dubious.biz(ness)

My verbal offer turned into a written offer from the same guy who interviewed me. Hand signed and hand written, not a form letter. I have to say that I am impressed with Imperial’s, ah, customer service. The guy reiterated in the letter that they would love to have me, are very impressed, so on. It is not the official university offer, he said that takes time to process, but it has been approved by the university, so I will definitely receive an offer from them.

One of the problems I don’t think that I’ve mentioned yet is that the UCAS application system is a bit different if you have all unconditional offers. My offers will all be unconditional and the system is really set up to cater to conditional offers. The universities you apply to will give you an offer, and you must accept that offer relatively early, before scholarships and aid are decided. You can select two, one is your primary offer, the second is your insurance offer and you only get your insurance if your primary denies you a place. The only reason for denying a place would be if you don’t meet the conditions of your offer. My offers are all unconditional so this means I must choose my university in the spring and that’s pretty much the “final answer.”

UK residents must make their grades, then deal with their offers which makes things rather complicated. If they do not make the grades of either of their two offers then they are placed into clearing which is where all schools fill the places left in their rosters. Needless to say a place at a clearing school is usually not that great. This makes the whole application process a bit like gambling in that you have to know what grades you will get and choose the best school based on your expected grades and an insurance who will accept you if you don’t quite make them, and then you have to achieve those grades.

For me, I don’t have to worry about that, but then again I have to know what to do far earlier than anyone else. I guess though all in all I’d rather be in my shoes than theirs.

Although I don’t know that I haven’t specifically said it in the blog, I’m sure everyone who knows me is aware that Sintha has left the country. I’m also moving out of our house back into my parents’ house. Moving can be fun I suppose if you’re excited about where you’re moving, and I’m not, as I’ve been there before, and I now have to do a crap load of work in throwing away a lot of stuff and sorting and packing and unpacking to get in there.

It is pretty depressing to leave the house, as there are a lot of memories attached to it and it seems like in packing I am in some sense admitting defeat to living on my own means. Of course, it is also depressing because I am packing for two people, one of whom is no longer here and a number of other reasons.

So unsurprisingly I am not in a holiday mood. It has really turned me into a bit of a scrooge because I am faced with three options for all the stuff I have accumulated: throw it out, store it, or fit it into my tiny room. As you might guess, store it and throw it out were the two majority winners. I am including “sell it” in throw it out, since I am selling everything at a significant loss.

All these things come from two sources: things I bought myself, and things that are gifts from others. I mean no offense to well intending gift-givers, but when looking at box after box of things going into storage, you have to consider that yearly crates of christmas gifts that haven’t quite made the cut are not good nor would you like to be faced with deciding if anything else you receive this year should be stored or not. Hence, I do not have much want for gifts.

The other source, things I bought myself, is equally frustrating. I would not say that I have ever gone on a spending spree, I consider everything I buy, but when I look at a big ticket item that I will not be using for three years I have to consider whether I should have simply saved the money or not. Of course, I could not predict the future and that I would be doing this when I bought them, so its completely meaningless to chastise myself but I still do.

The biggest problem items are books. Books are dense, heavy, and essentially worthless to me after I have read them, and yet I cannot throw them away in good conscience. Sintha is worse, not for her inability to throw things away but for the number of books she owns. Between the two of us we could easily start a nice library. I believe it was Mr. Asinocay himself who said “So often buying books is approximated to having digested their contents. Unfortunately buying books does not buy one the time to read them.” Indeed Mr. Asinocay, you are wise beyond your gambling habits. I am guilty of owning an entire box of unread books bought long ago.

Finally, I think one thing that has really gotten to me finally is the number of critical and sometimes insulting comments I hear. I know my audience in part and I am speaking to you, not as a confidant. I do not mind praise, but I am not seeking it, you do not have to go out of your way to tell me I am smart, I am doing well, etc. I can generate as much self confidence as I need without that. However, I do not wish to hear criticism in the form of murmurs, gossip, and accusations.

