19/02/2004

My god, I've been Hitchin for over a year now, how time fly I'm still here, so my cooking skills can't be too bad, although I did accidentally set my wok on fire last week. It's amazing how quick those things go up when you put some oil in them, put them on a high heat and forget about them for half hour. Oops! No damage done though, although I had to open a couple of windows after putting the pan out with a damp towel.

23/07/2004

It's been a long few weeks. I have accepted a job offer at a new company that is about as close to my dream job (well, at least I hope so!) as I can possibly get. I start halfway through August... so I'll know for sure then if it was a good decision but all things look good at the moment.

I need to find some new focus now though; what I'm not sure. I think it's time to start building up my creative side again, it's been ages since I did any video editing and I've got Rhythms of the world sitting on two dv tapes just begging to be turned into something... And next chance I get, I'm going to see if I can't start composing a couple of songs, time to visit a shop and buy some manuscript paper.

And I'm going to have a couple of quiet weeks in and buy some new clothes, goddamn, I need some.

30/06/2004

Life is good, I was over London yesterday,trust my luck to go when there was a tube strike on! Luckily, got a lift back to Kings Cross on the back of a motorbike. Hmm, think I might have to get myself one at some point.

But other than transport, 'twas a well spent evening..

25/06/2004

Well, we're out of the cup. Damn, I haven't felt as emotionally drained as I did yesterday for a long time. I was up and down, I used up all my happy juice and all of my sad juice, and just when I thought I was as empty as it's possible to get, something happened in the pub that squeezed everything else out of me.

So today I've felt exhausted, and because of extra time and penalties, more hung over than usual.

22/06/2004

My god, it feels so long since I last posted an entry. I guess that's because it's been so long since I did an entry...

I've been feeling a little low recently, I have started to realize that my life has ground to a standstill over the past couple of months. I have started having a bi-polar existance between work and the pub; I have forsaken all of my previous hobbies and this needs to change.

I used to spend hours on Kdenlive, hours practicing keyboard, hours coming up with fresh ideas for things that I'd never quite get round to filming (hey, but it's the thought that counts!), and it all seems to have gone pear shaped.

Well, It's reached the point where I'm going to do something about it. I've started taking up swimming on Saturdays, I am going to start going to the cinema again, I am going to pick up Kdenlive development again, I am going to start composing music, I am going to pick up learning Maya again.

And I think I'm going to have another go at putting together a schedule so that I actually fit everything in properly - I do tend to procrastinate about my own stuff if I'm not careful.

On the way in to work today, I was thinking a lot about where I want to go with my life, and thought that what I really need to do is to take charge of what hours I work, and how far I travel for work. Why as a software engineer should I need to work from offices when I have a perfectly servicable computer at home? Well, I know the answer - trust. I need to be able to prove to other people as well as myself that I can be trusted to work from home.

I know what I need to do - find a way to work from home and make it a success. I don't think I could pursuade my boss to let me, so I need to start in some other way - maybe seeing if I can put together some project in my spare time with some kind of commercial appeal. Then dumping my job and becoming self employed.

I watched England play Croatia yesterday (In the pub again, suprise suprise...) Very rammed, but wasn't really getting with the whole atmosphere of the pub. Ended up drinking four pints and feeling drunker than I wanted to be - I've noticed this recently, I don't enjoy getting drunk as much as I used to. I tend to go very tired very quickly. Perhaps I'm just drinking the wrong stuff, perhaps I just need to drink vodka and redbulls instead... but not at a fiver each I'm not!!!

04/03/2004 - First trip to London

Had my first trip into London yesterday since moving to hitchin. Went to Ginglik on Shepherds Bush Green to see General's gig with his new band Grow. Met up with Mike, which was good. The journey was no problem, reminds me of being back at uni again.

Works going ok, albeit I've had a crap week with various Microshaft SDK's that don't work in the way the documentation says they should. Simple thinks, like seeking videos are buggy and patchy in support (for instance, seeking DV files does not work with the media reference timer, it consistantly returns the video to the beginning of the file instead,)

01/02/2004 - I now have a job

I now have a job again. Woohoo! Back to a life of having lots of money and no time to spend it! (as opposed to having no money and all the time in the world to twiddle my fingers). Well, I'm moving down Hitchin or somewhere nearby tomorrow.

17/01/2004 - It's amazing what you can write when your drunk

There has been a spurt in job interests in me recently over the past week. It's true, a lot of them have been from recruitment agencies who have absolutely no idea how to read a cv. I GRADUATTED JUST OVER A YEAR AGO AND I AM 22 YEARS OF AGE, I AM NOT GOING TO HAVE 10 YEARS COMMERCIAL EXPERIENCE OR BE READY FOR A SENIOR POSITION. Sheesh, you'd think that a senior consultant should know this kinda thing.

But of things that look like they might work out, there are two vacancies I am pursuing. One is for a computer games company that I percieve to specialise in games for television, the other is for a small company run by an entrepreneur that is video based. One has a success rate, the other has work I am more interested in...

It's a hard choice, or an easy choice? Of course there are still the the more long term choices to consider (like a certain terrestrial television company) and some shorter ones, and i could always start temping and... No, it's a hard choice. I have to decide what is best for my life, where I can best focus my efforts.

