Monday 26th February 2007
So, I still need to get my site from Matt, but thought I'd do a quick update here. Yesterday I drove Anthony and Rob, with Matt and Hayley following, round to Essex. It was to celebrate no event in particular, but happened to be near Daniel's birthday, organised by Daniel, and with everyone meeting at Daniel's house. We went out for a meal, which was very enjoyable. I had a pepperoni and cheese stuffed chicken thing. It was quite nice, even though it just tasted of regular chicken. I also tried some squid, which was perhaps quite out of characer, but was actually very nice. After this we went to the cinema, to see Hot Fuzz. While waiting for the film to start, attention focused on one of those dance machines. Now, deep down I've always wanted to go on one, but never been brave enough to do so. So naturally I decided in north London with a big queue of people behind me was the place to do it. After a bit of a fiasco with the machine rejecting my money, I eventually had a go with Steps' classic "5, 6, 7, 8". I thought I was doing quite well for a first timer, and I did get a better score than Matt who had been on one before. I was quite proud. I think I actually enjoyed it more than I let on. Anyway, I need to go now as it's midnight and I've gotta be up at 7 for uni. Boo. I think I'll copy this into my proper blog whenever I get hold of it. Oh, on that note, I've given the Sun box that I want to replace konstantine a name. It shall now be known as "jessicka", after Jessicka. Though I've never listened to Jack Off Jill, I do quite like Scarling and I believe the same kind'a fans like Tura Satana/My Ruin/Tairrie B who I also like a lot. Most of all though... I just liked the fact it has a wonky spelling like "konstantine". Anyway, bed.
Thursday 15th February 2007
Song: Meatloaf - I Would Do Anything For Love
I'm not a very happy bunny... I've been a bit woeful over uni lately. I've got an odd situation where one of my module options is so dreadfully easy at the moment that I probably could have done it at high school. Admittedly it looks like it's going to get a bit more interesting, but it still seems like a bit of a waste of time at the moment. Then I have two of the hardest modules I could have ever imagined. Some thing about algorithms, and internet security. The algorithms thing at the moment seems a bit vague and I don't really know quite what is expected of us. It looks like one of those modules where I never will, too. The internet security one suddenly got much harder this week. It's very maths heavy, we're basically having to decipher encrypted text. I am kind'a interested in how encryption works, but my enthusiasm for everything has been drained lately...
One of the main problems at the moment was that on Monday of this week we got semester one results. Not good. I got an A for Java which was nice. However, I also got a C+ and a C- to accompany it. I'm pretty sure at that moment I waved goodbye to any hopes of getting a first class degree. It's quite annoying having come this far. What's also quite annoying is that for the module that I got the C- for, I actually worked harder than I ever have on a module before. There's a lot of chatter amongst students at the moment about that module as pretty much everyone got a lower mark than they were expecting. I've spoken to about 10 or so so far, and every one of them were unhappy with it. We'll see if anything exciting unfolds from that. So yeah... Bit pissed off anyway, but I guess a 2:1 it is.
Optimistically I will add that life does have a way of working out. Afterall, I didn't actually meet the minimum requirements to get onto the degree course I'm now on...
Sunday 4th February 2007
Song: Sugababes - Shape
So, two pressing issues which I feel I'm expected to have opinions on: The release of Windows Vista, and the collaboration of Girls Aloud and Sugababes for comic relief.
So, first up, Vista. Alarmingly until today I'd not used Vista at all, despite it having been out legally in the public (albeit as beta) for probably a year ish now. I just had no interest, and sadly didn't have a spare super-computer on which to run it. But today I went to PC World with Anthony, so while there had a play. Within a matter of minutes I completely understood where all the negative press was coming from, and managed to find what I believe to be a bug, though there may be an odd reason for.
First of all, the constant popups. This was on a machine without internet access, these are just popups confirming that I want to do everything I clicked on. Of course I do... There was no authentication for any of this, simply just a click through. So within a day of using it everyone is going to get so fed up they'll just click through everything, including all the spyware and shit that MySpace churns up. So, I'm not convinced about that aspect of the new "security". Also I checked and of course, the user account I was on was indeed an administrator. So, check the fucking massive security problem box there. Then there was the one and only selling point of the operating system, the new graphics. I won't lie, it was very smooth. Much smoother than my computer here, but it still didn't really do much. When I open a window, the window appears to grow from nothing up to full size quite smoothly, and at a nice speed. I liked that. But mysteriously when you close a window it doesn't fade out like the opposite to how it opened. It just disappeared like as on XP. That seemed odd to me. So then there was the main thing, the wonderful thing where your now 3D windows all line up and let you scroll through them. It's so shit! I just can't see any useful use for it, because they all overlap. So, the catchment area is so small if you're using a mouse to click on one, and if you're using the keyboard it's no faster than the old fashioned alt+tab. Also, because they overlap you can't see the whole window, except for the front one. But the point of it is to switch applications so the front one is actually the only one you don't need to see all of. Also, when you press Alt+Tab just once, and then release you get the last window used. Behaviour which makes perfect sense to me, is intuitive and has been in use for years. However now, if you do Windows Key+Tab (the shortcut for this 3D overlapping thing) and then release, you end up back on the same window that you're trying to leave. Hang on... That makes no sense at all. So to switch to the next one window, you have to press tab twice. It just makes no sense when everyone's used to the old alt+tab behaviour.
