dubious.biz(ness)

First day of Lent Bumps is today, I know I still haven’t explained what it is, but trinity offers a reasonable explaination. I’ll provide my own in a bit when I’m not so excited. Anyway, to be honest I wasn’t sure how well we would do. We have been improving a lot, but our race results weren’t very good up to now, and bumps are essentially a sprint that continues until you bump or the finish of the race, which 3.0km long. To put it shortly there were a lot of unknowns.

But we were all very enthusiastic, and we were also very upbeat. I think it would take a lot to get our crew down, bow 4 (including myself) are pretty jovial, while stern 4 seem to be the more experienced, confident sort. The combination is a good team dynamic. On the row down to start the race we had some good spots and bad spots, but overall we were ready to race.

When the cannons went off and the race started, I was so far back in the boat that I really couldn’t see anything, but from what I understand the boat behind us, First and Third II, came up a bit on us off the start, but we had actually anticipated that we wouldn’t be fast off the start, and we settled into a great rhythm after the first push and I think everyone in the boat just focused on what was going on in our boat. Before we knew it, we were hearing calls for 3/4 length, 1/2 length, canvas… we were closing in quickly on the boat in front of us. I started to feel very tense in my forearms and was having trouble getting the blade in because the boat had unsettled, so I had to really focus on my own row, but took a look over in a bit and low and behold, the bows of the boat in front of us (CCAT) were visible in the corner of my eye. I started to try to put the power down as best as I could (it was also my corner) and in a bit of a combination of them conceeding and us hitting their oars, we bumped!

I have to say that I was nearly on empty at that point and I wonder what will happen when we have to row beyond that (which was relatively short). At any rate we got the bump, and we are 1/4 of the way to validating the hard work we have done. As long as we keep bumping, we keep open the option of blades, and frankly that would be amazing for this crew to move up 4 spots or more.

Again sorry for the boatiese, but I wanted to get it down and for those in the know, you know, I’ll try to explain bumps for my family a bit later.

So this weekend was the CMEC. It was a really cool experience, I think the proposals before us were really a lot more interesting than I had expected. They were all very American and not very Belgian, not even European. So conservative were they, I expected the entire weekend to be a bust. I severely underestimated the diversity of opinion and needs of the EU. For example, one would think that no country would be interested in privatisation of social security and health care, but in fact many countries seemed to be keen on it and for justified reasons.

Anyway, we had lots of good debate and lots of interesting discussion, and it ended up that we passed every proposal before us in a seriously modified form with unanimous vote, probably the most strict of all councils’ voting requirements. In fact I think that were it not for the unanimous vote, we probably would have passed none, because the requirement that everyone agree to the proposal meant you had to consider sacrifices and attempt a satisfactory compromise.

I also had a lot of alcohol free partying (no drinking due to the bumps next week) and got to see hundreds of Europeans going nuts on the dance floor. Particularly nuts are my compatriots from the Netherlands. The president of the Netherlands is staying with me (err the guy pretending to be the president of the Netherlands), and I have to say that they’re the most drinkinest most happy go lucky nation in the world. They all wore orange ties, giant wooden clogs, and drank pint after pint (and they’re friendly to boot).

At the end of the conference, the Belgian delegation was awarded the best delegation award, and we all got bottles of Trinity College Port. This came as a huge surprise to all of us as we were lacking a PM (he never showed up) so clearly he got no votes from any of the other prime ministers and presidents, so the rest of us must have been well respected. We also did no preparation as a delegation (again because of the lack of a PM). I was personally hoping for the dutch delegation but maybe they were too hung over.

Pictures have just been leaked of what will be my new phone, the as of yet unreleased Sony Ericsson K800i.

Since my current phone (an HP iPaq hw6315) has taken to crashing every week, resetting itself to factory defaults, and the WiFi has completely failed, I’m in the market for a new phone. I have also been complaining about the size of my current camera and how its size prevents me from carrying it around. So I’ve been looking around and I nearly bought the Sony Ericsson K750i, which has a 2.0mpix camera and from the comparisons around seems to be the best camera in a cameraphone.

