Battle Rat

How cool is this... Apparently a neural net has been built and trained to fly a fighter jet simulator. Fairly impressive in itself but in this case, the neural net is a living one, grown from rat brain cells. What next? Hamster tanks? The story is on The Register

Pear Shaped

The Lady Gray wine has been a bit crap on the fermentation front for some time, so I finally asserted myself and made a starter with some fruitjuice and fresh yeast, racked off the wine and added the ready-fermenting yeast. It's not exactly bursting out of the jar, but at least now we are starting to see some movement.

Over the weekend I also started a new brew, using tinned prunes and pears, which yields a nice, dark, rich smelling must. It's fermenting away in the bucket for now, so we'll see how that turns out...

For the Love of Quinn

The last few days have seen the explosion of a story about Home Secretary David Blunkett allegedly abusing his position on numerous counts from giving train tickets (at the taxpayers' expense) to his mistress to (and this is the potential showstopper) accelerating an application for a permanent visa. "Independent" investigations are under way.

The whole situation is summed up quite nicely in a Register article from yesterday.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Many Happy Returns

Over the weekend <3 and myself took a trip to Pembrokeshire, having been invited to an Arthurian banquet (with a middle-eastern theme bolted on) by an old friend. With some slight trepidation we made the drive across country on the Friday, which gave us most of Saturday in which to act as tourists before the banquet began.

Our tourism exploits basically involved a trip to St. David's, where a small town plays host to a mighty mediaeval cathedral and a partially ruined C14th bishop's palace. We also found an "Xmas Fayre", where fudge and alpaca wool scarves were sold and <3 was introduced to the charms of cawl (Welsh lamb and veg soup).

The banquet was 12 courses of awesome food from "Moorish Venison" to baklava, accompanied by a fantastically friendly welcome which wiped out any last traces of trepidation about our leap into the unknown.

Now there is talk of a Middle Earth banquet (spit roast hobbit, anyone?) in a few months' time. We're looking forward to it...

Fires and Faith

In a slightly surreal passage of our lives, <3 and I spent the evening of Hallowe'en at an Irish funeral. Tragically, the sister of a school friend of <3's died of cancer aged somewhere in her 30's, and as we were in the right country at the time, showing our support seemed the right thing to do.

The general form for Irish funerals is in two main parts: the funeral mass and burial and, generally the evening beforehand, the removal (which is what we attended). Both are usually public events and announced in the newspapers.

We arrived at the funeral home for the removal, which is basically the ritual of moving the body to the church in preparation for the burial. Before this takes place there is a recital of the Rosary (several times) and an opportunity for sympathisers to shake the hands of the bereaved family, which felt rather strange when only one member of the family had ever met me before.

From the funeral home was a procession behind the hearse for some 20 minutes, after which everyone got into cars in order to make faster progress to the church. This reinforced my view of the chimerical nature of Irish culture: devout prayer and Catholic observances, in the middle of which was a drive through the suburbs of a medium-sized town where every second street marked Hallowe'en/Samhain with raging pyres and illegal fireworks.

At the church was a short service to mark the end of this stage of the journey. One of my biggest beefs with high church in general, and Roman Catholicism in particular, is the fundamental obsession with sin and how we are all unworthy. It all seems too hung up on the bad things to realise how great life can be. Strangely, it was in this short service, marking as it was the sad and premature end of a life, that I saw more hope and optimism than I have seen in a long time. Sure, it all relies on the dogmatic "Believe in me and even though you die, you will live on", but for some reason it felt right.

Now if only people could learn to celebrate and treasure life while it is still there, perhaps we would live in a happier world.

Lady Gray and the Great Garage Clear-Out

We had a productive weekend, sorting out assorted domestic chores like mowing the lawn, trimming the hedge and clearing a load of junk out of the garage -- to be rewarded by finding a pair of unopened wedding presents. To be fair, these presents arrived late amongst a pile of stuff brought over from Ireland by the inlaws a few months back, and which we just hadn't got around to sorting through. A nice surprise there.

There is now also yet another batch of wine on its way -- made with Lady Gray tea and a pile of raisins (which apparently improves the end result almost as much as adding grape concentrate). This is currently going through first-stage fermentation in a bucket, which makes for great fun as a loud "THUD!" is periodically heard from upstairs when the lid blows its seal under the pressure of CO2.

It's a Tech's Life...

From a support request today...

The colour laser printer ... has developed a fault. It has said that it is low on black toner for some time, but yesterday it said that it was out of black toner and would not print at all. There is no sign of it being short of toner. I switched it off and back on again. It worked fine, even though it was complaining about being low on toner. This morning it stopped again, complaining of the same thing. After switching off and on again, it is again working, and there is no sign of there being any problem with the print quality. I think it is inevitable that this problem will recur soon.

Indeed. The solution? Replace the toner.

Walk Of Shame

This weekend was the second Cardiff "Bootie Camp", an informal spin-off from STACK UK's annual Boot Camp for aspiring sports kite flyers. I'm not aspiring to compete any time soon, but what little team/pair flying I have done, I have enjoyed greatly, so I persuaded I'll Wager to come along as my partner, and much fun was had -- particularly working on a kite ballet routine to Toccata by Sky, and the "stick precision" competition held due to the fact that the weather conditions were not good enough to fly in at the time.

An excellent weekend marred only by the loss of an item that meant a lot to me. It's more-or-less replaceable, but that particular one was treasured. Nuts.

Of Examinations and Fermentations

Quite a lot to report now...

1. My rosehip wine is now happily bubbling away in a demijohn. It was a pig to strain the fruit pulp from the must, and still a little got through, but it's settling OK and is showing the first signs of thinking about clearing.
2. On an unrelated matter, I had my OU exam this morning. It was a tough exam, with some of the questions on concurrency and OO design finding fuzzy points in my knowledge. I think I did OK, but I'm not confident I hit my target grade. It's possible though. As celebration after the exam I got back to a bit more winemaking...
3. The mead has been clearing and had developed a thick sediment, so I racked it off into a new jar, taking the opportunity to have a taste (not bad!) and try out my new hydrometer. The gravity I measured was pretty much bang on 1000, meaning the majority of the sugar is now alcohol. There's still some more fermentation to go – this is going to be a nice, dry mead, and should be worth drinking by Christmas.
4. I now have a gallon of Ribena wine on the go too (yes, Ribena – why not?). This looks like it should turn out to be a sweet (possibly too sweet -- next time use less sugar!) pink wine. Nice and different to the others I'm making up.
5. PS. Knock me down with a bubble, I got 93% in that last assignment. Just born lucky, I guess.

Assignment: Improbable

So yesterday evening I submitted my final assignment for this year's OU course, M301 Software Systems and Their Development. This course has a rep for being wrought from pure evil, which is not entirely unmerited, and this last assignment fit this profile perfectly. This was probably the most wide-ranging of the year's six assignments, covering cryptography, security, project management, ethics, and various aspects of the use of Java and UML, which made it tough enough, but there were quite a few flaws in the way the questions were worded, which made for some real ambiguities.

Anyway, it's finished and submitted on time, and to keep my grade average up all I need to score is 60% -- fingers crossed. Now it's time to start preparing for the exam, which is in a little over two weeks' time.