6th, 2007|07:51 pm] |
While I avoid turning my computer on, I will be stuck without a decent web browser(see previous post). As a result, I need a blog with post-via-email functionality. This presents itself in the form of http://alsuren.blogspot.com
For those of you who use aKregator to read my LJ, please update your feeds list to include http://alsuren.blogspot.com/atom.xml
The post which caused this mess will be re-posted to blogspot in due time.
That is all.
David. |
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| FUUUUUUUCK! |
[May. 6th, 2007|03:58 pm] |
So guess who just lost 5 hours of typing thanks to internet explorer mobile.
There is a reason why I decided to avoid internet explorer mobile like the fucking plague: It's SHIT! It crashed my entire phone first time I went on LJ to post, and when I managed to get a post mostly finished, it fucked up and I couldn't even cut-paste out of IE in order to save. The only place I could save was splitting into chunks, and saving in the titles of favourites, wich were then sorted by title rather than date, so it would take me longer to unscramble them than to type the whole lot out again.
What's worst is that it took me longer than normal to type the thing out ad dit it than normal, because the up/down arrows are broken in IE, and the phone keyboard is about a third of the speed of a normal keyboard.
It makes me want to hurt things!
Is there an email-or-whatever-based lj-posting method that anyone knows about that would work on my phone? |
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| Lindy Hop primer |
[Apr. 22nd, 2007|11:39 am] |
I posted something on Jared's blog about what you need to start lindy hop (he said he has a problem with coordination, which stops him doing certain things). Unfortunately, it turned into a bit of an essay, so I'll post it on here. This version has been heavily modified so that it applies to people in england rather than america. It remains guy-centric though.
The level of co-ordination you need to go to a beginner class is pretty basic*. Look for a class with a social dance afterwards, and go along to that. Things to google for are:
"lindy hop" (best dance in the world),
"jitterbug" (another name for lindy hop. Seems to be used by people who like to dress up in period costume for it)
"balboa" (for lindy hoppers that want to get intimate :P )
"swing dancing" (a general term for the family of dances. People are sometimes careful about using the word "swing", for obvious reasons)
www.yehoodi.com (has a forum where you can probably find a class with a good social dance after)
Ask me (or any lindy hopper) about "Judy's list". You can't google it, but you can get someone to forward it to you.
* Many dances have a simple "basic step" (set of steps less than 5 seconds long), and your feet do that same thing (or simple variations on it) for a whole song. Eventually, it stops being about coordination, because you don't have to think about your feet. If you're not very co-ordinated, it's not a problem: it just means that you'll need a bit more time learning the basic step.
* Triple-steps are sometimes quite tricky to do at first, but most good teachers will wait until their whole class can do them before moving on (or leave them out entirely in some beginner (East Coast Swing) classes). Triple steps are useful because a follow can use a single triple step to move a good metre or get most of the way around a turn (basically, they're good for flash-gits).
* If you can hop four times without having to put your other foot down, you're balanced enough to learn the charleston basic. You can't really avoid the charleston in england (certainly not Cambridge) because it's what everyone knows. The charleston is marginally harder than the triple step based 6-count basic, but it's easy to improvise with. It's possible to dance a whole dance with simple variations on the charleston basic without worrying about your partner getting bored.
Notes on social dancing:
Most places have more girls than guys, so you don't have to keep a boring conversation going for too long before some girl will ask *you* for a dance. As long as you say "sorry, I've forgotten your name..." before every dance, and "thank you" afterwards, you'll have a great time and meet lots of really nice people. "hey: can you remember how to do that thing they taught the other week?" is a good way to start a conversation with anyone (guy or girl).
Don't get too worried if you think someone's flirting with you: They're not. It's just a dance. Guys/girls who *repeatedly* try to get off with other lindy hoppers at regular events quickly get a reputation, so generally they don't (or if they do, they don't do it *on* the dance floor, and especially not at regular weekly events).
For people who know another form of dance: Note also that Lindy Hop is different to things like ballroom in that lessons are always very closely associated with the social scene, and there is almost always a social dance immediately after lessons. This leads to some quite interesting differences between social dancefloors of the two styles. For example, there are certain phrases that are acceptable on a ballroom dance floor that are less popular in lindy socials.
For example:
"Sorry, I can't dance the [type of dance]"
becomes "*sweats and catches breath* tell you what: give me a dance to cool down, and I promise I'll dance with you next time"
or "*bounces for a few seconds to get the beat* Bloody hell. It's a bit fast/slow isn't it? What are they [the DJs] trying to do to us? [I reckon we could dance half time/double time/( or tango/samba/waltz if you really don't like the DJ) to this? Let's do it!]"
