I gave hosted publishing a try over at Wordpress.com, and after checking it out and trying to work with it, I’ve decided it isn’t meant to be. Something about not being able to choose my software, my own design, my own customisation, my own code if I so chose… it just troubles me.

Maybe I’m just spoilt, having good hosts, and free reign of the server.

A month ago I got a new Nokia 6630 3G mobile phone in place of my dreadfully obsolete and damaged Motorola C330. I just sold it today, and am placing my order for an iPAQ 6365. Ah sweet touch screen, here I come.

What have I been up to? I don’t really know myself. I’ve been working a little, but mostly I’ve just been sick. Ahh yes sick. No, no. Not the flu. Lets just say that I’m no quite sure what it is, except that it has a lot to do with chronic migraine, nerves and other fun neurological stuff. All that painfully fun stuff.

On a more positive note, I’ve been watching Lost recently, and am almost done with the first season. I love the way the characters all have such varied pasts. It is a little sad though to watch as they kill them off one by one.

With that, I think I will leave you now for another month or two.

“Open up Internet Explorer, go to Tools->Internet Options and clear all cookies, downloaded programme files and the history please. Alright. Now, please disconnect from the internet, turn off your modem for 15 minutes, and reconnect. If you still experience problems, call us back.”

“But… I’m on DSL/512. I shouldn’t be getting these low speeds no matter what.”

“Yes sir. Please turn your modem off for 15 minutes and call us back. Now, is there anything else I can help you with?”

What was my original complaint? I called up and explained that for the past month I’ve been having frequent disconnections, and reduced bandwidth to the point where dialup looks good. I’ve run their craptacular tests for bandwidth, and scored a consistent 142 kbit/s. I ran it three times as the page requested, took the average, and … what do they do? Tell me to delete my cookies.

As part of our course-work, our lecturer is making us do some presentations, whereby the students are cheap slave-labour. Each of us gets a portion of the book to lecture on.

Today, I had the pleasure of lecturing my Java Application Programming class on Chapter 3: Objects, Arrays and Strings. Apart from that being an oddly selected group of topics for once chapter, it seemed like a walk in the park.

Yeah, right.

I prepared a few slides — PowerPoint — and went to class. We have a rather casual setting, with one of the smaller labs, and about 10 students in the class (of which only 9 showed up today). About 9 o’clock I walk in and start my presentation. I finish up on Objects, and ask if there are any questions. The silence was scary. I started to get a sinking feeling as I typed out a couple of simple object questions for them. Fourty minutes later, we finished simple objects in Java. How simple? Here’s a rought estimate of what I asked of them:

Create a simple class to represent a person. Include name and age at least.

Next, write a running programme, and create a new object using the class declared earlier. Assign values to the data fields within it and print them to screen.

Out of the 10, 3 were able to complete this competently. Had the tenth student been there, 4 would’ve completed the excercise.

Next we went on to arrays. Same story. Single dimensional arrays were difficult enough that the remaining hour was spent demonstrating how they were declared and used.

*Sigh* I admit that not everyone out there has programming talent, ability, or whatever, I’d expect people who supposedly passed C programming to be able to create an array and populate it. At the very least, a single dimensional array. Nothing fancy, an int array perhaps.

Tomorrow, I have to present on Strings. I can feel it now. They’re going to confuse character arrays from C with strings in Java.

I was recently prescribed a painkiller called Imigran. Here’s an excerpt of the side-effects listed on the instruction leaflet:

Pain, sensations of tingling, heat, heaviness, pressure or tightness. Flushing, dizziness, feelings of weakness. Fatigue and drowsiness.

There you have it folks — a painkiller that’s also a paincauser!

I decided that GlaxoSmithKline was just covering its bases by including all that, and there would be minimal side effects, but I was wrong. I took it, and experienced almost all of the above list, and never touched the package again.