If you are of the opinion that my going to school is not a good idea for any reason at all, please let me know. However, if you simply want to trade in the opinions of others, keep it to yourself. I do not wish to shadowbox against people not in the room who have said or thought nasty things about me, nor do I wish to even hear those nasty things about me at all. These comments do a disservice to me and I have heard more than enough of them already. Quite honestly I am of the opinion that anyone with enough faith in one of these comments to pass it to me must also subscribe to that view.

It is not as if I am short on self doubt or have not thought this completely through. What I have not thought through is the shear number of ridiculous variations of suspicion that I heard. I cannot wish myself into a situation with more harmonious, less suspicious people, but I can and will control what enters my ears. And as I can easily imagine the finger pointing accusations I will hear from this post, it is not one, not two, not three, but many people I am hearing these sorts of things from. It would seem my ears should be burning nightly from the amount of talk that goes on about me.

As much as I hate to end the post like this:

Those with the balls to stand up for their own opinions, by all means, take your best shot. Those without, sit down and shut up.

I was just notified by York University that they have offered me an unconditional place at their University. To reiterate my feelings on York: it is a quaint medieval town that thinks it is a young college town. This is lovely except that I’ve already been in a college town (Lexington) and I’m not particularly interested in medieval towns.

The University itself is top notch and the cirriculum is impressive. Honestly I must say that I am impressed with the subject-based ground that is covered there, when you see that people are making real time control systems and full computers with graphics handling and IO that is all written from the ground up you have to be impressed, particularly when compared with what would be done in the typical US class (not nearly as much).

But unfortunately I cannot see myself in York with a bunch of drunk Englishmen in the middle of nowhere at a school which is unheard of outside England. I’d prefer a bit more cachet, reputation, and class from a University.

In my notes from the trip amongst some restaurant addresses, tube stops, and research topics I wanted to look at from some of the schools, were two lines:

Coffee
Pantyhose

I wanted to say a little about the British on both of these subjects. I’ll tackle the less controversial topic of coffee first. For those of you who know me, you know I live and die by coffee. I consider myself somewhat of a connoisseur of coffee, and the English take on coffee is quite different from American coffee. Obviously they are not very well known for their coffee but for their tea, and yet cafes and coffee are pretty popular. English coffee, however, is not for the weak of knees.

I suspect this may have to do with the English tendency to take their coffee like their tea, with cream and sugar. So much cream that a normal coffee would be overwhelmed. I, however, do not take cream or sugar in my coffee, so I ask for it black, giving my best American accent to explain my desire. Of course, this isn’t wise because it’s nearly mud, and twice as bitter. So I end up pouring sugar in most anything, though I suspect that taking it white is much wiser.

The strangest thing of cafes is that they all serve traditional italian coffees, cappucino, latte, and espresso, but they lack a traditional pot of coffee, so if you ask for coffee you essentially get espresso with less beans (or strange looks). So, enter the Americano. An americano is basically espresso shots plus steaming water to make it weaker, making it just slightly stronger than regular coffee. I often get americanos in the US, because I’m very picky about coffee and it’s much harder to screw up an americano than a pot of coffee, particularly at places that use crap beans for their coffee and good roast beans for their espresso.

I had often wondered why americanos got the name americano, the only barrista who had an answer said that it was invented in America, and so called. However, I suspect the real reason is much more likely that some stupid American bloke (like myself) wandered into an italian cafe and ordered “coffee,” but would not be satisfied with espresso or anything creamy. He wanted real, medium brew coffee. Equally agast, I imagine, were the customer and proprietor, and then he decided to literally water down the espresso into an “Americano” so named by the arrogant American who had the gall to ask for plain old coffee.

I know this because it was my burning desire to have a normal cup of coffee. The best I could get was a teeny tiny overpriced Americano. The coffee there is about 12oz for a large, 8oz for a small. To put that in perspective, starbucks sizes are 12oz, 16oz, and 20oz. Yes, I could go into a diatribe that would end in the fact that originally the tall size was the largest, and that they introduced grande to mean huge, which is now only medium, and venti is mega. But, other blogs can contain all that sort of whiny bull, I need 20oz, and I’m willing to pay, especially when one considers economies of scale. I can buy a 20oz venti and drink 16oz for less than two small americanos at a normal british outlet.