"No: I think you're doing that wrong"
becomes "*changes to a different basic*"(for guys)
or "that's an interesting variation *attempts to follow*"(for girls)
or "*confused look* You'll have to teach me that step later"(for both)
"*following/back-leading something that wasn't led*"
becomes "*hesitation*...*improvised break/jazz step*"
or "*waits until the lead actually leads her somewhere*". This means that you can dance with beginners/intermediate follows from another part of the country, and it tends to go by with only a few surprises.
"*Taking a girl and doing loads of moves that she doesn't know, expecting her to follow*" sometimes happens, but that can't be helped sometimes. If you mess up and lead something that can't be followed, most people either do a break, or default back into charleston basic (which almost everyone can follow and is always fun). |
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| Bottled water |
[Apr. 19th, 2007|11:20 pm] |
Why is Volvic so disgusting?
More to the point: why did I buy a litre and a half of it? |
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| London Lindy Exchange |
[Apr. 17th, 2007|10:13 pm] |
Okay, so I promised Liz that I'd post about LLX, and I keep getting distracted by Alex's fucking VB problems, and other stuff
From the thursday to the sunday, I totalled a decent amount of dancing:
thursday was 8:00-11:30 (swing thing: a weekly event at the Thames Boat Club)
friday was 9:00-1:00 (LLX welcome party)
saturday was 3-5 then 9-12 (theoretically 3:00, but I couldn't be arsed with the night bus after Friday's not getting in until 4 or 5 in the morning),
sunday was pub from 2 then dancing 7-9 (Could have been 11, but I had a headache, and I got tired of Lotte's friends appearing out of nowhere to dance with me in an obviously conscripted manner)
That's well over 12 hours of dancing in 4 days, which I say is pretty good going.
I initially attributed my headache to the annoying disco lights (which should be banned from all Swing events, as they are evil and tacky), but I am coming to suspect that it may have been the obligatory LLX plague that you get from dancing with people from all over the world, with their various interesting diseases.
Friday was the best dance night I've ever had. I arrived quite early, so I got to dance with loads of random people on a spacious floor, even before the cambridge guys arrived. Water was £1/bottle, but apples/oranges were free, so they provided the bulk of my refreshment. I narrowly avoided blisters, but my feet hurt the following morning, after walking home from chingford mount's night bus stop. Honourable mentions include: Jen[ny, but only with a british accent], Mandy, Natalie (with a T), tall-bald-guy-who-sat-next-to-me-on-the-coach-whose-name-escapes-me.
Saturday afternoon was good and chilled, but the floor was all sticky and yuk, which was less good. Jen and Natalie revealed themselves (and a canadian guy, whose name escapes me) to be sex-obsessed, of the explicit, american school. Honourable mentions include: "girl with duck taped shoes", Poppy, Monica (textile designer). Caption for the event was "Don't move, I'm getting my bag [from between your legs]"
Sunday was a live band, and it was a great display of dancing if you wanted to get people interested in Lindy Hop, because there was plenty of space at the beginning, so there were lots of swing-outs and variations thereof. There was also a jam session towards the end of the band's set, which was great to watch. I was still tired from friday night
Sunday afternoon was good, if a little overpriced (£4/magners or £3/lemonade). I heard lots of cool stories, and saw lots of funny dancing on the mini dance area set aside in the pub.
Sunday evening had lots of interesting girls-leading-guys, which was fun to watch, but I wasn't in much of a dancing mood, and they had disco lights (!), which didn't agree with me.
There is much else that happened, but my mind is not capable of noting it all down in one go. Can I go now? |
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| Improvements in Facebook and Skype |
[Apr. 11th, 2007|01:00 pm] |
Couple of things I've noticed recently, regarding changes to facebook
1) The adverts have gone (though I suspect not for long)
2) Pokes work under konqueror
3) RSS feeds have been added to notes etc.
4) They're open-sourcing some of their technology
If they keep going this way, it'll end up being less evil than LiveJournal, and I won't be able to hate it.
That's not good!
