Saturday 27 Jun 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Well, it was cold and cloudy all of yesterday. I drove home through fairly torrential rain. But, of course, by the time I got to my dance classes, it was no longer cold. Yay.

In fact, I arrived to find all the doors pinned open and several windows open, plus multiple extra fans dotted around the place. All of which made really very little difference at all. It was still miserably hot. Everyone involved got thoroughly wet by the end of it all. Indeed, we mainly concentrated on the slower dances because it was just too damned hot to think, never mind move around quickly.

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Saturday 20 Jun 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Well, last weekend was certainly an interesting weekend for dancing. Between starting the Rock & Roll class, dancing for 2 hours instead of the usual 1, and then spending all of Saturday night dancing as well, I was really quite excited about this week’s lesson. (Even if I have just spent all week hobbling around like a cripple.)

It turns out Mavis is back this week, so I wandered over and said hi and had a bit of a chat with her and Steve. I’m still amazed at Steve dancing with two partners at once; nobody I tell about it seems even slightly impressed. Indeed, Mavis calmly informed me that sometimes he dances with four. Anyway, soon it was again time for us to dance…

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Monday 15 Jun 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Things you can do with Wolfram Alpha which are bordering on useful:

+ Submit a query for “weather” to get a local weather report. (Gives history and forecast.) Add a geographical location to select another region. (Uses your IP address to figure out where you are; doesn’t always work right.)

+ Do currency conversions. Google can do this too, but Alpha gives you an exchange rate history graph as well. It even tells you the minimum and maximum values for the last 6 months or something.

+ Check name popularity. Type in a name and get a graph of how popular it has been over time, and an estimated graph of the age range of people having this name (along with assorted other stats, as you’d expect from Alpha). Beware: This uses American statistics only!

+ Type in a chemical name or chemical formula and get more technical data than you know what to do with. (Unless it’s not in Wolfram’s database. All the chemical elements seem to be, plus a number of common organic compounds and lab reagents.)

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Sunday 14 Jun 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Eight o’clock on a Saturday night. Usually I’d be sitting in my bedroom playing TF2. But this week, I was at my dance school’s summer dance.

I must tell you, I was very apprehensive about going. I’m not sure what’s going to happen, not sure if you’re required to actually dance, don’t know if I’ll be the lamest dancer in the room, not sure what to wear, and so on and so forth. But I promised my partner that I’d go, so I have a responsibility to go. Of course, I only made that promise on the basis of the Doctor Pepper principle. (What’s the worst that could happen?)

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Sunday 14 Jun 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Usually what I do on a Saturday is sit at home playing TF2 all day. But not this week.

For some reason my mum was still at home, so she was making my life miserable. Eventually I got rid of her. I drove over to the church in Stony Stratford. Apparently they’ve got some kind of event on. There’s various tables outside with raffles and so forth, and a notice proclaiming tours to see how the organ works. I wandered inside, and the organist looked predictably busy moving equipment around.

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Saturday 13 Jun 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so… for reasons beyond my comprehension, I signed up to do two hours of dance classes on Friday instead of the usual one hour. In other words, I did one hour of Ballroom & Latin as usual, and then I did a further hour of Rock & Roll directly afterwards. I must be crazy!

Well anyway, the first hour was fairly uneventful. My partner has changed her mind and says she’s not staying for the rock & roll class because she has to be somewhere. But she did sit and watch for about 10 minutes.

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Tuesday 09 Jun 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

So, I’ve had a little more time to play with this thing. It does some things that a very nice, and some things that are not so nice.

The nice thing is that if you ask about most things, it will automatically come up with lots of interesting and relevant facts. You get tables and graphs and charts and cross-references and comparisons and unit conversions and… generally it works quite well.

Not so nice things include the fact that Alpha is case sensitive! Try a query on “hg” verses “Hg”. Gotta keep that one in mind! I’m used to Google, which appears not to care about case.

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Tuesday 09 Jun 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Last night I got to hang out with the Director of Music. He’s a real chatterbox when you start talking about organs. Anyway, I did have a go at trying to pedal the organ. As I suspected, there’s a specific technique to it, and once you follow that technique, it does get quite a bit easier. (I think I might have to go in for some real organ shoes though…)

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