I Am A: Lawful Good Human Ranger Bard


Alignment:
Lawful Good characters are the epitome of all that is just and good. They believe in order and governments that work for the benefit of all, and generally do not mind doing direct work to further their beliefs.


Race:
Humans are the 'average' race. They have the shortest life spans, and because of this, they tend to avoid the racial prejudices that other races are known for. They are also very curious and tend to live 'for the moment'.


Primary Class:
Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the Earth, and work to keep it safe and healthy.


Secondary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.


Deity:
Mielikki is the Neutral Good goddess of the forest and autumn. She is also known as the Lady of the Forest, and is the Patron of Rangers. Her followers are devoted to nature, and believe in the positive and outreaching elements of it. They use light armor, and a variety of weapons suitable for hunting, which they are quite skilled at. Mielikki's symbol is a unicorn head.


Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy ofNeppyMan (e-mail)

Date:	2003-04-17 09:57
Subject:	One more party
Security:	Public
Mood:	confused

Yesterday I met a bunch of my friends for drinks in the evening in my house. We had some very delicious almond tequila, some beers, a bunch of peanuts and crisps and other munchies. We chatted, drank, ate, and had a wonderful time together. It breaks my heart to know that I won't be meeting them in a long time.

I went to Pemex, to visit some old acquaintances. Friends of my dad mostly. I managed to meet a couple of my dad's friends, but nearly missed a fellow mathematician that I really wanted to talk to (he was in between meetings, and we only managed a handshake), and I also missed my former maths high school teacher, who was in another meeting. Oh well, c'est la vié!

Date:	2003-04-13 10:29
Subject:	It's my party...
Security:	Public
Mood:	happy

Yesterday I threw a hamburger party for my mexican friends. A lot of them came, from the Alexander Bain, from the UNAM, from the UEA and from many other corners from around Mexico City; some of my cousins came as well.

The party went great, we had fun, had some good burgers and hotdogs, drank some beers and tequila, chatted for hours, played dominoes, and played spin the bottle, which Paco mysteriously lost every single time. It seems fate wanted Paco to ingest his first tequilas!

I missed my friends very very much, and I hope it's not another year and a half before I meet them again.

Date:	2003-03-28 12:36
Subject:	Das Rheingold
Security:	Public
Mood:	ecstatic

Last night I went with my parents, my uncle Fernando and Charlie to The Ring of the Nibelung, showing in the National Fine Arts Palace. It was an amazing experience.

The stage had a curtain in fron of it at all times; it was a black curtain with a huge circle cut out in the middle, and another semitransparent white curtain fixed in the hole. They were projecting special effects into this curtain during the performance, and the acting and singing went on behind it, so you would see a composite image with both acting and special effects.

At the begining they had a Big Bang, and the creation of the universe projected in the curtain, then all that was left was a bright blue dot in the centre of the curtain. As the orchestra started playing, the dot grew and grew, until it filled the white circle, but it was not only blue, it had the effects of water rippling, symbolising the Rhein.

Then, the backstage lights turned on, and three rheinmaidens started swimming (with the help of some wires, of course) and singing behind the curtain. It really looked as if you were looking inside a fishbowl, or as if you had a window to the inside of the Rhein. After a few minutes, Alberich goes on stage, this opera singer with an amazing outfit, covering his whole body, and a prosthetic head, complete with shining green eyes, in his mid torso, smbolising the head of the nibelung. He started playing with the rheinmaidens and finally steals the bright gold. The glimmer of the gold was projected onto the curtain when he snatches it, and as he is gloating about having stolen it, the projection morphs into a fiery ring which then morphs into a LotR style ring, which starts spinning and growing until it frames the white circle in the curtain. Every time there was a change of scene the ring would start spinning, it was magic.

The rest of the stage was amazing as well, the floor rising and lowering in sections, to give the feeling that the characters were climbing or descending, or whether they were on the top of the mountain at the foot of the Valhalla or in the depths of Niebelheim. When Erda comes to warn Wotan about the ring, a section of the floor just rose and rose, creating a cave from where she emerged.

The costumes of the gods were very interesting, they all had 18th Century style clothes, but all were wearing Kabuki style masks, and their acting also seemed sort of japanese mixed with "the robot". And the giants, Fasolt and Fafner, resembled modern art sculptures. The rest of the Nibelungs, reminded me of the Forest Spirits in Princess Mononoke. Logue resembled a multi horned "Judas" from our Easter celebrations.