07/01/2004 - A new year, new resolutions?

I'm not normally the kind of person who makes new years resolutions - I see it as kind of pointless to make promises to yourself unless you really want in you heart to make them a reality. And if you feel that strongly about them, why wait until New Year? This year I happened to feel really strongly about doing something around new years, so I'm gonna cheat and call it a new years resolution. Betcha want to know what it is dontcha? Heh...guess...

The job hunt goes steadily onwards, it's been real slow over christmas, I'm hoping that things will pick up a bit now.

Ok so my new years resolution is to learn to play all of the songs in the Simpsons Song Book from memory. Should make a good party piece at a certain type of party. (The kind with a piano or organ nearby)

21/11/2003 - Now seeking work

Having finished my last job, I am now looking for the next. My cv is updated, and on the website here, so if you are an employer and have a position that you think I might be interested in then are very welcome to email me and let me know.

In the meantime, I am enjoying a few days of relaxation whilst gearing up for a hopefully short and sweet job hunting session.

22/09/2003 - New Phone

Hey, long time no write. It's getting more difficult for me to find the time and inclination to write things in my diary - there just doesn't seem to be that much to talk about recently. It's like the usual emails I send out to various people. They all follow the "hey, how's work; my works fine/horrible, must do something some time" and it's kind of horrible noticing the routine.

Well I've finally bit the bullet and gone contract on my phone! Hopefully, I'll feel more inclined to phone people now, after 7 and on weekends of course. But who do I phone when I'm at work anyway? That reminds me, I still haven't got round to installing trillian at work yet.

Uni has almost started up again! (woohoo). I can start reliving my student life for a second year away from uni, I wonder how many more years I've got left in me before I am too old and decrepid? It's a worrying thought.

07/08/2003 - Off sick

I have not been feeling well today. I think I've got a little bit of sunstroke from yesterday - the last time I felt like this was after I had sat down in the sun all day drinking beer in mermaid square a couple of months ago. Just sitting in the sunlight by the window was uncomfortable, and I felt dizzy well into the afternoon.

And I really needed to be at work today really as well - I'm wading through a hefty brainfuck of a problem at work, and the sooner I can get it finished the better.

Oh well, all I can do is put it out of my mind until tommorrow. There is nothing that I can do today (I'd have asked to have some of the code emailed to me at home so I could get some work done, but it's against the company's policy), so there is no point stressing.

19/06/2003 - End of term

It's the end of another uni term, time for me to start looking at my social life and seeing what else other than Joe's, Beorma, Fab and Frenzy is out there. Well, ok, my social life isn't completely made up of student nights out but they play quite a big part, so the sudden absence of nights out is either going to make me start going out in West Brom again, or is going to make me depressed, probably both.

Something was different this year to last though - a lot of people (well, some) have left uni, but it doesn't feel emotional this time - maybe it's because I've realised that I could, if I wanted, get on a train and go say hi. There's something to be said for money, it's better to have some than to not have.

Had a nice weekend, on Thursday went down GTV to film a solo artist for Later with GTV, on Friday it was Susan's birthday so off to broadstreet for a meal and drinks, On Saturday I ended up going to a barbeque beef fest to meet up with people from around the country who I hadn't seen for a year, very pleasant, although I didn't attempt the beef fest challenge - 2Lb of steak and 1Lb of Mixed grill - 1Lb of steak did me, thankyou very much!

On Sunday, I meant to go out, but having got home and got changed.... I fell asleep.

Work seems to be going ok again now, I just don't feel any stress for the job at the moment, even with a deadline looming.

09/06/2003 - Tired

On the way home from work now at eight, it's been a long day, and the thought that I don't get paid for overtime is ever present in my mind. Why am I in this job? I wouldn't mind the hours quite so much if there was any reward for working them, but there isn't. Job satisfaction? Well, I enjoy writing code, and it's ok some of the time... but when it comes down to it, I enjoy my spare time much more, and I don't like it when people try to take it away from me. I have numerous hobbies, I have friends to chat to, I have the odd favourate tv program, hell I even go to bed occasionally, and there is barely enough time as it is working forty hours a week to juggle it all together, let alone fifty or sixty hours. Welcome to the real world you say? No, if you want my time you have to buy it from me.

So do I enjoy my job? As I say, sometimes. It's ok when we being asked to do forty hours worth of work a week and it actually turns out to be forty hours of work. It's not ok when it turns out to be sixty and your asked to 'take it on the chin'. I could keep ranting, but I could do it all day so I'll stop.

Oh well, uni draws to a close for yet another year, can't believe how quickly it's gone. Gtv's still just about ticking over, although it could do with a kick up the arse. As always, nobody every quite appreciates how much effort it takes to do anything worthwhile until it is too late. I'm doing an episode of Later with Gtv at the moment, with Susan and myself presenting, should work out ok, filmed a band yesterday, the Reverberockets, quite good, got four songs and an interview out of them.

