Flat3D

New endeavours

Today I started at Union College. Technically we had an induction day yesterday, but that hardly counts with the first classes being today. Today I had “Old Testament Narrative and Poetic Texts”, tomorrow I have a seminar on that, then Thursday I have everything else… that’s Church History, Greek and Hebrew. Thursday is a busy day, Tuesday and Wednesday aren’t so much. But that does mean I will have lots of time on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to get my work done for Thursdays!

Some people have bawlked at me taking both greek and hebrew in the same year (they are year long and run from now til May) but I don’t think it’s such a bad idea… Next year I am going to have harder modules than this year (this year’s are “beginners” modules as the MDiv is designed for people who haven’t studied theology before) and next year’s are proper advanced, postgraduate level modules. Therefore it might be good to have less on next year if I can. It also opens my options for modules next year and gets the languages out of the way!
Besides all of that, if it is all too much Prof Taylor has told me I can drop one and pick it up next year (presumably I’d need to drop it earlier rather than later, but I should know soon enough if it’s all too much).

The other thing I need to do now is get a job. I figure technically I can work a normal shift on Mondays and Fridays as I’m not in college. I know it’ll mean I have to get the college work done at other times but hey that’s life. So I’ve started looking for part time work by sending CVs and the like. Ideally I’d like to work in something related to IT or Computing as it would mean i could keep my edge a little sharper in regards to technology etc. Perhaps not in the cutting edge electronics and software world, but at least with computers, and I do like computers… So I thought one of the small computer shops in/near to Antrim, but I haven’t heard anything from any of them. I doubt they are even looking for workers to be honest so it was a bit of a long shot. I may have to resort to asking PC World or Maplin or somesuch if there is anything going…

In other news, my final box arrived from Japan today! My books, some clothes, a few CDs and my polystyrene Ir control aeroplane all safely stowed inside!

Quieter PC, fun in the sea and a new OS to try…

First up I posted a bit about making my PC quieter last post. I have succeeded to a certain extent… The first problem was the hard disk which was vastly improved by mounting the HDD on an old “Anti-roll” CD player mount I had from years ago designed to absorb shocks that make your portable CD player skip while using it in your car. The mount is basically a plastic platform sitting on four rubber stubs that are attached to a plastic base. The Hard disk is white-tacked to the top of the platform and the base is sitting (and also white-tacked to) the inside of the PC case. The rubber stubs absorb the vibrations from the spinning drive and so the hum is vastly reduced from the case-amplified buzz to the stealthy hum of the disk casing itself….
The power supply isn’t so easy. So far what I did was to use a dremel-like mini grinder to remove the grill that stops small children sticking fingers into the fan-hole on the back of the case. This took the edge off the sound of wind rushing through a metal grill. But it still makes a bit of sound that would be better avoided. But it no longer drives me nuts! And it is barely noticable when there are other sounds (even the sound of the rain on the open window pane)

Second thing is we took the kayaks up to the North Coast on Saturday on a day with the sun splitting practically cloudless skies. It was a beautiful day.
Initially no one was going to go, until Paul (PC, Piece) and I decided we’d go up at the youth club committee meeting on Friday night, soon Tommy decided to join us. Tommy took his little Pyranha playboat up on his car and PC and I strapped the Ocean Duo two seater sit-on-top kayak to the top of my 206.
The surf was incredible, nice waves in periodic sets being supported by a nice offshore wind and breaking nicely along Whiterocks beach. Every so often a really large set would come in and the Ocean Duo came into it’s own, once PC and I had “mastered” our surfing teamwork and the immaculate bracing required due to lack of strapping in! I have put some photos up, but there are none of PC and I as I was doing all the camera work with my Japan-bought Olympus…

See the pics here
Be sure to open the lyle.gif right up (click the thumbnail, then click the larger image) to see the animation…