So imagine how happy I was to locate a touristy map of London’s Starbucks…

And now on to my other topic, pantyhose. Pantyhose are, for all I care, the sexiest fashion accessory in the world. Screw tube tops, hip hugger jeans, and microskirts. Pantyhose are the way to go.

And the british agree with me. Whether it is their desire to still show a little leg in the middle of the winter or the fact that when the sun never actually shines the best tan you can get can be taken off at night, the british love hose. And I love hose. And I love British hose. Actually I should be more specific, the british don’t do pantyhose, they do stockings, which are in fact even better. And, they seem to particularly like stockings with patterns. I could say they’re fishnet, but really that doesn’t do them justice, because their complexity is bordering on tartan, with thick lines thin lines, spots, embroidery, my god, tears come to my eyes.

There was a time in the distant past of America where pantyhose were in fashion, but why have they fallen from grace? I’d much prefer to see less leg, but better leg than a skirt that ends high in the thigh. Perhaps one day, we’ll realize the error of our low slung daisy dukes and present legs the way that god intended, in black stockings.

(Note to my girlfriend: my knowledge of the fact that these are stockings and not pantyhose is based solely on information from you on the traditional garb of british female legs. Further, I still love you and please don’t kill me.)

I got out to Tower of London and was quite surprised to discover there is no tower in the Tower of London. At least not towers as we consider them, I’m sure in 1066 when the tower was founded if was very towering indeed. Some attractions in the UK do not charge for their exhibits, such as the National Gallery, and Tate Modern. Others, such as Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London charge a king’s ransom (get it). This was an unfortunate bottleneck because after paying 13.50 to get into the “attraction,” I felt it necessary to extract every last penny.

It should be noted what the Tower actually is. It’s a complex of “towers” that make up the first fortress of London and also the Royal Palace for about the first 400 years of England. After that it was a prison, gallows, and site of all sorts of other dubious activity. Now, it’s a tourist trap an the home of the Crown Jewels. I must say first that the Culinan I is by all means all its cut up to be. The Koh-i-noor is ok, it has nowhere near the sparkle of the Culinan, nor the cut quality, but the Culinan is massive. Unfortunately you only get to see these stones while standing on a moving walkway with hundreds of kiddies running by you.

I then decided to take a very enlightening and humorous free tour provided by the Yeoman Warders. These guys are better known as the “Beefeaters” and are even better known as the guys on Beefeater Gin. My particular Beefeater seemed to enjoy both dirty and sexist jokes and exposing the bloody past of the Tower through nursery rhymes.

For example “Mary, mary quite contrary” is actually about Bloody Mary, “Three Blind Mice” is also about her, Humpty Dumpty is about King Richard, etc. And nearly all those nice rhymes are about people losing battles or getting killed (or in Richard’s case, both).

Probably the weirdest story about the Tower is the legend that if all the ravens leave the tower, it will crumble and London will fall. So it was ordered by the King quite a long time ago that Yeoman Warders would be responsible for making sure that ravens stay at the tower. At first they did this by feeding the birds scraps of meat, However, now they do it by clipping the bird’s wings. There are offiically six birds, with one extra on reserve in case one dies. They hop around the tower flightlessly and quite satisfied with themselves since they too eat beef.

So after that I realized I had spent an hour and a half extra there, then went over to Tate Modern and tried to get lunch. Unfortunately for me I didn’t realize that art cafes do not specialize in service and waited another hour for my food and check. So I was quite late getting into the Tate.

The Tate is built in an old, unassuming power station south of the Thames. The main notable architectural feature is Turbine Hall which is the entrance to the museum. It’s a huge seven story tall room with a floor that curiously slopes downward, giving a feeling of a massive, square empty space. The fact that people disappear down as they walk into the hall enhances the enormity of the room. And really, the room is much as it was when the power station was, there, it’s just empty rather than filled. The actual galleries are to the left in the remaining half of the building and fill six floors. While I would say that their gallery is not necessarily as comprehensive as others, it is organized in a unique way, rather than by style and period, it is by subject and form, which allows you to see the evolution of different dialogues within modern art and to see, for example, the similarities between color field paintings and impressionism. I finally can appreciate one.

