Placement Part 2
So I failed at blogging again last week, how do people manage to do a full time job, do all the stuff like laundry and cooking and still manage to blog?! I'm getting in, doing the washing up and cooking, and by then it's gone 9pm and thinking in sentences is almost beyond me. But, despite that I am still really enjoying this placement. I'm finally getting some proper results out from my code now, and correlating it with a set of other data. Now I need to find some way of getting IDL's correlate() function to work properly with arrays that have (not necessarily coinciding) NaNs all over the place Done, and data coming out. Not coming out quite how I expect, but that may be due to the method of finding the edges of the aurora not being quite good enough, I'm doing that again with a different bit of code and will see if the results come out any differently tomorrow.
We've also been given times for the presentations we have to give, I'm about half way through, which isn't too bad, I (probably) won't be the first person to get something wrong in it, and I'm just before the break so hopefully everyone will be half asleep anyway. Slightly scarily, it's only 7 days away. I demand to know where August has gone! I'm not sure when a summer has ever flown quite so quickly. I'm actually even getting pangs for the Edinburgh fringe too. I swore at the end of last August that if I had to endure another August in Edinburgh some one was going to get punched (probably a touristy pedestrian as they suddenly stopped in the middle of the pavement to take a photo or ask for directions or just because they don't realise that people are trying to live in this city too you know), but now I've spent the last three or four weeks seeing the comedians that I really like talking about their shows and the cool stuff that is happening in Edinburgh and suddenly I want back there!
And then, after I get back to Edinburgh, there's only two weeks until lectures start up again. I still need to choose about 1/4 of the credits for next year, but it's looking like I might actually have some days that are not 9am starts! Also (for the group project at least) we finally get let loose on a telescope. Although that possibly also means late(ish) nights up on Blackford Hill (and lots of praying for clear nights, while I will maintain that Edinburgh only really gets the rain when the tourists are in, there's no denying that we get a lot of cloudy nights (but also some spectacularly starry ones considering it is a city)).
I discovered on Thursday that the mic in my phone has apparently given up on me, I can phone people and hear them, but i can be screaming into the phone and they get nada. This is not usually a feature you look for in a phone. So after work on Friday I raced my way into town to catch a bus out to the humongous Tesco to replace it. I think I have just bought the most basic phone I have ever owned (which, basically, this is the third). Even my Nokia 3410 could do (really, really basic) internet, my Nokia 6070 could do triband, internet and a (crap) camera. And this phone can do texts and phonecalls on dualband. I am finding this remarkably pleasing. I am most annoyed at not having Snake on it, but the Nokia that was slightly more expensive than this felt like a much cheaper phone, and so I have switched to Samsung.
I was mildly amazed that there didn't seem to be much choice of phones that were about on the same level as my old one, there were either the really basic options, or the upwards of £30 with all the bells and whistles I will never use. If there had been something in the low £20s I might have gone for it but nope, you either having nothing or you have it all in phones at the moment apparently. On the other hand, this phone will do 3+ weeks on a charge according to the box, so Yay! for not having to plug it in every day.
Weirdly, my phone breaking when it did turned out to be a massive stroke of luck. I get to the Tesco, buy the phone and decide, instead of rushing to catch the first bus home, I would take a drift through the rest of the shop. When what do I spy but the Song of Ice and Fire books, £4 each or 3 for £10. Thanks to getting first dibs in the oxfam shop I already owned the first one, but I hadn't spotted the rest of them cheap second hand anywhere yet so I was teetering on the edge of buying them new from Amazon. This way I got them for about £6 less than Amazon, although I did have to carry them the mile home from the bus stop in my rucksack (no, I don't really know why I used my rucksack for buying a phone, I just know I'm grateful I did).
On Sunday however, I realised that my camera has also developed a fault, the scroll wheel that lets you adjust exposure time and zoom in on images and whatever will now only scroll to the right (well the wheel goes both ways, the camera only bothers to notice when you turn it to the right though) so that will be getting packed off to Argos (and probably from there to Pentax), apparently this has been a not uncommon fault so hopefully they won't get sniffy at me and will fix/replace/refund without hassle. But yeah, not a good week for me and tech :/.
And then there is this, apparently people enjoy stories more when they have been spoilered, but this just doesn't feel like my experience at all. The study hasn't been published yet, so I can't tell whether they discussed these or not, but there are two major points that stand out to me from the press release that they don't seem to have addressed.
One is the emotional investment before reading the story. For me the feeling of waiting for a new series of Doctor Who (which, w00t, 3 days to go!) or a new Terry Pratchett book (two months to go) is almost as good as my enjoyment of the thing itself. I will go out of my way to avoid reading any spoilers or speculation to build up this feeling as high as it will go. But this is only true for a very small subset of all fiction available. I really don't care about reading the Stieg Larsson books, so it doesn't matter to me whether or not I come across spoilers in reviews or online discussions because there is no emotional investment.
The second is that if I know a spoiler about a story my mind very often ends up on constant lookout for where the first inkling appears that the spoiler is becoming a major plot point. This makes it really rather difficult to focus on the plot for the sake of the plot, and in turn this can (not always, but sometimes) make it that much harder to enjoy the story. It stops the fiction being a world I could submerge myself into and instead it becomes just words on a page. This isn't so much of a problem on the second read through, I will often read things twice, the first time for the deep submerging feeling, the second (and third and fourth and twentieth) time for spotting all those little clues that an author has dropped, the references to past works (and where future works have made reference to this one) and the puns that only suddenly make sense when you happen to read it with your head in the right space.
