I meant to go to sleep, then I forgot. Anyways, if the words “Web standards” and “IE8″ mean anything to you, you should read the above article. It’s gold.

It’s taken me just forever to get round to writing this, because as everyone knows, I’m pretty terrible and disorganised. And it’s going to be a pretty terrible blog post anyway, because I’m think I’m already starting to get typing-fatigue. Anyways, the show was fantastic, I kinda wish I’d thought to take a camera because there are pictures I’d love to show you, but I can’t. So I’ll have to resort to pushing you in the direction of Youtube and Flickr, which are no doubt full to brimming with media by now.

Anyways, the attendees were Dickie, Josh, Sarah, Samir, and myself.

Once we’d met up, we had trouble finding the venue. We walked all the way up the road to the Roundhouse, walking past the actual venue (Dingwalls in Camden Lock) by a heck of a long way. The moral of the story was that people shouldn’t listen to me when I say a big line of people doesn’t look like a queue. It was an amazingly huge queue, it stretched right around the corner and threatened to spill out onto the road, and it took ages for them to see everyone inside.

Finally we got in and found some (albeit cramped) seats. Which was lucky, as the show was a sell-out and thus the venue was filled to capacity. First impressions were that the place was filled with our people, our tribe, as it were. We spotted people wearing xkcd, HL2, Portal & Penny Arcade T-shirts. These people are our people. After buying some drinks, the man himself came on stage, apparently amazed himself at the number of people who’d turned out. The crowd was incredibly enthusiastic, cheering, screaming, the works.

The set started with Over There, contentious seeing as how it’s basically insulting us all, but I think we collectively took it in good humour.

According to “Tart” at http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2008/02/29/london-calling/#comments:

Set list was: Over There, The Future Soon, Ikea, Shop Vac, I’m Your Moon, Baby Got Back, Still Alive, a Billy Bragg cover called The Saturday Boy, Someone is Crazy, I feel Fantastic.

Set two was Tom Cruise Crazy, Better, Skullcrusher Mountain, I Crush Everything, Code Monkey (with new toy backing up the guitar), Creepy Doll, Drinking With You, Do They Know It’s Christmas (Feed the World), Chiron Beta Prime, Millionaire Girlfriend, Mandelbrot Set, You Ruined Everything, re: Your Brains and for the encore: First of May.

Highlights included Code Monkey featuring his brand-new Tenori-on, the impromptu Bandaid cover with riotous audience participation, the sweet-as-heck introduction to I’m Your Moon (it’s Charon singing to Pluto!), and general laughing and singing along all evening.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it immensely, and I have to say I’ll be first in the queue to buy tickets for another show in London. And I’ve been listening to pretty much nothing but Jonathon Coulton music since the gig, so that pretty much says all that’s required.

Top search terms for all time:

1. andy simpson
2. asuseee
3. weeping angel doctor who
4. sally sparrow
5. weeping angels dr who
6. weeping angel dr who
7. andy simpson music
8. revision sucks
9. weeping angel
10. office 2007 student deal

I think this rather clarifies that my core audience seems to be people interested in me, followed by Asus EEE users, then Whovians.

So people interested in me, you’re in the right place. Congratulations.

Asus EEE folks, you’ll want to check out eeeuser.com because it’s a fantastic resource, the wiki is well worth having a look at. Also, if your institution has some sort of VPN-over-insecure-network as a way of connecting to their network, it’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to hack in WPA Enterprise.

We all love Sally Sparrow. This seems to be a universal truth. The fact that we’re instead getting Catherine Tate, a re-run of Martha (she was OK, I guess…) and Rose (again? They don’t make barriers between parallel worlds like they used to) for the next series of Dr Doctor Who is just brain-numbingly painful to me. I sometimes wonder if Russell T. Davies actually has some kinda soft mulch inside his cranium, instead of the finely-tuned ninja-writer-brain possessed by pretty much everyone else writing on that show. Is the head writer supposed to be the worst of the lot?

I mean, I think the biggest achievement of the Sound Of Drums / Last of the Time Lords two-parter was to make you not notice the huge plot holes. I mean, why exactly did the Master go to all the trouble of becoming Prime Minister? One would think that controlling an army of 6 billion armoured robotic spheres would do the job well enough.