20/04/2003 - Snoozin

Had a very pleasant day relaxing in front of my laptop playing games, forgetting about my cares and generally vegging out. Then I got a call from Jon to go play pool, bugger. Went anyway because I constantly feel that I should be out doing stuff more, and met up with Daz and Ace as well. Got thrashed 10 - 3 or something similar.

Why am I writing this? I'm not sure today. I guess I've started to feel like I should be doing something else with my weekend other than sitting about playing games; on the otherhand what I really feel like doing at the moment is going to bed, taking my laptop with me and playing baldurs gate for a couple of hours. Hell, if I had a network connection up there, I'd only need to get up when I wanted food, now there's a scary thought.

Went to a christening yesterday, which included an easter service as well. Reminded me of school assemblies from back in primary school. Nice and friendly atmosphere, but ultimately a bit dull and could have done with more theatrics. Mood, color, light, etc. On the way to the church and back, all I could think about was how christenings, weddings, funerals... they all look alike. Everyone turns up in suits, pass pleasantries with people they only ever see at christenings, weddings and funerals, and then go home again, usually at the first excusable opportunity.

It's just too contrived for words.

16/04/2003 - NaSTA!

Hmmm, been back from Nasta for almost a week now, and haven't said anything yet... it was FANTASTIC! The Gusties put on a real great time, the Scottish dancing (I can never remember the name of it when I want to, it's always that word beginning with C) was funky, The golden bodge was depraiveds... Well I'd go on and on, but I am in the process of writing it up for a soon-to-appear page on the site, so I'll refrain.

And try not to regress in public (private joke that nobody who wasn't from GTV and at Nasta will get)

Back to work, and things are heating up for E3. We've been given the option of working through the easter bank holidays and having the time off somewhere else insead, but I think I need the rest - and at the moment there's a tricky problem to do with a database schema that I could do with thinking on anyway.

Back to life in general, it's sunny out side for a change which is very nice, so went for a beer at dinner instead of working through to get off an hour earlier from work. As I write this, I'm on the train back from Nottingham, and it's still nice and warm and sunny and pleasant. Hmmm, I might even try making use of my laptop outside this weekend! Or in fact, I might competely forget about computers for another couple of days and go swimming, or boozing in a beer garden, or play football... In fact, the more I think about it, the less I want to be stuck in front of a computer this weekend.

I'm stuck in what I guess is the start-of-career blues, when you realise that what is the good of having money if you haven't got all the time you'd like to spend it? And when you haven't got a job, it's the other way around. It seems so unfairly balanced somehow. If only the four day week could be passed as a law (and after all, who wouldn't want it?) then there would be a much fairer balance between work and play.

But this is the real world, and sensible ideas like that just don't happen.

03/04/2003 - Lack of spare time

Well, one of the downsides of having a job is that I have less time to do all of the other stuff I like doing, such as writing entries on this website. I bought myself a laptop with my ill-gotten cash so that I could recoup the time on the train. It helps, but I'm still disabled by my lack of a network cable - doing stuff on the laptop and transfering it to the web means burning a cd at the moment. Grr! Still, I shall be out in search of a cheap hub this weekend to add networking skills to my current ones...

I've been hit down by a cold this week, well not just me, most of the department has had it. I've been feeling rotten since Tuesday, managed to scrape through today, but I'm not sure if I'll be in work tommorrow - it comes down to how bad I feel in the morning.

And it's bad timing, or might be. Nasta starts next Tuesday, well, saying that it really starts at Anna's place on Monday night, since there are five of us (I think) driving down to the airport together at 5 o'clock in the morning... That reminds me, I must get myself a camera and stuff so I can get some pictures to aid the memory at a later date.

Not a lot else to say, I feel miserable because of my cold...

16/02/2003 - Job!

I started a job last week (at last!). You know what the best thing is? It's not just the fact that I'm working on exciting stuff, it's not just the fact that I don't have to dress any differently to what I do at home, it's not just the fact that I get to play games on a dinnertime and after work on a ridiculously powered computer on a ridiculously fast internet connection, it's not just the ability to drink as much tea and listen to as much music whilst I work as I want, it's not just the fact that I get to work with lot's of intelligent and competant people... No, it's all of those facts stuck together along with a pay check, and the realisation that I have merely augmented my hobby into a full time job!

23/01/2003 - Driving Theory Test

Took my driving theory test yesterday, I have to admit, I enjoyed it, which on top of passing, is always a bonus! I scored 31 out of 35 for the multiple-choice part, and fifty-something on the hazard perception test. I am very tempted to go into along rant about why the theory test isn't hard enough (and believe it or not, I did believe this before I took it), but perhaps I will save that up for the rants page.

I think I have recovered now from the shock of following a line of thought about ethics and morality to it's logical conclusion. But the world does make a whole lot more sense now than it did this time last week.

Met with Anna about Best Broadcaster, managed to arrive an hour earlier than is possible beause I set my alarm clock wrong - but felt much better for it! I think I am going to leave my alarm clock on when I go to bed now, and see if I can get by on six hours sleep for a while - hopefully that will give my system the kick-start it seems to need at the moment.

Met up with Jim after my test for a couple of pints, and several pound coins in the hangman machine later, went back to his place for half hour or so, before going home.

Went home via the guild to see if anything interesting was going on - nothing was.

