mrry

Just twenty minutes ago, I finally handed in the fruits of four months’ labour. Of all the dissertations that I have written (or helped to write), Gathering BLOBs with OGSA-DAI is possibly my favourite, though I’m still glad to have it finished. In fact, I finished 30 days later than planned, but that’s okay, because I planned to finish 31 days early. The deadline is tomorrow, and I’m handing it in today to save the schlep out to KB for the penultimate time. (One more trip next week to give a valedictory presentation, but that’s not too much to worry about.)

Thus its off for a guilt-free weekend of fun (to contrast with all the guilty weekends and weeks of fun that have gone before), with pizzas, parties and popular music.

You may think that was a rather self-satisfied post. Don’t worry: there are more Things I am excited about. It gets worse.

For the first time, I’m living in Edinburgh (well, sort of) during the Fringe. This has made it possible to see even more shows than last year. And it’s also given me the chance to work on my rage control techniques.

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Tomorrow marks the start of the first World Cup during which I will have day-to-day business with “English People”. Needless to say, this development puts me in something of a pickle.

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These accursed exams that I’m sitting have forced me to make a number of sacrifices.

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Since some time in the summer last year, I have often filled in idle moments with a sudoku puzzle. Though one might contend that they are simply crosswords for the illiterate and unimaginative, I relish a sudoku when I have some time to pass. In fact, give me a fully-charged iPod and a book of sudokus, and I would probably never get bored. At least until the charge ran out on the iPod.

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On my return to Glasgow today, I noticed that a little bit of my childhood had died. My walk from Cathcart station to my parents’ house takes me past the Beechings pub on Clarkston Road. Every time I used to pass it, rounding the corner onto Monreith Road East, I used to stop and breathe in a pleasantly familiar smell, which was peculiarly evocative of getting my hair cut at the local barber’s shop when I was younger.

I passed today for the first time in over a month: the smell was gone. I paused, considered this for a moment, [formulated a catchy title for a blog post,] and carried on.

I’d just like to state publicly that this is the only way my life has been negatively affected by the Smoking, Health and Social Care (Scotland) Act 2005.

That painfully-familiar template surrounding this blog can mean only one thing. Not that I’ve decided, in a fit of irony, to retrofit the Kubrick template onto my hacked-together CMS; but that I’ve moved to Wordpress.

Back in late 2002, it was a fun idea to knock together a CMS in PHP and MySQL, and throw off the shackles of Blogger. Now, in 2006, and having taken a hiatus of over two months, I think the change to Wordpress will prove a catalyst for the resumption of blogging on this site. Hopefully, anyway.

For the moment, the old posts and content remain in situ, so that I can preserve the old hyperlinks. I’ll eventually create a home page (how 90’s!) that sits at www.mrry.co.uk, and directs you here or elsewhere.

In the mean time, sit back, relax, and watch as a torrent of exhilarating content pours forth!