Thursday 30th November 2006
Song: My Chemical Romance - Sleep
Hehe, I can sort of see that Tor and I are waning a bit now on this blog-a-day challenge.
Rob had something exciting to show me last night. Linux on the iPod! I've seen screen shots and read about it before, but never actually used it. Primarily because I was always too scared to put it on my iPod. It has lots of lovely features, such as a spinny cube, Doom (yes, that Doom), and lots of other exciting looking games. The most lovely irony though... it can't play MP3s properly.
Apparently the new video iPods can play MP3s properly. However despite having seen how cool it is now, I'm still a little weary of messing about with the 'Pod.
Best get to bed now, got to get the train to uni tomorrow. I've got a 11-1 lecture scheduled, followed by a 4-6 workshop. However the workshop isn't always on, but we don't find out until we get there which is a little annoying. Oh well, quite looking forward to a day out by myseld tbh.
Wednesday 29th November 2006
Song: Million Dead - Margot Kidder
Well, good news. My hand is generally quite good again. :) Anti-inflammatories are quite magical.
I think I've got to start attending uni more. As Christmas, and the end of the semester, ar fast approaching. I am still going Thursday and Friday every week, which are the modules I struggle most with. However that's not to say Monday to Wednesday just aren't needed at all.
Today my mum has left the country, and I've got the house to myself for the day. Ordinarily that would be quite cool, but I want to grab a guitar and make lots of noise. However despite my hand being mostly better now, I certainly don't think that would be a smart move just yet. Alas.
Maybe I could be adventurous and do some more Java, since I couldn't be bothered to make the effort to attend. I'm quite pleased with what I've done so far, but not sure if it's really enough yet. This is why I need to attend. :(
Monday 27th November 2006
Song: Tegan and Sara - Downtown
Decided it would be fairer if I actually kept going. Sad though it is, despite being one handed I have still spent most of the waking day in front of the computer. Knowing this would happen, I decided to set about shortening the waking day. I went to bed last night at 3am, and finally got up at an impressive 2pm. Hand is definitely better than it was over the weekend. Hurrah!
In other news, my Tegan and Sara DVD arrived today. Short and sweet, much like the girls themselves. It has a couple of documentary things, and a show. Annoyingly they've edited out the between song banter that their live shows are famous for. Excitingly though, in the main "on the road with..." documentary thing, there's a small bit of the 100 club in London. I was there! There is a quick shot of the crowd, but I couldn't see myself or Mary. Alas.
In other news, James likes my hair. (There, now I've saved you the need to comment.)
Sunday 26th November 2006
Song: Busted - Who's David
Tor, I would like to request temporary exclusion from the 150-word-blog-a-day challenge. My left hand has got worse and consequently my right hand is now getting stiff as it's working twice as much. I'm planning on not driving for a while, and spending as little time on the computer as possible.
If anyone wants to take pity on me, I'm probably going to just be moping around the house all week, so feel free to pop by and say hello.
Friday 24th November 2006
Song: My Chemical Romance - I Don't Love You
So, some drama took place last night, and that 'C' word was used to describe me. I'm not offended by it personally, I just felt that it wasn't really necessary to have to stoop to such vocabulary.
It's all a bit awkward for me, as I feel like everyone is talking about this behind my back which I don't really like. My only request really is that several people (you should know who you are) don't suddenly stop liking me just because of what they have heard.
(I have just realised that if I don't use contractions, it will help with the word count!)
There have been problems for some time, so maybe last night was just what was needed to make it all come to a head finally. Who knows? It's done now.
I got a bit snappish (I miss Ally McBeal) at someone at uni earlier, which I immediately felt a bit bad for. I'm so crap at apologising, but I think one is due.
Thursday 23rd November 2006
Song: David Ford - I Don't Care What You Call Me
My wrist still hurts, which is rather shit. It's extra shit now because I think now I've worked out the secret to playing IDCWYCM on guitar. I got the chords from the mighty Flynn, who is rarely wrong on these matters. However... I think in this case he may have been. The verse chord progression appears to be E, Bsus4, F#m, Asus2. Not the E, A, F#m, A that I was first led to believe. Thankfully Bsus4 is incredibly easy to play, however I can't give it a go because tendons are inflamed. The bastards!