They were also running two exhibitions of work, one of a photographer and one of several filmmakers. I ended up spending four hours in the gallery and didn’t make it at all over to the national gallery.

I then decided that I had far too much cash in my pocket for only having 12 hours or so left in my stay. If you ever find yourself in London in this position, I would suggest you do as I did and head over to Oxford St to blow all that cash on fashionable clothes and junk. Oxford St is like Fifth Ave and Times Square combined. I had noticed frequent mentions of “High Street” and I assumed that High Street was a street like Main Street is a street in most towns that had shops on it. In fact High St refers to the concept of a shop lined street, as I had seen in several other places (Cambridge and York specifically), so it was no great surprise to me to find another High St, but what was suprising is the shear size of Oxford. It’s massive, and lined end to end, even the sidestreets have big name boutiques. Also featured promeniently are department stores like selfridges. I was able to drop pounds like a Oprah on fenphen, and ended up with barely enough to get me to the airport and feed myself.

However I also decided that I should get rid of the last few pounds in style so I took rather large risk and went off my the charted region of my map to a place far south west of typical london in Zone 3 (aka the boonies for a tourist) and found my way to The Gate, which according to my guide has the best vegetarian food in town. I would say I agree, but then I’ve been eating Indian and cafeteria food for the past few days so I doubt my vote is worth much.

Then I had to catch a train back as the tube was about to close at 12:00. Unfortunately I caught the wrong one and had to refactor and caught the last train to liverpool station and had to walk from there, which is about three quarters of a mile from where I was. Then I passed out.

Well, this is technically the first day I’ve had in London since I came in after dark yesterday. I spent most of my time today on the West End, seeing all the normal tourist sights.

The first on my agenda was to pick up a scarf, so somehow I ended up in Covent Garden, which is very shoppy. Oh yeah, I was going for a London guide as well, and went to Stanford’s, which is exclusively a maps and travel bookshop. So anyway, I went to Covent Garden for a scarf, and ended up with a overpriced but nice brass (hopefully) compass. I highly recommend all travellers carry a compass, I haven’t yet and can’t count the number of times I’ve been lost. It wasn’t an issue until london since I knew if I passed the city walls in York I was in trouble, and getting lost in Cambridge is a joke because it’s so small.

However in London your only savior is the tube, and its spotty in some places and dense in others, and best not to be relied upon. So I bought a compass. Yay. Then I took the tube over to Hyde Park (one of many parks in London, this one is quite large) and went to something or other arch (impressive arch?) and took photos, then went to a fairly small but very well done monument done by Australia for WWII. A photo is worth a thousand words, though so I’ll have to show it in pictures.

I walked down Hyde park and then saw Buckingham Palace as was privileged to witness the changing of the guard, which is not so interesting since its winter an all the Queen’s men wear gray overcoats over their red dress uniforms. There’s a full military band and a lot of confusing walking, probably the highlight of the whole thing was when a pair of guards walked over to right next to where I was on the side, and uncharacteristically said “Morning All,” to which the entire crowd responded “Good Morning” in kindergarten class fashion. I got tired of the pomp and circumstance which seems to take forever and required a bazillion of her majesty’s best. I started to walk and noticed the Queen’s real guard: snipers on the rooftop and a human shield of men with machine guns guarding the (currently open) front gate of the courtyard of the palace, so while the english are more often than not ridiculous, they are not stupid enough to think that a bunch of pansies in parade dress can protect the Queen.

So then I went down to see the real power in London at Westminster and Whitehall. Westminster Abbey is cute but I think I’ve finally had my fill of gothic architecture. Big Ben, being gothicly decorated yet utilitarian is much more my style. Adjacent to Ben is the ridiculously large Houses of Parilment, which for those short on history was a palace up until Cromwell’s revolution. Cromwell was for all purposes an ass, but he was the people’s ass, so he did this sort of blow up and burn down and take over pretty (royal) buildings thing quite often, leaving a large chunk of southern England in waste. Thanks Ollie.