But this baby is freakin awesome. 3.2mpix camera, autofocus, even what appears to be a real flash (though the ad is in german and it may be implying that a separate flash can be purchased, depending on the meaning of eingebautes). And they’ve adopted the Cybershot brand name as well, implying that the camera is even more closely tied with the photographic side of Sony. Of course what I don’t know is how much this thing costs. But I’m willing to wait. And it’s a “world phone” so I’ll be able to use it in the US as well as the UK (and chances are it will come out here first).

It was snowing this morning, so my first real snow in cambridge was pretty anticlimatic because I had to row through it. It seems that the weather is getting nastier by the week even though it’s nearly March.

I think I’ve mentioned everything that I’m doing already, hence I haven’t made any updates recently. There’s some stuff I want to write about which is unfortunately fading in my mind because I haven’t got the time.

The real problem is convergence. Tonight will be the start of the infamous Week 6. Ironically, a lot more good advice than I might have expected comes from one of my supervisors, Basty. Basty told me to ignore Discrete Maths because it was pointless and I wouldn’t do well on it in my exams (or rather to ignore it because he didn’t do well). I suspect this isn’t the best idea but I think it’s great advice. Basty also told me that Week 6 is the absolute worst week because it’s six weeks in to term yet two weeks from the end. This would look to be true.

I haven’t applied to as many internships as I wanted to, I did apply to the key ones. The once far off Cambridge Model European Council now begins the day after tomorrow and I am not as confident with Belgium’s position on the ultraconservative proposals as I had expected to be. I am doing six supervisions this week and five supervisions last week due to the start of new lecture series.

We’re rowing nearly every day and the big race of the term, Lent Bumps are next week, something I need to explain later to the noncantabrigians. I committed to rowing Head of River Race, a 4.25 mile course that is basically the boat race course backwards. I’m not sure I’m actually capable of doing such a long row, it’s three times longer than the fairbairns and it’s all at once. We’ll see after lents I guess.

All these are converging to make me feel like I’m living on borrowed time. The are a lot of things I’d like to do, like leave cambridge for a weekend, a few clubs I’d like to join (like the break dancing society), a few languages I’d like to learn, and then there’s the MicroPIC programmer I haven’t actually gotten to use yet, but I’ve bitten a lot off and I’ve got to start chewing.

I’ll probably post updates about how we did in Lents, maybe some of the things I’ve been meaning to post, but otherwise I suspect I may go undercover until the end of the term in two weeks.

I have been spending way too much relatively unproductive time in my room. I have found myself dependent on the computer and the internet for even the most mundane tasks, including help with homework. I don’t use my texts, and it’s easier to google the equation for a capacitor than to actually look it up in my notes. Further, I’m easily distracted from the vast boredom that is mathematics and physics (particularly math because it’s just so ridiculous at this point) and the internet is fertile ground for such distractions. Even iTunes has, as of late, been a source of distraction, as I’ve become overly obsessed with making playlists and categorizing the music I have. The blog, too, receives a fair share of my time.

I understand that everyone needs “down time” and that no one can be expected to work for 8 hrs straight, but unfortunately I am probably wasting 33% of my time in my room doing something involving this cursed box. So today, I have decided Something Must Be Done. I printed out all the course material I expected I would need (I had been using PDFs online, giving me a great excuse to get in some browsing instead of reading), and I’m going to start working elsewhere. To be precise, I am planning on spending less than 2 hrs per day in my room awake. That basically means less than two hours at this laptop, on the weekdays anyway. On the weekends, I guess 3hrs is reasonable. Considering there are only 16 waking hours in the day, this is still a substantial chunk of my time, representing 12.5% of my day.

Ideally this will allow me to stay up with everything while rowing and hopefully after rowing is over I’ll be able to go out of town for a weekend, that is if I can get ahead enough in work. That would be amazing, wouldn’t it?