16/01/2003 - Long time, no entry

Well, since christmas, I haven't really found much time to update my diary. I had a promising interview on Monday, which I am going to be waiting to hear back from for the next couple of weeks. We have finally managed to get a beta release of Kdenlive/PIAVE out, leaving me happy with the number of people who appear to be looking at the website, and hopefully trying it out, and a number of pleasant emails, thumbs up, and at least one news article! Everything so far has been praising kdenlive (and therefore stroking my ego) no end, and I haven't heard any bad things yet.

In fact, it has been a very pleasant week all round, I feel incredibly motivated and ready for action. Unfortunately, I felt a bit weak and dizzy on Wednesday, so I think I've been overdoing things. I remedied it by sitting away from my computer for most of the day, and went to bed early with a book. Didn't stay in bed for long, mind you, my mind is too active at the moment and there is nothing worse than having an active mind and nothing interesting enough to fill it!

I'm meeting up with old uni friends tommorrow in the uni bar, which should be good.

22/12/2002 - So here it is...

Three days away until christmas. It doesn't feel like it, but I've never been one to make a fuss about christmas anyway, not since I was a little kid.

I've got into the habit of going up the town with my mother and aunt in the mornings the last couple of days. Well, at least it gets me out of the house, and I am woefully in need of that at the moment. I have been trying unsuccessfully to get my sleeping rhythm back into some resemblance of normality - the fact that I am writing this at three in the morning having just woke up might be a sign that I have succeeded. Almost.

It's getting to be a long time between writing things in this diary. There's a reason - I don't see anything much happening in my life at the moment worth recording. I'm getting stuck into a hole, revolving around reading the news, coding, job hunting and very little else, and I don't see any way to break the cycle. I'm getting depressed.

05/12/2002 - Christmas Looms

Thursday. I felt absolutely rotten today, my fault really, I didn't have enough sleep yesterday, and stayed in bed too long today. Tried to focus on what I was trying to do, but didn't get very far, for the usual reasons.

GTV as per usual yesterday; Susan and I almost but not quite finished editing the Fab Burnt TV - at around three weeks, I think it's the longest - edited Burn ever!

03/12/2002 - More job hunting

Says it all. I've spent the last couple of days doing precious little else. I've said it before, I'll say it again - why did I choose this year to graduate from university??? If I'd done a masters I would probably have just finished by the time the market starts looking up again.

Anyway, I just spent about four hours searching for things to apply for, and only found one job that looked appealing (or even in the right direction), and I've applied even though it's asking for one years more commercial experience than I've got... let's hope my persuasive skills are up to scratch, I guess.

02/12/2002 - Damn

Phoned Rebellion a couple of days ago, and got politely turned down, I think the phrase is. Well, they said phone back in the new year to see if anything turns up, which I probably will, but I'm not really expecting anything. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Have spent an incredible amount of time recently working on Kdenlive, I haven't had this much for coding something since I started uni! Probably 'cos I got overtaken with GTV, but I've been doing a lot of stuff down there as well, helping Susan edit the Fab Burnt TV. It's going well.

I NEED A JOB!!! It's not out of boredom - I've got plenty of stuff to get on with, it'n not necessarily for the money - though it would sure as hell be nice, it's more so that I have a chance to actually get out of the house and interact with people a bit. I feel penned in at the moment; without money I can't organise anything, my other mates have either got jobs, don't live local, or are in the same situation as I am, and all of my hobbies involve sitting in front of my computer or keyboards - not exactly the most social habits in the world. Going to Birmingham to say hi to everyone down GTV is, sadly, the highlight of my social calendar at the moment.

15/11/2002 - Waiting

I've had my interview, I'm not sure how well it went, seemed to be ok, but I'm not experienced enough to judge really. The place is really nice, very close to Oxford town center, and I got the impression that I would really like living in Oxford, too.

10/11/2002 - Anticipation

I've been quite tense and excited the last couple of days. After firing off a reply to the interview offer on the Wednesday, I waited all day Thursday, hoping for a reply, and then fired another one off on Friday morning when I realised that I couldn't find their phone number. As the standard working day drew to a close, my heart fell as I realised that I would likely be waiting all weekend before I heard anything. On an impulse, I looked at the initial email again, and fired off a whois search on the ip address it came from. Staring back at me, the telephone number appeared, and five mnutes later, I had managed to confirm time and date for an interview. Five minutes after that, I had booked the train tickets to take me there.

God knows what I sound like on the phone though, my stomach was twisted in a knot through a mix of fear (at being rejected there and then) and excitement (I might be employed in a dream job soon!) and it was all I could do to make sure I didn't blabber and sounded semi-coherent.

I went to Electronic Boutique (or The Game, or whatever it's called nowadays) in search of some games that they have made. I found one that they had ported, which I thought was good enough, so I went for that one. And a couple of others, cos I really can't resist three for the price of two offers!

Well, that's it. I've got an interview, I'm dead excited about it, I want to do everything in my power to get the job, I am sure that I am competent to do it... What else can I say, really?

