While chasing a Daemon, Fitz inadvertently finds god1.

On a point of business, dear reader, I recently found myself on the homepage of one Peter Gacs. This was, as it turns out, quite a timely visit. I had found myself, you see, at something of a spiritual impasse in my life. I mean, we've all heard the savage barbs in our time about mathematics research being a waste of time and having no relation to the "real" world.... and, well, I suppose we've learned to live with them². What was beginning to bother me, brothers and sisters, was this gnawing suspicion in the back of my mind that it also had no relation to the "not so real" world, or possibly "realer than real" world (depending on your point of view). The supernatural world. The spiritual world. I mean, sure, maths can teach you how to cheat at cards and pull chicks at parties .... but what has it got to say about witchcraft, magic and saving my immortal soul? I was beginning, com padre, with a deep and abiding sorrow to take the view that the answer to this question was "zilch". My interest was piqued, however, by the list of online publications of Mr Gacs which included the following titles: The Angel Wins, Clairvoyant Scheduling of Random Walks, The Clairvoyant Demon has a Hard Task³. Sadly, however, these just turned out to be cool titles. There were no concrete instructions to be found on how to actually summon such a clairvoyant demon. Via a tantalizing link on the same page, however, one learns that maths and physics can help you find god and rescue your immortal soul after all.

Yay team nerd!!!!!

¹Yeah, it occurs to me that this title makes the post sound a lot more interesting than it really is......

²Being mathematicians, we always come up with the wittiest of responses. "Your mum's pointless" I replied once. "Yeah, well ..... QUICK!!!! LOOK!!! BEHIND YOU!!!" is another favorite. Well, actually, Busty's wasn't bad.

³ Also on the list we find On playing "twenty questions" with a Liar. Another cool title, but I couldn't work it in to the current post angle, unfortunately.

Random Ramblings on Wellington Part 1 of at least 1.

My first note will be, rather boringly, on the weather. I was informed, before leaving for the place that I should make good my farewells to the sun due to the fact that, if Richard Dawkins was born here, there might currently be a bestselling book on New Zealand shelves titled The Sun Delusion. I was also informed that Wellington is a very windy place. Now, I will grant you I've only been here a brief time in, well, summer but while I can certainly attest to the latter fact, the former one is bullshit. I've seen plenty of sun and there is good reason to believe that, given the truth of the latter fact I will continue to do so. I have, in point of fact, seen rain clouds racing across the sky that I like to think were having the following conversation¹:

Cloud Leader: Looks like we're going in full throttle!

Cloud one: Target's coming up.....

Cloud Leader: STAY ON TARGET!!!

Cloud one: We're coming in too fast!!!!

Cloud Leader: STAY ON TARGET!!!

Cloud one: Rain's away!!!!

Cloud five: Did you hit?

Cloud Leader: Negative. Just. Scratched. The surface.

My second note shall be about coffee mugs. This relates to Victoria University in comparison to UQ. More specifically, the tea room. The tea room at Victoria is, unlike that of UQ, furnished with the following:

1. Coffee beans, free.²
2. A coffee ginder, functional.
3. Tea, milk, sugar, etc.., long list thereof.
4. A fridge, frosty.
5. A boiling water dispenser, hot.
   
6. Plungers and coffee pots, aplenty.
7. A stove, also hot - but only when you want it to be.

Given that all of this is the case, I can find it in my heart to forgive the following omission:

8. Mugs, in large supply.

Now, up until now I had taken a similar attitude towards coffee mugs as I had to pens, umbrellas and wine knives. These aren't things you buy. There's just a common pool of the things. More are constantly being injected into the system as gifts and promotional items and people are constantly losing them, then subsequently finding another one someone else lost. But I needed a mug. Being forced to buy one, I resolved upon getting a good one. This was not, it turns out, an easy task. I wanted the kind of mug where, when pulling an all-nighter to meet the kind of deadline that, if missed, could result in your left testicle being fed to wild pigs, you could look down at it and develop the pleasing delusion that everything is going to be O.K. This was, it turns out, no easy task. I looked, and looked and looked but to no avail. Having failed to purchase a mug I then resolved upon stealing one. I would find a quirky cafe with interesting cups and make good my escape post-haste. Unfortunately, while I could find plenty of quirky cafes, they all had dull cups. I lost hope. I trudged dejectedly back towards uni, when I chanced upon a strange little shop. There were numerous flowers on a sign which read:

Fancy World
It becomes a dream....

