Where Am I?

Drove to see my grandmother this afternoon and on the way as I turned on to a slip road to a dual carriageway some VILLAGE IDIOT was reversing back up the slip road towards me.

I admit, for a split second I thought I was driving in Lagos, but I managed to refrain from blasting on my horn and shouting 'Oti a Were!' Which I hope means 'You've gone Insane.' A very common insult heard in Lagos. (Any Yorubas should feel free to correct me on spelling or meaning.)

In other news, I guess things are a little worrying in Lagos

BBC News | Africa | A tale of two Nigerian cities

Excellent article.

back in the UK

I've been back in the UK since saturday. I haven't really felt like I've had time to blog since I've been back.

I went to see star wars 3 on monday. It was pretty good! very surprising. Only irritating parts were r2d2 slapstick and ewan mccregor's ridiculous british accent! Alec Guinness was never that 'Dick Van Dyke.' Jar Jar Binks thankfully kept his stupid mouth shut despite a couple of appearances.

On the plane back they had the 'on demand' style entertainment system so I could choose what I wanted to watch. I watched the entire first series of 'spaced' that was very good, can't understand why I never watched it before. I watched the US version of the office and that was surprisingly entertaining. They certainly didn't hold back on tackling the topic of racism. Then started watching "Alexander". The flight ended only half way through but I have no intention of watching the end. It seemed a 3rd of the cast had Irish accents, a third had english accents and the remaining third were attempting some middle eastern dialect. And I found myself thinking that Alexanders sexuality seemed to be more important to the film makers than the plot. perhaps I should watch it again to find out if it is at all relevant to the end, but having asked around a lot of people say I shouldn't bother. There was however something Aristotle said at the beginning about homosexuality that I didn't quite catch so perhaps it's not what it seems.

Anyway, I also sent off CMA41 for my M150 course, that is the last part of the course. I just await my results in a week or so. I also got the results of TMA05 for M150. 85% which is very good. it means assuming I've passed CMA41 I am on for an overall score of over 81%. Not bad at all, but as I have mentioned before this course is not graded, it's pass or fail, and it doesn't count towards degree class assessment. None the less, I'm very happy with my first OU course.

I'm still working on the statistics for the final report. I should have them completed tomorrow. Then I can work on preparing the data to be handed over.

Statistics are flowing

Well I've managed to get 9 pages of statistics done today, I thikn I'll have to do another 2 sets of the stats I compiled today for different portions of data and there's a few other bits and pieces that need some stats analysis.

I managed to book a car through hertz. National were the lowest price but I couldn't book a one way trip for my dates so I gave up. Hertz was ok except I had to book 2 days as they were closed the day I want to take it back.

Mike Left for the Sunny shores of the UK this evening, Looking forward to getting home myself.

Still More Data to Tidy up

Well I finished finding existing Customers lost in our data, (there were about 6,800 I managed to match up - the rest appear to be redundant customers!?) and I started putting together the statistics when I hit a small hitch. Some duplication of property references in our data. I did anticipate that it may happen but hoped I'd find away to strip them out of the database automatically but because the duplicates aren't clones but different buildings at the same address, the key fields didn't correlate. So that means I have to remove the duplicates and since it is difficult to identify the 'real' customer from the dups they have to be viewed by a human. Luckily there are only 3901 of these issues and I've already written the tool I need to correct them and I'm already down to 1900 left to process. Then those stats should flow...

Debian 3.1 'Sarge' Has been released finally, that's good because when I upgraded the database server I installed a snapshot release of 'Sarge' from March 25th. Now I can get the finalised disk images and get security updates sometime in the next few days.

In other news, I got the latest episode of Hitch Hikers Quintessential Radio Series, I am thoroughly enjoying it, just not happy there's only 2 more episodes. There was a lot I had forgotten about the story, I thought Arthur would have been hunting 'Perfectly Normal Beasts' and making sandwhiches by now though. I did notice a few odd references to arthur making sandwhiches so I guess that is building up, Oh and Random has yet to come into the story.

I'm starting to think about my next OU course, Not sure what I'll do but I want to try and aim to be doing at least 90 points. so far the courses I'm on are only worth 60 points and I know I can do more work. I've found the courses so far to be extremely good. I'm enjoying it totally, and my marks seem to be reflecting that.

Almost there

Just taken a break from the last zone of Data I have to check, Shomolu. Only 688 left out of 24,376 that needed to be checked.

I submitted my TMA05 for M150 (Data, Computing and Information), This is the last assignment for this course, all that's left is the multiple choice exam I'll be completing when I get back to the UK. This assignment had a choice of two questions. I answered the programming question rather than the essay question, I was a little worried I'd have difficulty with the last few tasks of it but when I came to do it, I found it quite simple.

On this page I got the script working to display the bbc news headlines at the bottom of the left column. Looks quite nice. In the end I stuck to a pure php solution. That way search engines can also read it when spidering and I think that is better for the BBC.

Amazingly for at least 48 hours now we've had constant mains power from NEPA. This is almost unprecedented, but no doubt since I have just made this information public, the Secret Agents from NEPA ( 'National Electric Power Authority') will swoop in to correct this 'anomaly'.

Other meanings for NEPA include my favourite 'Nigerian Economic Paralysis Agency' or 'Never Expect Power, Always' The francophones say it means en Français 'Ne pas' which means 'Not' except it's funnier because it's pronounced the same.

97% on TMA02?

I just got my marked assignment back for TMA02 of T224 (Computers & Processors) my current level 2 course at OU, and I am quite shocked.

97%!

Now I've calmed down a little I am kicking myself for not getting 100%. Somehow I missed a question off. That question was worth 3 marks so I actually got 100% for all the questions I answered. Crazy.

Other than that, still working through Itire, and that's very boring...

I've also been playing around with JavaScript and XML feeds from the BBC but I haven't been able to get my own scripts working yet meanwhile a temporary and ugly hack is available from feedroll. The BBC recently issued a public license to display their news stories on any web page provided they are mentioned as the source, so I thought I'd try and work out how to do that. I'm nearly their with my script, I think it needs a bit of server side scripting rather than all JavaScript, so I'll be whipping out the PHP manual soon.

June is here

Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been in 'zombie' mode getting this data analysis done. 19,608 so far, and I have just finished Apapa (zone priority 12) in the last few minutes and started Itire (zone priority 14). We skipped Surulere due to a hiccup in the contract where totally innaccurate figures were used for Surulere. We have just enumerated Surulere as the first zone of phase 2, but none of that is in the system yet.

So... since Monday... Pretty much NOTHING has happened. Although I did forget to mention last time that Oscar 2 is 'pushing up the daisies'. He/She died around 27th or 28th of May with almost exactly the same symptoms as Oscar 1. Not sure what did it but I did think He was breathing like he had a cold and was pooing a lot. I'm sure I also heard him sneeze, if Parrots can sneeze, otherwise maybe he was making an attempt to immitate a sneeze.

What else,

Got first episode of Quintessential Phase of HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy Radio Series. Only half listened to it but planning on listening to it again before I sleep tonight. This series should be based on 'Mostly Harmless' the 5th and last book in the Hitch Hikers 'Trilogy'. If I remember this book was quite melancholy so I expect the series to have a sort of sombre, somehow saddening feel.

So I'm now counting down the days till my return, I tried to book a car from the airport but for some reason I couldn't get a one way hire for the dates I wanted with National Car hire so I might try Hertz or take pot-luck when I get to the airport.

Still another 4,600 of these things to analyse first though.

Speak Later.