07/11/2002 - Something Wonderful

Hopefully. I have been contacted by a company, asking for an interview. Woohoo! It's about time, but now I am on tenterhooks waiting for them to contact me back. So, when an annonymous phone call came at 12:00 I leapt to the phone like a shot to answer it. I said, "hello?". There was no reply, just what sounded a little like scratching. For a second, I thought it was a prank call, but then a pre-recorded message started playing, and I realised I'd got myself all worked up over the first phone call from Nokia Game. D'oh!

Still, that was pretty exciting all in itself. I'm not in NokiaGame for the phone, more to see how innovative they have been this year. Though I wish somebody would foot up the bill to do another AI-style game. I wish I'd had the chance to play that one from the start.

Of course, at the moment, I am jumping everytime my phone even buzzes the monitor. It can't be good for me..

I finally managed to finish reading Iain Banks' Consider Phlebas yesterday, after a rather long session in the bath where the water went tepid and in over an hour I still hadn't washed my hair. It was rather a good book towards the end, though I agree'd with the comments on Amazon - it was a little meandering in the middle, very much a first-book-of-the-series escapade where the author hasn't quite found his feet. Terry Pratchett's Color of Magic was similar in this respect.

Now all I have to do is buy the next book in the series, and I can get back to my marathon readin in the bath sessions again. You know, I think that was the best exam-time eccentricities I ever picked up?

2/11/2002 - Halloween

I feel tired. I went to see the vale fireworks last Thursday with Phil, Mark and Jim, and we went on to the halloween party at the guild afterwards. It was a pretty good night, the sound system in the Deb Hall was awesome - wall to wall bass speakers, but the room was only half full of people?!?

We went onto rounds of aftershocks at around midnight, and didn't stop till 2. I am not sure how many shots we had, and neither is anyone else. But with three people in the round, and one person up at the bar at any one time... urgh. I don't remember the walk back to Jim's place, which is nice cos it's so damn far a walk.

I started to feel weak just before fireworks though. It fits, it seems to be the time of year when I suffer from the odd fainting/panic attack. I still don't know how much psychological it is, and how much physical. I can check my pulse to reassure myself and there is never anything wrong, so I think it's just panic attacks. Maybe with a bit of lack-of-exercise tacked in as well. Anyway, I was good for nothing yesterday - I was worried about my driving lesson, but it went fine. to be honest, I think it was lack of food, lack of sleep and a touch of alcohol poisoning as much as anything that has made me feel like this.

Was down in GTV on the Wednesday before as well, and I was drinking then on the night time with Ian. (In many ways, that was a mistake...) Before that, I met with Anna and we discussed the Best Broadcaster script. That reminds me, I have to finish writing up a new version for next Wednesday. The GTV mailing list has finally been sorted out, which is good.

Had a call from Monarch Recruitment on Thursday just before the fireworks as well. It's nice to know they haven't forgotten about me!

12/10/2002 - Thief of Time

I dunno if I am happy about the last couple of days or not, really. You see, I got sod all work done, and had some much needed time off reading books and playing games. I feel a bit guilty about it, but I feel like I have renewed focus as well. I can catch up with the game demo, applying for jobs, etc. tommorrow.

I read Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time, which means I've now read every book (so far) in the Discworld series. Hurrah! I've read them all! But bugger! I've read them all! Like usual when I sit down with a Discworld novel, I read it in two sittings. It started out really good, and about hundred and fifty pages in I was very tempted to write a review there and then. But I got the feeling about halfway through that the story got lost a bit, and it meandered around trying to find itself. So not the best Discworld novel out, but it was still funny, with lots of little things that make you think, yeah, I can relate to that.

I'm going to move onto Iain M. Bank's Consider Phlebas now. After accidentally reading the last book in the series, I decided I should go back to the beginning and read them in order ;-)

I finally got round to ringing up about driving lessons, so I will be able to put "Clean Driving License" on my CV soon, even if I can't write "have own car" to go with it.

I have spent the last couple of hours hacking away on a halloween script again. Trouble is, I keep having ideas which are hmmph, either politically incorrect, sexually explicit, or just plain vile. They are all broadcastable though... just. Still, gotta laugh haven't you? I'm writing them all down, someone else can sort the wheat from the chaff.

6/10/2002 - Moody

Spent time developing my software as usual, but I seem to have taken an interest in darts as well. I'm not very good, but if I keep having 15 minute stress busting sessions in front of the dartboard, that might change soon...

Still nothing on the job front. I think I'm going to start looking for temping work in Birmingham until I find something better. The application through Vertex is still 'neither a yay or a nay', but I'm starting to think it's the latter - it's been too long now without any kind of feedback.

29/09/2002 - freshers

Long time no update, so I thought I'd stick something up. Well, this time time three years ago I was well pissed off that my loan check hadn't come through in time to go to the freshers party. Two years ago, I was making up to it by going to the freshers party through dint of doing a bit of work for it (mixing the visuals for the dancers). This year, the first party is tonight, and I didn't go cos I wasn't up to it and have left university. (the first reason being the more prominent.)

