As Briony alluded to, the final, not-going-to-tweak-this-bugger-any-more version of my thesis is printed, handed in, and forgotten about. Four copies had to be printed - doublespaced, ring bound, and sprayed with special pheromones to make the PhD assessors think they are poultry.

So I went on down to the graduate research school at UNSW, and I uprooted my thesis from its moorings, and hurled it across the desk into the willing arms of the PhD review machine. I filled in a little survey on my postgraduate life (What was your best experience? Worst? Discuss, with examples), and was promptly rewarded.

I received a box and a little congratulatory letter, wrapped up in a ribbon:



Inside the box, a little slice of flavoursome UNSW bling:



I plan to attach it to a huge gold chain and wear it around my neck at my graduation. That said, with bling in hand, I decided to pay homage to an old, old uni tradition.

You see, back in the halcyon days of being an undergraduate, we had this thing with exams. Our loosely knit group of friends (think of it more as a cardigan than a jumper), we'd turn up to an exam, and variously nervously twitch, scribble and fluster our way through it. About halfway though the exam, one of us would leave. This would prompt the rest of us to follow shortly thereafter, where we would congregate at the biggest dive that was nearby - in our case, invariably Mickey D's on Barker Street.

I exchanged some cash for a greasy apple pie from the equally greasy, spotty teenager behind the counter, and I wondered what he was going to write his PhD dissertation on. I munched on down on it, and realised the apple pies tasted better when they were made from chokos.

We're going to be moving in a few weeks, so now it's back to the unenviable task of re-packing all of our stuff into a small, small space. Luckily, I think I'll try to get a machine to do some of the work :P

Labels: nerd, PhD, photos

  Thank you all for the birthday well-wishes and gifts received; I had a great day on Tuesday. Amongst other things, I ended up with a new set of shoes (huzzah!), piles of books, a trippy CD and a stupendous dinner out with Briony.

After finishing up at Emotiv, I was pleasantly surprised to get a parting gift from them in the form of a shiny new Playstation Portable. In spite of a marketing department that appears to hate the device in question, it's quite a nifty bit of hardware. I'm mystified by the choice by Sony to have yet another proprietary format for their game discs, but, nevermind.

Hardware in hand, I visited the folks at EB games to pick up two classics for the PSP - Loco Roco and Me and My Katamari. I've never actually owned a console myself before, so I've never really got into the second-hand games thing. That said, it's really good value - the second-hand disc you get still has exactly the same content as a brand new disc.

Loco Roco is a pile of fun. It is, essentially, a kids game, with, in the main thread, only three buttons for control to speak of. It's fiendishly addictive, and has a very, very broad appeal - I even got my Dad playing it, and Briony, who is a not a regular gamer, is hooked.

However, my favourite, by far has got to be Me and My Katamari. Unlike Loco Roco, the controls appear to use all of the buttons on the PSP, leading to a style of gameplay which basically involves random button mashing with fingers, palms, and elbows if you can manage it. Outside of the horrific control mechanisms, however, is an incredibly perverse game. Really, there isn't anything quite like rolling around a sticky ball, and picking up, say, a squirrel. Or a horse. Or a bulldozer. Or a house. It tickles my megalomaniacal tendencies something silly.

The artwork and design of the game is also something to be admired. You can't help but feel that something got lost in the translation from Japanese to English, and are glad of it. Its quirky, colourful and sometimes inadvertently offensive. It's inspired people to go to some really strange lengths to pay tribute to it. If you can grab hold of a copy of any of the Katamari games for the PS2 or PSP, give them a go - it's strangely satisfying.

edit:
THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS. clicky.

Labels: emotiv, nerd

  The left hinge on my old-school laptop gave way a few months ago, and it was going to be another custom job to get it fixed again. The breakage occurred during that whole PhD thing so I had just kept on putting off the repairs - until I chewed up a few hours of Dad's time last weekend to get another part manufactured.

Since we'd made the part previously, we didn't have to spend long measuring the size of the aluminum brackets that we'd have to cut and shape, and were able to knock up a new (and stronger) part relatively quickly. Now the laptop rides on the bus with me every day, where I can sit and tweak the stack of papers I still have left over from my PhD to get published. Huzzah!

This also gave me an excuse to reinstall Mandriva, upgrading it to the new, shiny Mandriva 2007.1 spring release. Unlike a lot of other beta-ish releases, it came with a decent set of development libraries, and the hardware worked quite nicely out of the box. The only gripe I had was with the needlessly complex Drak3d tool to set up the 3D desktop. I got it working like this:

• Do the default mandriva install - don't touch anything
  
• Don't do the drak3d thing from KDM - this will lead to nightmares
  
• Instead, just login as root (without any 3D stuff) and run drakconf
  
• Go to Hardware->Configure 3D Desktop Effects
  
• Select metisse/compiz/beryl/whatever
  
• Logout, login as normal user
  
• Voila, instant 3D without any mucking about with config files
  

Beryl is very, very shiny. Its fast, and the tilable windows are actually really useful on a small screen. I play with the spinny cube thing on the bus, and it makes the other passengers nauseous. Yes, that includes you, random bus traveller, reading over my shoulder. Go back to reading MX or something.

Labels: nerd