I'm still here

That's right, I'm still cooped up in the corner of a computer room on the campus of the University of Warwick, where I probably shouldn't be anymore, with only a high-speed internet connection for warmth and the sounds of RaW1251AMBritain'sBestStudentRadioStationEver! for company. The queries for Milkshake continue to pour in: over 500 fools have landed here in their quest for enlightenment, and some crafty blogger has ripped my explanation and posted it on their blog. Still, someone soon it should fall of my front page, and we should be back to the class of person who is looking for nude pictures of Barbara Bush (and if you do find any, please keep them to yourself).

Although it's nice to visit scenes from my past, I really would prefer it if those nice Americans could return my passport and let me travel. I don't have any biometrics in it, but thankfully it's valid until 2013, so in theory I can get into the US with it. Although, next time I go in I will have to surrender my image and my thumbs to some database with a horrific acronym ("Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism", anyone?). I do feel rather like academia's version of the bag lady, which is the scuffy looking bloke who carries a large quantity of impossible to read scribbled notes and old sandwiches in a tatty old plastic bag, and who haunts the public access computer rooms looking for some impressionable youth to show his proofs to. Can I interest you in my short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem via elementary number theory that also settles the Poincare Conjecture, Riemann Hypothesis and P versus NP in one shot?

I'm typing this from a Gnome desktop on Redhat, or something similar. This is a bit of a novelty, since I've only ever used XVM or something similar before. It's a bit disconcerting, since the whole thing is clearly set up to be familiar and intuitive to previous windows user like myself, and it achieves this by throwing up random and mostly spurious error messages while I am logging in (so-and-so has unexpectedly quit, and such like). Still, it's better than... not having any computer access, I suppose.

In other news... New law means that every UK news article containing the word "office" must also contain a reference to "real life David Brents"... iPods now as tedious in Britain as they are in the US... impossible to tell whether this article in the guardian is serious or not...as predicted (privately), the "roses are red" poem attributed to GWB was actually written by Laura...