./~ come with the wind ~\.

Went to Compsci Formal. Nobody sat opposite me and mdavison. It was rather boring because I could barely hear the conversations I was trying to listen to. The food was okay but not really any better than normal Hall food. Afterwards half of the compscis organsied a drinking competition known as a Boat Race, and Tim Harris and a couple of us de-camped to the MCR bar so we could hear ourselves think, and because Matthew wanted to see if they had any decent whiskey. They did (and it was also where Paula, my Discrete Maths supervisor, had run off to; she'd run off to open up the bar). Eventually Tim Harris wandered off because he had a 10am lecture to give tomorrow, and so absolutely had to be awake. Sat around listening to Matthew and Alan agree about US surveillence and argue about DNS servers for a while (let's get this straight - *is* there a root zone file on a server known as the 'a-root' which gets propogated to the other roots and hence could be poisoned to screw over the 'net happily?) then decided I was too tired to be awake and retreated room-wards. Naturally, I decided to spod instead; GAIM crashed happily because MSN didn't want to talk to it, and currently nobody wants to talk to it...

Before Compsci Formal, I ran some more D&D. I actually had enough plot for the players this time, on the grounds of them wandering off and finding some of their own plot. Hadn't properly statted the NPCs, so probably let them get away too easily, but I didn't really want to trap them in the OTC Cathedral this early on in the proceedings. It looks like they're going back there of their own accord anyway, so maybe I'll be better organised next time.

Before that, I attempted to tidy my room. This failed mostly on the grounds that I got linked over to an interesting article about social networks, and also on teh grounds that someone's stolen my broom (well, it wasn't mine, it just happened to be in my room all last term) and so I was discouraged from bothering to tidy because I couldn't clean anyhow. Washed stuff up and cleaned my sink, though, and planned to dust things but couldn't find my Magic Dusters. Then remembered I had no map of Turnkey for my session and tried to find the one I drew earlier, which meant looking up how to find files under Linux (a rather non-trivial task, from what I found out; I wasn't thinking quite straight so there's probably a shiny graphical thing I missed, though). I didn't find it; I think I've deleted it off everything and generally lost it. Oh well; I have a description of it and I pretty much know it by now anyway.

There were some lectures in the morning. I was tired enough to actually listen to them (and my Psion was whining of low batteries). They weren't very entertaining, which was a shame, because they held so much promise, but all of the interesting bits were either deliberately skipped or glossed over. I hope we learn something about Software Engineering or about Java soon, or I will be most annoyed at bothering to show up. Read the introduction to the BlueJ book which I refuse to buy on principle (which principle? Either 'I do not buy textbooks' or 'I do not buy Really Awful Textbooks for Really Awful Courses') which explained how it was designed to be used to teach American middle-school kids how to code, which makes a lot of sense; this would indeed be an excellent Java course for such an age and ability range. However.

I sloped off back to Churchill after lectures, eating lunch on the way, and buying a new bottle of water to replace the one I lost at the CLC studenty thing on Sunday.

Now, this is a medium-length entry, perhaps. I like long LJ entries. Maybe I'll be even more verbose next time GAIM fails to work (currently it will load up, try and connect to stuff, not get past 'Connecting', and then suddenly say 'Disconnected' from all three services at once, then when I try to 'reconnect all' it will 'Connecting' for a while again and then just quietly disappear. I find this unhelpful of it).