TGRO's Web Log
What in space is The Great Radar Oven Doing?

MORE SNOW!!! Much less than last time though; school was not cancelled. I have not been very active on Neocities recently, but I have still been a busy bee updating this site. I have gotten into a bad habit of editing this site but not uploading it. A major mistake.

I have added pages for Emacs Lisp, Console Audio, GNU/Linux Vs GNU+Linux.

Recently, (as noted by Elementz, find their chemistry-oriented site here) I surpassed 1000 views of this site. Not a large amount by any means, but a milestone nevertheless.

SNOW!!! Indeed, here in the UK we have what we call a blizzard and what others call a light smattering. Joking aside, it is a reasonably large amount of snow. I am really pleased; I thought that I would not see snow here again until I was too old to really enjoy it!

This cold spell is interesting to me; we have cold north-easterly Siberian wind (fondly named 'the Beast from the East') combined with a wintry Storm Emma from the south-west that are causing the lowest temperatures for 27 years.

Unfortunately, cold weather has its risks. Icy roads have caused crashes; falling into freezing water, hypothermia; some (especially the old and very young) have died from simply being out too long in minus 10-15°C weather. Condolences to all.

That being said, I am off to make the most of school cancellation and freeze my hands off in the snow!

Been a while. Shall we say that mock exams didn't go quite to plan (at least in maths). My fault; I am in bad habits that I need to turn around; ergo, less TGRO time! (sarcasm). Let's move on.

In other news I have been using BBCode for small things. Don't get me wrong; It won't bump off Emacs' Org-mode, but for some things, I don't need thousands of options. BBCode's syntax is learn-able in 5 minutes at a stretch, less if you have ever seen HTML. Of course, it doesn't hurt that there is a good Emacs mode, too.

In light explanation, the formatting I use on say, an essay, is visual (title = big text at start). I don't need the Org-mode #+TITLE associated functions, when BBCode [size] tags do the same, and I write a reasonable amount of essays. Furthermore, tag systems are self-explanatory (i.e. "what does <code> indicate?"); HTML just uses tags for everything: No thank you. BBCode assumes that if something is not tagged, it is just normal text. Plus, as much as I like the HTML+CSS+JS ecosystem, there is something to say for such a basic language.

Better news! I threw out a request for people to program their solutions to this puzzle and, lo and behold, I got entries from the maintainer of a top neocities site, Strata's Place!

I was indeed excited. The entries are for C99 and Python 3, shall we say, slightly more common languages than my (most likely badly written) Erlang offering. The code is also on their site as well: C99, Python 3.

Remind me to take a look at the Strata's Place CSS file sometime…

Great news! I got a conditional offer from Kent. This means that I have an offer from every university I have applied for (I am surprised too!). Kent is definitely my top choice at the moment, though.

To celebrate, I have added a puzzle to the site. Go and give it a try!

MOCKS EXAMS ARE OVER! I will have a little more time to to mess about with this mess of a website. Hopefully I will get around to it and won't disappoint. Should I add some pictures? probably.

The blog is born!

This will not be daily (or even regular for that matter), don't get your hopes up. Alternatively, you might be overjoyed. The main reason is that I am addressing the large amount of text on the home page, and am effectively moving the old News peices here.

To my dismay, it has been a week since I updated this site. Sorry. I gave up trying to learn Colemak and have instead decided on Dvorak, the reason being that Colemak's similarity to QWERTY key: My muscle memory would immediately be triggered and I would type a frustratingly incorrect key. I have also heard that Dvorak can be better for programming (indeed, there is in fact 'programmer Dvorak').

In other news: I HAD A UNIVERSITY INTERVIEW! Namely at Kent University for computer science with a year in industry. I think it went a bit 'meh' due to nerves, but we will see. I am currently checking whether I can talk about a certain aspect of the interview on here that you might find interesting. Namely a puzzle that will give me an excuse to put a bit of programming on here. I'm looking forward to it, I think I may be the only one. Oh well.

I am learning to use the Colemak keyboard layout. Mostly I am doing this using the same program that I used to learn QWERTY touchtyping: GNU typist, which has an option for learning Colemak. It is taking a long while to adjust to the different key locations but so far it has been less difficult than I expected. My typing speed is detrimental at the moment but it is slowly improving with practice.