Barely daring to hope, I made my way around a store filled with various Japanese Hello Kitty style objects. Finally, I saw it. It had a pig on it. In answer to the question on one side of said mug I answered, weeping tears of joy, "No, I do not know the story of cute pig 'lulu'." Wiping away the tears and presenting my stiff upper lip, I continued "But the tale of this pig intrigues me. I am hungry to know it. Tell me more, Oh muse......". Sadly, there was little in the way of hard facts to be had on the other side of the mug save to say that the pig was crying in that Japanese cartoon type stylised way that just screams Waaaaaa!!! at you. There was, however, a speech bubble which said "Why she don't like me?" along with a squiggle reminiscent of a pig's tail. It would seem that our unfortunate lesbian pig had taken a sadly non-reciprocated liking to another sow³. The sorrow of Lulu touched me deeply, dear reader, and I made good my purchase. It came also with a lid that doubles as a saucer and a porcelain spoon⁴! Having wasted an entire morning on this search, I took the directest route back to uni⁵.

My last note relates to the results of a survey widely publicised here. According to Durex, New Zealand women are the most promiscuous on the planet. It seems, then, that perhaps the time is ripe for an "irresistible force vs immovable object" type of experiment: Will New Zealand women sleep with mathematicians?

Only time will tell.

¹I am aware, of course, aware that there is at least one person who regularly reads this blog and hasn't seen the original Star Wars movies. Let us all take a moment to reflect in sadness on the reference they're missing here....

² A footnote is in order here about coffee generally in Wellington. It's good. There are, you are informed, more cafes per square unit of area here than in New York (assuming of course that your unit is not sufficiently large as to include all of New York). The thing is, though, they all know what they're doing. There is actually a distinction in ordering a flat white and a latte here, other than the type of cup you get it in, for instance. I recall once being thrown behind an espresso machine at QPAC when someone ordered a takeaway latte. I picked up the take-away cup, stared at it for a while and turned to my colleague quizzically: "What" I asked "is the difference between a takeaway latte and a takeaway flat white", to which my colleague replied "hmmm.... I guess there isn't one".

³ I have since devoted a good deal of thought to the 'why' question with which Lulu seemed so concerned. Possibly, of course, the sow in question just likes boar. Possibly she has various objections to Lulu's poor grasp of Syntax. Maybe, Lulu, you're just too whiney.....

⁴ I suspect it may have been intended for children.

⁵ This involved a staircase. A big one. Oh fellow Brisbane-ites, you have no idea about what a big staircase really means. Wellington, being on a fault-line has bits of the city which are just suddenly much higher than other bits, and the university is on a hill. There are staircases on which, while climbing them, you expect to see the skeletal remains of people holding flags who just didn't make it. It was just such a staircase I was forced to climb carrying my piggy treasure.

Here Breaketh the Drought

There has, I will admit, been something of a dearth in posts on this here website of late. I have been aware of this and no amount of reminders, gentle prodding or rocks being thrown through windows on the part of you, the readership¹, was ever going to change this. It is now the case, however, that, were I Adam West playing batman, I might find myself tempted (or possibly contractually obliged by virtue of it being in the god-damn script Adam ... would you just for once drag your pathetic B-grade actor's arse off of the booze long enough to learn your fucking lines?) to say that the purpose for this pusillanimous posting paucity is past, my post-perusing pal.

You see, I was always aware of what many people would have been thinking sniggeringly behind my back when I left Australian shores last month: "He'll be back. Sure he's thinks he's going to do a PhD and all, but let's face it to get that far the son of a bitch is going to have to enroll ...... Oh, chuckle, chuckle chuckle, tee hee hee, hee hee hee." Now, while I was at least a little tempted before now to post about my administrative peccadilloes on that front, well, I was always just that little bit frightened that you might actually be right and hence I thought I'd just hide quietly in a corner² for a while. Anyways, I am now pleased to announce that I am now officially enrolled and, perhaps more importantly, am as of today able to actually log on to the fucking computer on my desk³. It is from said machine that I write this seminal post.

