Minor annoyances

[pozorvlak]

A guy on Reddit pointed me at this article today. It's the Wikipedia biography of the Welsh computer scientist Donald Davies. Like my father, he was from the Rhondda Valley; he was the co-inventor of packet-switched networks (like this big one you're using right now); and he once found a bug in Alan Turing's code, before the first computer had been built :-)

I think he may be my new hero.

In other news:

• I've just finished Portal. It was great, but far too short :-( If you haven't played it yet, then you should go and buy/download a copy right now, and cover your ears and sing "La la la la la..." until it's loaded to avoid being spoilered like I was. The puzzles are still a lot of fun, but the plot and jokes would have been a lot better if I hadn't half-known they were coming.
  [And I didn't find "The Cake is a Lie!", even though I was looking out for it...]
• Spent a lot of time sitting at the computer today, but didn't get any thesis done. Bah.
• After a similarly unproductive morning yesterday, I went to the climbing wall, and had quite a good session: I did two 6as (which is good, for me), led a widely-agreed-to-be-undergraded 5+, and finally knocked off a 5+ with a big scary overhang that had been tormenting me for months. Yay!
• This may be the most awe-inspiring programming war story I've ever read.
• Letter from Linacre: I didn't get the job. Never mind.
• The winter mountaineering course I was booked on next weekend has been cancelled due to lack of interest. Just when the snow's started up again! I'm much more annoyed about that than about the rest, to be honest.

Ah well, tomorrow will be better. Anyway, have a look at this video, which is the trailer for one of the films I saw at the mountain film festival on Saturday:

Click to view

That sea arch he's climbing up the underside of, by the way, is provisionally graded as a French 9b :-)