Today for the first time I actually saw a fine piece of furniture which I felt met the needs of my ongoing CD storage crisis. It was all looking so good. It held over 200 CDs (I currently have 165-ish), wasn't too wide, had a useable top. It was lovely... Then I looked down, and it was priced at £69.99. Now I know I have a bit of a reputation as a cheapskate, but I really wasn't sure where this thing actually got it's value from. It was five small bits of wood, and two hollow metal tubes.
I wonder if I've written over 150 words yet. I don't have a counter on this bit where I fill it in.
Wednesday 22nd November 2006
Song: David Ford - State Of The Union
Just found a little bug with my Javascript for saving comments. Can't believe no one had spotted that after all this time. When adding a comment, the text boxes that you filled in disappear, but the text on the link was still saying, "Click here to not add a comment", when it should have gone back to saying "Click here to add comments".
Anyway... My attendance at uni has got rather dreadful. I'm sort of worried about it, but mostly not. The reason not, is because I'm still attending the two modules that I know I'm rubbish at (and I do feel like I'm getting better at!). But like today, I kept telling myself, I *will* attend Java. But alas, it's now nearly half way through and I'm still at home. I will battle on with the work though. I was only going to go in to show the lecturer and get feedback, nothing vital really.
Anyway, since I've skipped that I feel like I should at least do some work on it while at home. So, I'm going to do that now... goodbye!
Tuesday 21st November 2006
So I got a message from a "Rock Steady". I'm slightly paranoid... Who are you? :(
Tuesday 21st November 2006
Song: The Starting Line - The Best Of Me
I've not listened to The Starting Line in years, it's quite nice listening to this album again. It doesn't seem terribly over-emo, which is nice.
I was discussing My Chemical Romance with James again yesterday, about how so many 13 y/old girls like them at the moment. However I can't help but think in a few months time there will be a new band to take the spotlight and MCR can go back to just having the original goths, freaks and weirdos that liked them in the first place.
My left hand is getting worse, which is really upsetting. I need to try and stop using it, but it's so hard! I'm also really bored at the moment as all big uni hand-ins are done, and so I've got nothing to do. Now, when I get bored, I like to grab my acoustic guitar and pass several hours by playing a load of good old pop songs. But sadly I can't do that. :(
Monday 20th November 2006
Song: My Chemical Romance - Cancer
This is such a nice, yet very sad song.
I've been in a bit of a funny mood lately, so apologies for those who've had to put up with me. I've been a bit grumpy (not going to go into it) and every now and again it all goes out of my mind and everything picks up for a few minutes.
Had a frankly rather tense game of Monopoly last night with Anthony, Matt and his girlfriend Hayley. Hayley was declared the winner, somehow accumlating a large wealth while the rest of us were busying ourselves with avoiding Matt's hotel on Mayfair. It was actually more enjoyable than I was expecting. We should get more people and do it again!
Annoyingly, my left hand is giving me hassle again. So I'm back on the anti-inflammatories (is that spelt right?) and not allowing myself to touch any guitars. I have however been sitting at the piano a few too many times. After sitting there for a few minutes playing 'Til The Day, I caught my mum humming the tune to herself just moments after. Something I thought I'd never hear! :)
So, despite being a bit moody, I did get on with my "Advanced Java" work... the thing with the Yahoo maps. So I've now got a JSP page loading, which fires off some Javascript which fetches another JSP page which spits out XML. Then the Javascript parses the XML, and creates two div tags full of links and puts a bunch of markers on the map. Then when you click on the link it zooms the map into the point of that location or event. That sounds much more complicated to explain than it really is, which is good as I think it satisfies most of the criteria for the module. The only sad thing is visually it looks pretty rubbish, and doesn't really do anything of much use. Going to take it into uni on Wednesday (I actually have that module tomorrow as well but don't want to have to get up at 7 for it) and show the lecturer to see what he thinks. I hope he likes it!
