Jan
30
2010

Lucy
at 3:20 am
Current Mood:
Tired
I got out of bed at about 5pm today, so today didn’t stand much of a chance from the start.
With the Glitterball tomorrow, there were a few things that I needed to get done today. Getting up so late meant I had to catch up with lectures, for a start. I’m determined not to build up a backlog of these, like I did last term. It was about 10.30pm by the time I’d gone through those and caught up on missed lectures. That was from 2 lectures I missed today. However, not knowing where the lecturers finished today, I had to read up until the point that I was sure I’d covered at least twice as much material as could possibly have been covered. I missed a lecture on Monday too, iirc, read to catch up and ended up reading ahead. Turns out that knowing the lecture material in advance is quite helpful. Unfortunately, some of the lecturers don’t put the material online until after they have covered it >_<
So yeah. That is about the only productive thing I’ve done today. I was supposed to have gone to bed (or rather, gone to do a few things and then bed) about an hour and a half ago. Yeah. Not much success there. About all I’ve done, other than lecture notes reading, is get distracted by Google Reader, MSN and the TV (not my fault, that one!). Also, I made this:

That is a mockup of what I would consider to be my ideal MSN client. I’ve recently (finally) downloaded MSN Plus, and tabbed conversations have been a really useful thing to have. But there is one huge flaw with them. When I have all my conversations visible, I can see what people have said recently. I can see what EVERYBODY has said recently. With tabs… I can’t. All I know is that X has said something, but because I’m on the Y tab I do not know what they have said. So, a few minutes of Photoshopping and I came up with the following slight modification to what my MSN currently looks like:

I gave up on that particular theme in the end, but the tabs on the left I found incredibly useful. And with the two slight modifications, I would have what would be my ideal messenger. What is in the first image is the GUI I came up with after an hour of playing with NetBeans. At some point I might get around to actually turning that into a functional client.
But yeah. Lecture notes, and a GUI that does nothing. That is all I have done today. Today, when I was supposed to be going to London to participate in a protest (the details of which I can’t be bothered to look for at the moment). That didn’t happen. Or rather, it happened without me. Me not going was partly down to getting up at 5pm (did I mention that?), but it was also partly down to me planning on going down with 3 friends and meeting up with another 2 once I got to London. The 3 pulled out and so did the 2. So, yeah. With nobody I know going, I was hesitant to go down on my own. Might have still happened; I did buy placard making material after all.
Which reminds me… on Tuesday, I was invited to go to Birmingham with a friend on Wednesday. I couldn’t make Wednesday, due to a coursework meeting, but said I could do Thursday instead. We agreed on this, I looked for, and bought a train ticket, and we decided it would be a fine thing. However, somewhere between my saying that I could definitely not do Wednesday, and my talking about the trains I could get on Thursday, I managed to somehow make them think that I had changed my mind and could make Wednesday after all. So, yeah.
Think I might just give up on optimism already. Simple statistics will tell you that it is a bad thing to have:
| Consequences of: |
something happening |
something not happening |
| Optimism |
No effect. You assumed it would happen, therefore it is no surprise when it does. (Score: 0) |
Disappointment. (Score: -1) |
| Pessimism |
Nice surprise. (Score: 1) |
No effect. You assumed it would not happen, when it didn’t you are not disappointed. (Score: 0) |
See? When you look at it like that, it is easy to see that the expected score of pessimism (-0.5) is better than the expected score of optimism (0.5).
In other news…
Yesterday I managed to get myself out of a depression cycle using self-hypnosis. At some point I’ll see if I can figure out how to explain that on here, perhaps provide instructions.
Today I noticed a rather large crash was imminent. Somehow I managed to stop that from happening, though my flood barriers did not manage to stop the entire wave. Even so, a reasonable success.