My only complaint was that it was a small orchestra, but you only noticed it at the moment of Wotan's resolve to go to Niebelheim and when Donner summons the storm (and maybe a couple other moments). Oh yeah, one thing I loved was that when Logue and Wotan are descending into Niebelheim and you hear the nibelungs working, the chattering of the hammers came from speakers on the rear of the theatre, once again, it was Magic!

The acting was superb, especially Alberich and Mime, but they were all great. And the singing was also very, very good. Alberich was my favourite, despite the fact that he was almost out of voice by the end of the play, but I do believe his character was the most demanding acting-wise, because he was laughing and shouting, and cursing and making a lot of extra exalted noises. The performer who played Logue was sick, but he still gave a wonderful performance, although he started singing with very low volume.

The Scene Director was the Mexican Sergio Vela, which, takes the palms according to me. Some of the singers were Mexican, and some were foreign. I want to make a special mention of José Guadalupe Reyes, who played Mime.

This was an amazing event, and the Art Direction is one of the best I have seen in opera or theatre; it could well be performed like this in Bayereuth or NY.

Date:	2003-03-25 08:05
Subject:	Finally home
Security:	Public
Mood:	happy

I finally arrived home. After a very bad night in which I slept like four hours in total, I woke up yesterday morning at 6:30 to start my long trip back home. Taxi picked me and Ven up at 7:30 from my house, I took the bus at 8:00 at 9:00 we had to change buses at Gatwick and by 10:00 I was already in Heathrow.

Check-in was a nightmare; it seems every passenger got an assigned seat since before so only middle seats were left. I also found out that since January, there is a 32Kg/bag limit on you luggage, my suitcase was 38Kg, so I had to open it, transfer some of my books onto my backpack, take my dad´s chess set out and transfer some more books to its box. Now we faced a new problem, hand luggage has a limit of 6Kg per piece so if you count the weight of the laptop, I was way over the limit. This time the check-in clerk took pity on me, told me not to worry, and put a "cleared for carry-on luggage" sticker in my backpack. She also put me first on the waiting list for an aisle seat, which I got, and the only empty seat in the airplane was the seat next to mine; Lucky me!

BA is amazing, it is elegant, comfy, you have room to stretch your legs and a private TV screen. They give you free headsets, eye covers, socks and a grooming set. They had a selection of six movies, and six TV channels, plus an extra channel with cockpit information including maps showing the airplanes current position. Every half an hour the stewards would go by handing out water and other refreshments. Very nice, I am very glad I chose this airline.

Finally, the plane landed at 18:10 local time, I was the first to get off the airplane, the first to clear immigration and the last one to get my suitcase. I was stopped in customs, because they saw that I was carrying some cheese, but after checking that the cheese was Cypriot and not British they let me through. WOW, they are taking the war against foot and mouth seriously in this country!

My mom, grandma and Charlie were in the airport to pick me up. I rode back with Charlie, and despite the fact that we left the airport around five minutes later than my mom, we managed to get home five minutes before she arrived! My dad was already here and we spent the whole evening chatting. I later received quick visits from Monica and Diego. I am happy they took a little time off to come and visit their friend! I know that some other friends called yesterday, I just hope they will phone me today!

Now I have a long day ahead of me, I have to wash some clothes that have been packed in boxes for 1.5 years, and I have to go buy some toiletries (esp. deodorant, cos mum already threatened to kick me out of the house because of the smell!).

I am sure I´ll have an amazing four weeks.

Date:	2003-03-18 13:24
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	worried
Music:	Parliament's debate on the war

Yesterday before George Bush's address, the BBC already had a logo and a series of war coverage specials programmed and advertised.

Every week night on BBC2, highlights of the allied assault on Iraqui baddies, at 10. And on weekends, a two hour special with the week's highlights at 9. Extra coverage available on BBC3 on Digital television, so get your digital set NOW!

Date:	2003-03-17 21:25
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	disappointed

This was a weekend with mixed emotions. This is the last weekend I will be spending in Norwich in at least two months. I will be going to Mexico next week and I will not see my baby fish in a while.

On the other hand, on Saturday I attended a party at my friend Alejandra's where I met a couple of old friends, we had some drinks, and shared a few laughs. :) I was particularly happy to meet my friend Poncho, whom I had not seen since last year.

I also spent most of Friday and Saturday acquiring goods for my family, including a bunch of DVD's, and a couple of very nice, albeit expensive chessboards for my dad. Combo asked me to take some stuff with me so I can give it to his family in Mexico. At least one of the items was a backpack!

Today we cleaned our babies tank, they were really really stressed, but at least we got to take some pictures of the shy plecostemus. I shall be uploading them soon (I hope).

