a joke from ed:

Q: What kind of music do parrots play?
A: Macore!

I can't tell it to anyone else because they'll hit me

-Ed.

that's ok ed. the truth's out now.

emergency link - garden's website is online! fantastic.

today made me realise how well my exams have been going. this morning's exam was.. fine. i can't remember it now. woke up at both 3 and 6 o'clock in the morning, after having not slept very well, perhaps chips and two-night-old vindaloo was to blame (man alive, blogging backwards? what am i, bloody momento?)i had an innocent smoothie before (the shop's last one), as has become the norm. non-symbolic artificial intelligence... i wrote about continuous time recurrent neural networks and artificial neural nets/genetic algorithms. that took so much effort to remember! then james carey and i went for lunch at, ultimately, afras, where all the pretty people who don't do any work hang out (i.e. arts students) noel was working at the cafe. they'd made some macaroni cheese, which sold out in ten minutes. no-one has had macaroni cheese for ages! and it was fucking tasty, they'd got the crispy stuff on top just right, and it was good and mustardy. exam number two - symbolic artificial intellgence (ah, did you see what they did there...). fifteen minutes reading before; james got in a minute late. we both sat there for 25 minutes, no-one typed a word. the whole thing was a complete joke. bumped into josh on the way out, on his way up to complain about it, so sat with three other people in david young's office about what we could do and what the exam board could do... just got this email:

Hi, we're a group of SAI students who feel several of the questions in
today's exam were ambiguous and that what was required was generally
very unclear.
We feel that the paper was more than merely hard - the lack of clarity
made it difficult or impossible to provide a sensible answer.

There are channels through which we can complain. If you agree with the
above conclusions, please send an email to
Student Support at scitechssc@sussex.ac.uk
Paul Lister (head of informatics) P.F.Lister@sussex.ac.uk
Kerith Harris (Student Advisor) K.Harris@sussex.ac.uk

with the subject "Symbolic AI exam complaint".

We have also put in writing some of the things we consider to be wrong
with the paper, and this will be available at the next few exams to sign
if you wish.
However, sending an email is likely to give your voice more weight,
particularly if you describe what you personally feel was wrong with
paper.


Sam F, Matthew G and Simon H, on behalf of several students involved in
formulating these complaints

so i know it wasn't just me going wrong, and the meagre crud i wrote for the exam was normal.

we travel further back through the weekend.
last night i finished off the beer, had a david gower and went to bed. i had been trying to revise, but was distracted by robin taking her tea set away. that was very sad. bought some CDs off alex - salad (believe me), smashing pumpkins (no, i never owned melon cholly! don't hate me!), super furrys, and the orb. that was the day.
on the previous day, that would be saturday, i got a call from rachel to say that susie weston (rachel's mum) was down, and would i like to come for some saturday brighton lunch? i thought short and insulated loft and said yes. infinity foods - mmmm. bumbed into laurenec (who prefers to be called laurence) who was with corey and corey's fella, and i tell you what, it was lovely to finally meet him, and his milKill t-shirt. blimey. that night was anna's house's barbecue. beer of the night - marston's firestoker. tastes like creme broulay! jess and i walked back, and sang the entire weezer album (up until the bit where her copy got taped over by reef's "place your hands", which i had forgotten and mis-interpreted as a banging techno tune {now there's an idea} - PUT YOUR HANDS UP!!PUT YOUR HANDS UP!!) that got us back double time. bumped into fletcher three times this week, to the point where i now just expect to see him everywhere. i'm going to do my barry bladder impression for you again now.

back. but off home.

what else happened...
less than a week till my shell and tim get married.
less than a month till fred gets married.
exactly a month today (allegedly) my flight leaves for far off lands - i paid for the flights now.
well that's lovely. see you later!
gxx