I don’t know if I mentioned a while ago that I am helping out a bit with the OMf Japan website update. But I am! The current stage is to go through the current site and extract all of the info from it. I began to do with by hand, its not a particularly large site, but I made slow, slow progress considering the time I have to give to the project (ie, it can’t be a 9-5 job). So my next move is to have some fun doing it! I am downloading Parallels Workstation and am going to install Ubuntu Linux onto it. Both items introduced to me by Matthew (a short termer at the same time as me in Itayanagi, Japan). I am not sure if my aging PC will handle running two Operating systems at once, but it’ll be fun to find out!
So how is this going to help? Well, I am going to use the shell scripting inherently available in Linux to write a script that will parse the OMF pages extracting the info I need. I could do it in Perl or possibly (with difficulty) using batch files or something in windows, but I don’t have much experience with Perl, but I did a bit of parsing files using bash and grep etc so it’ll actually hopefully be quicker to install linux and use it rather than spend a week or so of time I don’t really have to learn Perl.
Also I get to play with some new toys I haven’t used before! Hurrah!

Silence!

Before leaving to go to Japan I sold my Sony Vaio notebook PC. Since then I have found one benefit of a (properly functioning) notebook over the average (slightly aging) desktop PC. Silence. A notebook makes the odd little noise when accessing the HDD and occasionally the fan kicks in for a bit of cooling action, but its never too lound (at least my vaio wasn’t!).

But my (slightly aging) desktop PC isn’t so quiet. I have already quietened the case and CPU fans, but the power supply fan blows like a gale. And thats not the worst, the larger of the two HDDs hums like a taxi-ing plane! (ok it’s not that bad, but it is at that annoying pitch that seems to be amplified by the resonance of the case itself)…

So now I am on a new quest, to find cost effective (and ingenius) ways to quieten my PC. I have already got the HDD spinning down when not in use for 5 mins (it’s only used for storing media and so it doesn’t slow the PC down when it spins down)… but even with that occasionally it’ll spin up when Juice goes to check for new podcasts etc. I also want to quieten the PSU fan a bit… Any ideas how to do it without buying a new one or destroying the current one?

C’mon folks, post your ideas, the more ingenius the better!

Things are goin down

Been a little while since I posted here, certainly since I posted anything of significance!

On friday I register at Union, so far this has been a rather taxing experience and I haven’t even gone yet. I emailed the Posgraduate Studies guy in order to make myself known and sort of ensure he knows what I’m doing and checking its ok. Turns out I can’t really switch to an MTh after the first year, so it seems it’s gonna be 3 years a Bible College. Which is more sensible and probably something to do with the big man upstairs pointing me the right way, but its a little irritating. Also I got a letter saying I was becoming a minister, which came as a suprise. Well rather they said I am enrolling into the ministry course, which doesn’t make you a minister, rather it is an add on to the MDiv for those heading for the ministry. I didn’t apply for it and don’t think I’m going to be doing it… At least yet. See what the big man says in a year or ten…
All this means an extra year before I will be back in Japan (assuming it all goes that way)…

Union aside, a few things have been going on:
Last Saturday 14 of us piled into a minibus (and a Landrover) and headed down to Kildare/Dublin to take part in the Liffey Descent. 11 of us took part in the race:
Lyle “off board motor” Creighton and Jake “takin a pastin” McMahon
The three stooges (Davey, Alan and James)
Steve “Man O’erboard!” Little and Tommy “Where’s my goggles?” Maclaine
Mark “It’ll be grand” Wright and Heather “no it won’t!” Wright
Paul “the Piece” Clarke and I

All good craic!

In other news… My car is sorted, I installed an isolator switch to the modulator. All working nicely.

Irn Bru 32

I should be in bed, but I am up. I should be sleeping, but I am not.

I have been hearing a lot about a Irn Bru ad on the TV. But I have yet to actually see it on the telly, so I went and had a jeffries at the site of all things tubular:

Pretty funny…

But even funnier are some of the outtakes that are up there. Particularly this one: