I may have accidentally become a committee member in a group called ‘robogals’. It’s a LEGO Mindstorms group to enourage the teaching of robotics to schoolgirls. It turns out they were looking for someone who could do web-design, enjoyed LEGO, and could take pretty pictures, and I just happened to be in the room when they were discussing it. It does sound fun, but I would have probably preffered a regular robotics group.

*Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.*
(HT: Alastair)

1. Despite being really into baking myself, my favourite cake is still my mum’s rendition of Irish Tea Brack
2. I find programming as entertaining as a good book
3. When I was 4, my parents went on holiday with my brother. They flew to Spain. I prayed their plane wouldn’t crash into a mountain
4. I have never paid for a haircut
5. My great-grandfather was the inventor of the Aldis Lamp.
6. My first memory is of a black pig in a farm near Worcester
7. I miss talking to people who study humanities
8. When I was 8, I was only allowed 20 minutes a day playing computer games. This law was not rigorously enforced however, and by 10 I could remember the complete walkthroughs for every LucasArts adventure game.
9. I climbed Crib Goch in the snow with no grip on my shoes.
10. I once knocked over most of the shelves in my school library
11. If I can’t solve a maths problem, I feel physical discomfort.
12. When I was a wee lad, I used to draw fighter planes, tanks and military bases for a world domination force simply dubbed ‘Boom’. I used to draw pictures for it every day when I arrived back from school. When I was about 10 or 11, I destroyed most of them, but I remember Ally salvaging some. Perhaps they are still somewhere in his room
13. I wrote a play about Paris, Helen and the seige of Troy when I was 10. Again, all evidence destroyed, although I do have witnesses
14. I was Malvolio in a High School play. I still use the yellow stockings to keep my feet warm at night
15. Since moving to London, I have discovered how enjoyable it is to browse second-hand bookshops.
16. I can see exactly why my dad is a train-spotter, and expect I would be one too if I was his age.
17. I find Cricket more entertaining than football, although that really isn’t saying much.
18. I was Dopey in a primary school rendition of Snow White.
19. My first primary school teachers all took me for hearing tests due to my extreme selective hearing.
20. My Skype name is peterandthegoose and I have a SkypePhone. Add me!
21. When I first moved to Stoke, I was in the church’s youth group where my dad was a Pastor. Tom Morrow (who ran it with his wife, Chris) was saying that Nazareth was a terrible place to come from, and asked where we would hate to come from. I said ‘Stoke’. As the new Pastor’s kid, I think that was a bit of a surprise to them.
22. I once had a broken arm (greenstick fracture) for more than a month without a cast. During this time, I fell over skateboarding, climbed a waterfall and played ball games. It corrected itself, and I am thankful I didn’t have the weak, sweaty arm that others have had to deal with for the same ailment.
23. At five years old, I was in one of the famous palaces of Europe (cannot be more specific, it was Eurocamp, and I was five). We went into the main hall. I remember thinking the decorations were too extravagant and garish, and stated loudly that it was disgusting and I would have hated to live there.
24. At that time, I could remember all the JCB model numbers.
25. Alastair sponsored my silence for two or three days during my childhood

There musn’t be more than 5 readers of this blog, and if you have read this far, you are tagged! Link back to this post, thanks.

The only person I would like to tag specifically is Jack Davis, because he studies Philosophy and doesn’t have a blog for his musings. Surely that’s not right.

This site now has fully functional archive pages, so if you enjoy what you read here, you can read lots more. This was always something I was too lazy to sort out. You may have seen at the bottom for quite a while there were archives that looked sort of pretty, but messed up the page occasionally and were buggy. This time I went for the simple solution. I hope they’re helpful.

Also, for those of you who were able to access the archives in the past, you may have noticed that I was too lazy to style them properly, now I have done a little bit of work on them and they look fine.

There’s nothing particularly new here, but if you want a taste of quality student cuisine, you’re certainly in the right place.

Toasties

• Two slices of bread
• Cheese
• Oregano
• Tomato Puree
• Margerine

Well! There’s the ingredients, I am sure you can work out the rest.

I have decided to try out a little experiment in economy living. Simply put, I decided to see how cheaply you can buy things from supermarkets before contracting a tropical disease. My experiment today was centred around Sainsbury’s basics shower gel. This is probably the most ominous looking product in Sainsburys, and has an even less inviting subtitle than most of the basics line:

Shower Gel

Cleans, no added promises

So you can picture it, this stuff is identical in shade to Sainsbury’s basics washing up liquid, in fact, it is also identical in scent and consistency. I have a severe suspicion it may actually be the same product, but I shall find out. But most of all, however you look at it, 9p for this product represents astonishing value for money.
Just for comparison, and for a treat, I bought the 44p Sainsbury’s shower gel: marine blue. Perhaps the biggest difference between these two fine shower gel specimens is the warning on the back about keeping it out of your eyes. On the basics line, it is no longer entitled ‘warning’, but ’safety’, and is outlined in red with a big red exclaimation mark next to it.

