Listening to Clips of the Week on talksport.net

I am writing this on a HP iPaq 214 PDA worth 250 quid, donated for the solar car team. It was given to me for the vacation as we don't have a use for it. I don't either.


In other news: hooray for Spain! Arshavin you're having a laugh!

Typing on this thing is a pain in the ****

New Laptop

After attending a Labview training day yesterday, some of us solar car team members inherited swanking new laptops donated by HP. Whilst technically not mine, word processing on 2.2GHz Dual-core, 2GB ram and the latest Nvidia video and HD sound cards is still quite exciting.



It even has a LDR that turns the screen darker/brighter depending on the ambient lighting!

A few pictures of the prototype car thrown in for good measure. She's called 'Alice'.

Oh dear...

I just caught the end of The Weakest Link. It had puppet contestants. BBC really are scraping the bottom of the barrel now.

Caius May Ball 2008: City Lights

...so I guess updating the blog once a day when working full-time is a bit difficult eh? Anyway, here are some of the better photos I took during the ball on Tuesday night.

The queue.

The Old Courts.

Coconut-shooting?

Chocolate fountain, mmm...

Cello suite in the Panelled Room.

Hello Hawkster! Bet you didn't have to pay £118, you sod.

Hmm.

Supergrass!

"We are young, we run green,
Keep our teeth, nice and clean..."

The Vulnerable Things - a decent blues band from London.

Wednesday 18th 6:00am: waiting for the survivors photo.

First day at work

Today I just started working on a research project for the forthcoming Cambridge University solar car. My job is to optimize the electronics system for the new "Raycer", designed to compete in the 2009 World Solar Car Challenge in Australia. To be honest, I'm quite excited to be working on this. Having just seen the prototype complete the End-to-End challenge (http://www.srcf.ucam.org/cuer/endtoend/index.html), I'm quite confident of the team doing well next year.

More bakery

To make up for not getting Kevin anything for his birthday, I decided to bake him a cake instead. Two in a row, woah.

More marg, please.

I always wanted to learn (re-learn?) cooking properly, and remember during my HE classes how baking stuff was the most fun of them all. Incidentally, I still remember how I overbaked my cookies once, and they turned out pretty much like charcoal. Hmm...

Anyways, I tried my hands at making flapjack today. It's a Scottish snack made with oats, butter and margarine, honey/syrup and brown sugar. Mix everything thoroughly once the butter/marg have melted, and bake. Simple.

I wasn't sure if the greaseproof paper burned or not. Thankfully it didn't.

In it goes!

The finished product. The baking time was okay, although the texture wasn't as chewy as I hoped. Next time I'll use more margarine.

Rain

I was wondering this morning - who decided on the pronunciation and spelling of 'rain'? It's not as if the water droplets look like 'r', 'a', 'i' or 'n', or that the sound of falling water is like 'rayne'.

Thought about it for 2 minutes, then gave up.

Today was also my brother Kevin's 10th birthday. I hope he gets toothache from eating all the cake (just kidding).

Switzerland Vs Turkey turned out rather exciting, due in no small part to the downpour, which made the match more like a game of water polo.

Ouch

a) I burnt my mouth trying to eat in a hurry. Won't do that again.

b) Euro 2008 result: Spain 4:1 Russia - looking good! It's a shame my dream final Holland Vs Spain is impossible.

c) Don't lick Hallmark envelopes, unless you want glue melting on your tongue.

Poles apart

Today I watched possibly the worst and best games of football this year. France Vs Romania (0:0) was just dire, whilst Italy Vs Netherlands (0:3) should have been the final itself. I'll have to revise my judgement on Kuyt now, damn it.



Elsewhere, I had this for lunch:


It was supposed to be a pizza. Go figure...

Learning to play the guitar...

...properly is harder than one thinks. I've been meaning to learn Albeniz's Asturias for well over three years now, but I cringe as soon as I see the score. It's just unbelievable how one could move their fingers at such incredible pace. Guess dropping formal tuition when I was 12 was a mistake.

Sports Marathon Weekend

Saturday

Tennis: Womens' French Open Final
Motorsport: F1 Canadian GP Quali
Football: Euro 2008 Switzerland Vs Czech Republic, Portugal Vs Turkey

Sunday

Tennis: Mens' French Open Final
Motorsport: F1 Canadian GP Race
Football: Euro 2008 Austria Vs Croatia (Boo), Germany Vs Poland

I think I died and went to heaven.

Sudoku

Got stuck on this whilst on the train. Any help?

If not, here's a picture of some cats.Aww.

Everything's Rising/Back to the Cam

Maybe a year is a long time after all. Before I left for the US, a litre of petrol was just under £1, whilst Kevin (my younger brother) was barely 4ft tall. Now the petrol is £1.18, and Kevin has grown so much that I can't really walk into him and pretend he wasn't there anymore. Oh well...

Meanwhile, I just got back to Cambridge today. It has been a while.

Was it really 357 days ago?

Wait, before going in...

Let's grab some grub.

Classic BLT.

Come to Daddy.

There.

I'm back.

Some good, some bad

The good thing is that my internet connection is fixed, so no more blandness on the posts. Oh yeah.

The bad thing I discovered today, was that my body clock seemed to have overshot the BST timezone. Fell asleep doing paperwork this morning, and woke up at 4pm. Eh? Did it get on the wrong flight?

Chao (already missing the US a little)

Why?

Why would I want to do something like this? It's not like I wrote diaries or anything when I was young, or that I've been particularly good with words. Well, I guess after finishing the Cambridge-MIT Exchange, it's a good time to start, since I'm now 'turning a new leaf' to coin a phrase.

The blog will mostly reflect, as the title suggests, any random thoughts that I feel people may like to read and comment about. So anything goes, but hopefully nothing to attract the attention of the censors. I will try to make the posts as entertaining as possible, no promises mind. Updates should occur daily, unless I get lazy (fair to probable chance).

For the meanwhile, you may notice a lack of colour to the pages. That's because the internet connection at my house is going bonkers. To avoid possible meltdown/death, uploading pictures may have to wait 'til next week.

That's all.

Chao