The song was written and performed by Matthew Gehrett, an independent musician from the US.  It is licensed under a Creative Commons license, so if you feel that you just have to share this song with your friends (which I recommend you do, and get them to set it as their ringtone), you have the right to do so, as long as you don’t sell it and shiz.  And give credit to the author.

I suppose the only thing to do now is share it here.  Lyrics are below.

What Are the Chances, David (MP3)

Late last night over beers at the Bird ‘n’ Baby
Sat a young man pondering the probability
That all the heads outside the Sheldonian
Would burst forth singing together in harmony

The answer is staggering, it’s hardly worth mentioning
But only David would find himself wondering

David
Oxford’s favorite maths geek
David
It’s 1-in-a-kajillion or so
Aren’t you glad that you know?
Thanks to David

Awesome, or what?  (Don’t say what.)  He’s not currently taking any orders for new songs, but keep checking back.

Happy New Year everybody!

After getting some well deserved rest following our trip to Cambridge, we set about doing nothing useful whatsoever – and it was awesome.  Simply because we didn’t have to worry about problem sheets etc. making our lives a misery as they had done for the previous 8 weeks.  This week, we cooked for ourselves (gasp), bought Christmas presents, made colourful rubbers (erasers) out of clay and watched many, many movies on the projector.  As a result, Charlotte has now seen all of the Star Wars movies, and we made it a good way through Season 2 of 24.

On the cooking side of things, we managed to make a surprising array of dishes: cottage pie, lasagne, toad in the hole (ahem…), pancakes, and many more wonderful delights that would be just too numerous to list here.  On one night we battled the cold and went to the First Floor restaurant on Cowley Road – only when we got there we discovered it was a Chinese / Indian / Thai buffet, which made for a very scrumptious dinner.

On another night, we braved the cold once again and took ourselves ice skating!  Something which I haven’t done in years, and so within the first 15 minutes I found myself bottom-first on the ice.  Oops.  Charlotte managed to cheer me up by allowing me to go to Pizza Hut afterwards though!  I haven’t had Pizza Hut pizza in such a long time… *drools*  Other outings in Oxford included getting hot chocolate for Charlotte at the Oxford Castle, and going Christmas shopping for friends / family, which wasn’t very useful for me as my flight bag was already 20kg on the dot, and couldn’t afford any extra weight.

On Saturday, I got the train to Birmingham and then the plane to Belfast City.  Uncommonly, no travel issues – my hold baggage was 20.0kg… yessss!

So, that’s another Oxford term out of the way.  This one wasn’t too stressful, but let’s see what the next one will bring…

The second (I know!) dinner was Guest Night on Thursday, which David Burke attended with me.  I think we might have scared off some of the other students / guests with our “funny” faces and accents… ah well, the food was good, and if they really listened to what we were talking about they would have considered us COMPLETE GENIUSES, instead of madmen.  Ahem.

Charlotte’s OULES play (Snow White and the Seven Vertically Challenged Treasure Hunters) was on this week, and I went to see it with Jess on Tuesday, after a scrumptious dinner at the Eagle & Child.  (I really just think I was preparing my body for the shock of food that was to come next week… stay tuned…)  Charlotte had the part of Sneezy the dwarf, and she played it very well, managing to save the day at the end!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I managed to somehow almost move out of my room on Thursday, leaving only some boxes to be put into storage on Friday, as on Friday afternoon Charlotte and I set off for Cambridge to go to the Selwyn College snow ball!  It was terrific, not only being able to finally visit Cambridge, but the ball was such fun too – so much food and drink, doughnuts and chips (not together) galore!  (Seriously, this has become such a food orientated post.  Mmm… I like food…)  After getting back very late and having to sleep on Harry’s floor for the night, we all had a well-deserved lie-in and ended up going to see the CULES play, the Cambridge version of Charlotte’s OULES.  They did two mini-plays: The USS FingersCrossed and Jack and the Beanstalk.  They were both really enjoyable, although the bus ride back to Oxford wasn’t so much.  3 hours of being alone with Charlotte?  Argh!

