T minus 1 day and counting

[compilerbitch]

Well, this is it. I have one day of freedom, then I'm trundling off to Cambridge to start my PhD.

It feels strange. I should probably be panicking more, or feeling worse about leaving my friends and partner behind in Croydon. All I seem to currently be able to do is worry about whether I've packed everything! Have I packed the firewire cables for the external 250 gig drive I use on my laptop? Will I have enough network cables? Will the college actually let me plug everything in (see below)? Et cetera, and so on, ad nauseam. I wish it was over, and don't, all at once. I am already missing the people here, but I'm sure it will get a lot worse once I'm in Cam. Or better, because I'll be meeting lots of new people and socialising on a bigger scale. Eeek. The unknown. Won't be unknown for long, thankfully.

Plugging everything in

I am taking a relatively large amount of equipment with me. Being a geek and all, this is as necessary as it would be for most people to remember to take clothes, or (more accurately) a supply of some essential medicinal drug, without which shaking horrible withdrawal symptoms and ultimately death would ensue. Eddies, seemingly, limits you to one mains socket and one 4-way adapter. This is not going to work. I'm going to take enough 4-ways to do the job. They can moan at me later. My PC will need 6 on its own (monitor, external CD burner, system box, USB hub, Ethernet hub, scanner), laptop another 2 (charger, firewire drive), hi fi 2 (amp, CD player). Add a few more for things like mobile phone charger, DECT base station, a desk lamp or two, and we're talking lots of sockets... If I have enough room to take some audio equipment too, that list will nearly double. The fact that all of this equipment uses very small amounts of current (we're not remotely even in toaster territory here) will no doubt be lost on the college authorities.

Packing

Must make a packing list, especially concerning anything that I might need to extract from my housemates (e.g. 2 expensive, industrial grade staplers, a paper guillotine, my DECT phone, etc.).

Equipment not showing up

I bought a laser printer for the paltry sum of 24 pounds from someone on eBay about 3 weeks ago. It still hasn't turned up, although they claim they shipped it over a week ago. I'm not well pleased. I'm also waiting for an extra gigabyte of RAM and an extra 250GB hard drive to show. Which won't before I leave. Not good. Grrr.

Equipment that has arrived

I splashed out on a Dell 20 inch TFT monitor for the machine in my college room. It replaces a (huge) Iiyama 21" CRT monitor, which I could only run at 1280x1024 because I can't handle looking at a monitor using 60Hz refresh for long without getting migraines. The Dell does 1600x1200, is incredibly bright, ridiculously sharp, and utterly gorgeous. Coupled with the antialiased text rendering used by KDE 3, the result is quite astonishing. I like being able to get lots on my screen at once (I'm typing this on my laptop, which also has a 1600x1200 display), so that particular resolution is very necessary for me or I start getting irritated that I can't see enough at once.

x2x

I recently discovered (thanks for the pointer, Jim!) a really neat utility that ships with the X-Window system, x2x. If you have an extra machine on your desk that runs X, you can use x2x to allow a single mouse and keyboard to be used across both displays. In effect, you can move your mouse pointer off the edge of one monitor and onto the other, even though it may now be pointing at a completely different machine. It works extremely well. I can therefore use my laptop as a second display for my college room desktop machine (by logging on to my main machine via xdmcp under the cygwin port of XFree86). It will be extremely cool, for example, when hacking LaTeX to be able to keep kdvi open on the page I'm working on, on the laptop display, and have multiple text editor windows open on the main display, then have the kdvi rendering update itself automatically as soon as I've run LaTeX. I rather like the kate editor for this, by the way. If you haven't tried it yet, and have KDE installed, give it a go. It doesn't have the (over)sophistication of emacs or even vi, but the text gets rendered with antialiasing, it's really easy to use, zero learning curve, and you can open a terminal pane within the main window. I like it.

Summing up...

1 day to go. Feeling OK, not too bad really. Was expecting worse!

Anyway, I must get on with some last minute programming work, then final packing and a quick trip into central London to pick up my second TouchStream keyboard (which is currently in Vauxhall -- I wish I hadn't left it there!).

Comments

[snow-leopard.livejournal.com]

Regarding the item sent on e-bay - get them to provide prrof that they have shipped it (which teh should have - I always get proof of posting) and chase it with the company they sent it via. If they can't/refuse to do either of these things then complain to e-bay and go through their "claiming money back" procedure.
Usually the threat of this will be enough to get you the item.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, I am rather hoping I don't need to do that. It took quite a bit of doing to get a contact phone number for them -- their contact details didn't come up, other than a dead email address that bounced. My housemate found another current auction of theirs that did happen to include a phone number, however.

