alex.mullr.net/blog

After writing about spending time online, something obvious to everybody else quickly became obvious to me. I spend far too much time on the computer. An unhealthy amount of time? Probably, actually. (Dear me, I sound like my mum.)

So that’s what I’m going to do less of this year. And, because anything that doesn’t include nice big numbers makes me feel queasy, I’m going to use a computer to show me that I’m spending less time on the computer. I’m sure there’s something wrong with that.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with all that free time. Might possibly… read a book? That’s very last decade, I’m sure. If I manage to finish one this month, it’ll be Chris Frith’s Making Up the Mind, as recommended by David far too long ago. Might even do some work. Crazy, I know.

I’ll let you know how things unfold, partly to keep me motivated. And I’ll see you in the flesh sometime? It’d be a nice change to your Twitter profile picture popping up now and then. Have a great year.

I've wanted to write this for a while, but have only really felt like doing it today, after the ten of us who are living in this house have been forced to share one tiny toilet for 24 hours (and counting). Since arriving at university last October, I've had a great time – but the accommodation has been a complete headache.

So I got here late last year, just as the weather was starting to take a turn for the worse. After a few weeks, it became obvious my radiator wasn't working – everybody else's in the house was fine, but mine never got hot. I reported it to the porters lodge once (as we were told to), and somebody came a few days later (when I was out, though my housemate saw them). Apparently they did nothing though (it still didn't work), so I reported it again. Nobody came this time. It was left until I got hold of a radiator key, on the advice of my dad, and bled it myself. Full of air.

Since January, I can't keep track of the number of things that have gone wrong. We lost power on the top floor for a day (it was a fuse, but of course health and safety meant we were told not to touch it). The doorbell didn't work for about two weeks. The microwave was removed and we were left without one for about a week. The part I find funniest about that is that we're not allowed our own microwaves because they might catch fire, but we were apparently running that risk with the one we were given anyway. With all these things, we report them just like we're told to – and nothing ever gets done.

I don't have experience with university accommodation in general, but I do know other people at York – and I know that none of them have had problems like the ones we've come across. Sure, Vanbrugh has its pigeons and Eden's Court has its damp… but this has been continually going on for seven months.

To quote a college porter yesterday “the whole place is falling apart.” He's not wrong. We're waiting for somebody to come and fix the stupid loo. So here's what you need to know: don't let this put you off the university if you're considering coming but, for your own sake, do everything you can to avoid Halifax College in your first year. It's not worth it. I can't be alone in thinking that it's pretty ridiculous we've paid quite a bit of money for this place, and nobody seems to give a crap.

It's midday on Thursday the 28th, and we're back to sharing two toilets between ten people. Life is good better again!

Happy New Year all!

Seeing as New Year’s Day is a quiet one in my house, I thought it’d be worth doing a little bit of work on the blog. New year, and a few tweaks to the way it looks.

Have a great day, week, month and year. All the best.

Here’s something to consider (especially at this time of year, with oodles of cards being sent by post): Royal Mail tend to wrap their post bundles with red rubber bands, a fact which won’t be news to most people who live in London. Mainly because they drop them all over the damn road.

The map portion to the right is of a road just near where I live. The pink highlighted part is about 200 metres long, and on average I guess you’d expect to see maybe two or three rubber bands on a road that size; I certainly did this morning, but people can correct me if I’m wrong. On the map below, the same distance is highlighted again… so, extrapolating the data, we might expect to see perhaps thirty or fourty discarded on the pavement in an area the size of this map. That’s a guess, and in my mind it’s on the low side.

Fine, that’s all well and good. Except the map extract below shows how small that part of London is. Here it is in comparison to most of west London:

For the record, you can fit about 250 of the small pink rectangles in that map (as long as my Maths ability hasn’t totally left me). Does this mean that there could be 7,500 in west London? I’m doing the sums logically (as far as I can tell), but I don’t believe the numbers. Help me out here if I’m doing something ridiculous.

A bit of crappy weighing suggests that these bands are about half a gram each. 7,500 per day in one part of London suggests somewhere round 3.5 kilograms of rubber. Three and a half kilograms of rubber a day? I wonder whether they pick them up…

In case you think I’m making a massive deal out of nothing, take a look at this Times Online article from January 2006.

