Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Why my feet are wet.

I'm sitting, waiting for my coffee to brew, with dripping wet feet. I was eating lunch with my colleagues when the subject of conversation turned to Matlab colour schemes. I made my excuses and left for a walk in the rain. I then jumped from some steps into a large puddle. I thought that this may change me from a boring engineer into an exciting fun-loving interesting person. I fear it just makes me a boring engineer with wet feet.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Torpedo Entenhausen 3 - FC Polterberg 1

or

Welcome to the Porno Villa

The football season has restarted after a short summer break, and the league position of Torpedo Entenhausen received a massive boost. To quote from the news page of the spare-time league (second class):
NEW. The team of Soccerteam Bochum is no longer taking part in the spare-time league. Their place has been taken by FCP Villa. The schedule (date, kick-off time and pitch) remains unchanged. All games, for which FCP Villa replace Soccerteam have been classified as 0-2 defeats and have been updated in the table.

Now the funny thing is that we lost our home game to the Soccerteam in a disgraceful 12-3 ignomony. Miraculously, this has now turned into an automatic 2-0 win, boosting our goal difference by (do the math) quite a lot.

The other funny thing is that the P in FCP Villa stands for porno. I play with some of them on thursdays, and they explained that the nucleus of the team live in a house together, which was pimped up by the landlord so that it looked like a porno villa. Maybe Aston Villa and Villareal had some influence in the naming too.

Last night we won another match in the more conventional manner of scoring more goals than the opposition. For our first goal, I played a perfectly weighted 30 yard pass with the outside of the foot, which striker Aziz headed past the goalkeeper as he belatedly rushed out of his goal. I made up for this uncharacteristic poise and vision with a couple of foul-throws and lots of hacking around in the corners of the pitch, where rain has caused ruts which have been baked hard by the sun, so the ball now bounces around unpredictably. Whilst in the lead, I decided that kicking the ball into the unplayable corners was a good method to frustrate the opposition. Somehow they equalised with a scrappy effort.

Andy, our attacking midfielder with a good shot, drew a couple of fouls and eventually a penalty, converted by Aziz, and he then sealed the win with a good counter attacking goal. FC Polterberg put down the loss to poor fitness after the summer break due to excessive barbecueing.

So over the course of one match we gained 6 points (more than doubling our previous total) and boosted our goal difference by 13.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

What the hell am I doing here?

I spent two hours this morning trying to solve an exam question, and completed a quarter of it. Students are supposed to be able to solve the entire exercise in 20 minutes. I kept writing alphas instead of gammas (90 degree rotation syndrome) and 3s instead of epsilons (180 degree rotation syndrome, aka mirror reversal syndrome, aka L337n3ss syndrome). This is not good, at all.

I've done pretty much nothing useful this week, and spent most of Monday morning in tears. These things aren't very good at all.