Month: October 2006

I spent last weekend in Chester with a bunch of cultists I met on the Internet. This was a far less alarming situation than it would sound. It’s a nice cult, more keen on tea than kool-aid. Mass (or indeed any) suicide is frowned on.

Apart from the preposterous amount of time it took to get there and back, I had a fantastic time. Note for people travelling to Halloween parties in another country: airports don’t like toy guns in luggage, even checked in. They don’t have a good reason for this, but you won’t win an argument with them over it.

On Friday I flew to Manchester and took the train from there down to Chester. I stopped briefly in Manchester to collect some elements of my Indiana Jones costume from the awesome Sarah. Without her I would have just been dressed as a man in brown trousers. When I reached Chester I checked into the hostel that we had taken over for the weekend, and then got myself off down to the pub to a disconcertingly enthusiastic welcome. There was much rejoicing.

We spent Saturday afternoon in the middle of Chester giving free cakes and sweets to bemused passers-by. Reactions ranged from eagerness through bemusement, confusion, wariness, distrust, and apathy to plain old-fashioned running away.

The ladies in a very expensive looking clothes shop which we went into despite being convinced it was "too posh" for our brand of frivolity turned out to be very enthusiastic about our random act of kindness. Conversely, the grouchy fuckers in the Jesus shop, who we thought were bound to be friendly, turned out to be rude to the point of meanness. Maybe they don’t like pagan rituals like dressing up.

Saturday closed with retiring to a pub. And then another pub. And then a third pub. And then getting thrown out. My theory was that if I went to sleep at all I would be wasting money, so I was among the few remaining at the end of the night.

I took some photos but, just like my vision, most of them were blurry or out of focus. Those that came out well are up on Flickr.

The Last Kiss is Zach Braff’s first movie since last year’s Garden State. This time he neither wrote nor directed, though apparently he did select the soundtrack.

The supporting cast were great. Special shout out to—I have no shame in admitting this—the infeasibly attractive Casey Affleck; far better than his brother. Rachel Bilson is this year’s Natalie Portman (though I preferred last year’s).

I wasn’t as interested in the main story as I was in all of the myriad side-stories. I don’t think the various threads had all that much influence on each other either.

Not a bad film. It certainly has its pluses, and not just in the partial nudity department. But I’m keen to see Braff go back to writing his own material. To be fair, I think it was actually rather good but not at all like the kind of movie I should have been watching today.

I submitted my thesis today. This seems like a notable event, only I can’t think of anything in particular to note about it. There was a very short queue in the central bureaucracy, I guess. That’s rare enough.

Now I play the waiting game…

I can only assume, or perhaps hope, that I’m not the only person who sees entertaining or insightful things on the Web and feels the urge to find the Digg thumbs up icon. I need some sort of indicator of, "I approve of, endorse, and/or was entertained by this content," without having to think up and type a proper comment.

Stephen sneezed and I caught this meme off him.

Five things I would do if I were a millionaire

I take that to mean five things I would do differently, or in addition to what I do now, thereby removing the option of posting the sarcastic answer of, "breath, eat, sleep, drink and shit, not necessarily in that order."

Charity is the obvious first answer, and I think it would be a very difficult thing to decide quite how much to give. I don’t see myself giving significant amounts to domestic charities; I’d be far more inclined to support international organisations, like Concern or Oxfam. Incidentally, it shouldn’t just be millionaires giving to these charities.

Of the remainder, I’d want to get the best property that I could afford, possibly including borrowing. Small differences in value now translate to larger differences in value in the future; at least that’s how the property market has worked in Ireland thus far.

I’ll round out the list with a holiday to somewhere far away (New York, Las Vegas, Egypt, Rome, …), and a trip to London to meet some friends.

I think I’d spend some time trying to think of something really stupid and wasteful to spend some of the money on.

Five bad habits

• Getting up ridiculously late
• Not making plans and relying on other people to sort out my entertainment
• Procrastinating
• Propagating memes rather than putting the effort into proper blog posts
• Not finishing lists properly

Five things I hate doing

I’m not sure there are five things I hate doing. There are innumerable things that I would hate to do, but that’s different. I guess I don’t like getting out of bed when I’m tired.

Five things I would never do

I’ll let a Google search answer this one for me:

• Buy WinZip
• Shoplift from Laura Barton
• Misuse the subject line to place the body text
• Go to school on a Saturday
• Go out in deep ,cold ,water, risking death by drowning in something I had built

Five Things you regret

Why is it suddenly about things you regret rather than things I regret? Was this some sort of subconscious distancing of the original author from their regrets? Or were they just inconsistent?

