Thanks or attaching me to the MC league, whoever did it. What a plonker I am. I had Phil Tufnell, Linda Barker & Anthony W-T which were doing nicely. I knew they'd slide in value after the show finished, but thought the divi was worked out on a daily basis - so sold Phil & Anthony the day before the divi was announced. So of course I got no (huge) divi. Ho hum - learn from mistakes. Slightly amazed to find myself in 3rd posn. in the MC league @ moment. Can't see that lasting !
Was making a few cunning trades at the weekend, calculated to be in David Beckham at divi time, and one of the trades must have got stuck in the door. I came in this morning to find I had nearly 170,000 in cash and virtually no shares, so no divi this weekend. Groan.
Presumably when you get to a million you dump back down to 10,000 but get that little wad of green notes by your name - is that right ? How then do you get the sports car and yacht that I see some people sporting for pity's sake ?
I've not had much time to concentrate on it for a while now but I think I'm no good cos I went at first for celebs who interested me rather than ones who might grab headlines, so I'm saddled with a lot of loss makers... I bought lots of JK Rowling and Keanu Reeves when they were cheap though so those strategies are finally paying off!
Bit quiet the noo... Any particular reason? Working hard? Found something in our lives more fulfilling than MC? Me? I've got a talk to write... grrr...
I've been away, and busy both sides of that; I don't post much here but often keep an eye on things. I managed to skillfully avoid checking 52 pairs of glasses today, and did an exensive literature search instead. Didn't find much interesting. Ho hum.
Time for dinner - tempted by pizza and DVD, really.
Incidentally I think the celebdaq people should be warned that Big Brother is starting again at the end of the week. Presumably they add 'celebreties' to the list as time goes on; in the meantime, maybe Davina might be worth investing in?
[rab] I've been working and doing housy stuff, mainly, when I haven't been uploading broken fixes to OMC. I'm currently considering turning on my work machine so I can get on with my day working at home. Although I may wait another hour so I can start nearer a normal time.
Was thinking of starting a new fund and doing two big brother trackers - one for people still in there, and one for people who've been voted out. Don't know why, but thought there might be some value in the exercise. Thinks: revision is getting to my head. I need to get out more.
A paper that I spent most of February writing has been described by the editor of the receiving journal as 'truly superb'. That's an accolade that deserves a beer I think...
Dear Professor rab: Thank you for submitting your paper to the Journal of ____________. I have now received the comments of two highly qualified reviewers, and I regret to inform you that while both reviewers and myself agree that the paper is truly superb, we none the less feel that it addresses a rather narrow technical topic of limited interest and therefore does not make sufficient contribution to warrant publication in our journal.
Thank you for submitting your truly superb work, and I am sorry that the outcome was not more favourable.
Hmmm. Sixteen thousand words to write by next Wednesday (Master's Dissertation). Good job the girlfriend is away for the weekend - no nagging me about staying awake 24 hours a day. I plan to be "resisting a rest" a lot. Anybody know anything about how to stay awake whilst reading Data Warehousing sh1te?
Dear Professor rab: Thank you for submitting your paper to the Journal of ____________. I have now received the comments of two highly qualified reviewers, and I am delighted to inform you that both reviewers and myself agree that the paper is truly superb. Accordingly, we should like to proceed with publication as soon as possible. In view of the quality of your work, we are prepared to have it prepared for publication at the reduced fee of £1520, a reduction of £20 on the usual tariff of £1540. Please enclose a further sum of £2340 for your 1000 half-price concessionary copies of the Journal, to distribute to your friends and colleagues. We shall proceed, therefore, as soon as we have your cheque or banker's draft for £3959.99 (including £79.99 postage and packing).
[gil] Don't joke. There's one very well known and wealtby US journal of physics that sends out a bill for publication of your work. In extremely tiny print you can find the word "voluntary"... but it is hidden...
[ISP] Try and think of how all the theory you're reading about might be used. For instance, imagine a database of all the MC games online, all the players, all the IP addresses they were played from, all the timestamps, replicated from the servers in real time while people play. You could come up with fascinating information like how particular players vary their posting times over, er, time, or what each player's favourite move is, or some query which you would actually need a data warehouse for!
That's the way I made some of my AI papers more relevant to me, anyway. At the time it was examples from roleplaying, but the point is the same.
[Boolbar] It's an excessively elaborate fictional naval salute, as devised by Arnold Rimmer from "Red Dwarf", who was notoriously bad at exams on account of devoting two months and three weeks of his three-month revision time to designing a revision timetable.
I recommend the first couple of Red Dwarf books, the authors are "Rob Grant" and "Doug Naylor", who also appear in Amazon's catalogue as "Naylor, Grant". IF you are interested in the DVDs of the series, they are also highly recommended, the stars are Chris Barrie and Craig Charles.
We had the mother of all power cuts last night. A pneumatic drillster managed to slice his way through the main electricity supply to the north-eastern segment of Manchester University... I didn't see it myself, but the sparks were said to be quite spectacular. The drillster was - amazingly - unharmed. However, the same cannot be said of our computer system. It often comes across as though the whole thing is held together by three pieces of string and a lump of chewing gum. For a while the main server had no case and was wrapped up in 'Police Line -- Do not cross' tape. I jest not. Anyway, I can just about get a login, but seeing as the main server is going up and down like a pair of whore's knickers, the best I can do right now is to fire up Netscape 4 on a twm desktop. What nostalgia... But at least I'm pleased I wrote these pages in such a way that you can actually look at them on steam-powered browsers. (In fact, dare I say it, but they work rather well on lynx, lest anyone ever need to go back to the 1930's).