From Westminster I walked a bit more and landed inTrafalger Square. I didn’t really realize how close the two are but yes, indeed they are close. Actually much of that area is very compact and dense, and in the morning it seems like a short walk everywhere.

I ended up eating in Trafalger Square then had to navigate my way to South Kennsington to my interview (see previous). After interview I popped back out, was going to go to the Natural History museum, but said screw it. I went to Harrods instead. Harrod’s is like Macy’s, Walmart, and Neiman Marcus, all in one. It’s huge (like Macy’s and Walmart), ridiculously expensive (like Neiman Marcus), downtown (like Macy’s) and represents everything that is Britian (like Walmart), and has tons of food (like Walmart again, but this is all gourmet and rare gourmet at that). They have a few specialties: Christmas bears, tea, and rules among them. The food halls are also quite a big thing, as they are somewhat of groceries and restaurants combined as you can buy and then eat or have waiter service and so on. It’s six stories tall and I chickened out at the fifth. If you do go, unless you are brimming with excesses of money to spend, do yourself a favor and go to the food halls, go to the Egyptian room, up the Egyptian escalators to the fourth floor, go to the toys, then leave.

I then took the tube to the London Eye. I happened to have purchased tickets for the eye, and boarded it. It’s basically a huge 130m tall ferris wheel with closed capsules where you stand and look around. It’s the London equal of the Space Needle or the old top-of-the-world-trade-center, or what have you, in other words, a good view. The difference between this good view and others is that in London there are very few tall buildings (quizically) so it’s far taller than most anything and still low enough to the ground to let you see everything. It’s right across the river (the perfect distance) from Big Ben, and is a great way to see all of London and get your bearings.

The downside of the Space Needle wannabe is that you have to go through an airport style security check to board. They specifically ask you if you have a laptop. I said yes. This caused a hugabug and then I had to get out of queue, go back to the ticket counter, get asked twenty questions about my laptop, then I had to have my entire bag searched and they bleeding scanned my laptop. Like there was something in it. So terrorists, PUT YOUR BOMBS IN FLASHLIGHTS, THEY FIGURED OUT THE LAPTOP IDEA. Then I had to leave my whole bag with them. I asked if I could take my camera, and perplexingly the answer was yes, so MAYBE YOU SHOULD HIDE YOUR BOMB IN A CAMERA, THEY DON’T GIVE A RATS ARSE ABOUT THAT. Stupidly enforced security is better than no security, but it’s far from good security to have such obviously ridiculous rules. Perhaps this is because the London eye is actually owned by British Airways and they just trade out their normal stupid airport staff to the eye for a working vacation.

After the London Space Needle I embarked on an interesting task: Find a south Indian “curry house” within zones 1-2 which my tube travelcard is good for. This is quite difficult as the first street I went to had none and it was quite a bit of work just to get there. Finally I found one, curiously named “Ravi Shankar” which is, unless I’m totally mistaken, a living Indian musician who has had a long musical relationship with George Harrison. I expected that it was his restaurant, like an Indian Hard Rock Cafe, and would have signed sitars all over the walls, but on the inside it was a typical Indian restaurant, poor service, cramped, but it had excellent dosa.

After walking all day (for the past seven days really) I decided to come back here and get my emails and blogs on. I may go out to a pub just to say I’ve been to a London pub and knock back a pint.

Tomorrow is going to be art museums, and who knows what else. Off to research.

Ok, last interview was today. This one was quite interesting. The guy interviewing was very buddy-buddy which put me at ease, and did the technical part last, which was nice on the whole since I didn’t have to get put en garde right off. So we chatted about going to school at London, how the school compared, differences, benefits, etc. One thing I noted that is quite funny was the only school that didn’t first toot their own horn was Cambridge. The Cambridge interview went like “Welcome! What’s your favorite color? What’s the capital of the USA? What is the square root of cosine of sine squared plus 3i? Thank you, any questions for us? Bye now!” All other interviews go something like, you’ll love it, we’re the second best in nation, blah blah in the world, we beat Cambridge in this area, come on then, What’s two plus two?”