Finally I am deeply saddened by the current state of events in the area of world diplomacy (or lack of thereof). Today the head of the House of Commons, one of the guys who helped Tony Blair coin most of his policies, quit because he could not support the stupidity and arrogance of these events.

I am saddened the world could not prevent this. I am scared that the fate of the world is in the hands of, no, not a madman, but a retarded man, with big guns to compensate for his natural one. Let's just hope the world doesn't decide to forget this time. Finally I must admit I am a bit scared about flying out of here next week. I think that is going to be one of the worst days for travelling.

Well, it has been almost three months since my last update.

This has been a term with a lot of ups and downs. On one hand, I started working as a workshop demonstrator/marker in my university; I am helping out in Engineering Mathematics. Every week on Tuesdays I have to attend a one hour worshop session as demonstrator which basically means that the students go and try to solve in that hour the current worksheet, I answer any questions to the best of my abilities, collect the worksheets and spend some time marking them. I have re-discovered the fun in teaching, and even grading is not that bad, because you can always learn new tricks for solving old problems and it is nice figuring out the way brains think. It is like cracking a puzzle, when you figure out why a student made such or such mistakes.

I dropped one of my PhD projects and started working on another automotive engineering related problem, this time I will be working on the optimisation of gearshifting control. I have not defined a precise project but I have many ideas, and finally I am making progress the way I like it; solving a series of problems each one a bit more complicated than the previous one. This will provide a standing ground for me, as well as insight on mechanical engineering and the use of Matlab.

Speaking of Matlab, I hate it. Matlab is a numerical analysis tool. It is very powerful for conducting numerical estimates for differential equations and other stuff, but, as a mathematician, I am used to gaining insight by manipulating equations. I can see an equation and identify what each component does, where it comes from and what impact it'll have in the solution. But a number will not give you that. Damn, we don't even have the symbolic toolbox at school.

I have three officemates: Nagib from Syria, Srikar from India and Tony from China. Nagib has a very nice, state of the art computer, Srikar has a 133Mhz Pentium with 128 Mb RAM, Tony has a Monitor with no CPU and I have a dreadful 333Mhz PII with 64 Mb RAM. It is horrible having so little memory, especially when running memory demanding applications such as Matlab. I was trying to read a .pdf file the other day, and it took me four minutes to go from page two to page three of the document. I hope I'll get a new computer soon.

Finally, I am a bit tight on the money. With the current situation of the US Dollar, our $1,000USD monthly stipend is only £580, which is just barely enough to pay the rent, food, bills and a monthly train ticket to Norwich. There is nothing left for books, copies, clothing or other unforseeables. We are trying to get some more money from Conacyt or at least try to secure a monthly amount in GBP in case the tense war situation disrupts the US economy even more. Shit, they chose to stick to USD in the time where it's been the most volatile in years!!!

I have taken a lot of pictures around Brighton, and in the near future I'll try to upload some of them. I'll keep you posted.

Date:	2002-12-12 00:20
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	happy

I just came back from Alina's house. She is one of Dirk's (my flatmate) classmates in SPRU. I had some really spicy Borsh (however it's spelled) and some chocolate cake with vanilla icecream and chocolate syrup (too sweet). Dirk's classmates are a really nice crowd.

They have decided to have a dinner get together every so often, and since the first one was in our flat, they decided to adopt me as an honorary SPRU student. So far we've had lasagna here, a selection of Turkish and Indian in Umut's place and Borsh at Alina's. They also invited me to the SPRU end of year party last Saturday.

Alina is a good looking Russian girl, and a couple of the guys are interested in her. Unfortunately for them, she is living with her partner, a really nice italian guy named Federicco, but these guys obviously hate his guts, well, they don't hate him, they just want him dead or something. I mention this because the atmosphere at the party was kind of dense, despite the fact that he was not there. I think he is aware that some of Alina's classmates do not like him or something and he didn't show up until very late at night because he was "working". BTW, the moment he showed up, the party was over, and everybody left, which was in part nice, as I was really tired, plus I got a ride home.

I hope I get invited to more of these parties.

Date:	2002-12-11 17:42
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	disappointed

I am a bit frustrated with my work. I am studying ways to find optimal controls to certain problems. So far, I've been using Pontryagin's Maximum Principle, a very nice tool. The thing is my supervisor wants me to check that the answer I got was in fact the optimal solution, and he wants me to do this by programming the optimal solution in Matlab and then perturbing it a little bit, and then plotting the cost against the magnitude of the perturbation so we can see if the cost is really minimum when the perturbation is 0.

