Fire! Fire! - Wednesday - 12th of October

I woke at 7 ish, I was going to do my washing this morning but I was too tired, it can wait. I was just about to get into the shower when 'RING RING RING' goes the fire alarm. It turns out it was a drill, I got some shorts, t-shirt and shoes on and got outside. I was the lucky one, most people had been asleep at the time, and that alarms are two arms lengths away from our beds, what a lovely way to wake up. My first lecture of the day was computing, I saw the lecturer about the Othello game (also called Reversi, mine is called Odummo) and found that we will only need to write an AI, they give us the basics of the game. This is undoubtedly good news as any AI I implement is very mathsy and can be written in any language very easily. During the lecture he asked for two volunteers, I of course volunteered for my side of the lecture room. We played pictionary and despite me declaring that I was from the 'best side' we lost. If anybody out there knows lots about machine learning or Othello strategy and wants to teach an eager pupil, just email me at sarkalian (squiggly A symbol) gmail.com and I'll be interested to improve my AI, at the end of the year, if they are good enough we'll be publishing them on sourceforge.net, and probably playing them off against each other (hence why I want mine to be the best ;) After the two lectures, before going to the library I travelled about half a mile to the 'nearest' Natwest building, there a very nice lady called Jane took the time to 1) Learn how to say my name, 2) Comment on it, 3) Spend several minutes trying to phone and then faxing another Natwest branch. I took out a lovely book on C programming and returned a Java one I wouldn't be using. I now have a book on CSS, Javascript, C and Graphical Algorithms. Combined they are 13cm high, I think I have read about 1 or 2 cm of that. When I got back to my room I found that my leaving the window open had allowed some rain in, luckily it was not too bad. I started work on the WoA results, it took a couple of hours. Myself and my floormates had dinner where Tom (head chef) told me a very intersting story about someone who thought that the meal tickets contained not 10, but ONE meal, she had thrown them all away. I hope that reception gave her some more... I had still not finished the WoA Results when the CU had their meeting. I of course went and had loads of fun, we played a game of Happy Families and also the Chocolate Eating game. I ran back to my room to get stuff several times, I also ended up with a quarter of a pack of pringles and half a bottle of Dr. Pepper (the two litre bottle) After the CU meeting Launa invited me to her floor for a drink of coffee, not being a coffee sort of person at 2200 I went instead for orange juice. Myself, her and some of her floor mates (I wont even try to spell their names, I will get it so wrong) played a game of Rummy, then, as they were not very outgoing, I introduced them to Cheat. I must say that I was very pleased at the speed that they picked it up and caught onto the many different ruses that sarcastic people can provide, I actually didn't win the game, I had a great time, maybe next time I should bring an Othello game along.... After that I finished the WoA results, wrote the blog, showered and went to bed. Lesson of the Day - Keeping a straight face is not the only way to win at cheat, the trick is to make them have no clue what you are planning