So he discused a lot of interesting things with me, his area of study is machine learning (artificial intelligence). Specifically automatic proof of mathematical theorems. He seemed visibly miffed when I mentioned Godel’s Theorem (which states that no algorithm and therefore no computer can prove or contain a complete set of mathematical rules, somewhat of his adversary).

When we got to the technical part, I was quite excited. I had just been reading about the sum of odd integers equaling sucessive square roots (1=1 1+3=4, 1+3+5=9, etc) and he asked me how to write an algorithm that prints the first ten squares without using multiplication. He said, there’s an easy way and a hard way. I said ok… sum odd numbers. He said write it out. I did, and he said good, that was the clever way of the two, (apparently the not so clever way is to sum 1, 2+2, 3+3+3, 4+4+4+4, etc). I guess learning discrete was a very good idea after all. Now to go back to that trig…

So then he asked me a tougher one. He said, take an 8×8 grid, and cut two opposite squares off the ends, so it’s 8×8-2 with two opposites missing. Prove why no 2-square rectangular tile can tile the grid. It’s called the dog-eared checkerboard or something, but the proof goes that if you color the squares black and white you end up with two less black than white, therefore you can’t tile it since every domino covers 1 black and 1 white, (so you end up with 2 blacks uncovered no matter what). This was reasonably easy, and unlike the previous he was quite satisfied I hadn’t seen it previously.

He actually told me he was advised to give me a place and it looked like I was fully qualified. He said it would be unconditional considering my overseas qualifications, and that I was looking ready.

The particular thing that ICL has that I am interested in is that they are the center for The Grid in London. I’m very interested in this project, because it’s essentially an extension of the network technology to allow you to share resources like storage and processing out to other places on the network (like pushing hard computing to other universities or purchasing time off Grided commercial servers elsewhere). There are a lot of technical challenges to this that are yet to be solved, which means there’s a lot of work yet to be done.

Edinburgh is in fact the main center for the grid, so perhaps that’s something I want to look into, argh argh argh. So many offers so hard to decide… So I have reasonable confirmation that I will be getting 2, I’d say York is a yes also but a no in my book because it’s so damn beery and dreary. So the question is can I afford Londontown. The admissions tutor man mentioned quite a lot about getting work especially in the 3rd year, which might mean I would be able to get a sponsorship (this is common if it’s a merchant bank or similarly boring job).

So, good that I seem to have a green light, but I guess it’ll be making the decision that’s difficult.

So, I got off at King’s Cross, got a tube over to my hostel. Fortunately, this hostel, a YHA hostel, is not total crap like the other one. That one was totally crappy and disgusting. This one is quite nice. It has lockers, a little bedside drawer to store your pocket contents in, and a restaurant that’s pretty reasonable. Most important (beside not sucking and having decent showers) is that it’s in damn near the center of london proper. This is not necessarily to say it’s in the center of tourist’s london, which lies mostly to the west, but it is in a very good location. Notably, it’s right in front of St. Paul’s cathedral, which is the zero-milestone of london, and nearly all Londoners refer to areas based on their direction from St. Pauls, which means I can easily guess where it is.

This is nice, but an unfortunate thing is the wildly distorted tube map, which tells you very little about adjacency and the physical layout of the city. In fact, you can often walk to most places faster than ride the tube, especially if you consider that you have to go down and back up to take the tube.

After getting unloaded at the hostel, I walked around london, taking the Millenium Bridge across the Thames, which is even more so a river than Ouse (maybe river width is proportional to internet access price?). The Millenium Bridge is a new bridge, as of 2001, which was immediately closed until late 2002, and reopened. It’s very thin, light, and for foot traffic only. It originally had problems with stability (it had a harmonic frequency very close to the rhythm of walking) and wobbled dangerously, but now very little wobble is detectible, and the bridge goes straight from St. Pauls to Tate Modern, the largest modern art gallery in the world. The south end has recently been the subject of much development and I was interested to see what it was like. It has a lot of state-sponsored work like the National Theatre and the London Eye, but lacks a real nightlife unfortunately.

