It’s pretty safe to say that there are few people out there who understand why I do the things I do. Which is a bit irritating, but I guess I have to live with it. People continually don’t believe what I say either – they think I didn’t appeal because I was actually guilty, it’s been said that I only stood for President to annoy Sen, and can’t understand why I pulled out of the race – I’ve heard a few alternative explainations, but I’m pretty sure I stated my reasons pretty clearly in that letter. So I have divided the world into three groups, and I have a message for each of you.

1. You have no idea who I am – cool, you’re welcome to have a look around. Stick to articles like this one and this. The rest of them won’t make that much sense, since you don’t know who I am.
2. You think you know me – basically, you don’t. You won’t be able to tell when I’m being serious, you can’t tell when I’m sarcastic. You’re going to read things here and jump to conclusions about my feelings towards my friends, and my opinions on the world at large, and you’ll be completely wrong. You’ll misinterpret my intentions, make false assumptions, and then take them with you and judge me by them. And you won’t ever ask for clarification, or check that you’ve got it straight. So be very, very careful. No, more careful than that. I alternate between morose and flipant, serious and seeking a reaction, and you can’t tell which is which. You can only understand the subtleties if you actually know me quite well.
3. You actually know me quite well – basically, you don’t. Because I know who really knows me well enough to not misunderstand what I say here, and they don’t read this. You belong in the previous catagory.

I hope that clears things up a bit, and will lead to far fewer hours of my day spent justifying what I write here, and why I write it.

Update : I should point out that these three catagories apply to the ‘real world’ as well, in everything I say and do. It’s just the same, except sometimes you’ll be able to look me in the eye, and see the twinkle. But you’re still don’t know me as well as you might think you do.

Unless you leave your head under a rock, it’s hard to avoid hearing about the ongoing war in Iraq. I’m still kind of ambivalent about it, since I don’t think that there’s been a clear cut case either for or against (but the US have done a very fine job at screwing up international relations; they’ve got as much diplomatic ability as I have). What I find quite interesting is listening to other people’s points of view – some of them are quite surprising, and a few of them are quite random (in the DramSoc sense of the word). The taxi driver who took us back to Luton Airport today piped up when we were talking about foreign currencies, and french francs in particular. He said, in fairly halting English, that he didn’t think much of France and Germany, and "when they say no, is bad – they were enemies of us in the past, so to do that is not safe’. Fair enough – he can see that the actions of those two countries (and I didn’t like the french attitude of ‘we’ll veto it, no matter what it says’) could lead to destabilisation of relations between them and the US and UK, and that ain’t a very good idea.

Another fairly interesting viewpoint, and surely one you’ve already seen linked to, is that of one of the Human Shields who travelled to Iraq, and found it quite different to what he had expected. One of the main points being that he was totally mistaken in wanting to help the Iraqi civilians, since he found that, at least for some, they wanted to be ‘liberated’, and his actions would hinder that goal. See, he didn’t actually know what they thought, he just assumed. Which is a bad thing to do.

But perhaps the best thing I’ve seen came off of the weblog of a Mozilla developer, Kovu. The best bit was when he was talking about religion:

As far as killing innocent Iraqis, yes, that sucks. But you have to look at death differently than we do. Life is precious, but it is also Hell compared to the next world. You cannot say that death is bad and that God exists; the two are mutually exclusive. If death were bad, God cannot exist because then God is bad.

Now that’s just trying to get peoples backs up.

Boiling eggs is not as straightforward as you would think. Feel free to mock me now.

I scoffed, along with the millions, at Delia Smith’s back to basics ‘how to cook an egg’ thing a few years back. After all, I wanted hard boiled eggs, so all I needed was eggs, boiling water, and four minutes. But I soon realised that’s the equivalent of saying I only need sand, cement and a few days to build Edinburgh Castle. It’s a bit more tricky.

Firstly, salt in the water? Dunno, but I’ll add some anyway, it seems like the right thing to do. Should the eggs go into cold or boiling water? I hedged my bets, and waited until the water was warm. I now realise why people put the eggs onto a spoon and lower them in, since I just dropped them into shallow warm water, and they thunked onto the bottom. One of them cracked and started oozing out and cooking. That’s why I hold my head when I’m pissed off, incase my skull cracks and my brains start oozing out. I imagine it would look kinda similar. And I know that when you put eggs in water, they’re either supposed to float or sink, but I don’t know which. One of them was floating, but it was oozing as well, so I let it off. And four minutes from when? Putting them in, or when the water was boiling? Just as well I didn’t want soft-boiled eggs, since I once again hedged my bets and gave them six.

So a bit of a farce then, and too much mental shrugging of the shoulders. But since they came out fine, I guess either I’m a genious, flukey egg cooker, or cooking eggs is as foolproof as I had at first suspected.

Bet you feel that that was really worth reading, eh?