Oh, apparently "Javascript" is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems. I didn't know that until a few days ago.
Saturday 18th November 2006
Song: David Ford - Go To Hell
After a little bit of research of what Google, Yahoo and MSN can offer in the way of map data, it turned out that Google wasn't right for me. For reasons I can't blame them for, they want to know what site you're using their maps on, which means it needs to be an internet facing webserver. Something I didn't want to set up for this module. So I set about using Yahoo, except I then found out they only do Geocoding for America and Candada. Bastards. Thankfully I've found a converter from the UK National Grid to longitude/lattitude. So, armed with all my tools, I set about getting my map going, and get my map going I did...
So without further ado, you can now see my very quick job of getting a map loaded and marker positioned by clicking here!. P.S. Don't steal my idea please, Daniel. ;)
So with that complete, I've set about installing project Glassfish on my Mac. Glassfish is something that my old friends, Sun Microsystems, have made for doing JSP/Java-ry web development nice and easy. I am going to suffer for daring to have a different set up to how it is at uni, but since I've only attended about 3 of the 14 workshops we've had so far, I can't imagine it will set me back too much.
I quite like doing these in the early hours of the morning. Makes me feel like I have a day in hand. :)
Friday 17th November 2006
Amazingly, it seems England are already getting hassle about not being prepared enough for hosting the Olympics. I kind of saw it coming, with my ever increasingly cynical view on this country, I always thought hosting the Olympics was a little ambitious. As Bill Bailey put it, "I am English, therefore I crave disappointment".
Apparently, "organisers of the games failed to budget for the cost of VAT on the construction of Olympic facilities when the original bid was made". Source, Guardian.
So proud to be British...
In other news, I've just posted a mini-rant on the ever wonderful Blackboard, complaining about having to submit work in MS Word format. After having written this 13 page document in NeoOffice, and then printing out two paper copies, I then get in a situation where the electronic one I've submitted doesn't actually look identical as you may expect because the conversion to Office screwed it up. That's annoyed me quite a bit.
Wasn't in a very good mood to begin with. :(
Thursday 16th November 2006
Song: David Ford - Give Me Strength
Listening to "I Sincerely Apologise For All The Trouble I've Caused" earlier, walking home from uni. I'd never noticed the piano in "I Don't Care What You Call Me" before! I was rather amazed, he's just playing the four chords in a loop in the second (or was it third?) verse. I would love to see his ProTools thing, to see quite how many layers he has. I also noticed a second layer of vocals at the end which I'd never noticed before. Not bad considering he did the whole thing by himself. Looking forward to Milk and Cookies! I just wish the next month or so would go away, including all university work due during that time.
I keep telling people that the third year isn't really that hard, just boring... But I'm starting to re-evaluate it. I think the hardness is not so much in the work set, just the volume of it. I've not even begun Java properly yet. I am looking forward to tha though. I plan on using Google Maps' maps for displaying the location of olympic events. Stay tuned for updates on that. I'm not sure at this point how hard that will be though.
Wednesday 15th November 2006
Song: McFly - She Falls Asleep (Part 2)
Quick update on the blog-a-day challenge. Daniel is officially a non starter, but we've recruited Richard! The level of competition is rising fast... after all, he blogs about bacon.
My proper update for today is below.
Wednesday 15th November 2006
Song: McFly - I'll Be Okay
Gosh, this blog-a-day challenge is starting to get quite difficult already. The main problem I'm having today is I simply can't be bothered to write it.... Which was largely the reason for doing it.
So yes, some stuff to write about. Well, KFC now apparently have a logo that can be seen from space. Bit bizarre, but there you go.... Strangely makes me want KFC too.
Saw the new Taking Back Sunday video earlier, for Liar (It Takes One To Know One). You can tell their budget for videos has gone up a lot over the years. Click here to watch. I quite like Adam's hair in it...