Quirky lecturer thing: Maths person who pauses, says the word “right?” fairly distinctively and then continues. Lectures take five times longer because of this (technically, we get five times less stuff done because of this). I got so frustrated with it last week that I decided to put an asterisk in the margin of my notes every time he did his thing…

Conclusion: 47 times. 47 times he did this. I wanted to cry a little.

Today I finish three weeks of employment, the first proper work I’ve ever done. It’s been in a small restaurant startup in south west London, a place called The Kitchen. Owned, managed and run by Natalie Richmond and chef Thierry Laborde, the concept is something quite new and different. Here comes my ad copy:

You order a couple of meals on their site, book a date and time and come along to Parsons Green. Everything’s all set up for you (we’re talking ingredients, utensils, instructions) and you prepare it with a couple of chefs on hand to help. They package up the food for you, and you take it home to cook. Love the idea. It’s relatively cheap (£20 a week for evening meals?) and much faster than doing the shopping yourself.

The software used on the site is something called EATS, which in itself hasn’t been bad. The UI on the backend is more complicated than it needs to be, but this is a trend that can be seen more and more with new content management systems. I hope I’ll find time to write something more on the design and branding work they’ve had done there, as some gorgeous stuff has been created by a small company in central London.

Bulleted thoughts:

• Networking a printer on a Windows network is harder than it looks. Especially when you have a BT BusinessHub to contend with – yuck.
• Programming a cash register is so much harder than programming a computer.
• Fax machines are still used?!
• Outlook is disgusting, and Access is actually scarily bearable.
• Dell is fantastic. They delivered a machine five days before they said they would, and four days after I ordered it.

In any case: cheers, Natalie & Mark, Thierry & Claudio, Katie & Zuzana, Jhon & Nico and Clare. And Sophia for getting me there in the first place. As well as all the customers I’ve had to talk to over the last 20 days, of course – they have been great too. It’s done great things for my confidence, and I’m going to miss it.

I’m not doing much to counter the theory that there is too much free time in the world. Spent half an hour this evening going through my address book to create a Google Map of people I know, so without saying any more:

To be honest I am a little disappointed in how concentrated the pointers are around the UK. To clarify this map, it’s populated by people who I know well enough to know where their permanent address is. Not that I’m inviting myself to stay or anything…

How data changes over time is starting to really interest me – things like, for example, how listening habits can be graphed year by year to see changes, or the fantastic TweetStats, which gives a whole bunch of numbers and pretty bar charts. I would be very interested in recreating this map in four years time, or maybe even ten years time, and seeing what has changed.

Hope I haven’t forgotten anyone this time round.

Everything I’ve learnt at St Paul’s School (Wikipedia) has been on the same campus, from September 1998 until this summer, when I left for the final time. I started this post at the beginning of December 2007 in the hope that things would be fresher in my mind than they are now (that’s because it had a couple of paragraphs on everything I thought was wrong with the place; I decided I didn’t want those hanging around).

There are so many fantastic things that I need to list and, as much of a cliché as it sounds, I really don’t know where to begin. I do know that I’ll have run out of positive adjectives by the end of this post. The friends I’ve made have been the best, and we’ve had more awesome moments than I can remember. I really hate the fact that I’m listening to Eagles – Take It to the Limit while writing this, because it’s making me well up inside – that said, any song would probably do the same right now. The long lunches, sitting talking about such specific stereotypical rubbish as “girls” and “the weekend” for two hours, never failed to put a smile on my face. Conversations about sporks and Adam snorting salt won’t be forgotten any time soon.

The second great thing was the teaching staff. This is the place where I have to mention people, if only so that I remember them more clearly; Dr Gerry Leversha, my tutor for five years, who helped take care of just about every problem I ever had – one of the most intelligent, kind and considerate people in the place, and I was lucky to know him; David Smith, head of ICT since the beginning of 2007, has changed the department (and the way it’s thought of) for the better in so many ways; and finally Okan Avni, for dealing with my UCAS application fantastically, and not complaining when I kept on letting it get behind.

There are too many others to mention that I could fill a book with names. To finish: Alex Wilson, Jenifer Ball, Richard Barker, Chris Fry, and even back to James Renshaw when I was an eleven year old learning Latin. David Emery deserves a mention; he was never really a teacher to me, but just such a brilliant person. Let’s face it, they’ve all had the fun of writing reports about me for the last nine years, so it’s only fair I get my chance to mention them now ;-)

I have no idea how to end this. No idea at all, so it’s going to be fast. How about just… thank you.