cdave | Entries tagged with me

I managed to score some tickets to a recording of "Comedy Store" at "The Comedy Store" for "Comedy Central". The site proclaims:

On its grimy stage some of the greatest acts in the business have perfected their act

Which clearly isn't true. They was a two man team with a mist-er and a stiff broom giving it quick scrub when we arrived. Owing to my leaving the office later than intended, we were one of the last groups let in. We wound up with a choice between left wing front row, left wing a few rows back, or right at the back.

We decided to sit at the front. I thought that this meant there was a good chance I'd get picked on. As I mentioned I'd come straight from the office, and was in a suit. I've been at the comedy store before where the stand ups picked on the suits.

As this was a TV recording though, and they generally wanted to try and keep to a tight set, ( I almost got away with it. )

Current Mood: amused

I was walking past Oxford Circus, when I saw an unusual busker. There was two guys each with a set of plastic buckets up turned round them in a semi circle, seating on another bucket. One of them was bashing away with a set of drumsticks, using rim shots and different volumes to create different sounds. After a bit his mate picked up the rhythm and the two of them improvised an awesome bucket solo.

On my internet travels I've seen a couple of comments recently on how genre stuff isn't taken seriously by literature geeks.

These two things are more connected than you'd think.

I took GCSE music largely because it meant I got to muck about with computers. I'd never really learned to play music, and scrapped past the performance sections. But for the compositions, I had a access to MIDI keyboards, drum modules and a compute with cubase.

For one of my compositions, I decided to muck about with the drum module, and wrote a whole piece that was nothing but drums. Lots of drums. Starting with a few riffs, and layering them over each other, building up in complexity, matching the tones of the drums to make a sort of melody. Anyway, it was okay.

One day I sat down and someone had swapped the drum module out for a keyboard without me noticing. So instead of the melodic drums, I got atonal staccato piano. Which I intrigued me, so I used that as the kicking off point for my next piece. It was a different piece, but built the same way the drum piece had been, containing just about the same amount of complexity, and "story".

The external examiners gave the staccato piano piece over a grade higher score than the drum piece.

Current Mood: contemplative

Someone just asked on a forum I frequent if anyone had any old trading cards they didn't want.

I do. I found them ages ago. I was quite into the franchise of which the cards were part of, and had all sorts of related tat. I found an incomplete set in a charity shop, so snapped them up. But I never new anyone else who was into them. And didn't have a display shrine or anything. So they just sit in a bag. Taking up space I don't really have spare.

I quite like owning them. But they serve no real purpose. Unlike a book, I'm not keeping it with the thought I'll re-use them some day. Unlike art, I'm not really going to get pleasure from looking at them, or displaying them.

So I'll give them up to someone else who wants them. But it feels like a scarily grown up decision. I can't be more than 5 years since I saw them and thought "nifty, want".

Current Mood: uncomfortable

My plans for last night were as complex as my plans ever are. Finish work. Head down to the 'ton, since I'd not made a first Thursday for ages. Then head out to the Tacheback party, in order to claim a cocktail and join the parade. And finally head back to the Cock to drink with the Joinees.

I never made it to the Cock. ( I had way too much fun at the Tacheback party. )

Current Mood: pleased

Bit late for a What I Did At The Weekend (Went to Caption (Oxford small press comics convention) on Saturday, and down south to visit parental units on the Sunday) post, but one of the things I did was clear some of my junk out of a parental loft.

[Poll #1446736]

I found that I had 3 cardboard boxes of "school stuff" and 2 plastic crates of "University stuff". I didn't have much time to go through it, but managed to sling a few bits (such as all my sixth form era invites to University open days). While I do like the odd doodle in the margin, and in joke scrawled on the cover of a notebook, I'm really not sure I need to keep quite this volume of stuff.

Given that I haven't looked at it in years, and am unlikely to do so in the near future, I probably should just sling most of it. But it's so final. This stuff, as useless as it is, is literally irreplaceable. I managed to avoid picking up a "bargin" in IKEA the other day on the basis that I'd rather pay full price when I need it, than hang onto something that just takes up space. But this stuff is my own hand.

Current Mood: nostalgic

On Friday night I hosted a girly night in Mamma Mia PJ party.

Then chilled out on Saturday before eating far too much free Ice Cream at the Ben and Jerry Sundae in the Park.