The thing is, this are numerical mathematics. I hate numerical mathematics. There is nothing like symbolic maths to really understand the working of a problem. If you just come up with a numerical solution, you gain no understanding of the workings of your problem, and you have no idea of what to do when you want to obtain a slightly different result.

I am running Matlab on a Pentium II with 64 Mb RAM under Windows 2000, so you can guess it is sloooow as hell. To make matters worse, I have a bunch of toolboxes, but I don't have the symbolic toolbox, so I really have no idea of how to tackle the problem. I've spent the whole week trying different ways to get a solution and none of them seem to be effective. I really miss not having anyone else in my office with whom I can share our problems, and maybe we can help each other out. The think tank is empty.

I also wanted to take some courses, but my supervisor suggested that I could pick up everything I needed from books. Well, every Matlab book I've consulted so far, supposes you have the symbolic toolbox installed in your system.

Oh well, I have my weekly meeting with him tomorrow. I hope he can sit down with me and show me because even if I have some experience programming, numerical maths are totally new and disagreeable to me.

Date:	2002-12-02 09:29
Subject:	Online at last!
Security:	Public
Mood:	excited

Finally, after a long wait Tiscali provided me with my broadband internet connection and I got my ADSL Modem/Router. I spent the last hour setting it up, and finally I can say I am ONLINE!!!

Painful day.

After going to the aquarium, I went to the Royal Sussex County Hospital for a check-up. Boy was it painful in more ways than one.

- Four hour wait.
- Without having peed in the previous four hours, so eight hours holding it.
- I had some little warts which were frozen using liquid nitrogen (mildly painful).
- Blood test (more stressing than painful).
- A test involving a catheter and one of my bodily orifices (really fucking painful).
- Having to pee afterwards having a sore orifice.

I had to book an appointment to pick up my results, but since they took so long, the reception was already closed by the time I left, and they close on Fridays so I'llhave to leave the appointment for Monday. Fancy that!

And on top of this, my only meal till I got home was my bowl of cereal I had for breakfast.

At least the bus ride back home was nice and uneventful.

It seems one of our fish is ill. On Tuesday we noticed a white shiny spot on one of our fish, to me it looked like an injured scale, to Martina, Venetia's housemate, it looks like fungus. Unfortunately all aquariums in Norwich are really far away and somewhat unaccesible from where Ven lives, so, I had to take charge and go ask about it at an aquarium in Brighton. The shoptender agrees that it might be a scale injury, especially if the other guppys are bullying this one around (which they are). He suggested getting some females into the aquarium, say two per male to keep them happy (both, males and females).

Think about this, two females per male; and they are all happy about this...
...who wants to be a guppy?

Well, Ven and me decided to set up an Aquarium. After a long price checking expedition we decided to set the aquarium in Norwich (one more incentive for me to leave the conforts of Brighton for Norwich). We got the tank last week; a Juwel Record 70, some black gravel, a log, a nice red rock and some plants. I will post some pictures later. Unfortunately the filter system requires a couple of weeks to be matured, so we had to wait a few days before buying our first fish.

Today, we bought our first fish. We bought six male guppys. Four mosaic red, and two yellow ones. Very pretty, they seem to like the aquarium.

Now, it seems we did not wash the plants adequately and there are a lot of snails running up and down the walls of the aquarium. We were advised that some loaches would get rid of the snails, but we have to wait some more weeks before we can add these fish. Another problem we are facing is that the nitrite levels seem to be very high. I just hope this is because the bacteria have not settled in the filter yet.

The aquarium looks very nice with the fish in them. We plan on adding a lot of tetras (neons and others) and some catfish and some algae eaters (maybe a twig catfish would be nice).

I will leave Norwich tomorrow, and won't be coming back until mid December. I will miss not being here for the settling in process.

Today it is the day of the dead, so to celebrate it I met Ven in London.

In the morning we basically roamed around Chinatown in the rain. We were looking for a Chinese restaurant and for some stuff (I wanted some Chinese chopsticks, cos I cannot cope with Japanese ones).

Then we went to the James Bond exhibition at the Science Museum. The exhibit was ok, they had many gadgets and props used in the various movies, they even had M's office. All of this was accompanied by a brief history of both fiction and real-life MI-5 and MI-6.

Fun Fact: In real MI5, "M" is known as "C".

They had a lot of the props used in the new movie (yipee! Bond gets an Aston Martin once more!!!), as well as some videos showing how they made the opening sequence and a nuclear reactor meltdown simulator. Gosh, I felt just like inside Dr. Evil's underground lair.

