Officially a Bachelor of Computer Science Degree holder now, and thus can finally claim the term bachelor in all ernest. Or something to that end. Very exciting day, either way. If anyone ever says “oh there’s no point going to graduate”, tell them… well, tell them they can skip their own if they really want. Don’t skip yours, no matter how bad that gown/hat looks on you! (looked terrible on me, I know that) ...

I’m in the middle of an experiment right now: writing real letters. It all came about because of a movie which featured letters prominently as a plot device, and the discussion that followed in my family about how letters used to be the only way to communicate across distances. Telephones reduced that, and email has virtually eliminated the need to send a letter which is not business related. I left that in my ideas drawer for a bit, noting it as something to perhaps come back to in the future. (I don’t actually have an “ideas drawer”, it’s more the abstract concept.) A few weeks ago, I picked up the book White Mughals, which is about the East India Company and its rise in the late Mughal era of India - nicely historical, engagingly written book. I noticed that the primary sources for so much of the writer’s information was letters (other sources like journals also cropped up). That got me thinking… what would the historians 200 years from now scour over? Google’s old decaying datacentre hard-drives? An Archive.org that was bigger than the ‘operating net’ itself? History rarely records the emepheral things such as conversations, and one could say quite easily that emails etc are just digitized conversations, not letters in the same sense they were 200 years ago. ...

Watched M:I:3 last night. First impression within 30 seconds of the start: Wow, get a bloody steadycam or tripod, will you? Yeesh. I don’t know what makes film makerst think a camera shaking like crazy, at an unecessary time (i.e. when the action is mostly static), is somehow “modern” and “cool”. All it does is make me want to close my eyes before I get a headache. Also, most overused plot technique in movies these days: the flash-forward, or perhaps half-movie-is-flashback-from-first scene. I don’t know which movie did it first - Fight Club is the first example I can remember - but now it’s just getting predictable - “Oh look! First Scene and we’re in the thick of things and we the audience have no clue what’s going on! I know, we’ll wait for the plot exposition.” ...

Some of you may have seen this email before; supposedly, it’s got the wisdom of the Dalai Lama in it & what-not, and part of it is organising a list of animals “by your preference”. If you’ve ever been asked a question which is more random or left-field than that, let me know. The idea is that these animals reflect your priorities in life. Somehow. Let’s go through this list. If you don’t want to be spoilt for when this email pops in your inbox, look away now. ...

and the day started so well… * * * I’d had a long day at work, with the weekly meeting running way over time. I’d rushed to the station, only to find the train had been delayed 10 minutes. It didn’t get better, as the train was stopped at a later station for nearly 15 minutes more before we actually were getting anywhere. I still had work to do at home, a conference call, and I was just tired. ...