I crossed back over on another new foot bridge, the Golden Jubilee Bridge, which is attached to some other bridge I don’t know the name of, and juts out on either side with strange suspension poles while “borrowing” the old road bridges pillars to support itself. It looks oddly hung over the edge like a fishing pole, but serves its purpose, and takes you directly up to Trafalger Square, the tourist center of London. I then took the tube back to eat at the Hostel before it closed the cafe, so I didn’t get much more exploring. To be honest, it’s very very cold here now, so I don’t want to go back out anyway.

So now, I am at the hostel on this expensive internet connection and have 45 seconds left. If you’re wondering I’ve put probably 5 or 6 pounds in it writing this, so no, I didn’t not make my time limit… Another pound goes in the slot. Tomorrow I have the interview at ICL, which means I need to figure out where ICL is. ICL has a lot more history than York, though being founded only in the 1800’s has nowhere near the who’s who list of grads that York does. York is now probably on my back burner, and if York is on the back, I will have to refactor the list, but perhaps ICL is a good place. London is great but certainly expensive. I guess we’ll see tomorrow.

Let’s see how much I can post in 9:26, because that’s all the money I’m feeding this stupid machine. Internet access has gone continually up since I got here. £1 in Cambridge, £2 in York, and £4 in London. It’s to be expected that it’s more expensive in London than anywhere else, but why is Cambridge so cheap? The rule of thumb is supposed to be as you go north things get cheaper, but it would seem that’s not necessarily the case.

Anyway last night I found some food at a Greek restaurant, which was holding a very loud private party upstairs. As I ate, people danced the tarentella, and all I could hear was the echos of the music and noises which sounded like the roof was going to cave in. Then as I finished they started smashing plates. If you’ve never been directly below plate smashing, I wouldn’t recommend it. It sounds very much like someone is trying to hammer away at the ceiling.

Then I walked around for a bit trying to get my bearings. York is essentially a quintessentially british town, what everyone thinks british towns look like. There are roads upon roads that are crooked, narrow, and built with increasingly overhanging tudor buildings. Of course, Yorkist and Tudor are actually very important to York’s history, the House of York gave the place the importance that it carries, and the House of Tudor healed the wounds of York by uniting the two warring dynasties, York and some other which I can’t think of and will ruin my time limit should I try to think or look for it. Anyway. Very important stuff. Yeah.

So, the city centre is all contained within the city walls and is very compact, but due to a reason I can’t quite fathom, the entire Yorkshire population from Leeds to York has a fascination with drinking. I know this because rather than backpackers the most common guest at my hostel was a local in town for a bout of liver poisoning who was wise enough to not try to drive home. So, not only did I get a crappy hostel, I got the uninteresting local drunkards as well.

However, there were quite a few backpackers there, as it is quite a large hostel (and it was full). One from South Africa, several from Australia, two from New Zealand, and one from the US. The US one was quite funny. He is from Hawai’i, and has been going to school in UEA which is not far from Cambridge, however he’s been here long enough to pick up most of the East Anglian accent, which sounds ridiculous, because it’s half surfer dude, half east anglian. His pronounciation of Hawai’i was in fact so poor that even the English couldn’t understand him. He says it something like “haway” but as if it were always at the end of a sentence and fading at the end. A proper englishman would say it like “heway-ee” with a full stop, as he was coached by the other people in the group.

This hawaiian had decided to pair up with a man from a village with 18 houses who was under 18 and thus couldn’t drink in pubs. This suited the hawaiian fine, and south african, as well. The Australians and kiwis however wanted to go to a pub. They only conceeded when someone went to the liquour store and purchased more alcohol than I could possibly imagine consuming in one evening, and only for the four or five of them.

So they went to work and had a “who’s more drunk” contest. It came down to a tie between the S. African and one of the Australians, and was only resolved when I was sprayed with water for saying that S. Africa and Australia are on the same fucking ocean. This for some reason offended the S. African, so she sprayed me with water, which I found quite stupid, so I asked her which oceans she thought S. Africa was on, to which she responded the Indian and the Pacific. She wasn’t quite sure of the oceans that Australia was on, but was quite, quite sure that it wasn’t Indian. I will leave the correct answer to the reader, but suffice to say even the Kiwis then knew who was drunkest.

