Monday 31st December 2007
So it's 31st December 2007. On 31st December 2006 I wrote some new years resolutions. Lets see how I did!
- Move out of parents' home. As nice as it is to live for free with little worry, I think my overall mental health depends largely on getting out of here.
This one I did... twice!
- Leave Woking. This is obviously tied in to the above, but I think it's important enough to need it's own thing.
This I also did twice.
- Drink more alcohol. Get drunk if necessary. Apparently it's good.
I have drunk alcohol a handful of times this year, once getting to a point where I was a bit wobbly when standing up. Not properly drunk though.
- Get a first class degree.
This I didn't do. My enthusiasm for uni plummeted at the most important time. I got a 2.1, that'll do me for now.
- Tidy up my room... For God's sake, it's always a mess.
This comes in waves. Generally a mess though. Consider this one a failure.
- Stop buying computers.
This one I've done! :D
- Buy a guitar for over £500.
I got a sexy PRS for £450, and it makes me very happy. Admittedly yes that's less than the target £500, but I feel it's close enough.
- Learn how to arpeggiate fluently on a piano so I can woo people with only a chord sequence.
Still struggling with this, but have learnt a few more things on piano, so I'm quite content with progress there. Slow, but definitely happening.
- Make myself known on an internet forum. I always stay so low key, perhaps I should start talking more.
Completely failed.
- Try to be more tolerable of little things about other people that annoy me.
I think I don't do too badly with this. Though when I'm a bit tired, I find I just get very unresponsive which is the best I can do.
- Improve general conversation skills. I think they've been slacking lately, even with people I feel comfortable with.
I think I've got better with people I know... Definitely need a bit of work with strangers still though.
- Buy a car outright with my own money.
This I did! Quite a lucky situation, but I got my lovely little Focus. It has traction control and a heated front windscreen. So modern.
- Spend more time with people I really like. I don't really know why, but I seem to be quite bad with this.
Oddly I think I've completely failed at this one. I don't know why I have such a problem with this one. :(
So that's 2007. I don't really have any resolutions for 2008. I think I'm quite happy with most things as they currently stand.
2007 has taken me on some fun adventures. I wonder where 2008 will take me...
Thursday 27th December 2007
So Christmas wasn't the most fun I've ever had, but it's getting better. I'm in much better physical health today. I also managed to sleep uninterrupted last night, which was the first for a while.
Yesterday I bought myself something wonderful. After much debating for quite some time, I bought myself a sat nav thing. I was after one of the new flat screen ones, but it turned out if I got a big fat one I could get more features for less money... So I did. It's very exciting. My lady is called Karen, and she's a pleasant blend of Australian and English. She's not a real lady though, oh no. It has a text-to-speech thing which works remarkably well, so she reads road names to me telling me where to turn. Excitingly she also reads destination names, so I ca create places with funny names and drive to them to make her say funny things. Oh the joys.
The thing that's got me most excited about it though was a feature that I hadn't planned on getting, but has won me over. It's got a bluetooth thing for my phone to make it function as a hands free kit. In this day of handsfree laws, I thought this could be good. I just loved how well it worked with such ease. It not only lets me answer phone calls while driving, but I can make phone calls by picking numbers out of my phone book. Also I can do a POI search and it brings up phone numbers of the place I'm driving too so I can make a call to them with one touch. Very nice. Annoyingly the thing doesn't support SMS with my phone. It's a shame, as apparently with this text-to-speech thing you can get Karen to read text messages to you, in her sexy Australian accent. I'm holding out for an update to make this work.
Tuesday 25th December 2007
So it's Christmas day... Before I get into this, I should remind everyone of how little I like Christmas.
It's only 3:37pm and I'm bored out of my mind. Anthony's run off upstairs, my nan's watching something on the TV, my mum's in the kitchen tidying up and my dad's in his room playing music loud enough for the rest of us to hear out of some very tinny sounding speakers.
I came back home Sunday evening. That night I only managed to sleep a little over two hours, from about 4-6:30am. So I felt pretty crappy all of Christmas eve. I had to go to work at about 9am though I was officially off all this week I had to take care of something quickly. So I took my mum for a ride down there to do that. Then soon after we got back everyone started going out. It wasn't long before I was the only one left at home on Christmas eve... So glad I made the effort to come home for Christmas.