Both were great fun but, I'm not feeling very inspired to write today.

Current Mood: apathetic

Last night I went to sandpit #10 for some unusual games.

Aside: Hmm, I'll need some new nicknames here.

Aside2: Just realised I never wrote up Sandpit 8.

hawkida,

stefzilla, Ladybird, and Chef went then.

We signed up for Mexican Thumb Westling, which took all night, so we didn't get to do any of the other big / outdoor games.

Instead we played some of the pick up and play games. First of we played Exquisite Corpse story. Write a line and word or two, fold over and pass on. One of these was brilliant. Two were funny, and one made no sense at all.

Then we got into a fairly large round of werewolf (about 20 people), in which Chef accused me of having hairy hands, and that I must be a wolf. I wasn't but Ladybird was, and IIRC won!

stefzilla made it to the final of Mexican Thumb Westling.

Floo, StarShirt and Ladybird were there for sandpit 10. This time they had ticketed it, and set each game to last an hour, so you could get three in. However they had sold out.

So back to the pick up and play games.

Dadaist Trivial Pursuit was surprisingly good. One person reads out a random question from a Trivial pursuit card, and the others then read out the most surreal answer on their cards.
"What colour are all snakes eyes?"
"German"
"A Cow"
"Michael Flatly"

Next I rounded a few random people who were waiting 20 minutes for their game to start and tried to host a quick game of Werewolf (which I ought to explain here, but don't have time. Read more if you want). No one there had ever played before, and I'd never hosted. It went okay, but not great. StarShirt was lynched straight off as the Villagers thought he was smiling too much, so must have just killed. He was innocent.

Then we tried to play a simplified version of Mao, a hidden rules card game, but that didn't go so well.

At this point we were thinking about leaving when the game of "Super Secret Robot Werewolf" descended on our table, so we snuck onto that. It was a Werewolf variation set on ~~Battlesta~~ a space ship, with crew, ~~cylo~~ super secret robots, a security officer, and a science officer with a ~~cylo~~ robot detector. StarShirt was lynched early on as the Crew thought he was smiling too much, so must have just killed. He was innocent.

I was not. For the first time ever I was a ~~werewolf~~ ~~cylo~~ robot. I think the highlight of the game was when someone announced that they were the science officer, and they knew who a robot was. The certainly convinced us, so the secret robots all backed up each others arguments, and convinced the crew to lynch him. At the end of the game it turned out he'd been lying anyway!

Oh and we won. 3 ~~cylo~~ super secret robots took out the crew of 13.

Current Mood: happy

Last night I went to sandpit #10 for some unusual games.

Aside: Hmm, I'll need some new nicknames here.

Aside2: Just realised I never wrote up Sandpit 8. {redacted}.

We signed up for Mexican Thumb Westling, which took all night, so we didn't get to do any of the other big / outdoor games.

Instead we played some of the pick up and play games. First of we played Exquisite Corpse story. Write a line and word or two, fold over and pass on. One of these was brilliant. Two were funny, and one made no sense at all.

Then we got into a fairly large round of werewolf (about 20 people), in which {redacted} accused me of having hairy hands, and that I must be a wolf. I wasn't but {redacted} was, and IIRC won!

{redacted} made it to the final of Mexican Thumb Westling.

{redacted} were there for sandpit 10. This time they had ticketed it, and set each game to last an hour, so you could get three in. However they had sold out.

So back to the pick up and play games.

Dadaist Trivial Pursuit was surprisingly good. One person reads out a random question from a Trivial pursuit card, and the others then read out the most surreal answer on their cards.
"What colour are all snakes eyes?"
"German"
"A Cow"
"Michael Flatly"

Next I rounded a few random people who were waiting 20 minutes for their game to start and tried to host a quick game of Werewolf (which I ought to explain here, but don't have time. Read more if you want). No one there had ever played before, and I'd never hosted. It went okay, but not great. {redacted} was lynched straight off as the Villagers thought he was smiling too much, so must have just killed. He was innocent.

Then we tried to play a simplified version of Mao, a hidden rules card game, but that didn't go so well.

At this point we were thinking about leaving when the game of "Super Secret Robot Werewolf" descended on our table, so we snuck onto that. It was a Werewolf variation set on ~~Battlesta~~ a space ship, with crew, ~~cylo~~ super secret robots, a security officer, and a science officer with a ~~cylo~~ robot detector. {redacted} was lynched early on as the Crew thought he was smiling too much, so must have just killed. He was innocent.