Nick gave me a call earlier whilst I was still in bed asking me if I wanted to go out for an all you can eat Balti, and I thought that since I hadn't seen him or Claire in the last month that I would. They are going on holiday next week, which is depressing cos I'm not. What can I say, I have no money at the moment. Still waiting on a job, the Vertex thing is still "in prgoress", and I have heard nothing from elsewhere. I'm still sending my CV off to various places but it's fairly discouraging. Might change tack and think of a different way of approaching the problem of being out of work. Hmmm.

In spectacular return to form style, I went into University on Thursday with the aim of helping out sort out stuff for the freshers fair (which I did), but in the meantime I met up with a couple of mates and bought club Tropicana tickets in the meantime. Well, my guil card doesn't run out until the 30th does it? I will be going in tommorrow to help out again, and probably a couple of the freshers meetings and stuff. I'm not sure how much yet; really, geting a job is a priority,

16/09/2002 - Signs

Went to see Signs at cinema with Ace & Kevin today. Hrrrmmmm, I still don't understand exactly why it is that almost every director feels the need to give every movie a Hollywood ending. In this case, it completely didn't fit with the rst of the film, and in my opinion, spoiled it. Oh well. It'll probably appear on UK Living in about 5 years time, cos that's the kind of film it is.

Had a text conversation with John from down GTV earlier thiss week, it really made me feel the need more than anything to get a job; I just wish there was something more that I could do than I am doing. I'm stil waiting on the vacancy from Vertex - think I'll give them a call tommorrow to see if anything has come of it.

10/09/2002 - Sound

Shocking, it's quarter past five in the morning on the 11th when I write this, but since I am about to go to bed, it's less confusing if I still consider it to be yesterday. Err, something like that.

I spent the early part of yesterday (the 9th, but after midnight so actually the 10th, but before I went to sleep and started calling it the 10th) finishing off adding some sound effects to Tux Football, and then (and this is the important bit) packaging it and sticking it on the web. I'm so happy! No, not with the sound - that's quite awful - but I figured out that my sound card was in fact capable of half-decent recording! So I went for it, and recorded a quick little improv for the title screen, and a drum loop for in-game, as well as a couple of cheesy sound effects else-where for ball bounces, etc. Still to be improved, but I was happy.

I spent the first hour of the day looking and seeing if I could force myself to hack at some of the duller parts of Tux, but I wasn't in the mood. So I spent some time catching up on some emails I'd been meaning to write, and spurred on by an email from some person who was interested in Kdenlive, I started working on drag 'n' drop again. Quite productive once I'd got stuck into the code again!

I found a Swordfish DVD on the dresser which I assume my mother has borrowed and forgot to tell me about, so I stuck it on and watched it. Quite a good film, all things said, and it had something I wish a lot more films had - after watching it the first time, you get to watch it all over again with the director commentating it! Wicked, and just the sort of thing I need when I'm up all night programming (along with the bacon sandwiches, gallons of tea and coffee, and the incentive which has been in short supply recently).

Hmmm, seems to be a very technical diary entry today, so I'd better try and balance it out a little. I need a job! Not for th money, though that wouldn't go amiss, but I've always had the problem that I have three or for hobbies/projects going at any ome time, taking up all of my time, and that they all revolve around my keyboard or my computer... which means that for most of the day I'm not moving more than about 3 meters in any direction, and I can't think of any real excuse to move either. I really hope this application form I've sent via the agency comes to something; I think a move out of town and a fresh start will do me a lot of good.

Well, time to go to bed I think. Good night, or more accurately, good morning.

2/09/2002 - Cross Compilation

I'm feeling tired... I have spent the last 4 days or so getting tuxfootball up to a state where I can be proud enough of it to show it off, and in between I have been filling in an application form for a very interesting looking job. Now all I have to do is find around 20 megs of webspace to put my various demos on and I'm all set...

I think I need to start exercising. No, scrub that, I need to start exercising. I think that's what is making me really tired and lethargic at the moment - all I do at the moment is sit in front of the computer. Oh, or stand up and move over to my keyboards for an hour or so.

I keep thinking about training for the toughguy competition - 10 mile cross country followed by an obstacle course. The next one is about 11 months away, so it would give me loads of time to prepare, but the trouble is I doubt I'd convince anyone else to do it as well, and I don't know where I'll be or what I'll be doing this time next year.

No response. Try again.

28/08/2002 - Update

Well, it's been a week or so since my last update. I am still working on my various projects, I am still out of work and seeking employment, and I still can't force my ass out of bed at 8 in the morning like I'd really like to. Yeah, it's cos I haven't got any pressing urge to get up, and because I can work during the night in peace and quiet. What worries me, is that I seem to have got stuck at waking up around midday, no matter what time I go to bed - whether it is before midnight or at six in the morning. So I prefer to go to bed late at the moment.

Well, I got round to my 21st birthday pub crawl last Saturday - only a month after my birthday! :-) Didn't ask that many people, mostly an excuse to go drinking with Phil, both Marks, Neill, Ace, etc. I started drinking around midday, finished drinking around four in the morning, got up without a hangover. Woohoo! And it was the first time I'd been drinking for about a month, too.

