deadlines, creditlines and trendlines

My final year project is finished and handed in. It was inevitably a mad scramble in the last few days before the deadline and an exhausted anti-climax afterward. But now i’ve caught up on my sleep, i’d do it all over again.

Somewhere in those dark hours before dawn I did a bit of comfort shopping, in a few short minutes I spent two hundred quid on Amazon:

1 of: Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience: Understanding the Mind by Simulating the Brain [Paperback]
By: James L. McClelland (Foreword), et al
£38.95

1 of: Bayesian Artificial Intelligence [Hardcover]
By: Kevin B. Korb, Ann E. Nicholson
£39.99

1 of: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience S.) [Paperback – 2nd Edition]
By: Mark H. Johnson
£24.99

1 of: Neural Engineering: Computation, Representation, and Dynamics in Neurobiological Systems (Computational Neuroscience S.) [Paperback]
By: Chris Eliasmith, Charles H. Anderson
£18.70

1 of: Axiomatic [Paperback]
By: Greg Egan
£5.59

1 of: Imperial Blandings: “Pigs Have Wings”, “Full Moon”, “Service with a Smile” [Paperback]
By: P.G. Wodehouse
£8.39

1 of: The Jeeves Omnibus [Paperback]
By: P.G. Wodehouse, Bob Norrington (Illustrator)
£10.49

1 of: Teranesia [Paperback]
By: Greg Egan
£4.79

1 of: Neural Networks and the Financial Markets: Predicting, Combining and Portfolio Optimisation (Perspectives in Neural Computing S.) [Paperback]
By: Jimmy Shadbolt (Editor), John G. Taylor (Editor)
£52.90 (ouch)

At least that was my original order. Amazon do make it so easy to click this, then that and run up a big bill for more books than you’d be able to carry to the tills in Waterstones. But you don’t get instant gratification. My order was due to be dispatched in 6-8 weeks.

Fiddling round with it I discovered it was being held up by the NN & Markets books, since when they say “Group my items into as few deliveries as possible” they mean “one delivery” (can’t fault their logic). But if I changed the options there’d be £20 p&p to pay.

Since all orders over £19 have few delivery I thought I’d outwit the system by removing the Shadbolt and ordering it seperately. I removed it and expected delivery time when down to 7-10 days. I had outwitted them or so I thought until I tried to reorder it. The price had gone up to £69 pounds PLUS a £1.99 fee because it was hard to find.

Which was too hard to bear, so for the moment at least, the financial markets are safe from my artificial intelligence.

About caspar

Caspar is just one monkey among billions. Battering his keyboard without expectations even of peanuts, let alone of aping the Immortal Bard. By day he is an infantologist at Birkbeck Babylab, by night he runs BabyLaughter.net
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