I was not. For the first time ever I was a ~~werewolf~~ ~~cylo~~ robot. I think the highlight of the game was when someone announced that they were the science officer, and they knew who a robot was. The certainly convinced us, so the secret robots all backed up each others arguments, and convinced the crew to lynch him. At the end of the game it turned out he'd been lying anyway!

Oh and we won. 3 ~~cylo~~ super secret robots took out the crew of 13.

Current Mood: happy

( or why I call myself Dave. )

I realised the other day that despite never keeping a diary, or weighing myself more than once every few months, I can remember my weight at various times. So graph time!

I knew I'd got into the healthy weight bit of the graph, but hadn't realised I was within a year of weighing less than I did when I started uni (if I keep losing weight at the same rate).

How odd. I'm really not focusing on anything particularly to do it.

{ETA: Any Banana Wing fans out there there's a discussion on Imposter Syndrome on radio now.}

Current Mood: nerdy

Owing to being really busy at work, and (when I get out on time) in the evenings, I've not posted much recently. So here's my current list of things I don't have time to do justice to:

Dating

Having seen a couple of people point to a flawed article on dating amongst other things has made me want to try and write an Introspection post on the topic, so I can get my own head around my own thoughts on it.

RaceFail '09

I've spent many hours I don't have to spare reading up on the past three of months this fandom wide argument, and come to the conclusion that I don't have anything useful I could say.
I may or may not keep reading, but given that you would find it hard it hard to tell if I had, lets not worry.

Avenue Q

Went to go see this at the weekend with Dad. Very good.
Particularity enjoyed the song "Everyone's a little bit racist".
For some reason I got tunes from The Little Mermaid stuck in my head afterwards.

What is the correct way to include A Title in a sentence about "a title"?

Images

New Shelves (from Islington Council's version of freecycle)

How do I get in my room now?

I just put these up, how are they full already?

"Northern Irish" flag

Remember that artsy new flag for Northern Ireland?

Well over the weekend it got caught in the string, and today seems to have been torn in half. Nature causing art to imitate life?

My Mad war with chiller
A repost from my Facebook wall explaining why I was explaining maths to Jehovah's Witnesses

Gödel's incompleteness theorem is a mathematical proof that in any sufficiently complex system of arithmetic, there will statements that you cannot prove as true or false.

E.g. Tell me if the sentence on the next line is true or false:
This sentence is false.

You can assume the statement is true and develop a whole branch of maths off of that. Or you can assume it is false and develop a whole different branch of maths.

This is what I personally believe about God. The question is undecidable. You can form a coherent set of beliefs starting from the assumption that there is a deity/pantheon of some sort. You can form a coherent set of beliefs starting from the assumption that there is no God. But since it's not provable either way this seems like a waste of time.

This is why my religion on Facebook is Evangelical (I like telling people this) Strong Agnostic (I believe you cannot disprove a god).

Meta post

Given how little time I seem to have to blog I wanted to take a look at why I do again. Culminating in a poll asking you to pick one of my tags: Diary, Link, Introspection, Reveiws.

Ironically, I don't have time for this.

Current Mood: busy

Valentines Day has always seemed to have two parallel traditions. For those in a relationship it is a day to express your love for each other (lets set aside cynicism for now). I think this is a lovely sentiment.

The other one is anonymously declaring your love for someone. This bit doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand it at all.

Asking someone out, is fine. Telling someone you think they're gorgeous in person, could be objectifying and creepy, so is not so cool, but can be done politely. But anonymously saying you love them seems a bit... well stalkery.

Can you explain this to me?

That said ( purely for the purpose of a scientific test... )

I never turn off anonymous comments, but what the heck, I'm declaring this to be an anonymous comment Friday. Log off face book and say what you want.

I told a story about getting in trouble in at school to

hawkida,

purplecthulhu,

major_clanger,

tanngrisnir, and Alice WIPIOLJ,AQPOMFL,BIANS¹.

It seems that

offensive_mango has declared this to be a meme today, so I'd better share.