I recieved an email last Friday which I am hoping will mean the start of the end of a disagreement/falling out which really shouldn't have lasted as long as it has, and which I still don't really understand how it happened. I fired off a reply, and I'm not sure if I'll recieve similar courtesy. I hope I do, because unless we can sort things out, events seemed destined to continue as they are at the moment, which I don't believe is in either of our interests.

Yes, that last paragraph was intentionally vague,

18/08/2002 - Spelling

Doing well on the football game - I'd give it say two more days and it will be playable. But I'm starting to get slightly annoyed that I seem to have lost the ability to type accurately - I keep spelling the same words wrong in exactly the same way, and I can't understand why - things like sequenence instead of sequence, containter instead of container, and of course, the one that has plagued me for some time now - blueyodner instead of blueyonder. I wonder if there's a name for this kind of typo?

15/08/2002 - Football

Spent the day coding some more on the football game I'm making. I've almost finished the sprite manager - I really need to get SDL_Image working though. It may be approaching the point when I say goodbye to one distro and hello to another...

14/08/2002 - oops?"

Now after checking the weblogs I'm not so sure if it was such a good idea.

*Sigh* Anyway, had a phonecall from L&G telling me that I hadn't got the job, so I guess I can start posting my diary to the web again! To be fair though, it was a relief in many ways, and I knew when I picked the phone up, cos I was worrying that they would say "Yes you have the job"! I don't think I would have been cut out for it - I think the guy who did the technical interview was right; None of my interests lie in database work for a company dependant on the stock market, and I would have proably got bored.

I'm waiting on Vertex now to see if any games developer jobs come my way, and becuase I think it's probably a necessity to have one, I'm putting together a demo game using SDL. It's a football game! Just like the one I started planning way back in first year A-Levels, but nowhere near as limited (well, I was coding for DOS in real mode at the time!)

13/08/2002 - workaroo

Spent a large part of the day designing a website which only one other person will ever see...

11/08/2002 - Old friends

Had a nice suprise whilst checking my email yesterday - Ellie has discovered my gtv webpage and sent me a very nice email congratulating me on it! It's going to be nice catching up and finding out what she's been up to for the past year, and it makes me wonder why people lose touch in the first place - it's so easy nowadays with email and mailing lists and the like to stay in touch, and if you've spent a couple of ears knowing people, is there any particular reason why you want to lose contact? Well, I thought about this, and couldn't find any fault in my own argument, so I have proposed that my Friday night drinking buddies and myself should have our own mailing list to keep in touch.

I spent today yet again trying to fit my CV onto two pages. I've trimmed out everything I can, it just still seems to be way too crowded. I am unsure as to what I should do with it. Perhaps it just naturally is a three page cv? Hopefully though, I will not need it..

9/08/2002 - Assesment over

Went to the L&G assesment yesterday, and... hmm...

You see, when I started the day I was really happy about the place, and getting a job there, but when it came round to the tech interview, the interviewer said to me "the only thing I'm worried about is that you've listed these interests, and as you probably know, we don't do any of them"... And although I knew that when I applied, I'm starting to wonder if there are actually more suitable jobs that I could do.

I did terribly on the competency interview, but I think everyone thought the same, and the rest of the day went very well, so when it comes down to it.. well I'm not sure if I am hoping that they give me the job or not.

7/08/2002 - coding

I'm on track for meeting my kdenlive deadline - well, that's sort of true. I'll probably be a day late and get it out on Friday, but hey, if I do that I should be able to polish it a bit more.

I had a good day today, woke up early, got a lot of programming done, going to bed now to get up to go to the job center to sign on tommorrow (definitely a temporary arrangment). Then I'll have the day to code and prepare for the trip down Surrey for the Legal & General assessment day. Fingers crossed.

Hmmm. I'm not going to put this up on the web till after the assessment (just in case anyone in that direction is watching :-)) but I'm not altogether sure what to do if they say "ok, can you start in two weeks time?" You see, the idea of waiting for these other jobs from Vertex-solutions and seeing what comes of them is very tempting. If I get a call saying "yes, you can be a games programmer" and I have to say uh, yeah but I've signed myself away as a web database developer for two years I'm going to be pretty heart broken. On the other hand, if I don't try for the L&G job and then the other jobs don't come up... well I'm going to feel like a prat. I think I'll be putting on my best show Thursday, and then crossing my fingers on the games developer front.

5/08/2002 - Phone call

After a night on the booze yesterday, I got awoken at half eight by a phone call from one of the agencies I have sent my cv to. More to the point, they had emailed me at 8 o'clock asking me to phone them, and then phoned me at half eight. Does this mean anything? i don't know but it put a spring in my step today! They are looking at me as perhaps a junior games programmer, which is much closer to what I'd like to be doing than e-Commerce.

Anyway, I've spent the rest of the day (after spending another two hours dozing) looking at emails, news, etc. and geting back into gear for coding on Kdenlive - I want to hit my self-imposed deadline of Thursday to get the first milestone completed.

1/08/2002 - Jobseeker

Went to the job center for a second time today, this time to hand in the form and watch someone type it into the computer while I sat there. I can't see any particular reason why they don't make an online version of the form. Of course, it meant I had to sit through an agonising half hour interview. Yes, that's right, it was agonsing. I could not believe how badly designed the user interface of the software she was using was. It was real newbie programmer writes his first visual basic program stuff. I was half tempted to say "look, give me fifty quid and I'll tidy it up for you", but alas, modesty prevailed. Still, it does make me wonder what they hell I am worrying about getting a job - if the competition is made up of the kind of people who design like that.