Having left Brisbane airport at 9:00 on a 3 hour flight which arrived in Wellington at 15:00 local time, I was feeling a little cheated. Assuming that I do so during another period of daylight saving, however, I suppose I will get to make that up on a subsequent return journey and take a 3 hour flight into a city 3 hours behind my point of departure - thus achieving the giddy thrill of feeling like I am arriving at the same time I departed. Anyway, perhaps because I was bitterly knawing away at this thought, I didn't just go straight to the university as it turns out I should have done - resolving instead to do so on the morrow. Let me explain why this turned out to be a terribly bad idea with a little aside, yes?

There is something, I think, rather endearing about the working habits of mathematicians. These being, to my eye, not dissimilar to that of composers or artists generally. In between sometimes feverish fits of work, they often find themselves just kind of tossing ideas about, taking long naps, coffee breaks, three hour lunches, wandering around and generally waiting for inspiration to hit them. Sometimes, for instance, they just need to up and go surfing on the south island for a couple of weeks or so. Funnily enough, this is precisely what my own principal supervisor found himself doing as of the day after I arrived - as I discovered upon checking my in-box on the 28th. There are a few more points which I feel are relevant to our discussion at this juncture:

1. Australian students are here treated as domestic - and thus have to enroll in person.
2. I discovered the above after sending all of my forms over in November 2006. Not to worry, though, the relevant documents (including required certified copies of academic transcripts, degrees and what-not the originals of which I was to subsequently leave in Australia) were, I was told, forwarded to my principal supervisor for safe-keeping, and all could thus be made well on my arrival.
3. Even if I had all relevant copies (which I was cautious enough, in point of fact, to bring with me), and acquired minty fresh new forms to fill in on arrival - I still needed my supervisor's signature on one of them.
4. The terms of my scholarship contract clearly required me to be enrolled by March 7 else there would be "no dineros for me".
5. My supervisor was to return on March 11.

As it happens, the scholarships office people were surprisingly (given my past experiences with administrative types) quite prepared to ignore point 4. Further amusement, however, was to be had on my endeavours to open a bank account into which the dineros mentioned in point 4 should be payed. I'd opened an account with HSBC Australia before leaving with a view to conveniently subsequently opening an HSBC New Zealand account on arrival here - having been assured that they did, indeed, have branches in New Zealand and would in the mean-time be able to access the Australian account through ATMs anyways. It was, on reflection, a mistake to assume that "branches in New Zealand" meant "branches in Wellington, the fucking capitol". Happily, however, there are three branches in Auckland through which, being the bloody minded son of a bitch that I am, I resolved to set up said account. To do so, I required various certified copies of various proofs of identity and of address. Of all the various options for identity proving, the only viable options for me were a passport and a New Zealand driver's license. To prove address, I essentially needed an official letter from a New Zealand employer to a New Zealand address⁴. My next step, then, was to acquire a New Zealand driver's license. To do this, I required the following:

1. My passport
2. My Australian driver's license
3. A proof of address⁵
4. To pass the theory test you do to get a learner's permit.
   

The proof of address could take the form of a utility bill, a bank statement, or some other ambiguously worded letter of proof the exact wording of which I do not remember past to say that the meaning of said wording was not remotely clear. The utility bill one was clearly out. Thus, it seemed, I needed a bank account to get the driver's license and a driver's license to get the fucking bank account. Yip-de-fucking-ha. Not to worry, though, it turned out that any official-looking computer generated letter correctly addressed would fall into the third category. Not knowing, at this point that they wouldn't even keep a copy of the letter, it is a source of deep regret to me that I didn't simply invent a bogus company and letter-head and write the damn thing myself. Instead, I got my Aunt (who currently works as a policy adviser to the police) to write a bogus letter on official New Zealand Police letter-head instead (note that I was doing this before the actions of footnote 4). Note that the address in question also happens to be her own address.