Never mind that the Doctor said he permanently fused the controls on the Tardis, only to then fix them again at the end of the episode. Maybe he just locked the controls out with private key encryption or something, but it seems ridiculous that the Master could turn the Tardis into a Paradox machine, but couldn’t fix the controls.

Awesome tangent. Anyways, I think my favourite term not in that list is “insipid boom-fest” for which I’m randomly the top search result on Google. Weird.

Thanks to Dickie for inspiring me to look at search terms, mine are all much duller than “ugly fatties”.

Update: I forgot to mention, I saw a League of Gentlement / Doctor Who actor/writer Mark Gatiss, as well as another Doctor Who writer I recognised but couldn’t name in Forbidden Planet in London. It was cool, and made my sister angry, which is always fun. Felt too lame to ask for an autograph, so I didn’t.

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2008/03/04/london-tickets-on-sale/

If you played Portal, you should come. He also has awesome other music. Go listen:

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/primer/listen

Installed Expression Web (after getting it gratis, thanks, Microsoft) and had a go at editing the theme for my blog.

Basically, it looks like it barfs horribly at that stage, because it doesn’t support PHP. Which the entirety of WordPress is written in. Basically, it looks like I’m going to have to either:

1. Give up entirely
2. Write my own WordPress theme from scratch, implementing some clever hacks so that all along Expression Web doesn’t think it’s actually dealing with PHP at all, and nothing breaks.

I think I’m going to go for 2 because I’m me, and frankly I love the intellectual challenge of fun hacks.

I might have to do some experiments to see what’ll work best, see if I can figure out a way of going with the grain rather than against it. We’ll see.

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Windows Server 2003 Standard
• SQL Server 2005 Express
• Microsoft Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional

Buying this stuff individually would cost a fortune, this is an amazing deal, so if you’re at all interested in developer / web designer tools (or you know someone who is) this is well worth taking a gander at to see if you’re eligible.

Microsoft DreamSpark

So the other day (Friday) I took it to college as a shakedown run, I guess you could call it.

This threw up one rather major difficulty – WPA-Enterprise isn’t supported by default, and that’s what the Imperial wireless network uses. Bugger.

So support for WPA-E has to be rather hackily hacked back in. One ham-handed attempt by me has already cost me the use of the network monitor in the tray. No great loss, but kinda irritating.

Anyways, I’m right now running a specially customised version of Ubuntu Linux, which should fix the network issue, but the list of post-install tweaks on the wiki is frankly just frightening, and some of it is pretty important stuff, like fixing SD cards not mounting.

I’m starting to get the impression that Linux is an operating system designed for people who, a priori, know what the fuck they’re doing, and in the hands of these people it is an incredibly powerful tool. You can do anything you like, assuming you know how to do it.

In some ways it feels like the direct manifestation of the principle that the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time, so they’ve only done 5% of that last 10%. Most everything works, and you can fix or disable anything that doesn’t, right? Because worst case scenario, you have to delve in to the command prompt, type in some arcane commands and poof, it works.

Thing is, I really don’t want to install Windows on here. I want to get to a point where I can use Linux, but not being able to get onto the Imperial Wireless network might really be a dealbreaker.

We’ll see.

Then I took a bus up to Piccadilly Circus (because walking to South Ken tube is extremely tedious), somehow managing smack my little finger on something I was getting on, causing the tip of my nail to kinda crack in the middle and start bleeding. Which was kinda icky.

Anyways, got there and had a bit of a stroll. A purposeful stroll. I wandered over Leicester Square, up to the Seven Dials in Covent Garden. On a side note, the Seven Dials is rapidly becoming my favorite area of Central London. It’s just cool.

Got to Forbidden Planet and bought the new Buffy comic, then headed up past the Intrepid Fox (heavy metal pub. Interesting clientele) to  Tottenham Court Road, with the intention of buying a white Asus EEE 4g. First place said they hadn’t had stock in about two weeks, and that he wasn’t expecting any again ever.

Next place I tried was Micro Anvika, a sign outside said they were in stock, which is usually a good sign. I wandered over to the guy standing by the display model, pointed, and said “I want one of those, please”. Really. He then proceeded to sell me one. The weirdest part was the whole paying by card part. You do start to realise how easy it is to blow vast amounts of cash really, really fast.

