So I just meditated for the first time in a while, it was very enjoyable. If you are not skeptical about meditation then read on..
.. in the middle of my meditation I had a huge flow of energy flow through me like water starting from my feet moving up to my head (this was laying meditation), it was such a reviving feeling, really nice. The entire thing lasted about 20 minutes, and just before the experience finished I could see a wolf face, slowly moving further and further away, it was a kind wolf face not an angry one and I felt like saying “I will be back soon, don’t worry, I will be back”.
If you haven’t done meditation before, I would really suggest it - no matter what your religion you should try it. Its a relaxing technique that will clear your mind, and allow you to focus on what you need to. I believe that if you have religious beliefs then your meditation may (and probably will) be based upon that religion; whether its christianity, judaism, islam, paganism, buddhism or whatever.
Grrr!
I needed to call Orange Customer Services… my phone keeps coming up with “No Service”, its happening every day - sometimes twice a day. It is in this state for at least an hour each time. When it is in this state nobody can call it, in fact its even worse - it comes up with “No such number”. Then when it reconnects to the network on my side, people can phone again. I have no idea whats going on there.
So I decided to call Orange on 150 earler, got through to the right bit… and had to hold - fair enough. So I waited, it went through the first 4 songs, then started to iterate (thats loop for those who don’t know)… and I waited on hold (not talking to anyone) for 3 hours! That does prove I have dedication, but it shows that they can’t answer in 3 hours, seriously if I was in a queue for 3 hours that would mean a hell of a lot of people were in front of me, and surely they wouldn’t have waited as long?!?!?!?!?!!!!??!!?!? So three hours later, and I haven’t got my problem sorted… I have emailed two of their departments, and am awaiting a reply… if I don’t get a reply by later/tomorrow then I will call again.
(for those who don’t know - Orange are a mobile/cell phone company in the UK, and they are supposed to be quite good)
So at the moment I am a bit annoyed… hopefully online radio will calm me down.
Daniel.
technorati tags:orange, mobilephone, cellphone, customerservice, callcentre, onhold
Well today is a sunny day in Oxford and I am reasonably happy.
Yesterday I went to London for a day out with Hazel, twas very fun. We walked around Camden and Covent Garden.
Watching the street entertainers at Covent Garden and realised they all tell the same jokes:
- “You would pay about £20 to see us as headlining acts on stage”
- “You’ll like this trick, here it goes..” takes off hat, puts on floor, rubs fingers
- “We normally get £2 from everyone, but if you decide to give us £50 then you can take us home”
Oh dear.
Wednesday I found a good online radio station called Radio Fantasy (it is on the Shoutcast network), it plays mostly anime music. Today I am listening to Circle Of Souls radio using iTunes, which is really good to listen to when its really bright and sunny.
technorati tags:sunnyday, oxford, london, coventgarden, camden, radio
I think I have my PhD topic… right now to construct a proposal by March 2007.
https://www.apple.com/xserve/
Right so the new Intel based Xserves are “5x faster than the Xserve G5″. Doesn’t make sense, the G5 based Xserve had 2 single core G5 processors. The new Xserves have 4 dual-core 64-bit Intel Xeons in… am I seeing something a bit weird here, wouldn’t that mean that the G5s are actually more powerful!!!!!
- 2 single core G5 (2.3Ghz) - 1x faster
- 4 single core G5 (2.3Ghz) - 2x faster
- 4 dual core Xeons (3Ghz) - 5x faster
- 4 dual core PPC based processors (3GHz) (e.g. The Cell) - much more powerful
Apple should have gone for the Cell Processor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_microprocessor * https://www.research.ibm.com/cell/ ). They probably would have, but couldn’t because its being developed partly by Sony - who are the evil arch-enemies of Apple.
Just realised, you’ll hardly ever see blog entries by me about hardware.
Daniel.
technorati tags:apple, xserve, mac, macintel, xeon, cell
So I handed in the council tax certificate today to the letting agents I blogged about on Saturday… and everything is fine and dandy. I demanded a receipt saying that all the things had been handed in, and the guy rolled his eyes and got a ‘with-compliments’ slip and took ages to write that everything had been handed in, and he signed it and dated it - now they can’t say that I didn’t hand in! - this was the same guy that i dealt with on Saturday.
So I am now feeling really happy that that is sorted.
Once again, on the way home I went to go to the bank, but as it was lunchtime it was uber-busy and I couldn’t be bothered to wait.. I may go later.
Grr Letting Agents.
The letting agents for the house that we have just moved out of said to me when I handed in the keys that all we needed to hand in were the bills for the services, the guys words were “gas, electricity and water”. We needed to take these in to get our deposit back.
So the electricity and statement came yesterday saying that everything had been paid, and the water statement was a couple of weeks ago. So I decided to take them into the letting agents today, the guy (different guy to the one last time) said: “ok, so you are going to have to bring the council tax certifacate in before we can process this” - the guy had a bit of an attitude. So I thought ok, I can still have time to go back home and bring it back before the 1pm closing time (which Maria had found out)… except he said to me just before I left: “we close at 12:30″, that extra half an hour would have allowed me to get home find the certificate and then go back again and we would have got the deposit back earlier. The new home is about 10 to 15 minutes by bus from the letting agents, or about half an hour walking. Damnit!
I was feeling really happy before I went there too, feeling quite confident.. after annoyed, irratated and a bit sad. Maria had asked me to do one thing, and I mess it up again as usual 
(Maria is working today, which is why she couldn’t come with me)
Another thing happened on my way home (probably due to my naïveness), I went to go to barclays bank to put a cheque into my account… but it was shut. Banks are closed on Saturdays??? Grrr!
technorati tags:lettingagents, oxford, personal, rant
I have decided to transfer my blog from Blogger to WordPress (because of my recent work on WP_RDFa).
Hopefully this shouldn’t have an effect on any feeds (and I know there is a Livejournal thing which is collecting the old feed… it should have changed so could someone let me know if it has).
If you are getting this, then it’d be nice if you could comment (esp. if you read the feed). Heres the URL: https://www.vanirsystems.co.uk/danielsblog/
Enjoy my new blog layout 
(in the future I hope to get WP_RDFa working on it, which will be fun)
Daniel
[EDIT 19th August 2006] If you want to read this blog as a syndicated feed through livejournal, then you can by adding it to your friends list using this page: https://syndicated.livejournal.com/danielsblog (a couple of people do this)[/EDIT]
Just found out that I can use my laptop in the Open University Library and it still connects to their wireless. This is definitely something that Oxford Brookes University should do, they actually don’t have wireless networks yet (except in certain areas where they are ‘trialing it out’).
Anyways I am not feeling too well today, and I don’t have anyone to talk to really (Maria is working hard dealing with the prospective students and their A Levels being released today.. and my family are on holiday).
Work is going well, charging through my undergraduate project… if I build it well enough then it may become a public web system
I have decided to do a PhD after finishing at Brookes, but I am unsure at the moment what topic to do it on. I have three areas which I may like to do:
* Semantic Web - which is what I am covering at the moment in my undergrad project. I am starting to know quite a lot about it too.
* Fuzzy Logic - I found this really interesting, and would like to put it into practice.
* Ubiquitous Computing - this is a very new topic within the computing field, and it sounds quite exciting.
Maybe I should combine all three into some weird monster thing.
Anyways, I had better go.
Daniel.
