We caught up for about an hour that night before she diagnosed1 me, saying it’s because I’m not doing stuff any more. I’ve already figured that I need to play more, but I need to work out why I can’t.
Sketch in my notepad says “cool ring” pointing to a scribble of a hand in an impossible position, but hey, the guy sitting next to me thought it looked good.
Started learning how to use @media queries to create pages which scale better. It’s an interesting challenge, and I’d love to do more if I had some extra mobile hardware to play around with, but it’s one of those things that you can get dangerously obsessive about. I felt that I had to, at least, extend my newly-learned skills to my own blog, but I’m not sure if it’s worth applying to permalink pages.
“I hope you realise that literally no-one cares.”
Bret Victor - Drawing Dynamic Visualizations
Anonymous asked: Hi, I can't decide on which uni to go to for CS. Just wondering what made you pick York in particular?
I always say that there isn’t much difference between courses at undergraduate level, at least for a BSc, so it’s best to make the decision based on the feel of a uni/city or your gut preference or whatever.
I don’t recommend York for a few reasons, mainly that Heslington East is too barren and isolated to make a good student experience. I definitely wouldn’t have gone there if I’d known the department was moving.
York probably has the best student media (newspapers, radio, TV) in the country. That said, it’s fairly small and isn’t that great for sports (historically, you’d have to pay to join any sports societies, etc.). Fragsoc is fairly unique if you’re a PC gamer.
My choice was between York and Southampton. These two stand out by being a bit more hardware focussed, but there’s not much in it otherwise. I guess I felt like York open days had it a bit more together, the accommodation was nicer and I preferred to be in a smaller city. In all honesty, people from my secondary school were the biggest factor.
Clearing through my Drafts/Notes/Memos/Q101 file with a bunch of little things that I’m too lazy to write about in detail.
Won a 1v2 Bot lane without help. Not that impressive considering how much trying to jungle has tanked my MMR, but still felt like an achievement. It just had to be a last-pick Teemo that forced himself to go duo Mid…
And we don’t know
Just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed
Into the earth below
Roast pork shoulder with sautéed potatoes, served with parsnips, iceberg lettuce and onion gravy. The meat is moist despite being twice-cooked, the potatoes are crispy and the parsnips have flecks of leftover pancake batter. 9 (How’s that cameraphone?)
I get embarrassed that I can’t read or write Chinese, and it’s been about a year since I last had a conversation in Mandarin. That time, I could barely string meaningful sentences together, but I think I’ve completely forgotten it by now.
At Chinese School, people either spoke it at home, flunked entirely or cheated their way through. I fell into the last camp because I felt such a pressure to do well, rather than actually wanting to learn. I didn’t (and still don’t really) understand how it’s possible to learn a language of so many characters and I quit around my 7th birthday… I didn’t have any friends there — I think if I did, that might’ve kept me going, but I’m still not sure the teaching would’ve got me anywhere.
I forced myself to try again many years later, but I never really put in much effort. I guess that I don’t have a genuine desire to learn, but a fear of getting caught out when I go into a Chinese restaurant or I visit my relatives. Anyway, languages aren’t really something you can learn by yourself.
And really, it decays so rapidly with infrequent use that I almost don’t want to waste my time. My English reading comprehension is already bad enough.
“If the right thing were easy to do, the world wouldn’t be as f***ed up as it is.”
- Armaan Khan, Tiger Attack