I agree with the cliché that it’s better to regret things that you’ve done than things that you haven’t. But even then I’m not so sure that I regret anything. It’s just not an emotion that affects me long-term. Sure I can regret betting on a poor hand in poker, but it won’t keep me awake at night years in the future. I haven’t done anything worth regretting recently, and the stuff that happened long ago is so far in the past that I can’t regret it without also regretting who I’ve become since. Which I don’t. So I don’t.

Five favourite toys or things

Laptop, iPod, Camera, … Playstation? No, not hugely keen on that. I guess I’m not really a materialist. Either that or I’m so much of a materialist that I can’t even properly appreciate all the cool stuff I have. I like my Nikko bag. They don’t make them anymore.

Five special young people I choose to do this

The Planeteers

I wrote the following for the History Matters One Day in History program. The point is to get "as many people as possible to record a ‘blog’ diary which will be stored by the British Library as a historical record of our national life." It’s geared towards the Brits obviously, but I didn’t feel like being left out.

It seems the intention of this project is that people in the future will be able to read back on what we have written as a broad illustration of what life was like for a slice of mostly British, mostly educated, and slightly skewed towards the financially affluent 21st Centurions. For those of you reading in the 22nd Century, I hope you have the flying cars that the movies continue to promise us.

My name is Rory Parle. I’m Irish. I’m 23. I’m in the final stages of a masters degree in Computer Science, a field which I expect to be over-represented in any Web-based endeavour such as this. By final stages, I mean that my thesis is written and ready to be published any time I feel motivated enough to go to find a printing shop. Other than that small remaining task, I’m essentially unemployed.

My day started at 1PM, and probably won’t end until some hours into the early morning. I spent the early afternoon at my computer, reading emails and other communications.

I spent the evening at Trinity College Dublin’s juggling society. I’ve been a member (though not technically, because I never attended the college) for four years. I spent most of the three hours teaching new members the basics of juggling, and catching up with friends who I hadn’t seen for a few months, as this was my first session this academic year.

Boring details that might be of interest to future historians: I travelled to and from the juggling meeting on the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit), an electric rail system. I occupied myself during the journey (of approximately one hour) by listening to a pre-recorded radio show on my portable music and video player (an Apple iPod). I didn’t just teleport straight to the meeting, because we can’t do that yet, despite what television would have us believe.

Some readers might be aware of the details and intricacies of my take on Lost. For those who aren’t, the gist is that I blame J.J. Abrams for stealing quite a few hours of my life. And never giving anything in return. I guess that’s what makes it stealing. Whatever. Anyway, there may be a reason to watch at least a couple of episodes of the next season. This (vaguely spoilerish, and very short) article on E! Online suggests, in a rather outright stating it kind of way, that Firefly‘s Nathan Fillion will guest star in a number of episodes. Anyone who wants to know who he plays should follow that link.

Four men stand dotted about a function room, all turned to face a stage where the quizmaster presides over a trivial spot-prize competition. Each of the four has one hand on his head, the other clasped firmly on his buttocks.

The game is this: put each of your hands on either your head or your ass. You can put them both in the same place if you want or, like a communist distributing the fruits of the public’s labour, give one to each. The quizmaster then tosses two coins. Two heads on the coins and all of the people with both hands on their head stay standing while everyone else sits down. Simliarly, tails equals ass. The game continues until there is one player remaining. Tradition dictates that this person be labelled the winner.

A simple game. And with a moment’s thought, a simple optimal strategy. Clearly in this game placing both of your eggs in one basket is the inferior choice. One hand on your head and the other on your ass gives a 50% chance of staying in the game at each round. The other options have only a 25% chance each. These four remaining men know it. They have played the same position for each round leading up to this and none of them is keen to switch strategies. We are at an impasse.

This is where my faith in humaity begins to disappear. The quizmaster tosses the coins again. A head and a tail. All men remain. Again. Two heads. All sit down. We can’t finish without a winner. Stand up and we”l go again. A head and a tail. It slowly dawns on the quizmaster and the assembled onlookers that this game doesn’t appear to be nearing a conclusion. The men are asked to change their choices. They all look around at the others hoping that a rival will concede to the request. No-one does. More coin tossing. Sit down. Stand up again. Another draw. Whatever will we do? My mood sinks deeper and deeper. More sitting. Stand up again. And then it happens. Humanity, by the hand (or, in fact, voice) of a lone assailant on reason, loses the battle.

"Change the coins."

In his inaugural address on that very first World Smile Day Harvey Ball laid the groundwork for that World Smile Day saying that the smiley face "…just reflects what is inside every one of us – a smile is what we want to see when we look at another human being." He said, "Sometimes we forget that. Sometimes the world seems big and filled with problems that are too hard to understand much less solve. We start to believe that we are too small to make a difference. But that’s not true. The truth is that every one of us has the ability to make a difference every day."

Celebrate World Smile Day, and watch the world smile.