Nicholas Taylor

Okay, as Edith pointed out that my last post rather hid the important part of it:

I am marrying chess on the fifth of August, at 11.30am in Churchill College chapel. Please come; this is an invitation for you, yes you.

There will be a reception after the wedding, also at Churchill College. This is by specific invitation only, and will mostly be full of family. It will, however, be less full of family than anticipated; if you would like to come, please let us know so we can invite you (if we've room).

After the reception (or, if you're keen and not going to the reception, directly after the wedding), we will be going to the Carlton. It would be lovely to see you there. Optimistically, we'll arrive at 3pm. More realistically, at 4pm. It would be handy if you could tell us whether you plan to come to this, so Terri has some idea of numbers.

I'm back from Maelstrom, and feeling guilty about not updating my journal in, um, ages. Maelstrom, for those not in the know, is a weekend-long LARP event. It's great, and everyone should come. Conquest of the New World, but the natives are variously human-sized, intelligent (if often stupid in the way only the intelligent can be) snakes and wasps, magic has only just started working, and various inanimate objects are coming to life - probably as a result of the whole magic thing.

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Also, you should all come to my wedding to the delightful chess. This is an invitation, for those who require an invitation; I've issued one before, but that was a while ago, it didn't have times, and people might have forgotten. It will be at Churchill College chapel, on the 5th of August, at 11.30 am. There will be photographic faff and drinks afterwards, followed by a reception, also at Churchill. The reception will be invitation only, as we have quite a lot of family. Some of them turn out not to be able to come, though, so our ability to invite friends is less strained than we thought. Would any of you like to come? We have a whole class divide in the families, and can offer only Churchill's catering and wine to dull the pain. After the reception, we'll be heading to the Carlton (probably arriving some time between 3pm and 4pm), where we'd be delighted to see any of you; I think Terri(?) would quite like some idea of how many people there'll be, so if you could let me know by some mechanism whether you intend to come to that bit that would be nice.

Prompted by senji's question Quite Some Time Ago, I've been trying to persuade LaTeX to do some of the calculations needed on an Ars Magica character sheet. The character sheet that resulted is here. It provides handy commands for listing your Technique + Form totals and showing one-line spell summaries. These last include the amount by which your casting total (before dice) exceeds or falls short of the spell level. They take no account of the Penetration skill (because the increase varies), or the casting total increase that comes with spell mastery. I think including an optional "mastery level" argument to \SpellLine would work, but at the time I decided against it. Thoughts for improvement or extension, anyone?

I have some results, despite the best effort of my triggers to foil me. As other people are now using the gun, I've been thinking about displaying these results. I have the output of a photodiode, recorded as a continuous trace over time. I also have some still images of the cell whose light output the photodiode was tracking. I think this is a fairly good way to display them:

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The images are positioned and scaled so that they cover the times for which the image was exposed. They should also all be 100 ns later, because I forgot about a delay. Thoughts on this approach?

I also intend, once I get back at the gun and have fixed my triggering issues, to take spectra of the light given off by the cell. These spectra will be taken over about 500 ns, and will bear a superficial resemblance to this (taken from the room lights, over rather more than 500 ns):

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I think there's too much information to be squeezed into the space filled by the still images. I don't really have much idea how I'm going to include them in the results. I can always fall back on including them separately, with a caption indicating the time, but I feel there ought to be a better way. Again, I ask for your thoughts.

As most of you are probably already aware, chess and I are getting married. We now have a date: the fifth of August 2006. The chapel will hold 120, apparently, so if you feel like showing up, please do. The reception venue is less capacious, and the reception costs money per person. Therefore we intend to invite only those who would otherwise be mortally offended (mostly our families), and those who will moderate our families effectively (or at least provide entertainment as they fail to do so). If you feel you belong in either group, please submit applications <G>.

Edit: We also intend to have a "surprise, we're married!" party in the evening, at wherever we're living.

I feel I should clarify my political opinions. Instead, I'm going to post about them to LiveJournal.

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Oh, yes, and people should go and vote for someone, or at least scrawl "Re-open nominations" on their ballot paper.

I'm now back on the spod again. In recognition of this, I'm posting LiveJournal while in bed with my girlfriend. Truly, the wonders of modern technology know no bounds.

In other abuses of complex systems, Tom's new monitor (very nice 20" Apple affair, a mere snip at less than my monthly stipend) is excellent for playing ZAngband on.

As I seem to be in free-association mode, the ZAngbandTk build system is utterly hideous. If an author is going to invent his own build system (for no other reason, I think, than "I really, really like Tcl"), is it too much to ask that they use it correctly?

And that's it. I'm going to bed.

Wait a minute...

I have given up teh Spod for Lent. This includes all LJ. The observant will notice that Sundays are not part of Lent. That's about it.

Christmas holiday was good. Food still yummy, London still full of far too many bags of water on legs. I now have a rather fun, if questionably useful, wind-up LED torch. There was a rather nice ToothyParty at the new year, which made up very nicely for our cunningly-hatched party plans falling through.

Vampire: Bloodlines was highly enjoyable, when it wasn't displaying its extreme bugginess. It seems much less stable on my machine than on anyone else's; either it really dislikes dual-CPU machines, or my computer's melting again. Also, it seems frightfully keen to press you into combat. Sometimes you can use your social skills to go around combat, but there never seems to be anything you *need* social skills for, while there are several inevitable combats. At least, that's my experience; I've played through as a quite un-necessarily hard Brujah with minimal social skills (and Celerity is *very pretty indeed*: they actually draw the bullets, and distortions in the air behind them, at the higher levels). I started again as a talky Malkavian, but this rapidly became a shotgun-wielding Malkavian with side orders of talky. Still: "I'm a keyring: feed me! Then you can't see me."

I've spent most of today playing with a build system for all these random documents I write. This has made me much happier, and possibly saved me up to thirty seconds on producing a document. I win at time management. I'd only studied "make" by peering at automatically-generated makefiles when things Weren't Working; I was pleased to find it was much less painful than this experience suggested. I stole senji's "stabilise" script from Vasily's character sheet; please shout if you'd rather I didn't (and I'll just steal the basic idea).

As ways of avoiding the plague of twisted dreams going around, though, it leaves something to be desired.

Dana D. Dlott is starting to grow on me. It's nice when someone points out what experiments you need to do to get parameters for their theory. If she only had better taste in references - one of the books doesn't actually exist, according to the British Library. Another says very little on the topic she's using it for, and nothing at all which supports what she seems to have drawn from it. We also have data which seem to show her theory doesn't actually hold for my work. Still, I feel I should understand it properly, which entails piles of notes. The UL is nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Also, Newton doesn't pick up "Concordances", and goes off and sulks if you feed it "Bible". So much for my cunning plan to do bible study for tomorrow's Cell there.

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