It's been known for a long time that I don't like a lot of the ways that Microsoft conduct their business. Thankfully, some people called the EU seem to have a bit of a problem with them too. This has been going on ages, but now it's getting exciting. From slashdot headline, "Before Thursday next week, Microsoft must hand over all secret information on Windows protocols to its competition. Should the company choose to ignore this demand, it will be severely fined. Microsoft's history with EU fines so far amounts to approximately Euro777.5 million". Even for Microsoft, that's a lot of money. Nice that someone gets to bully them for a change.
Now, I have to go update a stupid report for uni.
Tuesday 14th November 2006
Song: My Chemical Romance - It's Not A Fashion Statement
From time to time I still like to read the blog of Jonathan Schwartz. He is the Bill Gates of Sun. Though it was perhaps a bit more relevant when I worked for him, I still sincerely like the company and he is quite a good writer I find. It's now I think common knowledge in the geek community that Java has been open sourced, and the GPL is the licence of choice. To be honest my interest in this ongoing thing hasn't always been terribly high, but as I understand it the GPL does seem to be a fairly good choice. Stops Microsoft forking the code and developing a proprietary implementation, and gets to reap the benefits of being open sourced.
I thought this fact was rather impressive: Apparently "Java runs on more devices than Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, Symbian and the Mac combined". Apparently also Google, Oracle, Motorola, Nokia, Apple, Apache, Red Hat, Samsung, and Sony have all contributed to developing Java. Can't help but notice Microsoft missing from that list of big names.
There's now suspicion/rumours of them GPL'ing Solaris. As I understand it... Linux could stand to benefit a *lot* from that. At the moment it's illegal for any Solaris code to make it's way into Linux. However if it were to be GPLd, I believe that Linux could soon have support for Solaris zones, DTrace, awesome TCP stack and many other lovely things that Sun have done so well. And of course, Sun don't lose ownership of the code, so they're not really likely to lose anything from it. The only risk would be that they could be benefitting their competition, but I think they're past that now since they sell machines with Linux on anyway. I think they're more interested in selling servers, whether they run Solaris, Linux or even Windows. I imagine though it won't be GPL'd anytime soon. It took them so long to get it out under CDDL (and some of it still isn't open) that it could be many years. But it's nice to speculate...
This question is mainly aimed at people who have similar music tastes to me, but what do people think about Panic! At The Disco?
Tuesday 14th November 2006
Song: Spice Girls - 2 Become 1
So, a challenge has been set... A blog update every single day, minimum of 150 words, for myself here, Tor, and Daniel. It was proposed as a challenge, and as such there will be a winner and two losers. However at this point I'm not quite sure exactly what the prize is. Since it's actually 2am and I've not gone to bed yet, I'm still considering this Monday, and so is my second day in a row! Check back daily kids!
I've added a word counter to help keep things fair. For those who would like to know how many words I've done, append "?wordcount" to the URL, or click here and it will say under where it says the song. I imagine only Tor will really ever want this info tbh. After having added this, I'm starting to reconsider the 150 word rule, and maybe 100 would be more apt. My life really isn't that active.
So, I have reason to suspsect that the "Be a little bit wiser baby, put it on, put it on" lines in the Spice Girls song "2 Become 1" may be about wearing a condom. Lovely. Don't forget this is the same song with the line, "boys and girls feel good together", which mysteriously didn't make it into the single version.
I think there should be a petition for their reforming.
Sunday 12th November 2006
James and I were having a dispute yesterday, is the video for Helena emo or goth? It shouldn't surprise anyone that I said it was goth, and he said emo. The video, for those who don't know, can be seen here. It's so clearly goth. White face powder, black eyeshadow and mascara, red ties, red lipstick, woman in a corset... And if nothing else, they're at a funeral!
While looking for that, I found this, similar to the last post. Perhaps a bit more credible than "Clarkers".
