I was doing an assignment for Cryptography last night and ended up stuck on a question for a really silly reason: I knew the answer straight away. All we had to do was decrypt the following cipher:

53‡‡†305))6*; 4826)4‡.)4‡); 806*;48†8¶60))85; 1‡(; :‡*8†83(88)5*†; 46(;88*96*?; 8)*‡(;485); 5*†2: *‡(;4956*2(5*-4)8¶8*; 4069285);)6†8)4‡‡; 1(‡9;48081; 8:8‡1;48†85; 4)485†528806*81(‡9;48; (88; 4(‡?34;48)4‡; 161; :188; ‡?;

Which is all very well and good except that is possibly one of the most famous pieces of encrypted text there is. It’s froma story by Edgar Allan Poe. In fact a quick search on Google for 305))6*;4826)4 reveals 56,700 results. All but one of them on the first page are about the decrypting the damn thing.

So my problem is how do I write down my method? “Well I knew the first line began ‘a good glass in the bishop’s hostel’ and I worked from there”? Ack.

I need to go to the Post Office to buy envelopes. But there is a chance Julia might be online while I’m away. Hopefully isshe is she will read this and understand :o)

Well here I am awake really late again. Oh well, I got lots of stuff done with various websites. Including WebSearch which is the stupidest.

I now have the following sites active:

• http://www.sitereviews.org/
• http://www.condoms-cheap.co.uk/
• http://www.websearch.me.uk/

Julia was online earlier. Which is a relief, I thought I’d missed her. She’ll be online again tomorrow too :o) We didn’t really talk about anything that exciting. Or at least nothing that other people would find that exciting ;o)

Well mixed results for SUDC (in general in fact, not just us).

We got knocked out of Intermediate Ballroom which was largely due to me getting too nervous and forgetting stuff. Although I actually enjoyed the Viennese Waltz.

As a major shock we got through to the second round of the Novice Latin. Hanna’s slight costume problems may have helped though. The straps over her shoulders wouldn’t stay up so it looked like her dress was about to fall down (which it was never in danger of doing).

And then I ended up actually being part of the Offbeat team. Like everyone else on the dance team (which we found out an hour earlier). The whole routine was basically formed on the day and we actually beat Cambridge with it (who spent an hour every Tuesday since October working on it).

The party on the coach wasn’t as good. There were too many sleeping people interspersed. Plus Simon was more interested in Deepti than anyone else (although considering things I now know…). John brought Absinthe but didn’t actually drink any. And I found out that I probably was sillier than I realised on the coach last time and Florence was just really polite.Esther is just honest.

Last day of February. Therefore there is only 10 nights to go!

I may go to Pizza Hut. I got another sale so 1/5th of it is paid for.

I joined BidVertiser, BPath’s attempt to compete with AdWords. I’m not quite sure whether I can put Google Adsense ads and BidVertiser ads on the same page though… (Google disallows Adsense code from being placed on pages with other content targeted ads or ads that mimic Adsense.

I just watched the second part of SG-1’s eighth season’s finale. That was cool. It brought everything together and explains what happens in the the final episode of Atlantis.

On a completely unrelated note there is documentary about chavs on at the moment.

Wandering from topic to topic I feel I should also mention they decided to close half the damn underground today. I had a lesson that finished at 5:30 and needed to get to my sister’s for 6:30. And every bloody route was blocked by “planned engineering works”.

I only had four hours sleep last night and I’m wide awake. Always helpful I guess.

I added a new friend to this thing. Friend is probably overstating things slightly but she qualifies as being the only person I know who uses LiveJournal and is posting (since someone else can’t get enough internet access :( ).

I want to make this entry reasonably long so those pictures aren’t the first thing people see when the page loads.

Best way to do that is lots of one sentence paragraphs.

I’m cold. And according to LiveJournal cold is a mood.

It’s the finale of ICs Arts Fest tonight. Florence is dancing in the Dance Company and Arman, Anne-Marie, Phill and Deepti are dancing in the dance club demo. And then there is apparently a (free) party in the Union bar. I’ll go but I’m not sure how long I stay. Depends how many people I know are there.

14 nights to go I think.

It’s nearly two o’clock. I should sleep. Even considering the 18 hours I had yesterday. I havetotidy up first though, the cleaner will be in tomorrow (how stupid is that). The cleaner arrives at 10:00am though and I hate having to get up so early.

Why do some localisations use backticks instead of single quotes? ’ is a single quote. ` is a backtick. Backticks have specific meanings in some situations (admitedly most people won’t come across these situations but still). Grrr.

For some reason I have a PageRank of 2. God knows how. I can’t even find a link here in Google.

Odd coincidence. Or perhaps not, perhaps it’s planned. One of the ads is in English but pointing to a Finnish domain.