Oh, so this little bug I found... When you do WinKey+tab, the desktop has an entry in the list. That's ok... I'm down with that. On the little preview window you see your wallpaper and all your icons as they exist on your desktop and when you select it you get your desktop as if everything is minimised. Same as winkey+D on XP. However, if now from here you do winkey+tab again to get all your 3D windows lined up, the desktop again has an entry in the list, and again the picture is of your wallpaper, but this time the icons are missing. That just makes no sense whatsoever to me. I was thinking about it and couldn't work out any possible reason why the icons would be missing when doing it from the desktop, but not when doing it from any other window. Ridiculous.
I know there's improvements to the kernel, the way drivers work, blah blah blah. That's fine, but consumers don't know what they stuff is, they don't know how it works, and frankly it's stuff that Microsoft should have got right ten years ago. So yes, I won't be ditching my Linux+Beryl or my Mac OS X anytime soon. Sorry Bill, you've failed.
So, the other pressing issue, Girls Aloud and the Sugababes have collaborated doing a cover of Run DMC and Aerosmith's 'Walk This Way'. It is every bit as dreadful as you would imagine, but of course there is a part of me that secretly really likes it just because it's them. They've got them in the two rooms sharing a wall, like Run DMC, and after a bit Girls Aloud bash a hole in the wall with a mic stand to Sugababes on the other side, like Run DMC. Then Sarah and Nadine (both with impeccable makeup) sort of shout the chorus, "Walk this waaaay, talk this waay", but none of the eight girls really can shout in the same way as Steven Tyler, so it's all a bit rubbish really. Then mysteriously they're all on catwalks strutting their stuff. I don't really know what sort of link there is, but I doubt they care. I guess at the end of the day, for a song that was originally written by Aerosmith and arranged as a duet, eight female pop singers really weren't ever going to do too well with it, were they?
Saturday 3rd February 2007
Song: Bryan Adams - Everything I Do
So last night was... interesting. In celebration of Hayley's birthday, I drove myself, Anthony and Amy down to Basingstoke, for a night in a pub. Had a nice chat with a guy who's name I can't remember who opened by eyes a bit more on the matter of what I should do about job hunting after uni. Won't get into it all now, but I've been having a crisis over whether or not to email my old manager(s) from Sun, seeing if I can get back there. The problem I've been having though is not being sure of whether or not I actually want to. Anyway, this guy was about 10 years older than me and so had experience to speak from.
So yeah, Amy was drinking Guiness, and evidently didn't know when to stop. This was where it went wrong, as she sailed past the happy, fun, tipsy bit, into emotional, clumsy and difficult to control. When we eventually got outside (about 12:30am) we were faced with the problem of fresh air having hit her, so we had to wait ages as she was still struggling to stand up. I'm not sure what happened but at one point Matt (also been drinking) was struggling to hold her up, and she fell back and hit her head on the wall. So, more crying followed. There was no bleeding which was fortunate but it delayed us further. She nearly threw up a few times, but didn't quite. Eventually we got her in the car and we the long drive home followed. Hayley gave us Sainsburys bag to take, just incase. Much to my dismay, the bag came in use while we were on the M3. Fortunately it mostly stayed all in the bag. When we got her home, and her very unimpressed flat mate met us outside to carry her in, I checked the seat and there was some residue vomit left. Lovely.
Fortunately though it was a good night aside from this. :) Matt and Hayley were both quite pissed, but crucially were both able to keep it in.
This morning I then had to get up at 10am to drive Anthony to Reading. Hopefully no more driving people long distances for a while. I don't really know why, but I don't reallly like it. I prefer driving by myself.
So I finally started on the written side of my final year project work today. I think I really need to get deep into that, before it's too late. Contrary to popular belief there really isn't that long left for it. So yeah, I need to stop going out for a bit, because if I put it off anymore I'm just not going to get it done... and it is sadly rather important. :(
Hrm.
Thursday 1st February 2007
Ugh, I was looking at one of my new modules for uni earlier, to see what it entails. It's some advanced web stuff, so I thought it could be mildly interesting (though I think really it was just the least rubbish of what available options were left). So yeah, apparently the bulk of what I'll be "learning" is how to make web pages using CSS, why using tables is bad, a bit about XHTML and XML, etc. There is of course the obligatory AJAX stuff, though I expect it'll be less than we learnt last semester in advanced Java (even though it's nothing to do with Java). Either way, I got quite comfortable with AJAX when writing the code for the comments saving and displaying, so I'm not too hopeful there.
Tuesday was nice, I headed in to uni for 9am fearing being late with rush hour traffic. I eventually get there and make it to the room only a few minutes past 9, I see Daniel sat there so go and sit down next to him. Then I look around and realise I am one of three students there, and the person at the front isn't the lecturer I was expecting. It turned out that he was in Japan, but wasn't allowed to cancel so we had some quite nervous looking, quite young girl who had a few slides to go through with us. Eventually a fourth student turned up by about 9:30, and so we got underway... By about 9:45, the slides were done and uhm, that was it.
I love how worthwhile university is.