Chris Worfolk's Blog

I’m not sure how much the rest of the world is aware of what is going on but here in the UK (though the event didn’t actually take place in the UK but rather on the continent) a little girl named Madeline Mccann was abducted. They think. She has gone missing, presumed abducted after she was left alone her her two twin two year old siblings in a holiday apartment^[1].

While this is, of course, a tragic event, it’s not uncommon. It happens around 3 times per week in the UK^[2]. This specific case, however, has been taken up by the media and blown out of any kind of proportion. So far it hasn’t helped to find her.

It’s been interesting to watch the developments on Facebook. First, the “Find Madeline” groups appeared. Then the “if this group reaches 10.000 then I will release Madeleine McCann!!” group appeared. Now the “get Durka Pedro banned from Facebook!!!!” (the creator of the former group) has appeared.

While the motives for the joke group are unclear it makes a good point. All this media attention which has been a fantastic earner for the media has yet to turn up any results with regards to finding her. Second, the latter group, with debates about the former raises some interesting points.

The Find Madeline contain such topics as “What would you do if you got your hands on the person who kidnapped her?” These are people who don’t know her posting in this. What kind of person posts such comments as “rip out their windpipe and beat them to death with their tonsils”? Presumably, the same type of person that would abduct a small child. I know it’s a crazy idea but when we catch a child abductor, maybe we could, just possibly, make them stand trial and be brought to justice.

Events such as thing provide two things. First, they provide an opportunity for the media to make lots and lots of money off the story. Second, the provide an excuse for people to act like animals and ruining people’s lives with hysteria-driven witch trials. We should be ashamed of ourselves. Especially the supposed educated elite of the Facebook networks.

It’s been a long wait. A very long wait. But the wait is finally over as long as I don’t mind skipping this whole revision thing ;). Kieran alerted me to the release of phpBB RC1 which is a major step forward in the road to a stable phpBB 3 as they will now provide upgrade paths and support.

I’m looking forward to having a play around with it as I haven’t pulled a copy down since the very early days when was fairly hard to gauge just how much of it had been improved because most of it didn’t really work yet. The feature list seems fairly promising though. I guess this means I’m going to have to launch some new forums which means I’ll have to buy some more domains. It’s a hard life :D.

I normally avoid swearing on my blog as I like to maintain an open audience policy but I think this is probably worth it. It’s a voicemail I found when I came out of work last night.

Come to Wendy, I can’t believe you’re at work! You, Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! You suck! Come to Wendy now! Now! Now! You have no choice mu ha ha ha. I’m not drunk at (…). I’m drunk. I’m clearly very drunk. I love you really. I was going to say I hate you but I don’t, I love you to bits. Come to Wendy. Bye.

Last night I missed Wendy House for the first time ever :(. Well, since I started going. But since I first went in January of 2006 I had, had a perfect addendance record. 16 Wendy House’s in a row. More than anyone else in the circle by a long way. Not that the latter statistic doesn’t still hold as it does but my perfect attendence record is ruined.

It’s probably a good thing, I was getting slightly anal about it which probably wasn’t healthy. I couldn’t win either way really as it was ruin my Wendy attendance record or ruin my work attendance record, both which were perfect until last night. In the end though my responsabilities got the better of me.

As depressing as it is that I missed it, it’s even more depressing how little I care. The recent despondence has given me a lot of time to think and that’s never good. Ever.

As I’ve mention before, I’ve pretty much been unable to think about anything other than sound systems for the past few weeks. As such I’ve spent time re-searching them lots and trying to work out what I want if I suddenly find myself with like £3,000 and have to spend it on a sound system for some reason rather than using the money productively.

I say ultimate, it could be even more powerful and I’m sure nightclubs have more powerful systems. However I’m fairly sure that this is more powerful than some bars and indeed even clubs in Leeds have. Not bad for a bedroom system :D. Before I talk about my current design problems, I’ll let you have a look.

First off, the monitor is crap. It’s a floor monitor, a good one but for a DJ booth it’s probably not the best choice. Also, if the monitor is being used for a band, there is only one monitor for everyone rather than one monitor each.

Secondly, this presumes that if you connect two speakers to one amplifier channel, while it reduces the impedance and so increases the power, the power will be split between the speakers. If this is not the case the speakers could be overloaded. It is also the case with the sub-woofers that the amp is actually under powered.

