So it’s the middle of the night again, this seems to happen to me daily. I’m sitting here at my laptop, thinking about going to sleep then getting up early to carry on working on my DAS exercise. Then I get to thinking about how much I still have to do, then also about how much time I have left to do it… I’ve left everything too late as usual.

So here we have it folks: It’s my first all nighter of this year! I have managed to do way less work than I had hoped to do today. It’s strange how having work to do focuses you to do all those things which you normally have “no time to do”, i.e. when you are sitting on your arse watching TV.

So far today I have:

• Done work on this site
• Watched some TV, not only watched TV but watched repeats of shows I had already seen!
• Read a few more chapters of the new Terry Pratchett book, Going Postal (very good by the way)
• Caught the end half of Blow that my flatmates were watching
• Oh yeah, I also did some DAS.

That extra hour today really helped me cram all those things into it. I’m just looking for more things to do to put off the inevitable work which I will have to get on with. I think this calls for another chapter of Going Postal, followed by some refreshments and then back to the coding. Oh the joy!

I love university.
- Chris

Anyway on first hearing this I thought that I had heard it somewhere before however couldn’t remember where. After forgetting all about this I was sitting in bed a few nights ago reading Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett. This book contains a machine called Hex which was made by a wizard, basically it’s the first computer ever on the Discworld, it works by having thousands of ants running through tubes, controlled by leavers and a huge keyboard. It tends to add things onto itself and grows larger and more complex on its own. A mouse had made its nest in the middle of the machine and when it was removed it made the whole thing not work, therefore it was left and allowed to live there.

An extract of the book is given below, a wizard named Ponder Stibons has just used the machine to generate a spell and had said Thank you to it:

He was beginning to suspect that Hex was redesigning itself.
And he’d just said ‘Thank you’. To a thing that looked like it had been made by a glassblower with hiccups.
He looked at spell it had produced, hastily wrote it down and hurried out.
Hex clicked to itself in the now empty room. The thing that went ‘parp’ went parp. The Unreal Time Clock ticked sideways.
There was a rattle in the output slot.
‘Don’t mention it. ++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.’

I knew I had seen the Out of Cheese Error somewhere before!

++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
- Chris