My paragraphs are getting shorter.

Oooh, ooh, ooh, SUDC on Sunday. For those not in the know, SUDC is the Southern Universities Dancesport Championships. Everyone calls it SUDA though (Southern Universities Dancesport Association is the group that run the comp; it’s easier to say). We (Hanna and myself) are dancing in the Team Match for IC (probably C-team Waltz), Intermediate Ballroom (Waltz, Quickstep, Viennese Waltz) and Novice Latin (Cha cha cha and Jive). By the way our Latin officially sucks. But it’s Novice so who cares. I would have preferred to enter Intermediate just so I could dance Paso Doble but we didn’t have time to get the three routines we needed.

Speaking of which (well not really but I’m trying to pretend this has structure), the London Ball is a wonderful excuse to try and show Julia more dancing :) Maybe she could dance with Marcus…

I’m currently on LiveJournal’s website (obviously) and I noticed the pages are BML pages. I’m sure I read somewhere on the site what BML was but the first thing I thought just now was “Bob’s Markup Language”. Oh well.

What you just read, or about to read, or may well ignore is the first chapter of a story of mine I might just finish eventually.

I just added this website (http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk) to my UDS (http://www.universitydancesport.com) profile. They have a PR5 domain and they have the damn thing frame their website. They really need to sort it. But of course since Caroline is in control it won’t happen. I’m thinking of proposing the website is added to the IVDA constitution. Probably not good to complain now there is a chance of someone from over there reading this. On the other hand how bad would it be to piss people off? They can’t do anything anymore (although I’m not sure what John’s would be to negativity about Caroline).

This is babbling I know. But it’s therapeutic I told you.

I need to add fake tan.

I wonder what Julia will think of fake tan. Does she know it smells? Not badly or strongly, just persistently.

Google for instance have wonderful text processing skills. And their spell checker actually learns. Although the human side leaves a little to be desired.

This neatly brings me to one of the reasons I’m posting this (as hinted at two entries ago). I recently started a new website, http://www.condoms-cheap.co.uk which sells things (I’ll leave it up to your imagination to guess what. Again I’m, not sure who I’m telling exactly since the only person reading this knows about it anyway). And it has very few inbound links(ah, I get to explain how Google works; something the person in question might not know about). When I say very few I sort of mean none. As in it has some but they aren’t in search engines yet. And since this page is not in a search engine this won’t really help much.

Google gives a page a rating called PageRank. This is defined recursively and is confusing to think about from the middle (and since it’s recursive everything is the middle - bear with me). When a page links to another page, Google counts it as a “vote” for that page. So pages with more votes have a higher PageRank. However the votes from a page with a high PageRank are worth more. Not sure where to go from there but I hope it was educational.

Meanwhile check out:

• http://video.google.com/
• http://catalogs.google.com/
• http://maps.google.com/

The first will be cool eventually but isn’t that impressive technologically. The second is absolutely stunning to be honest. The third is nice as a “proof of concept”. It will be better when the rest of the world exists. Now if they could include public transport in the system, scheduled flights and ferry services and keep it all up to date, they will definitely rule the world. Imagine being able to put in two addresses (not just cities but exact addresses) and it tell you exactly how to get from one to the other. Now that is what the information revolution should be about.

This is a continuation of the previous entry but I like the wonderful computer advice of “save often”.

Anyway today we had a half hour Viennese Waltz class. After a migraine I’m usually dazed and dizzy for a day. Spinning around for half an hour didn’t help. But we’re getting quite good now. If the judges see the first thirty seconds of us dancing we’ll be fine. After that we’re just too tired.

It is now 15 nights between now and the time and I see Julia again. Just over two weeks. Should be enough time for her present to arrive even if it is delayed… which I think it might be. Shame I completely failed to keep it secret from her.

I’ve also been thinking about the London Ball in relation to Julia. But I can’t articulate the thoughts so I’ll leave it there.

My hands are cold and it’s making typing hard.

I was walking with Sherwin and some Hong Kong Chinese girl from the beginner’s class today. I think her name was Theresa but I can’t be sure. Anyway I mentioned Julia to her (mainly because it was snowing really heavy. It wasn’t settling though (it has actually been snowing on and off for about four days now - no hint of it on the floor in London)) and she said she used to have a boyfriend in England but it didn’t work out. She then went on to add unexpected detail that caught me completely by surprise.

Which brings me neatly on to another point. I tend to judge people’s intelligence on their language ability. With a native language this works reasonably well. But there are so many people I know now who don’t have English as their first language it doesn’t work. But it doesn’t stop me being surprised when people are smarter than they sound.

This stupid spell checker keeps finding don’t and haven’t incorrect. I call it stupid because compared to the clever things that some people do with text and language processing, a spell checker is really simple. I bet it doesn’t even learn…