In other news, I now have skype on my phone, and it works better than MSN. If skype publish a telepathy based client (which they look like they're going to) I might start expanding my skype contact list beyond the current total of 5. |
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| Simplified D-Bus interface |
[Apr. 4th, 2007|12:42 am] |
I hacked together a little bit of python to help anyone who wants to control dbus from a command line, or from python. If anyone wants to submit patches, they're more than welcome. Check my userinfo for contact details, or just post a comment to this entry (it will automatically get forwarded to my email address)
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/dl325/media/code/thebus.py
Hope you enjoy it. It's supposed to be the D-Bus equivalent of the command line dcop program for KDE3's DCOP, but (it being python) it also doubles as a module that you can use in your code. |
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| shutdown /r |
[Mar. 30th, 2007|09:32 pm] |
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Okay, so that was *too* priceless. Windows vista's shutdown command can be run as any user (with hilarious consequences). |
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| lots of nothing |
[Mar. 30th, 2007|11:51 am] |
Not posted in a while. I've been messing about with telepathy, Windows vista and kde4 (details can be found on my wiki at http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~dl325/moin/moin.cgi/RecentChanges ), and not dancing and not doing any work. I feel that dancing and doing work may be linked. I always feel productive when I've been dancing and gotten a good night's sleep.
I've also been going to see my nan in hospital. She had a brain tumour removed a while ago, and her mood swings somehow remind me of my mum's laptop, when it halts and catches fire every so often.
I was also thinking of something that Gavin said at past midnight sometime during term. I think it was something about not having any philosophical objection to certain hypotheses relating to the set of real numbers being impossible to prove or disprove, because the set of real numbers contains numbers that are impossible to define (if you remember the proof for the fact that the set of real numbers is uncountably infinite).
This got me to thinking whether you could produce a set of numbers that could do most of the things you normally want to do with the set of real (or complex) numbers, but is countably infinite. Let's call my set Cc (the countable set of complex numbers)
So what do I want my set of numbers to do?
1) be countable.
2) contain the rational numbers
3) satisfy f(x,y) in Cc for all x,y in Cc (for functions involving powers, like f(x,y)=x^y )
4) (for bonus marks) contain pi, and other "interesting values" like e
Is it possible to create such a set, or is there some proof that says "this is impossible"?
My first idea was to create a set of the "rational powers of rational numbers" (letting you write numbers of the form x=(i/j)^(k/l), which would be countably infinite). This doesn't even satisfy 3) though, because 2^(2^(1/2)) is an "irrational power of a rational number". My instinct says it might not even be guaranteed to satisfy 3) for functions like f(x,y)=x*y. This is Not Good.
Any mathmos fancy coming to my rescue? |
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| blogger |
[Mar. 11th, 2007|01:36 pm] |
It seems that blogger is crappy. While it seems to be what most people pick for writing technical blogs, I think I prefer livejournal's simpler posting interface. Mainly because it *actually works* in konqueror
In other news (Dance related) I don't think I was dancing very well yesterday. I was kinda idling boringly, while planning overly complicated moves that I couldn't lead properly. I should also remember to always shave before dancing, as I don't think I was looking too respectable last night.
I was reading a couple of posts on http://www.yehoodi.com/phpBB2/ this morning, and apparently (as in general consensus among follows worldwide), it's more fun to follow if the lead does mostly the simple basic moves and does them with variations in style that fit the music, listening for what the follow is doing all the time. That way, the follow can add her own flare as well. I should really do that more. There was also the comment that it's nice when a lead dances moves that have recently been taught in classes, but that seemed to be only a minority request.
I will have to go in search of London based swing communities for when I go home, I think.
Also: Linux day in the JCR on 16th. All welcome. Dunno what will happen, but we may have a gigabit switch and super-twin-aerials wifi router courtesy of my dad (he's sending them up here so I can test them out, because he knows I will only be staying here for a few more days after the end of term |
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| In other news: |
[Mar. 4th, 2007|09:59 pm] |
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00:01 British Summer Time on 21 July 2007. (HP7 for the win) |
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| Dancing ( :D ) and other things, with names removed to foil google |
[Feb. 25th, 2007|02:12 pm] |
Okay, so it would appear that I have spent about the same amount of time dancing since wed as I have working. The only work I've done is the entirety of thursday in the library (lectures don't count as work), but I've been dancing thrice in that time, each time for in excess of 2 hours. This is a statement that used to be true of playing pool, and was completely normal, but dancing is *actually* physical, so this is a new thing for me :P
There are a few consequences of this:
1) I have dancing people in my head. When I'm idle, I keep getting images of [the birthday girls] dancing with [that guy with the tassled trousers]. He was really good: Dancing with [some other people he'd never met before], and looking both flashy and in sync at the same time, as if it were already choreographed. Might also help that the ladies present were also amazing. I spent most of the time watching, and wanting to be that good.