So….. after the debacle in the hostel bar (which was actually the TV room), I went to bed sightly damp. The next day I woke up quite late, at about 10am, and packed up and checked out, then went to see York Minster.

It was the happy coincidence that it was a Sunday, and the third week of advent, which is quite a big deal in the Minster and the Minster was open to visitors and it was having a service. There is a choir of about fifty or more boys and a few men, and all the elderly from the town were there for service. The Minster is notable for many reasons, first of all it’s the largest cathedral in Europe, and the largest gothic cathedral in the world. It took 400 years to complete the main building, and is also notable in that it is currently used, has been used continuously, and is not preserved like many cathedrals in one state (well until recently when much work has been done to restore things back to prior states).

While I can say I like seeing things as they were, such as in King’s Chapel in Cambridge which is mostly the way it was in the time of Henry VIII, it’s also very nice to see things in perspective. For example, there are crypts and monuments to perhaps two dozen people inside the Minster, such as Mr. Lloyd Esq. (of Lloyds of London), princes, primates of York (like archbishop) and of Canterbury. Also there are a great number of monuments that were constructed to WWI and WWII victims, including an entire window devoted to WWII. There is currently a renovation going on in the Minster, they’re not trying to exactly replicate things the way they were, in fact, in the Chapter House, they are carving entirely different and far more detailed oramentation on pillars and such, as well as preserving some of the old work. Thus the Minster today reflects the history of England for the past eight centuries which is quite impressive.

The thing is also huge, on a scale I can’t even compare things to. Suffice to say it’s larger than Notre Dame, larger than St. Pauls, Westminster, and so on. I only have one good photo that shows the scale of it, which just shows a few people in front of the doors, but even that doesn’t show the tallest point. It’s huge.

So, after that I found a place that sold Yorkshire Pudding, vegetarian. I was going to have a tea, but I couldn’t find the place which is supposed to be a shrine to tea, Betty’s, so I settled for Yorkie Pudding. Yorkie Pudding is actually quite boring (like most other English food), it’s a breadbowl made from biscuit dough filled with meat and potatoes and such, and topped with gravy. Except, mine lacked the meat and gravy, so it was pretty bland being mostly potatoes, mushrooms and onions. It had a classic british fried tomato for good measure. Those things are disgusting. Yuck.

So then I took a train from York to London which was ridiculously overpriced (£60) and found my hostel…

The York open day was today, which took nearly all of the day, and was quite interesting. The school is very american in style, it’s a campus outside the city, very self contained and, well, american looking. I don’t particularly like it, honestly, it’s very smart but the Uni in general seems like an extension of York, and it’s very very un-international, nearly all the students were English, and northern mostly also.

The CS department (as they were wont to tout) is the best or second best in the UK and the work you do is very very impressive. In one class alone you build first a circuit, then a computer with a Z80, then a SBC, then a FPGA. That’s not typical for a bachelor’s in CS. They were using the computers to display information on an osciliscope like a monitor, and the FPGA was capable of displaying directly to VGA. All this has to be coded in, which is non-trival.

They also coded a full rendering engine, wrote a network stack of their own design, made a self-driven car, and a smart home. All as undergrad projects. Wow. Yet, the place was uninspiring. I think that my impressions were deeply colored by the first impression I had the night before, though.

My interview went swimmingly, it was very little problem solving and mostly about why I wanted to go to school, what I hoped to achieve, and so on. The only question was:

“Do you know what a function is?”
“Do you know what a recursive function is?”
“Make a recursive function that gives the factorial of a given number.”

I only made one minor mistake on that easy easy question group, which was that f(0) is actually defined and equals 1, whereas I assumed the base case would be f(1)=1 (which is also true). Anyway, it was terribly easy, and that was it. She told me that they would let me know in 10 days, which is pretty quickly. (Cambridge said sometime in January, but then they can do nearly anything, can’t they…).

All in all I think I did well here, though I think I may have changed my mind on going here, it’s just not a place I can visualize myself living in for three years.