I went to a fairly relaxed senior school. On lunch time a bunch of sixth fromers found a supply of parcel tape somewhere. So naturally taped a guy to chair and took him out to a the school roundabout. After flailing for a bit he managed to tip the chair over to the amusement of the younger school kids who's started watching. A teacher marched over, picked the chair up, put it back up right, and left him taped to it.

I only got in serious trouble twice.

The first time I got sent to the head's office for fighting (there are over 1500 students there, so this really is a rarity). I was probably in year 9 was playing football against a bunch of year 7s. One particularly little one had decided he had something to prove, so was trying to pick a fight with the tallest guy there. Me. Now I was really scrawny, and have never been a fighter, so he'd have better off trying to wind up almost anyone else.

Eventually he got to me though. When he pulled yet another two footed tackle after I'd passed the ball, rather than dodge, I let him take my feet out, and promptly fell over. On his face. Elbow first. And got caught out by dinner lady.

The other time was a my only ever detention. I was sitting the middle of the room in front of the teacher. On either side of the classroom where a couple of seat warmers who were decided to have elastic band / paper wad war. Being directly between them I got hit a fair few times, so discreetly returned fire. But the grey matter deficient guy on the left took umbridge at the class geek joining in their game, so walked over and socked me one. Right in front the teacher. All three of us paper flingers got detention.

I was at least allowed to serve it separately from them. I spent a couple of evenings stacking chairs with a nice kid, who been caught picking the lock on the vending machine restock cupboard.

¹ Who I presume is on livejournal, and quite possibly on my f-list, but I am not sure.

Current Mood: nostalgic

All of these deserve more space, but time is fleeting.

Why I dislike spoilers. At the end of the 2006 series of Dr Who, I thought it had a week more to run, so the ending was a real surprise. I watched it on DVD box set recently, and didn't realise the last disk was all extras, so the same thing happened again.

Response to a tlanti post, on how I MacGyvered my way into my house once.

Seeing how few of chiller's friends sleep well, post a poll asking how often people know that they have dreamed.

Impressions of last week's work travel. Business class to Karachi.

Next reading list:
Finished reading JPod.
Nighthawks spotted Good Dog, Bad Dog in the DFC. And Dead Like Me. Wish I could remember the first time I was aware of this painting. It was in the last few months I'm sure.
Finished reading Perdido Street Station.

When I caught a bus coming the other day, as I was walking past the bus stop I said "bonus" out loud. I think that's a nice phrase, and wanted to blog about why. Not sure I've ever heard anyone say it as an exclamation if happiness though.
Chatted to lady waiting at stop on Northern line cursing me.

Blog about the Alternative Press Fair.

Been tagged to do a 16 things about me meme.

Been a while since I re-did a Myres Briggs test and that one looks good as it shows you relative strengths of them (I was borderline on the last two iirc).

Current Mood: busy

Monday: Found out I'd be leaving on jet plane next week.
Tuesday: Bender likes Rikku, because doesn't realise she's an Al'Bhed.
Wednesday: Failed to play darts, but did hear a dog outsmart the Lord of Evil.
Thursday: Unexpectedly found some Golden Sprouts in a basement, but had to leave them to play "wind up 118118" with some Unusual Weasels on a first floor.
Friday: Watched some bubble wrapped Astronauts fight on trapezes, some mechanical Russian's act out an Italian book, and got blessed in a garden of dead roses.
Saturday: Traveled for 7 hours to spend 2 hours looking at somewhere I will soon spend 4 days, and sit in a room for 4 hours.

Current Mood: busy

They've been relaying the tarmac outside my flat all week. I live at the northernmost edge of the Finsbury Park Parking Zone. So on Monday morning I drove my car the 5 minutes to the tube station and left it there all week.

I went down to pick it up today, and there was a peice of paper under the windsreen wiper. I thought it would be some passive aggressive note from a home ownerer telling me the car had been in their space for a week now, and asking me to move it.

But it was in fact a quite threatening note.

From a character in wrestling game me and iBon had made while testing what manor of monstrous distortions were possible. Had me in stitches.

Current Mood: amused

A post on the scientific preprint paper blog on how the credit crisis spread, reminded me of my masters dissertation.

It was on attempting to model solar flare statistics using a self-organised cirtical forest fire model. In laymans terms we had a program that updated a grid with spaces, trees, and fires following some simple rules. This paper sums up the sort of thing we were supposed to be thinking about.