Thirdly, the crossover which is before the sub-woofer amplifiers maybe unnessecarry given the other parts of the audio signal in the crossover are not being used. I don’t know if putting it in will actually have a negative effect as it means the sub-woofers will only be getting fed bass though most of them can do a larger range than that. If taken out the sub-woofers could be done in stereo rather than mono as they currently are.

Other concerns and general notes are there is no digital effects processor. I looked into putting one in but there didn’t really seem much point. Maybe there is, I’m open to the idea. Also there are no microphone pre-amplifiers which isn’t really needed given the mixing deck has mic pre-amps but it might boost quality a little. The equipment on the whole is a bit crap. A better DJ deck with XRL outputs would be good. There is no CD players and while the laptops can play CDs, DJs may prefer seperate CD players.

Finally, in terms of expansion, you could daisy chain several speaker stacks. If you got two distribution amplifiers and sent all the left channels to one and all the right channels to another you could have two identical speaker stacks acting in stereo with each other which would also take the power from 4.2kW to 8.4kW plus whatever the booth monitors output.

Bah.

Two down, four to go. SY23 went really well on Tuesday until we got to The Old Bar afterwards and I realised I had missed a question. 8 marks. Out of 60. That’s over 10% of the paper! I had left it to go back to it later and somehow missed it when I went through everything again.

Then this morning (yesterday morning by now) I had SY22 which went fairly well given everyone else seemed to think it was a bit of a strange paper so I’m not too worried about dropping a few marks here and there. That exam was one of the hard ones along with GI so it’s good to have it out of the way.

8 days since I blogged last. That has to be some kind of record. I had a post lined up last Friday but after clearing my head with a walk through town I lost the motivation to finish it.

For weeks now, all I’ve been able to think about is sound systems. It sounds like a joke but it’s driving me insane. I can’t think about anything else. As far as I can make out it’s just my subconscience trying to avoid the subject of revision and Rich assures me that such obsessions are quite normal, explaining how they painted their entire house to avoid revision.

Yesterday I managed to briefly take my mind of it by updating the spec for my server. They seemed to have stopped doing the case I was going to get and the new one is missing a drive bay (it only has 11!) so I had to pick a better one. It also occured to me I was missing a heatsink which wouldn’t have been the best situation. Today I actually managed to get my ass out of bed with a promise of a breakfast and got some revision done. Attempts to sustain such work seem to be once again failing though.

Spending a string of continuous nights in front of my computer screen has unfortunatly acted as some what of a eye opener though. I’ve realised that I am exactly where I was 5 years ago. Sat in the dark, in front of a computer screen, promising myself I wouldn’t still be here in 5 years.

Ain’t no sound in space. You know why? Because sound can’t travel through a vacuum!

So why is it I can hear Voyager travel past the camera in the opening credits!

Is it really that much of a mission to be scientifically accurate? Firefly managed it. I mean sure, that was a show so universally hated that the network went to the extreme of actually cancelling it mid-production but still.

I promised a while back that I would post pictures of the PA system I got for Rationalist Week. Now I’ve finally got my phone transfering Bluetooth files again here they are. The first two are obviously one of the speakers (with a 500ml coke bottle for size reference) and the other two are the mixing deck and amplifier.

Friday night was The Riley’s which are the unions awards for societies. Having burned it down to Bretton Hall and back to see Claire’s cool art displays we almost made it back on time. A-Soc was shortlisted for only one of the three awards we were initially nominated for (how could we not be shortlisted for best society?!?) and we ended up losing to Bretton Music Society (is anyone else thinking who?) so that was a bit of a bust. We were sooooo robbed.

Afterwards we headed into Fruity after picking up a John and proceeded to dance the night away in Stylus. It’s been ages since I’ve been to Fruity and so it was good to finally get another one in as it was a decent night in the end.

Having met Joanna who works at the chaplaincy during Rationalist Week I decided to take her up on her invite to come down to Skeptics Anonymous on Friday. It basically consists of having lunch and sitting round chatting about religiously biased philosophical topics. There was quite an interesting range of people there, indeed there were quite a few Christians. As seems to be the way with these events, the audience generally seems to be slightly eccentric postgrads rather than undergrads.

The conversation mostly followed the lines of going round the circle with each person saying where they stand. As points came up we would then drift off and discuss a point more in depth. All in all it was a slightly strange but never the less fairly interesting event and I think I will probably drop by again.