Tuesday 7th November 2006
Song: My Chemical Romance - The Ghost Of You
I found this earlier... thought it was quite well done (assuming you've all seen the original music video). It's such a nice song... Would probably hold more credibility if it had been sung by Amy Lee of Evanescence though, as it was written by the same people who wrote "My Immortal".
Pretty much anyone who's spoken to me in the last month has probably had to listen to me moan about uni. The other night while doing yet another dreadful assignment, Daniel came out with this gem.
"I think it would be very inconsistent of the uni to give us just one module that reflected the real world". Beautiful. Couldn't have put it better myself.
Then more recently I got a letter in the post... They want me to give them over £1,000! Madness! So I paid that today with great displeasure. Decided to get a student loan to make me feel a bit better about the whole ordeal. I didn't really want to, but for numerous reasons it seemed a better move than applying for a parental loan. I've still got a fair bit saved from my year at Sun, but I recently went to Holland, and last week bought this, which at £450 was one of the cheapest. It's so lovely though, it feels much more justified than my course fees. :( Now I'm going to stop buying stuff though... Honest.
The other big news recently, is Beryl! Oh yes. I believe a while back I put up a screen shot of this big spinning cube thing I had for a desktop. I soon got rid of it before as it was terribly unstable, and there was a lot that wasn't right with it. It just looked cool, but was useless. But now, many months on, it's coming on well. It doesn't appear to be crashing at all. So here it is, the obligaory screen shot. It's now become two smaller cubes (I have two screens y'see), but the cube is actually the least useful thing I find. It has a thing like Mac's expose, where you can see all the windows at a glance. Very hard to explain, but very cool if you can see it, and far more practical than just a taskbar for switching between programs. What else? Oh, when I alt+tab to switch between things like in Windows, I get a little preview of the window, but it's not just a picture, it is the actual window still, only smaller. So for example, if you're playing a video and do alt+tab, the video will be playing in the little preview. Awesome. Less practical but cool all the same are things like menus shooting out and shrinking back, when I minimise stuff it sort'a shrinks down to the taskbar. Windows XP tries to make it look like it does this, but actually can't. When I drag a window across the screen it kind'a stretches around the point it's being dragged from, as if there was an actual force being applied to it to make it move. Then when you stop dragging it sort of wobbles back to settling still. Ooh it's just so lovely, mere words do not do it justice.
Wednesday 1st November 2006
Song: Spice Girls - Viva Forever
Right, back in England now... Thought I'd share some rather beautiful photography with you all. It's not really typical tourist pictures, there's loads of them on the internet. I took pictures of more interesting things.
So on the second day, we went out, and we saw this evil baby in the shop window. To be honest I think it looked more evil if you were there than it looks in the photo.
Here, is a picture of a toilet at a tram station. I have no idea...
Just incase anyone doubted that there's a lot of bikes there...
We all know "when in Rome...", so we got bikes too. Here is mine. Isn't she a beauty?
This is quite odd, but it actually made me laugh a lot so I just had to take a picture. It was sevaral floors up, on a building... Basically it just appears to be a satellite dish attached to an open window. But how the hell can that work!? Those dishes need to be pretty precisely lined up, as far as I know, so God knows how they get any use of that!
Here's Daniel, just rocking out.
This was in the museum. Hard to make it out in the picture, but I believe it was a decorative thing for placing flowers in each of the holes. However Rob seemed to think it was some advanced piece of smoking apparatus which amused me a bit, so thought I'd share it.
I'm quite well known for being quite boring, but I couldn't help a childish giggle at this gem I saw from the tram. It seems less people than I thought are familiar with the term, so if you're confused, click here.
And finally, though I didn't take any pictures while in there, here's the ticket to prove we had a look in a sex museum. Frankly I thought it was a bit disappointing, but something to say I've done before I die. It was mostly just filled with photos of people having sex, which frankly I found a bit boring. I was hoping for lots of insane and scary looking eqiupment. For example, like the guy in Euro Trip who visits the dominatrix has to experience, for those who've seen it.