I was sitting on the 295 today right outside the flat that I spent the summer in, watching a group of policeman across the road talking to some well-dressed men. I had noticed three policemen at the bus stop on my side of the road, and the two meatwagons and a patrol car outside my old block of flats, so I was intrigued as to what was going on. One of the men passed a sheet of paper to an officer, and as he turned away, I saw a name badge with a familiar red circle with a horizontal bar. Suddenly, it all became clear…

Well, not quite a script from a detective thriller, because a guy appeared on the top deck of the bus, and asked to see all of our tickets and passes. He had a policeman standing half-way up the steps as moral support, but apart from the poor kid beside me who had a bit of a panic when he couldn’t remember which of his (suddenly infinite) number of pockets his ticket was in, it all went smoothly. More inspections would be fine with me – the drivers can only afford to give passes a cursory glance, since there’s often over a hundred people trying to squeeze on in as short a time as possible, it’s hard to check that the photocard is valid, the travelcard is valid, the numbers on the two match…

The 295 is a bit of a strange one for me to be on, but I thought I had better take a quick pass by Hammersmith bus station on the way home. That’s cause on Friday, after some rather unexpected happenings in the Union, I saw a guy getting the absolute shit kicked out of him by a group of about six others, right on front of me. And I mean right on front – I was sitting on one of the ledges around the balcony (you’ll know what I mean if you know the bus station), and the glass beside me and the floor around me got sprayed in some kind of Mafia film style when the guy got kicked in the face as he lay on the floor in front of me. For once, I’m completely proud of what I did to help – absolutely nothing. You see, normally, and especially when I’m that many sheets to the wind, I’ll jump in and try and break it up, and usually get punched in the face for my efforts. Like yonder time in Switzerland in fairly similar circumstances, except I was off-duty staff in the club that time. So on Friday I managed to control myself, sat stock still, and jumped on the first N72 that arrived, just as large numbers of police arrived. And that way I avoided spoiling what would had been up to that point a rather pleasant evening.

And so today I went past again, out of my way, to see if they had one of those bright yellow appeals for witnesses boards up. I don’t see that much in the way of violent crime up close and personal, so I felt it was worth the effort, and unfortunately that seems to be the only way of finding out (passively) if the police are looking for help. Their website seems reserved for the highest profile murder appeals and suchlike, and walking into a police station is a bit too much effort. The big yellow boards are quite useful I imagine, but they only work if you happen to see a crime somewhere that you pass regularly. So why didn’t I hang around and talk to the police there and then, like a truly good citizen? Because I was very drunk, very tired, and very happy, and I was in homing pidgeon mode, so nothing would be able to stop me from heading straight to bed. Which is where, coincedently, I’m heading now.

The idea of ‘Iraqi state television news broadcasts’ always has the word ‘propaganda’ somewhere close behind it in my mind, but I’m also concerned about the state television broadcasts of a country closer to home. I’m not the only one – there’s plenty of cynics who think that the BBC is just as bad as any foreign (read less-desirable-country) state-run broadcaster. I’m not quite there with the (anti-government / anti-capitalism / anti-globalisation / anti-rational-thought) crowd though, but I still have to take things with a pince of salt. As far as I can make out, there are only three ways that information comes out of Iraq – through reports from the Coalition Central Command (hey, did we not used to fight for the ‘Allies’? Have we lost that many friends that we are now only a ‘Coalition’?), from journalists who are working with the Coalition forces, and from reporters who are ‘in-country’, who are shown around by the Iraqi Ministry of Information.

Not exactly a good set of sources – imagine trying to describe the colours of a painting when you only get to look at it through blue, dark blue, darker blue and dark green tinted goggles. In chemistry terms, there’s an inbuilt bias in the measurements. For example, what is happening in Western Iraq? Last night, the BBC were candid enough to say that they didn’t really know – there’s been a couple of catchily-named airbases that have been taken over, but that’s all that the Central Command have said. But there’s no Western journalists with that set of forces, so who knows what else is going on. Rapid advancement on Baghdad, preparations for an airborne redeployment of forces to Northern Iraq (since Turkey didn’t give in to Coalition bribery), or a whole load of sunbathing? Journalists in southern Iraq get to see forces being held up by pockets of resistance, but from the actions of the particular amoured company (only a handful of soldiers who will guard their words with care), they have to extrapolate whether this constitutes a few score isolated troops, a few score scared troops with loyal Guardsmen keeping them in line, or a few-score troops screening a credible Iraqi force that are quite happy to let the Coalition over-extend themselves northwards and will harrass their supply lines in days to come? After all, trying to prevent the northwards advance is folly, against a force ten times your size and around three decades more advanced (and that’s three decades of the most rapidly advancing military force on this planet, remember). Play it smart – hide in the cities, attack the supply lines, and fight battles that you can win. But I’m getting off topic.

I’m fascinated by what is going on in Iraq. Invading a country and conquering it (choose your own definition of conquering) in around a week is staggering. I’d really like to know what’s really going on though, and I mean that in a kind of omniscient manner. It’s not going to happen though. Although many people will say "Don’t believe everything that you see on TV", I think most of what you see on (British) TV news coverage is the truth. However, it’s not possible for it to be the whole truth, so perhaps we should ‘Remember that there’s a lot more that you don’t see on TV’. Not quite as catchy though, but perhaps more accurate.

