Holizz versus the Web

I got my white belt in Jujutsu! I passed nunchaku level one in kobudo too.

Everybody passed. So all the ungraded beginners are now white belts.

Hooray!

Congratulations everybody.

Barry from SLC: Can I have numbers 2 and 6 from your secret password?
Me: I don’t know that.
Barry: It’s on such and such letter from the first year that you applied with us.
Me: I don’t know where those letters are.
Barry: It’s the one with your Internet password on.
Me: Ugh, I’ll call you back when I find it.

This is after they’d already had my Automated Response ID, my PIN (ddmm of my date of birth), my Student Support Number, my name and my date of birth. I wish my bank was that secure.

Although I must say my call was answered relatively quickly.

And now I’m going out to see The Curse of the Were-Rabbit with Davina. So it’ll have to wait until Monday.

☆

Next week we have two courswork deadlines (Wednesday) and a SEGP deadline (Friday). DS I found out about today; two thirds of CASS2 is impossible (and half of the third I can do is quite tricky (read: I feel like screaming at it until it goes away)). Luckily for my group, SEGP is the one I’d rather do.

XuQa.com is an academic social networking Web application. (NB: UB is listed as The University of Bradford).

It’s pronounced Zoo Ka, apparently. I should really learn PÄ«nyÄ«n and its pronunciation one day. Chinese is quite a popular language and I’d like to be able to at least pronounce people’s names.

I quite like it. Not least because the developers seem to get it when it comes to the forms. Under Sex there’s an option for Complicated and under Ethnicity there’s an option for Mixed. They also seem to get Web application design better than some bigger social networking sites; it’s just easier than some other sites. The fact that they beat Facebook to Bradfordthe UK endears me a little too.

Here’s my profile.

Last night I was busy stripping out HTML compatible empty-element syntax from WordPress. Now, my site is happily conforming to HTML 4.01 Strict.

I also got rid of Kubric. It was horrible (in the sense that it’s used on almost every WordPress blog in existance). I may remove some unneccesary markup next time I fiddle with it, and maybe put in some style.

But for now barely-styled HTML is good enough for me.

[18:55] holizz> I ♥ HL2 because I get to be a scientist who wears glasses _and_ I get to kill things.
[18:56] holizz> It's like some kind of geek dream.

I got 264. Niall got some high number and came second of the novices.

We were shooting against Keele and Sheffield. It was fun.

I’m ashamed to say that one of my arrows went right over the target. It fell off my bow twice before I managed to shoot it (thus I was probably aiming high to keep it from falling off). On reflection I should have put it away and shot my spare.

Last night we went right past where the shooting happened to get some bosses (the things you put target faces on and shoot at). Fortunately the cordon on the Great Horton Road side of Claremont was taken off soon after we got to the place where we had the spare bosses stored, otherwise we’d have been rolling big straw targets past the police which seems a bit insensitive.

Today two police officers were shot (one dead) somewhere on Morley Street (which is just round the corner).

Tomorrow I am shooting in an archery tournament.

Update:

It is not the kind of area you expect this to happen.

Source: Female officer shot dead in city (BBC News)

It is exactly the kind of area in which I would expect this to happen.

Today I did something productive. Unfortunately it wasn’t coursework. Nor was it attending lectures.

I learnt some more kanji, bringing my total up to 40. That’s half of what’s required for the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) level 4 exam. I’m really pleased with myself.

Japanese is more important than coursework, I think. It’s certainly easier than the CASS2 coursework (Computer Architecture and Systems Software 2). When I go to the lectures I generally try and understand what’s going on for the first fifteen minutes then give up and learn Japanese.

Today I decided to learn the days of the week, because I was having trouble remembering them. They seemed very arbitrary because I didn’t know the meaning of the sounds. When I saw the kanji it all made sense.

(No I won’t go easy on you and give you the Rōmaji.)

This way I only have to remember which day is which kanji (meaning), then recalling the reading (sound) is easy. The alternative is to arbitrarily remember the sounds of the days; which, as we all know from A-Level Psychology is less memorable than remembering the meaning. Kana (Hiragana and Katakana) tells you what something sounds like and the meaning must be in your head, kanji tells you what it means but the sound must be in your head.