By the evening everyone was back and I'd completely had enough of everything. I had a shower, thinking it would take some time, but the hot water ran out while I was in there so that just became pretty rubbish too. I hate having to finish washing my hair in cold water.
Got a bit more sleep last night, but still not really much. Woke up at about 4am burbing up stomach acid-y tasting burps. I actually thought I was going to throw up for a while. I got out of bed and ate some bread and drank some water. Hoped that would make my stomach happier, and watched some TV for a bit as when I layed down I felt ill again. There was a programme about drag kings on. It was quite interesting. I got to see how they apply facial hair, which I've never known before.
This morning I was then the last to wake up. I felt pretty awful. Sore throat, headache, and eunny nose. But Christmas day began. I went out for a fun drive with Anthony to pass some time before lunch. The plan was to go in separate cars round lots of fun back roads. However I got stuck doing less than 50 behind some stupid car on the lovely 60mph bit where there's no sharp bends. Anthony was able to overtake, but my car doesn't really have enough power, and there was cars coming the other way. :(
Came home for lunch, couldn't eat much, parents got annoyed at each other, and then we all split up ending up in the places described at the start of this entry.
Merry Christmas.
Wednesday 19th December 2007
I've just written some lovely code for work, I wanted to share.
int result = (data1Hi & 0xFF);
result <<= 8;
result += (data1Low & 0xFF);
result <<= 8;
result += (data2Hi & 0xFF);
result <<= 8;
result += (data2Low & 0xFF);
It's constructing a big endian (I think, it's late and not tested yet) 32 bit integer from four separately stored bytes. It's sexy.
I was talking to a lecturer from uni the other day about uni, and how they just don't teach us this sort of stuff anymore. I learnt this stuff from a transsexual at college (good times), and uni completely overlooked it. It's so crucial though to the sort of thing I'm doing. Especially with my recent discovery that Java doesn't do unsigned numbers at all, which seems completely ridiculous to me. One big mark against Sun for me.
Anyway, this is boring to most people, so I'll stop there.
Tuesday 18th December 2007
So, I had a rather fun weekend... Friday night/Saturday morning at about 4am I decided to go and get petrol. I knew I'd need it for M&C and wasn't sure what this planned petrol protest was going to do... James and I went out to get petrol. Then we decided to go for a bit of a drive. We went round and about all over the place, and we then went on to my work as I needed to restart a computer there. So at about 6:30am or something, we head back home and go to bed. I then only slept a few hours typically. Didn't get a lot done Saturday, tried to sleep a bit in the afternoon but it wasn't too successful. Saturday night I went down to see Anthony and his new three litre monster. It was quite nice, we stayed there until about 2:30am which was unexpected. It was then gone 5am before I got to bed, which wasn't a very clever decision. On Sunday Daniel, James and I were having a Christmas dinner of sorts. I had my doubts, I won't lie, but it turned out to be rather wonderful in the end. There was a bit of a rush as James and I were going out to Milk and Cookies, but we enjoyed our little feast.
Milk and Cookies was obviously brilliant. By far the best song was introduced as him trying to play two instruments at once, and a song inspired by Strictly Come Dancing. It was a cover of Britney's 'Toxic' done on a massive grand piano with a synth thing sat on the music stand where he could press buttons throughout the songs, which played that main hook that we all know and love, as well as the background beat. Oddly, it actually sounded very like the original. He did press the wrong button at one point and stopped the beat, but a quick cry of "bollocks!" or something, and he was off again to finish the song. It was lovely. Another highlight was the duet with Chris Flynn of Mariah's "All I Want For Christmas". It was good.
Sadly the night ended on a bit of a low, as I had a run in with the law. Driving through Weybridge I got stopped by the police for speeding. Thankfully I got away without any points or a fine, but I did get breathalised and had to sign a thing that said I admitted to speeding. It was quite an interesting experience though. For one, I'll probably never speed down that road ever again. Even though I'll probably speed down other roads and the police may never stop there again doing speed checks, it'll stick. But the nicest bit was that the police people were all very nice and friendly. They weren't at all pushy, they weren't trying to treat me like a criminal, they just wanted me to understand that what I was doing was bad. I thought this was very nice of them, as the police these days do tend to have a bit of a bad reputation, and no area of the police more so than those who do speed checks. The next morning, it took me a bit longer to get to work, as I was a bit scared of getting stopped again. I wonder how long until that will wear off.