Anyways, I am officially posting again, and shall write more anon.

¹The little people

² Some might say that this is an apt characterisation of what not just myself, but the entire population of New Zealand finds itself doing.......

³This is not to say that I wasn't happy with the various fulfilling pastimes I was able to enjoy with my nerd-machine. Why, I could make the keyboard go "click, click". I could rest hot beverages on it and play with the log-on screen for, oh, hours at a time. I just felt that it was time to take our relationship to the next level is all....

⁴This last was achieved in a quaint manner via a conversation with Rob (my administrative supervisor) which went a little something like this: Me: "Ah, could you possibly just write a letter on official letter-head addressed to me at this address?" Rob: "What should the letter say?" Me: *shrug* Rob: "Why don't I just write to confirm you're doing a PhD here?" Me: "No, I don't want it to sound like I asked you to do it....." Rob: "How about I just inform you you were allocated that office I showed you to yesterday, and that you should pick up at the school office that key you have in your pocket?" Me: "Perfect."

⁵Seriously, though, what the cock is with all of this address-proving crap you have to do here?

Success!!!!!

It's high time I put my cock where my mouth is ....

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Hail the conquering heroes, and what the cock is wrong with GA?

In the spirit of my 'only blog trivia when you kick arse or suck balls'¹ maxim, allow me to report the greatest performance ever achieved by a trivia team (with me in it) at Harry's since the Gaussian eliminators somehow won the fucking thing the second time they went there. That's right, dear reader, it is my august privilege and sombre duty to inform you that our team somehow managed to beat every other team playing Harry's trivia last night. Trounced them, I say old chap. We kicked nine colours of shit out of them, Charlotte. We was awesome.

This achievement should, I feel, be in no way sullied by the fact that the statement is trivially true ....... on account of trivia not actually occurring last night due to flooding. Sure you might also just as well say that we were beaten by every other team to play last night too. You might say that. But if that's the kind of 'glass half empty' defeatist attitude you're going to carry around with you in life like an albatross chained to your neck, well, you can just sod off home with your negative vibes and leave my blog in peace, OK?

In other news, google analytics is informing me that I have had no visitors at all from the 1st-5th of February. Which, given comments posted, is clearly false. It appears that god continues to punish me to satisfy his petty vindictive urges.

¹Why the hell have I never received any web traffic from the constant use of that statement? I guess the 'suck balls' line is just too competitive a market, hey......

On god being a bastard.

It has come to my attention that in a past lives I was possibly both Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler. This is the only explanation I can come up with to explain current events which, in the immortal words of Millhouse, started off like Romeo and Juliet, but ended in tragedy¹.

My employer, you see, has just moved offices. I found upon arriving to work this morning that my new office was, on cursory glance, far superior to my old one in every respect. It's larger, it has a lovely view of Moreton Bay and there is no dentist on the other side of the wall. In general, in fact, the new offices are far better than the old ones. Life, I said to myself this morning, is truly sweet.

In a sadly short period of time, however, the minty fresh sheen evaporated from this new working space. The first thing which indicated to me that perhaps all was not well in the state of Denmark, as it were, was that my lovely view also includes a primary school, which means that if I stare too long at the bay I look a little dodgy. This, however, was nothing to the dread realisation that hit me like a lead pipe in the hands of a man named "Bubba" at approximately 9:30 this morning. You see, while it is certainly true that I am no longer next door to a dentist who hates me more than he loves life, I am now directly above a fucking gym. This is, apparently, not a problem for anyone else in the office in as much as for some reason the loud duff-duff style "yeah, let's work those abs!" music that drones on in the place doesn't reach any office but mine. This, I discovered, is on account of an open door to a fuse-box which cannot be fucking well closed!!! I've tried pushing, kicking, and alternately praying to every deity I could think of and rocking back and forth in a fetal position whimpering. All to no avail. The only thing I have yet to try is strolling into the gym with shotguns akimbo to explain calmly to the denizens of the establishment in question the benefits of working out in silence. This, clearly, must be my next step.

¹Given how often I use this phrase in everyday life, it is perhaps a little surprising that I only just now worked it into my blog.