I called yesterday. The blokey who answered said he was sure it had been sent a while ago, and later emailed me to say that it was sent on the 9th. He didn't include proof of posting or consignment information, however.

I'll keep prodding...

[snow-leopard.livejournal.com]

As I said, if you threaten to report lack of item to e-bay you will probably find item turning up rather quickly!!! Also leave BAD feedback even if you get the item to warn others.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I agree. They are toast-to-be. ;-)

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

One mains socket? That's just silly. Every college room I've ever had has had at least four and computer ownership has gone up dramatically since I started at university.
If it's true, I imagine that everyone in the entire college ignores the restriction on adapters.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I suspect that it's one of those college rules. You know, the ones inteded to make it easy to drop heavy objects from a great height on someone who has a dozen toasters plugged into a teeter-tottering stack of double adapters culminating in a mains plug with a bolt-for-a-fuse.

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

Ah, the blu-tak rule :)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Yesss... (says someone who just bought a packet of white-tack, postcards for the sticking up of)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Oooh, my room has a big pin board. Yaay!

It doesn't have picture rails, unfortunately, so not much art is going to be coming with me sadly.

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

Maplin order code L61AG is a device that will tell you the current and power factor of anything that you can plug into a mains socket. (It also tells you the supply voltage and frequency, and can work out the wattage and accumulate the number of kilowatt-hours that have been used.) You could use this device to demonstrate that you are not exceeding the rating of the supply or any of your cables.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Well cool... I think I might well pick one of those up in that Maplin shop in Cam next week.

Excellent idea... ;-)

[fluffymark]

8 or 10 way adaptors are your friends!

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Indeed. If push comes to shove, everything can go into a 19" rack case with one lead visibly coming out of the back! ;-)

[fluffymark]

True - and I think you're unlucky in getting so few power sockets. I associate Cambrdige with a profusion of power sockets (i'm sure I had at least 8 double sockets in my final year room) and London with very very few sockets. My current room being a case in point - *zero* sockets, as it used to be the house bathroom. I have to run an 8 way adaptor from the *single* socket at the top of the stairs, and thats no way enough. Grrr. But I'm moving soon, so yaaaaaaay! :)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

It's possible I'll have more sockets, but I won't know until I get there. They only guarantee one, according to the bumph, but there's some chance I'll have more. My room is supposedly one of the bigger ones in the college (it's on the most expensive of the four price bands, so I certainly hope so!). I think it's supposed to be about 15 square metres -- I'm not sure what that works out as. I'm taking quite a lot of books, so I'm kind-of hoping for a reasonable amount of shelf space. I was a bit shocked at how little shelf space there was in my office, mind you -- probably about five linear feet between two people.

We shall see... ;-)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I'm there. The bumph I read was over pessimistic. There are at least 8 wall sockets, so I just plan on using one 4 way in each. I doubt anyone would be likely to complain.

[sjmurdoch.livejournal.com]

On the subject of electrical safety, you will probably be invited to go to a safety course run by the University. While it is fairly unlikely you will be playing with excessively dangerous stuff while you are here (unless you visit the Security Group hardware lab, with the lasers and other fun bits of kit), I thought the courses were fun, so might be worthwhile going to.

The electrical safety one was good, plenty of pictures of what happens when people daisy-chain 4-ways without doing the maths, and also a demonstration where the lecturer gives himself (low voltage) electric shocks at various frequencies to illustrate the nerve response. The mechanical safety course was also interesting, a bit gruesome at times, but still a memorable illustration of why not to wear ties while working over a lathe.

Also this reminded me of a friends room, where he has a kettle, space heater and toaster all running off the same multi-block, he's still alive and hasn't been thrown out of college yet, so you should be fine :-)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Points taken on the safety course front. There aren't really any relevant courses on the second day unless I stretch the definition of what I do somewhat. I quite fancy doing the more interesting sounding courses, even though I have little excuse for doing so. :-)

[hmw26.livejournal.com]

Although I'm actually going to be in Philadelphia for the next academic year, I will be in Cambridge from 27th Sept. until 6th October. Would you like to meet up while I'm around?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, meeting up would be great. I should be around for most of the time you're in Cam.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I'm now in cam. Drop me an email to sort out the details. :)

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

Noooooo! you are in cam, too. Noooooo!

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Yes. We've convened a meeting of the PWACAB (People Who Are Conspiring Against Bat), to be held in Cam at the first available secret opportunity.

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

but if you all leave to go to cam, id notice!!
i could pretend to be someone else and join in.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Damn... must watch out for strange bloke with dodgy accent, potentially fake handlebar moustache and a penchant for chocolate ice cream...