Oops, forgot to update this thing all weekend. OK.
On Friday, my nice new laptop, a Toshiba Tecra 8200, arrived, and I spent the morning playing with that. Then the BOFH lunch, after which I went to OUCS, and helped Sebastian out with some Perl and picked up the job application form which is sitting on the desk in front of me. Scary. Job applications are supposed to be things that happen to other people. Oh well, I'll fill it in eventually.
On the way back, got hold of Black and White and Quake III (Although that one didn't work) and wasted the rest of the day playing with that, as well as setting up an internal network and filling my laptop with things that make Windows useable. (Like, for instance, Debian.)
Saturday was spent looking after Yasuyo, a Japanese friend of Cristina's who was passing through the UK on her way home from America. Since Cris had some work to do, I agreed to take her around Oxford. We went rowing, which was a stupid idea, firstly because the current was quite strong, and secondly because I couldn't find the bloody Cherwell. I mean, come on, two rivers in Oxford, and I lost the junction. Really dumb. Anyway, we paddled about for a bit, and then walked up through Christ Church Meadow to Magdalene, and had a look around there.
On the way back, we met Joel and his girlfriend, and this time he had some work to do, so I had another female to entertain for the afternoon. Thankfully, she had imagination, and suggested we went to have a look around the Ashmolean. Unfortunately, it was 4:30 so we didn't get much time to look around before it closed; we saw the Egyptian art, the mediaeval stuff and some of the Japanese art (and Yasuyo and I found a bug in the labelling! It should be "shichiri" not "nanri")
We then popped over to the University Parks, Blackwell's and headed back along Cornmarket, where we passed Michelle Pfeiffer. (And yes, it was her, because Joel saw her three more times in the day.) Meeting Joel outside Pembroke, we arranged to see "The Mummy Returns" in the evening. Not a bad film, although a litle too over-the-top.
The only thing I remember about Sunday is that I was up until 4:30am getting Debian properly installed on this machine without a floppy or a CD and with a flaky network card.
On Monday, I picked up a fan for my new CPU (Athlon 1.1Ghz) and put it all together again. Still no joy. I took the mobo and CPU to John Mason, the resident hardware guru, who cast the runes and declared that it was the case switch providing a permanent instead of momentary connection. Amazingly, he was wrong, and after fiddling around I found that the CMOS needed resetting. Now I have a nice, new fast machine to play with.
Today, I got up bright and early to a wonderful day, and went to a Classical unseen lesson. The best thing - in fact, the only good thing - about Classical Japanese is that it sounds really good when you declaim it in your best samurai voice. It's also very impressive when you guess it correctly, but that's not quite so frequent.
Then I've been out on the lawn doing what my laptop was supposed to enable - lots of useful writing without the distraction of a network connection. Instead, however, you've got the distraction of bright sunlight making it impossible to see the monitor. Bastards.