Anyways, I took it home, and it’s now what I’m using to type this blog post. The keyboard takes some getting used to, but it’s really not that bad at all!

On other matters, on Tuesday, me, Sarah^2, Niro, Daisy, Rowan & Craig gathered at Sarah & Daisy’s place and made pancakes, which was awesome, and then went to the Temperance pub, which was really nice, and all in all it was a good night.

I was sitting on a London Overground train – which on a tangential point had departed from Brondesbury station, which has been very nicely refurbished and repainted following the TfL takeover – and I had a sudden realisation that I wasn’t even really sure I was on the right train, going to the right place.

On a Tube train, there’s pretty much always a map of the line somewhere in your eyeline, and the station you’re at or travelling to is clearly signposted by signs on the station platform itself, the recorded  station announcements, and the scrolling matrix displays. It’s almost impossible to lose track of where you are, so much so that you can master the Zen of Tube Travel and completely conk out on a trip back, waking up just at the right station.

On this Overground train I was totally lost – the station names weren’t announced, the stations were inadequately signed, and there were very few maps on display.

Which got me thinking about how important all this kind of stuff is.

For instance, the bus maps displayed at bus shelters are no end of useful, as they show not only the routes serving the local area, but a small street map showing the location of nearby bus stops. This is useful above and beyond simply finding buses, as it also gives the pedestrian both a map and a point of reference from which to navigate. It makes travelling around London a heck of a lot more pleasant, even when you’re going somewhere you’ve never been before.

However, travelling large distances on foot in London is still difficult. Using tube and bus maps for long-distance walks, or even short hops can be unhelpful because of the distortion of distances and positions to convey the networks in a simpler way.

So, rather handily, they’ve instituted a project called Legible London which aims to install good pedestrian signage across London to make pedestrian naviagation simpler and more intuitive, by capitalising on research into how we naturally navigate, i.e. forming mental networks of routes between landmarks. It’s very interesting stuff, and a prototype has been installed around the Bond Street Station / Oxford Street area.

Which might help certain people (who shall remain unnamed) realise that there is no actual street called Bond Street. To be fair, it’s a fairly common mistake

Alas, it’s hard to properly describe it without using words like “wavefunction” and “quantum state”, but I’m going to try anyway.

Your basic elementary particles like electrons have a property called spin, which is kind of like the particle spinning on its axis like a spinning globe, but in fact is actually very much not like that at all. Anyways, a particle can either be spinning one way, or spinning the other, and these are known as spin up and spin down states.

Which again, isn’t entirely true, because particles don’t have to be in either of the states, they can exist in what is known as a superposition, where the particle is a mixture of spin up and spin down, and only when you try and measure the spin state of a particle does it become up or down, a process known as collapse. This is the choice alluded to in the first paragraph – in one universe, the particle was seen to be spin up, and in the second, the particle was seen to be spin down. The superposition has collapsed into two definite outcomes.

Where the idea of the branching universes isn’t right is in this idea of collapse. What the originators of the orthodox Quantum Mechanics forgot to include was the vital element that essentially the person doing the observing and measuring is himself (or herself, with a lower probability…)  a quantum system, and the state of that quantum system is affected by the result of the measurement. Something different will get written down in the results.

In essence, the superposition of the spin states of the particle doesn’t collapse into certainty – the physicist instead enters a superposition! This is the crux of the idea – that large systems can enter superpositions, then each state in that superposition evolves independently of each other – forming individual universes, unreachable and undetectable.

This approach extends naturally to the entire universe, evolving in time as a single quantum system, with every single possible event playing out simultaneously.

It also has a rather grisly underside – the idea of a quantum suicide. As long as there exists a possible state in which you remain consciously aware, then a version of yourself will be consciously aware. Subjectively, this means that you can continue to survive an indefinite number of suicide attempts, murders, deaths by natural causes, etc. What worries me is that there are likely to be many more states in which you survive indefinitely in horrible pain than there are where everything goes really well.

This realisation really freaked me out the first time I sat and thought about it. Still unsettles me now.

Actually kinda makes me hope that Everett was wrong, and that wavefunction collapse does actually occur.