Well, sure enough I was pretty busy over the weekend, quite probably too busy to be honest. There were plenty of things that came up that I feel like discussing, but I am, as usual, too lazy to do much about it. And there are other things, which if they had happened a few months back when I still liked to rant quite so much, which could be discussed, but I don’t want to rant anymore.

A while back it got to the point where I wanted to just leave London, and get away from it all – I looked taking a few weeks off of uni and just bugging out. I soon came to realise that I didn’t really want to ‘get away from it all’. Instead, I want a life that I enjoy – I don’t want to ever feel like there’s something so bad that my only option is to flee. And I hope that a friend of mine realises that whilst there’s nothing wrong with tears, there is something badly wrong if you need to cry.

I did a bit of changing around links on gravitystorm last weekend, for two reasons. Firstly, I had read an article from the W3C recently, talking about trying to keep urls permanent, and removing links that show the mechanisms of the webserver. So I changed all the weblog archives so that it no longer mentions php anywhere, but with still keeping the same database backend and not having prolific numbers of html files everywhere. As a completely unexpected benefit (cough cough), Google now crawls all the weblog articles (it puts a heavy penalty on what it reckons is ‘dynamic’ pages; it uses question marks in the url as a main indicator of such pages), so I’ve managed to increase the noise ratio on the google results in one fell swoop. I’d give you some of the examples of what people are looking for, which is often quite funny ("I need sex Tooting" being one of them), but I’ll need to wait till I go home for that. And I don’t think that I’ll have much change of doing that over the weekend, since I’m rather busy with DramSoc stuff.

I study chemistry at the top university for chemistry in the entire country, and so when we’re taught something, it’s generally done pretty thoroughly, and to a pretty high level. Especially when it gets to the final year of a Masters course. So what gets irritating is when a bunch of computer geeks start debating the benefits and drawbacks of having a hydrogen economy. They really don’t understand the difference between energy sources and energy vectors – the point behind a fuel source is that there is plenty of it to mine or otherwise consume. That isn’t the point behind using hydrogen as an energy vector, which is completely different. Did you know, for instance, that it’s more economic to move energy in the form of train loads of coal than over electricity lines, despite having a national grid. But then again, it’s hard to convert both wind and uranium into coal, or better yet oil in pipelines, so the whole issue is rather more complicated than just comparing the energy efficiencies of GDI engines and low pressure polymer fuel cells.

I could explain it further, but I’m not going to. I’m just too lazy, and will only do so if it comes up in my exams in May. Lazyness is also one reason that I didn’t reply to the slashdot story, but also stopping me from bothering to reply were concepts like signal noise ratios, banging my head off of a brick wall (like Mr T does whenever electrical stupidity and ignorance crops up), and also because it’s quite satisfying to pretend to know more than someone else and lord over them. Suffice to say that I support the idea of hydrogen as a primary energy vector. That and lots of fuel cells hooked up to wind turbines.

Ooh, it’s nice to see that some people are finally realising that there’s more to life (on the Internet) than just Internet Explorer. The ‘supported browsers’ list for the latest incarnation of SOLE reads as follows:

• IE 4.x and above
• Netscape 7.x
• Mozilla 1.0 & 1.1b
• Konqueror 2.2
• Safari 1.0 Beta
• OmniWeb 4.1.1
• Opera 5.

It even states that other browsers may work, but just that they aren’t officially supported. Now if only the dipsticks over at the Royal Bank of Scotland would sort their online banking out, I’d be happy. It used to come up with a message saying that you needed Internet Explorer 4.0 or above (hmmm), or Netscape Navigator 4.0 to 4.76 inclusive (shudder), but now it just automatically closes the pop-up window if you don’t have the right browser, which is pretty poor customer service. It’s as if I went into a branch, walked up to the counter, and when I started speaking the teller just shouted ‘Next!’, with no explanation as to why I wasn’t being served. That would be shocking; as is their website as far as I’m concerned.

Why is it that I am inexorably drawn to things that make me unhappy? Despite my best efforts, I still can’t help sticking my oar into the discussion on Live!, even though it pisses me off. Once again, the issue of the disciplinary crap came up, and I felt that I had to defend my reasons for not appealing. But why? I don’t have to justify my actions again. I couldn’t help myself though. I’ve even allowed myself to get drawn into Mustafa’s inane drivel about elections – if he claims to ‘have not been involved in the union this year’ one more time (how many papers has he taken to council this year? I even remember him making one up during a meeting), I swear I will blow a fuse.

But this attitude is pissing me off. Why should I care? Why can I not just let them get on with it, with their stupid little power games, incessant wingeing, and perspectives on issues that would make M.C. Escher proud?

Hopefully, when I get over the cold that laid me out for the end of last week and over the weekend (I’m even tempted to call it the flu, since I properly couldn’t get out of bed for 18 hours, not just prefer-to-stay-in-it style), I’ll keep up my quest to get away from it all.