2) I need to get to work on my lab report now, because I have done a total of nothing, and it's in for tomorrow. Rubbish!
3) I have provisionally accepted a sponsorship form for the hopathon the day after my birthday, but I don't trust my ability to keep dancing for entire songs straight, without stopping to experiment with different moves that I didn't quite understand during classes. I think what I really need to work on is my ability to pick random breaks to do when things go wrong, so that I can feel better about doing things I'm not too sure about without having to stop and look stupid when it all goes to pot.
4) I have concluded that the good dancers are, as a rule, both: exceedingly hot, and at least half a decade older than me. What's with me and older women? :P
In other news:
1) I've decided against going to MIT, because I'm really more one for small amounts of optional difficult work than large amounts of compulsory work that reaches the same standard in smaller increments.
2) I have yet to email anyone about holiday work: either UROPs or working for external companies. This needs to happen at some point.
3) My phone will not be getting its deserved dose of linux until during the holidays when I will have two O2 phones with free calls to each other for testing.
4) Our rooms are really not very clean. Both [my favourite mathmo housemate] and I have been getting sticky eyes in the mornings, and [our esteemed ex-sex editor] has reported the same symptoms. I'm tempted to put all of my sheets and towels in a boil wash, but
a) I don't expect it'll do much good, given that it seems to be almost parkside-wide
b) This would need to include my quilt and mattress protector, and they would take a lot of money to dry in driers, and I don't have any spares, so I can't just chuck them on the line overnight.
5) There is enough exciting stuff happening around my birthday (see dance.3) that I don't think I'll be doing anything centred on myself this year.
6) [someone I slept with at last saturday's party] is proving to be incompatible: After making some effort at talking to her, I am realising that all we have in common is the unnerving ability to nod off to sleep no matter what's going on around us. She does give the most amazing hugs (both relaxing and exciting, and something that I may never understand), but while a trip to the cinema would be a good date, I can't think of many others. As a result, I would really prefer it if [a certain physicist] would get a partner of his own, before acting as official commentator on the passed up romantic opportunities of others.
7) I have a packet of mayonnaise from hall that has been in my pocket for a while. It seems to have some kind of gas trapped inside it. Assuming this is because it is rotting, I'm wondering how long it'll take to expand enough to explode. Sweepstakes, anyone?
8) I have received complaints from [everyone's favourite interfering boatie] about my posting of a text-dumped jabber session to my pwf space, which included my entire contact list in a slightly obfuscated form, and was then indexed by google. As a result, you will notice a lot of square brackets. It should be noted that this is a purely ironic gesture, to point out quite how ridiculous the complaint was, and will not be repeated. To those in the know, it should be a trivial exercise to assign names to each set of brackets, and to those not in the know, a name will mean nothing anyway. |
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| Drunken proles |
[Feb. 18th, 2007|01:14 am] |
Okay, so after walking Helen home ( :D ) from Tom's most excellent partay (when did the rest of the yobs leave, I wonder?), I was riding home on my bike, when I saw a woman's shoe flying across the road at me, from a little scuffle involving 2 (I hesitate to call them ladies, but could hardly call them girls) and a bloke. I promptly dumped my bike and went over to make sure nobody was going to get injured etc. I wasn't going to do anything on my own, so I beckoned to some onlookers who were watching from about 10 yards away (not exactly useful if anything *does* start to happen). Took a few blank looks, but eventually, some guys came over to "break it up". Nobody needed to be touched, because it was a jealous (recently made ex-) girlfriend, and when she realised that she was being quite so undignified, she started to calm down a little.
I then got back on my bike and was waiting at the traffic lights when some random guy came up to me and said "You're cool: I like you". It was only then that I realised that I had just almost gotten involved in a street scuffle, while wearing black tie, with a shiny red waistcoat and pocket watch. |
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| PWF linux and printing |
[Feb. 16th, 2007|03:21 pm] |
Seems that the Public Workstation Facility Windows machines aren't letting people log on, but linux works fine, so I've had to teach people how to restart the machines to linux and use firefox etc.
I now need to test whether printing works by trying to print something to the computer room. For this purpose, I think I may just print this page.
If someone picks this up from a printer, would they be so kind as to post a comment on http://alsuren.livejournal.com/, telling me where it came out?
ho-hum
*posts, prints, and runs off to find scraps of paper* |
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