Not looking good on the progress test front at the moment I’m afraid. A D in Thermofluids, and an E in Maths. The E was about average for the class unfortunately.

After that last post, you may be wondering why I was in Euston in the first place. I met up with Jonathan and Monika, we went to O’Leary’s and had some Irish stew and an amazing fudge cake. I had my first taste of Guinness and thoroughly approved.

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Since being in London, I have taken up a new hobby. This has been particularly dictated by how naturally adept I have shown myself to be in this field. The hobby is simply getting lost in London. At first, this was something that worried me. I used to bring my A to Z everywhere, and worry about the fact that some streets were ’squares’, which means in practical terms that you could be pointing in just about any direction and there was really no way of knowing. However, now I have become more accepting of the problems of walking long distances through London without a clue of the surrounding streets. And once you’re used to being lost, simply ‘finding’ things is exciting. You often stumble across something and think, “Oh! So that’s where ____ is.” Of course, the problem is you have no idea where ‘that’ is in any meaningful terms, and that’s part of the fun. London has many aids for the habitual meanderer, including postal codes on each street sign. It took me a little while to realise that W was the West end, WC is west central, and SW is south west, wherein I live. W2 is more west than W1, SW7 is more south west than SW1, and so on.

A technique I have found helpful is to stay out of places when the postcode changes from W to WC, or SW to W, as such happenings are sure signs that you are genuinely lost, and not just having a fun time discovering London.

This method, although professional sounding, does have its shortcomings. W1 must cover about ¾ of the globe, meaning that if you are lost there without a compass, you could be walking in great big loops and you’d never know, until you saw a sign to where you started indicating that is only ¼ mile away in the direction you were walking.

This is what happened to me last night more than once. I have provided a map with some annotations of places I remember seeing. You will notice that the latter part of the map is less annotated, and it has to be said that the attractions of sightseeing wear off when it is lashing down with rain, you have no umbrella, and you are still lost after walking for over 2½ hours.

Hello all,
I’ve been back at Imperial for a week now, and I thought it was about time I gave you an update.
The most exciting thing to greet me on my return to Imperial College was a genuine Ferrari F1 car. Fortunately for you, my wonderful readers, I have pictures!

The Ferrari has been lent to Imperial college for a short time, although I forget the reason why. I recall it being something to do with the Mechanical Engineering department collaborating with Ferrari on something. I said it was a genuine F1 car, but that was a little misleading. It is actually a show model with no engine. I am no F1 expert, but it looks as though it is the Ferrari F2003-GA, but painted in 2009 livery. If you have time, take a look at Ferrari’s new 2009 F1 car.
On Thursday we had quite a fun lab in which we tested the efficiency of two different engines, a diesel and a petrol engine of 1.5 and 1.3 litres respectively. It was definitely one of the louder labs we have done.
But it’s not all fun and games here at Imperial. In fact, practically none of it is fun and games, and despite the light smattering of exciting new things like fiddling with Engines and learning MATLAB, there were also a series of rather horrendous progress tests. I’m not sure I’ve failed any of them, but I’m certain I haven’t performed spectacularly in any of them. I am most optimistic about Mechatronics. Before the test, I didn’t understand any of the questions, and things gradually started to dawn on me through the course of the test, although I forgot the equation to find the V_RMS of an AC wave.
Hope you’re having fun and I’d love to hear from you all,
Peter

Bogle or boggle is the scottish version of the word ‘Boggart’. It is also the word from which ‘Bogeyman’ is derived. This is the original meaning of the word ‘Boggle’.
Wikipedia also informs me that Bogles were famous for many things, including putting their cold hands on peoples’ faces at night. Rather more humourously, they were also responsible for people crashing on sharp bends, pulling on peoples’ ears, turning milk sour and making dogs lame. However, their chief end was torturing young children who disobeyed their parents.

The bogle is also a creature that loves to vex humans until they go insane. They may cause a human to hear a voice around a corner, only to find that nothing is there, and then repeat the same antics around another corner. This will go on and on until the human decides to give up in utter frustration. Another way they might annoy humans is to enter a person’s house and create a mess, make weird noises, or do other small things that for some reason, always happens at very unopportune times.

Wikipedia
Bogles can be found nowadays populating printers, networks and student fridges (particularly those of the milk-souring persuasion). A complementary Bogle arrives with copies of Settlers of Catan, in order to make sure the 10 is never rolled. However, their favourite activity in modern times is making people drop the telephone just as you’re answering their call. They do that quite a lot.