PS: After writing this I seriously considered searching for a piece of software that would keep a running time of how long I’ve used the computer each day. While this may seem like a good idea, it’s also a great way to waste another 30 minutes searching and installing random bits of software, when I could be actually working. Precisely my problem…

I upgraded the blog to WP 2.0.1 and installed a few new toys. I don’t normally hang around the internet cognescenti blogs so I am often behind. There’s a service that’s been around for a year or so (ie forever in terms of the internet) called last.fm which picks up the music you’re playing and does various neato things like suggesting new music based on what other people with similar tastes listen to. It’s not very good, frankly, for a lot of reasons. So I installed it mainly for the reason of displaying the music that I’ve just listened to under the photos on the right there ==>. I also hacked it to display the time the way I like and a few other modifications. So now you know the last 4 songs I’ve listened to, and perhaps that might tell you something about my mood. It’s stopping short of having some lame ass live journal “current mood/current music” thing.

I would note that I have nearly a 100GB of music, enough to last me 54 days according to iTunes, so I don’t typically listen to anything in particular, I just put it on shuffle, so it’s probably not actually a good indicator of mood, but it seems to make me more alive than the static blog, and it looks fun, and it was a great way to waste the afternoon hacking some crappy PHP plugins.

We had our second race. I feel like I am working to exhaustion in the boat during the race and at the end of it, I feel completely empty. That’s good, I mean I’d like to go faster and pull harder, but I can’t and that’s a really good sign for the race. I need to work to get fitter so that I can work harder. But there is another weird thing, I’m not sure I can put my finger on it, about an hour after the race I feel like I could have another one. This is sort of why racing twice at Fairbairns didn’t bother me.

It’s actually a really bad property for a rower, in my opinion. I should like to be dead for the rest of the day so that I know that all the energy I had I used up. But who knows; I don’t go out and actually do another race every time so maybe I would be total crap at it.

Anyway, this particular race was the Robinson Head (nearly every race is some combination of a college name, in this case Robinson, and a type, in this case a head or timed race, alternately regatta (side by side), bumps, cup, etc). In our previous race we had one substitute in the boat, and in this race we had in three substitutes. That’s nearly half the boat. So we weren’t exactly our normal crew. Admittedly the substitutes are all previous senior rowers, but the main problem seemed to be combining everyone together. The pace we’ve taken in both races is too slow, and in this race the timing was way off, and the power needs to be stronger. It’s been pretty much canonically proven that I’m the weakest rower in terms of strength, so I need to catch up with everyone else more than build up my power.

The results just came in, we got 14 out of 29 entries. That’s not very good as we were 11th out of 14 first men’s crews. I honestly think had our regular crew been in the boat, it would have been much better. I can’t help feeling that I could have contributed a few less seconds to the time, but that’s what a race is, it’s a trial of your abilities and you can’t go back and change it. :-(

Anyway, I was also lollying around the Wolfson College Boat Club site and found another first boater’s blog. Since he seems to not mention his name, I won’t but I’m nearly 100% sure I know who it is. And he’s the biggest, strongest guy on the crew, so you’ve got both ends of the boat being blogged.

Today’s schedule:
0300: sleep
0600: get up drink some coffee, forget to pack my water
0700: row ridiculously hard
0900: lecture @ chemistry building
1000: lecture @ new museums
1100: hand in math supervision work at the chemistry building, come back, do OS supervision work
1200: lecture @ new museums
1300: finish OS supervision work
1400: OS supervision @ Computer Lab
1530: Go back to college, get papers
1600: Cycle to New Museums to do practical work
1700: Turn in practical work
1715-1745: FREE TIME! (now)
1800: Math Supervision @ Chemistry Bldg
1930: Get takeaway and eat (for the first proper meal)
2000: Do physics supervision
2100: Miss salsa
0030: Sleep

Repeat… that’s my damn day.

Here’s a map of where I cycled today.

So my plan for “photo a day” didn’t work out too well, I actually have photos but I haven’t posted them. Not 1 per day, but in bursts, maybe 5/week or so… Anyway, I think the best idea may be to keep the camera around and to take photos when the moment is there and aim for a batch per week. I don’t want to end up taking crap and posting that, which is what I would be on the verge of doing if I did a photo a day. The reality is that I stay in roughly the same places, and it’s fun to try to interpret those places but it only goes so far. I’ll try to upload the sets I’ve got this weekend. I may end up doing more when I get a new phone.