However, that’s nothing when you hear of the events of WEEK 9 (YES I SAID WEEK 9).  It involves cooking.  And me.

Oh dear.

Friday was the ARCO room ballot, in which I was below the cut-off point for getting a room in college for my 3rd year… but since some people about me decided to live out, I was able to get a room!  Yay!  We also went to see S1L3NC3 (“magic Simon”) at the Burton Taylor Studio in Oxford, and I was somehow cheated out of an 80% chance of winning £100, darn.  But the show itself was really good, definitely up to usual quality.  The following night I was treated to a dinner with Charlotte and her mum, and then we went to see West Side Story, an amazing play which I would encourage anyone to go and see, even if not musical-inclined (like me).

Final thoughts: managed to book in for Christmas dinner, despite getting up at 8am to find the server going ridiculously slow.  Also, Doctor Who.  “I’ve gone too far.”  You think?

1. Betty and Me
2. IKEA
3. Shop Vac
4. Better
5. Code Monkey
6. Drinking with You
7. Tom Cruise Crazy
8. Big Bad World One
9. Space Doggity
10. Birdhouse in Your Soul
11. Creepy Doll
12. Mr. Fancy Pants (on Zendrum)
13. I Crush Everything
14. Up the Junction (Squeeze cover)
15. The Future Soon
16. Skullcrusher Mountain
17. Still Alive
18. Re: Your Brains
19. Always The Moon (unplugged)
20. First of May

Charlotte and I both really enjoyed it, we even got t-shirts!  And, most importantly, we even got to meet Jonathan Coulton at the end, get our t-shirts signed and got a photo with him!   That was on the Friday evening; we spend a good part of Saturday with Jess going around London a bit, eventually getting some lunch / dinner in Pizza Express, before heading back to Oxford.

*sigh*

Happy David.

This week, I:

• Did lots of programming;
• As a consequence of the above point, had action-packed dreams involving PHP functions…;
• Went to Simon’s really interesting talk about “code making and breaking”;
• Made microwave lasagne (the result was average, but not the MLIA kind of average);

In addition, my body has, for some reason, refused to wake itself up in the mornings properly recently, resulting in me missing 3 of my 6 lectures this week, oops.  There’s no harm done, since the lecturers just read out the online lecture notes anyway, but it’s kind of annoying, and I feel a bit guilty.

On Saturday, it was the Mansfield Ball!  We had booked early, so we were able to get dining tickets, which meant that we were able to go in at 7pm and have a 5-course meal in the dining hall.  It was a bit squashed, as all meals at Mansfield are, but the food (apart from the 2nd starter) was nice.  The ball itself was amazing – attractions included dodgems (or, to give them their proper name, bumper cars), banana swings, a fortune teller, a casino (where we won >£10000, but then promptly lost it all by betting on red instead of black on the roulette wheel), free (included) burgers / chicken nuggets / potato wedges / fudge / sweets, shows including dancing and magic, and loads of music.  It was such a fun night, we left a bit after 3am, and I wasn’t even tired.  Although some fairly hyper dancing was done and seen near the end…

Anyway, this week included the following (yes, laziness is prevailing somewhat):

• Writing a letter to the BBC commissioner asking that old children’s TV shows be released on DVD or on iPlayer;
• Planning to go to two company presentations;
• Failing to go to two company presentations;
• Creating a Halloween costume consisting of carrying an inflatable spider;
• Actually organising my lecture notes…

On Saturday evening, I went to the Oxford University Light Entertainment Society (OULES) Halloween party, where I met a bunch of people who I’ve only seen in plays before, not as actual “real” people.  So, it was essentially the same as being at a celebrity party.  I kept saying “Oh, there’s the evil villain / bee man / random villager!”.  They were all really fun people and we got on swimmingly.  I can’t say the same for the state of the bobbing apples though…