Friday 14th December 2007
I've been in a bit of a funny mood lately, up and down a lot. Not been sleeping terribly well and my eating got really bad again, struggling to eat one thing per day at times.
Pleasingly though, work lately has been really good. It's been talked about for a while, but I've now started doing development for an embedded device. They've given me this exciting 'development board', which quite simply is a circuit board designed specifically for development, as opposed to a closed box which is what obviously what's sold at the end of it all. Here is a picture.
Just the circled bit... the other board there is something else. Somewhere on there there is a program running, that I wrote. I've never done anything like this, so I was quite excited, but its all in Java so it's also been reasonably simple. The main obstacle has been the stripped down version of Java that I've got to work with. It's exactly the same as the Java you get on mobile phones. With the benefit of hindsight I was thinking I should have taken the module at uni which was about writing Java for mobiles. Oh well. It's quite good fun, anyway.
Tonight was work's Christmas do. I've never really done a work do before (I didn't go to Sun's), so wasn't sure what to expect. It turned out to be really good though! Met lots of wives/husbands/partners who were all very nice. There was some really nice things said about me which obviously was nice. Good times. I was actually in the last bunch of people to leave, which generally is something I never do. I'm always one of the first. Good to know that occasionally I can not be entirely socially retarded.
Last year I was accused of having "serious issues" with David Ford, following my excitement of Milk and Cookies. But nevermind... Coming soon (Sunday) Dav, Milk and Cookies returns to Lewes for another evening filled with more instruments than I can name, some awful covers, some great covers, and of course, some baked goods. We also get treated to a performance involving the legendary Chris Flynn. He hasn't said what song he wants to do, so we'll see. I'm sure it'll be very good. I was thinking, there seems to be so much money raised this year (it's for charity). There's been bids for a cover of your choice, and bids to play a song with David, both fetching somewhere around £200 or £300, there's apparently also going to be an auction selling some Ford stuff. Not to mention the M&C CD, random merch, alcohol, cookies, the tickets themselves. I'd quite like to know how much gets raised.
Tuesday 11th December 2007
I was out walking back from being in Kingston town center this morning when I bumped into a girl that I recognised from meeting before, so we started chatting. She was quite cute, and seemed to like me. She brought up something that we had discussed before about doing something together. I was too scared to ask for her number though. We stood around talking for a while and when it came to parting ways I nearly walked off but then turned round and asked for her name (Sarah) and phone number. She was more than happy for this. Success! So I got my phone out to enter her number, but oddly on each screen of my menu a different picture came up as the wallpaper. Most of which were really awkward choice of colours making it impossible to see the text. I assumed someone had been messing about with my phone. I also couldn't work out how to get rid of them very quickly, so I resorted to asking if she had any paper. She did, so I began writing and some of the digits kept coming out wrong. This was very annoying. So I tried to give her mine, and something went wrong there too. It was about this time that I realised I was actually asleep and this was a dream. I hadn't quite entered lucid dreaming though, as I kept going as I was, rather than consciously taking control of it. I kept trying to write down my number. When I checked it on my phone after eventually writing it down my number was completely different, leading me to wonder if I'd changed the SIM at work or something (we have loads of Vodafone SIMs at work, for what we do). I got through several pens trying to write down my number, but it just wasn't working. I can't remember how the dream ended now. I think I woke myself up in the end, but I can't really remember.
Now I'm awake I've remembered a thing about phone numbers being used in lucid dreaming as a way of waking up, as apparently generally no one can recall phone numbers in a dream. How strange. Before this one I had had a lovely lucid dream where I was able to make myself fly and things. It's all quite strange.
Friday 7th December 2007
So last night James and I went down to Brooklands College... My father has been involved in the organisation of a local radio station, born out of a spin off of sorts of the Hospital Radio from St Peters in Chertsey. It was quite interesting, and quite fun. Time goes rather quickly when there's something happening every 3 minutes or less. It's also a bit odd having to stop talking in the middle of a conversation each time the microphone came on.
Anyway... I need to go to work now. Might update more later.