But anyway, I'm definitely not going to change my spoilering habits over this just yet. And anyone who spoilers the George RR Martin books for me is going to get thumped.
(Also, has the firefox spell checker add on broken in lj for anyone else? it's working everywhere else still, just not here. And I don't like the built in lj spell checker. And hmm, weird, it seems to work in html mode but not when I'm using the rich text editor. This is really very frustrating)
We've also been given times for the presentations we have to give, I'm about half way through, which isn't too bad, I (probably) won't be the first person to get something wrong in it, and I'm just before the break so hopefully everyone will be half asleep anyway. Slightly scarily, it's only 7 days away. I demand to know where August has gone! I'm not sure when a summer has ever flown quite so quickly. I'm actually even getting pangs for the Edinburgh fringe too. I swore at the end of last August that if I had to endure another August in Edinburgh some one was going to get punched (probably a touristy pedestrian as they suddenly stopped in the middle of the pavement to take a photo or ask for directions or just because they don't realise that people are trying to live in this city too you know), but now I've spent the last three or four weeks seeing the comedians that I really like talking about their shows and the cool stuff that is happening in Edinburgh and suddenly I want back there!
And then, after I get back to Edinburgh, there's only two weeks until lectures start up again. I still need to choose about 1/4 of the credits for next year, but it's looking like I might actually have some days that are not 9am starts! Also (for the group project at least) we finally get let loose on a telescope. Although that possibly also means late(ish) nights up on Blackford Hill (and lots of praying for clear nights, while I will maintain that Edinburgh only really gets the rain when the tourists are in, there's no denying that we get a lot of cloudy nights (but also some spectacularly starry ones considering it is a city)).
I discovered on Thursday that the mic in my phone has apparently given up on me, I can phone people and hear them, but i can be screaming into the phone and they get nada. This is not usually a feature you look for in a phone. So after work on Friday I raced my way into town to catch a bus out to the humongous Tesco to replace it. I think I have just bought the most basic phone I have ever owned (which, basically, this is the third). Even my Nokia 3410 could do (really, really basic) internet, my Nokia 6070 could do triband, internet and a (crap) camera. And this phone can do texts and phonecalls on dualband. I am finding this remarkably pleasing. I am most annoyed at not having Snake on it, but the Nokia that was slightly more expensive than this felt like a much cheaper phone, and so I have switched to Samsung.
I was mildly amazed that there didn't seem to be much choice of phones that were about on the same level as my old one, there were either the really basic options, or the upwards of £30 with all the bells and whistles I will never use. If there had been something in the low £20s I might have gone for it but nope, you either having nothing or you have it all in phones at the moment apparently. On the other hand, this phone will do 3+ weeks on a charge according to the box, so Yay! for not having to plug it in every day.
Weirdly, my phone breaking when it did turned out to be a massive stroke of luck. I get to the Tesco, buy the phone and decide, instead of rushing to catch the first bus home, I would take a drift through the rest of the shop. When what do I spy but the Song of Ice and Fire books, £4 each or 3 for £10. Thanks to getting first dibs in the oxfam shop I already owned the first one, but I hadn't spotted the rest of them cheap second hand anywhere yet so I was teetering on the edge of buying them new from Amazon. This way I got them for about £6 less than Amazon, although I did have to carry them the mile home from the bus stop in my rucksack (no, I don't really know why I used my rucksack for buying a phone, I just know I'm grateful I did).
On Sunday however, I realised that my camera has also developed a fault, the scroll wheel that lets you adjust exposure time and zoom in on images and whatever will now only scroll to the right (well the wheel goes both ways, the camera only bothers to notice when you turn it to the right though) so that will be getting packed off to Argos (and probably from there to Pentax), apparently this has been a not uncommon fault so hopefully they won't get sniffy at me and will fix/replace/refund without hassle. But yeah, not a good week for me and tech :/.
And then there is this, apparently people enjoy stories more when they have been spoilered, but this just doesn't feel like my experience at all. The study hasn't been published yet, so I can't tell whether they discussed these or not, but there are two major points that stand out to me from the press release that they don't seem to have addressed.
One is the emotional investment before reading the story. For me the feeling of waiting for a new series of Doctor Who (which, w00t, 3 days to go!) or a new Terry Pratchett book (two months to go) is almost as good as my enjoyment of the thing itself. I will go out of my way to avoid reading any spoilers or speculation to build up this feeling as high as it will go. But this is only true for a very small subset of all fiction available. I really don't care about reading the Stieg Larsson books, so it doesn't matter to me whether or not I come across spoilers in reviews or online discussions because there is no emotional investment.
The second is that if I know a spoiler about a story my mind very often ends up on constant lookout for where the first inkling appears that the spoiler is becoming a major plot point. This makes it really rather difficult to focus on the plot for the sake of the plot, and in turn this can (not always, but sometimes) make it that much harder to enjoy the story. It stops the fiction being a world I could submerge myself into and instead it becomes just words on a page. This isn't so much of a problem on the second read through, I will often read things twice, the first time for the deep submerging feeling, the second (and third and fourth and twentieth) time for spotting all those little clues that an author has dropped, the references to past works (and where future works have made reference to this one) and the puns that only suddenly make sense when you happen to read it with your head in the right space.
But anyway, I'm definitely not going to change my spoilering habits over this just yet. And anyone who spoilers the George RR Martin books for me is going to get thumped.
(Also, has the firefox spell checker add on broken in lj for anyone else? it's working everywhere else still, just not here. And I don't like the built in lj spell checker. And hmm, weird, it seems to work in html mode but not when I'm using the rich text editor. This is really very frustrating)