Of love, life, and linux.

So I hear w00t about Gill [1] and not being ambiguous and not running away.

It seems that I have been struck by the "more girlfriend implies less
blogging" syndrome. I was thinking I could avoid it, but evidently not. There
has even been loads of stuff that I have thought "I should write about that".
I would also like to spew my feelings on here, but I suspect that some people
might have objections to that.

I really need an economist/machine learning specialist to help me build a
model of love based on utility/expected reward. So far, I have
Utility(him) = Utility_0(him) + love(her) * Utility(her)
Utility(her) = Utility_0(her) + love(him) * Utility(him)

So if love(him) = love(her) = love (a constant) then how large does it need to
be for Utility(him) to double? Also, should there also be a "time spent
together" factor in there, and what form should it take?

I've been stupidly busy recently. Probably my own fault for being so
lazy/distracted on the weekend/before. I'm gonna get screwed tomorrow for not
handing in work, and the next day (though I was able to do surprisingly much
of the risk paper in the half hour I thought I had)

In Linux news, we now have a JCR computer, for use with hermes. If you want an
account for more than that, please put something tasty in my (or Rob's)
pigeonhole. Also, if you know a good method for providing authorization
from /etc/shadow to kerberos or radius, please let us know. It would be good
to let all srcf users have un-restricted access onto the system. We'll see
what happens.

For Kopete users: a nice little hack: in the alias plugin, assign
"idle" to "exec dcop kopete KopeteIface setAutoAway"
Now you can type /idle to immediately go "away" until you next move the mouse.
Useful for adding finality to conversations without fucking up your status
for when you actually return.

[1] wget

http://alsuren.blogspot.com/2007/05/dancingthe-fateful-post.html

-o - |
sed -e s/Jill/Gill/

Organization

It seems I win at failing at organization.

*may have frantically started doing supervision work 10110* minutes before my
risk supervsion.*

*and no, that's not binary.

In other news:

Squee: I have my bike back! Fankoo mummum and daddums!

The Cambridge Lindy Exchange was really good, and I am thoroughly shattered.
Also, Cycling back from the speakeasy with just a sweaty t-shirt on is
probably not wise. I will go to the shops at some point and get lots of fruit
to ward off the customary "I've just been dancing with half of about 80
people from around the world" pestilence.

Sucks to be Stu, who managed to get diseased before they even *arrived*.

Reliable contact methods.

It would appear that email is the best way to contact me. My phone was having
a strop from about sunday morning until now, so attempts to organise meetings
etc. may have failed. *blush*

To contrast, I have checked my email about 10 times in that period, and my
computer has checked many more times, just to make sure that nothing was
missed, and so that it could quickly give me an error message if the system
failed for any reason.

Performance Dancing

When I was in London, Sally asked me whether I would join a performance
troupe, so when I came back to cambs, I told the guys about it, and asked
them (very vaguely) whether it was a good idea. They said yeah...

Then on [last] wed, I went to the intermediates, and was completely dead. I
wasn't leading properly, and I was thinking way too much. Katherine also
reminded me that I was still yanking rather than body leading swing-outs.
Also, I should probably make the effort to get the breaks/half-breaks in the
shimsham. All in all, I really don't feel ready for performance dancing.

On the other hand, There are so many things that I keep getting told that I'm
doing badly, and I see really obviously when I see pictures of myself
dancing. Maybe joining a dance troupe would would provide the explicit
invitation for people to try to help me sort out those things. I think I
would also benefit from seeing a video of myself, and correcting my own
mistakes.

I think I will try to get at least one private lesson before the end of term.
I should ask Matt and Lotte about what's possible though.

I will tag the relevant people in the facebook copy of this when the lindy
exchange is over, and they're a little less busy. I would like to see
people's comments on this. What should I do?

To all you yucky competition dancers.

I say that "Jack and Jill"s are the only competitions that have the right to
call themselves partner dance competitions. All others should be called
paired solo/performance dance competitions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_and_Jill_(dance)

Example:
http://www.lindylibrary.com/main/ultimate-lindy-hop-showdown-2006/ulhs2006-jack-jill-finals-competitio.html

Synchronisation

I have spent *hours* messing about with my phone, trying to make it import my
calendar. It seems that the solution is actually really simple. The reason it
took so long to find is that it doesn't involve using any of the linux
calendar synchronization utilities.

1) Create an account on http://www.scheduleworld.com/
2) install the funambol client for windows mobile on your device
3) sync mobile device
4) export an ical from linux
5) import ical into scheduleworld
6) sync mobile device

The *really stupid* thing is that all of the above is done using open source
software, and yet there is no solution on linux which will let me sync with
scheduleworld. Let's hope this improves for KDE4.