The most interesting results we got out of model in the end came when we started playing with underlying rules. If you let a few of the trees wander about into empty spaces beside them, you still get self organising behaviour.

This sort of model had been using in the past to look at measles epidemics (Spread of fire ~ spread of disease).

One thing we didn't get a chance to try, was adding an occasional long range correlation. In other words giving a tree a friend on the other side of the grid. Turning into the kind of small world network, where there's only 6 degrees of separation between any tree and Kevin Bacon.

I couldn't find this in the literature anywhere. So thought that if I'd stayed on at Warwick I might have been able to write it up, and get published.

I just had a quick look now and it seems that while I was thinking this, someone else had already done this, written it up, and it was awaiting publication. I'm quite glad I didn't end up wasting a lot of time on this now.

In an entirely unrelated matter, if anyone buys me this t-shirt, they will be thoroughly irradiated.

Current Mood: thoughtful

I've spent lunch time sorting out plans for the coming month or so. Let me know if you're interested in any of the below.

Avenue Q, the adult musical version of sesame street finishes it's long west end run in March, so I'd like to go see it before it goes. Cheap tickets seem to run out by February. The cheapest January ones I've seen so far are £20 for the Friday 23rd matinee but I can't make that. ~~So £30~~ {edit: Looks like £25 should be possible} on another evening. Anyone interested?

On Friday the 23rd I'm planning to go to Shunt. An nightclub cum art venue under the vaults at London Bridge. Since a mate will be doing circus stuff there that week.

I read

jabberworks's LJ for three reasons. Firstly she's a brilliant illustrator, whose daily doodles are simply fantastic. Secondly she draws one of my favourite DFC strips. Thirdly she really has her fingers on the pulse of the UK small press scene.

Alternative Press Fair, Euston, Sunday 1st February 2009, 12pm to 6pm.
I think I'll aim for around 2ish.

St. Jude's Gallery
Details: Mon, 2 Feb, 6-8pm opening; exhibition runs until Thurs, 12 Feb.
Bankside Gallery, 48 Hopton Street, London SE1 9JH. Open every day from 11am-6pm.
Anyone work near the South Bank and feel like having a look one lunch time?

I can't make late night Science Museum or the BSFA's Michael Swanwick Interview on Thursday 28 January, as they clash with a Karaoke thing I'm going to with a few mates from a previous Job. Grr. In fact they both seem to be on the last Wednesday of the month.

I want to go see Yes Man, but suspect it'll be out of the cinema's soon, so have probably missed the boat on trying to organise that one.

Current Mood: busy

( Look at them roots! )

I've got over a centimetre of roots now, and soon I think it'll look quite odd(er). So I think I'll dye my hair at Christmas.

[Poll #1316720]

Current Mood: pretty

Or, what I did at the weekend.

Feeling Christmasy now. I bought most of the remaining presents I needed to over the weekend, and few bits of tinsel and bluetack. And a couple of postcards for an upcoming Joinee bit of sillyness.

#5 - Christmas dinner with Floo's flatmates. They sqeueezed about 30 people into their 3 bed flat. Even going so far as to make a couple of benches out of MDF to fit us all in! They cooked a gorgeous turkey, with lovely home made gravy. We did a secret Santa, and I got a wonderfully pungent bouncy ball, and got to watch people have great fun as the built the ~~Lego™~~ plastic brick construction toy I'd thrown in :)

#6 - Another Christmas party up the Picadilly line. With friends, home made mince pies, and impromptu GTA2 LAN party in the back room.

And a bonus to make up for not posting these on the days:( What the plan was for the bus at the start of The Italian Job II )

Current Mood: happy

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Entries tagged with me

Asking for trouble

Plinky plonky bingy bangy

Materialism, or I don't want to grow up.

The tacheback party

Old notes

WIDATW: Abba and Ice Cream

The Super Secret Robots will destroy you from within!

The Super Secret Robots will destroy you from within!

Confidence is a preferance

Weight for it!

Current half written posts

Anonymous Valentines. I don't get it.

Ahmmma! I'm tellin' on you!

Current list of half written posts.

My week as a cryptic series of Bullet points.(tm)

Dis-carded car

Forest fires where the trees have pen pals.

Some stuff I want to do, do you?

(no subject)

Happy meme #5, #6