In the evening we went to the Royal Albert Hall, where we met Ven's American flatmate Brian, to catch a concert. They played Saint-Saens's 3rd Symphony and Carmina Burana. Now, this was a weird experience. Firstly, the acoustics suck big time. We were sitting on the side, and we could hear half the orchestra coming from one side and a horrible echo coming from the other side. Secondly, the organ just ate away the orchestra; when the organ was playing, you coudn't really tell the orchestra was playing. Finally, the audience clapped when the second movement of the symphony was over. Brian, who studys music and thinks he knows a lot of stuff, tells me that this is normal for some 20th century music. Strangely enough they did not clap after the opening O Fortuna in Carmina Burana. I can understand that people might want to applaud after a great and magnificent piece of music, but definitely not after the slow 2nd movement!!! (By the way, it was first played in 1886, so it is NOT 20th Century music).

Now, the orchestra was The Royal Phillarmonic Concert Orchestra, and well, I was surprised to find that winds are as bad as they are in Mexico. Let me put it this way; if Dr. Hannibal Lecter had attended this concert, the orchestra would be missing one of their trombone players, one of the horns and one of the trumpets (the trumpet had just one slip, but it was the most noticeable one, so I'd save it for dessert, or maybe let him go with a bite).

Date:	2002-10-31 10:33
Subject:	A hectic weekend
Security:	Public
Mood:	pleased

This weekend Venetia came to visit me in Brighton.

On Saturday we decided to go see Donnie Darko. After wandering through Brighton in search of any movie theatre screening it, we decided to call it a day when we reached UGC at the Brighton Marina, and they also failed to screen it (for f*ck's sake, they are even showing it in Norwich).

That night it was a very hectic night; clocks went back an hour, and seven people died because of the high winds. Heathrow and Gatwick were closed in the morning, and 30 flights from Stanstead were cancelled. On Monday we got the Daily Telegraph and saw some pictures of the wreckage, which included planes from local airfields turned upside down, and an impressive shot of a rescue boat flying between the waves in the ocean.

On Monday we did the sensible thing and decided to look up local listings on the internet (Damn, I need my Internet connection at home) and finally stumbled upon Donnie Darko at The Duke of York's.

Good show! Weird, dark, intelligent plot, and surprisingly enough, I cannot find any temporal paradoxes. The guy who plays Donnie is creepy at times. I give it my seal of approval.

Ven left a couple of hours after the movie was over, but we are meeting again this Saturday in London, where we are going to the James Bond exhibition, and we are attending a concert at the Royal Albert Hall.

Date:	2002-10-15 11:53
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	optimistic

The meeting with my supervisor didn't go as bad as could've been. The problem was that I didn't sleep at all last night. Half the night spent shivering, and the other half sweating like a pig (yes, I know, pigs don't sweat).

Well, on Friday I got my scholarship confirmation so I can now make it public:

I will be staying in Britain for the next 2-4 years (more likely 3-3.5 years) doing a PhD in Non-Linear Dynamics and Control at Sussex University in Brighton.

I will be based on the Graduate Research Centre of Engineering and Information Technology, not the school of mathematics, so my research will be rather applied, which is a good thing. Don't get me wrong, I love doing maths and I do believe in the pursuit of knowledge for knowlege's sake, but I need looking at the fruits of my work; I need to be able to be able to point at something and say "I did that".

I liked todays meeting with my supervisor, he outlined a few possible lines of research and:
A) I could understand what he was talking about.
B) It seemed like fun.

I think this will work out better than UEA did.

Anyways, I am still feeling sick so I will just go to the library, borrow a couple of books and go home (maybe I'll stop at Border's as they are having a 20%-off student sale).

Date:	2002-10-14 21:30
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	depressed

I just did one of the hardest things I've had to do in my life.

Just adding up to the fact that my tonsils are swollen as hell, I have a mild fever so I'm shivering, my back is killing me for having to carry my not-so-light suitcase in London's subway and rail network.

I feel like shit, and the fact that I have a meeting with my supervisor tomorrow morning at 10 is not helping.

Date:	2002-10-08 19:37
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	tired

As for the rest of my day, I spent half of it looking for stuff to make my house a bit more homier (I am staying here for three years, so some larger investments are in order). At least I got to buy some toilet paper, soap, detergent, dish soap, toothbrush, toothpaste and shampoo, as well as some tuna so I can eat the following days.

While I was wondering outside Virgin Megastore I saw a poster advertising Asereje, the Ketchup Song, by Las Ketchup. This was the mysterious song I heard constantly in Romania. Oh well, I might even buy it.

I have to wake up earlytomorrow morning as I have to attend a workshop which will hopefully enable me to work in the University.

Good night.