Talking about design, I spent the day redesigning this website (did you notice?), trying my damndest to do all the visual effects I want, and as per usual, coming up against the limits of the software fairly rapidly and painfully. Still, by the time I upload this, there should be a little marking saying "XHTML Compliant" somewhere on the page, meaning I can stop worrying about it not rendering properly in browsers and start blaming the browsers instead :-)

I am becoming more and more tempted about recording some songs recently, only being let down by the soundcard in my computer. I think that I may buy a half-decent one if the computer that Colin is (hopefully) giving me doesn't have one.

27/07/2002 - Nethack

Well say fairwell to not drinking at home. For my birthday, Keith bought me a crate of Stella, and after four weeks or more of not feeling like drinking at home, I've now been feeling like having a can almost every day. I think it accentuates what I though in my last entry - I drink if there is booze going, and otherwise I don't, which kinda suggests that I should never try and build up a decent sized drinks cabinet. On the plus side, having a couple of cans yesterday gave me enough distraction to be able to trudge through half of the gtv photo archive and convert 'em to web format so hopefully I'll get those up in a couple of days.

Anywho, got up today, and thought I'd have a quick game of nethack/falcons eye. Then another and another and another, and before you know it the days gone. I don't feel bad about it though, as I'm feeling quite relaxed now and getting some serious programming done again, and it has helped to keep my mind off other things.

25/07/2002 - Tolerance Lost

Went into uni yesterday to gtv, making use of my bus pass whilst it still worked. Met up with Phil Hayes again to do what we hoped would be the final crawl of the archive. No such luck though. Now graduations are over, the guild closes at 5 o'clock, and so we only had a couple of hours to grab as much as we could. We only really got as far as mopping up the gaps from the eariler years, and grabbing stuff on the computer, including all of the faces that Anna pulled for the All Day Breakfast title sequence, and which she is going to hit me for when she discovers them on the web for prosperity :-P

That means we've still got the whole archive from 1998 onwards still to trawl through at some point.

I gave Paul a call afterwards, and we went Gun Barrels, followed by the Brook. It's the first time that I have been in the brook, and to be honest, I can't figure out why it seems to be avoided by so many students. It's a very nice, quiet pub, a bit like the Vine on the Harbourne run. A good place to go for a drink and chat with background music that doesn't get in the way of the conversation. I almost made the whole night without mentioning the fact that it was my 21st birthday as well! I decided a week or so ago that I would not celebrate my 21st until I had some money to celebrate it properly. I might even leave it till September, when everyone returns to uni, but I'll have to see how many people are around.

I've noticed that my tolerance for alcohol has dorpped considerably in the past month : in my last year at uni, it was very rare for me to feel rough in the morning unless I was having a serious night out. Now, I am waking up with a rough stomach after only four or five pints. I'm quite happy in a way though - part of the reason for this is that I am drinking less, mostly because there isn't a bar within 30 feet of wherever I happen to be anymore! I haven't really felt any urge to drink beer when I'm at home, so it gets rid of that fear that I might become a raging alcoholic by the age of thirty.

21/07/2002 - Thunder

I woke with a start today, not because of a dream this time, but because of a very loud explosion. From the length of time that it went on for, I thought that a bomb had gone off, or a building collapsed or something of similar grand scale, and I jumped out of bed and went over to the window to see what it was. I couldn't see anything, and feeling a bit shaky got back into bed, when there was a flash, followed very shortly after by another loud explosion, and it dawned on me that it was what is normally one of my favourate types of weather - a thunder storm.

Graduation didn't go badly last Thursday, in fact it wasn't as boring as I was expecting. I saw Jim afterwards and we went for a drink, and I stayed out all night as per usual... His new housemates seem to be a decent bunch.

And I got an invitation to an assessment day at last. The first one that I've had in quite some time, so I was happy about that. I'm going to have to start looking around for some more though, don't want all the eggs in one basket so to speak. There was another job down Camberly which I have applied for, but I do not know if anything will come of it.

And I'm happy, it seems, for about the first time in nine months. The last two days has been the first time this year that I've sat down and actually been able to enjoy programming, without my thoughts straying to other matters and putting me in a somber mood. I guesss it has something to do with an email I sent a couple of days ago, leading indirectly to the removal of an area of doubt from my mind which has been haunting me for the past six months. I know what I mean, but there's only a couple of other people who could guess.

15/07/2002 - Job hunting

Another day searching for jobs, applying and waiting to see what happens. I have spent a large part of the day rewriting my CV. I realised that I have not mentioned on it any of the software projects I have worked on over the past several years, and considering that it's one of my strengths, that's quite an omission! I'm still in the process of reviewing it, but it's at a stage where I feel comfortable sending it off to people again, so let's see if I seel myself a bit better now.

My graduation is this Thursday, but to be honest it feels like just something that's going to happen. I am not feeling any emotion about it whatsoever. Hey ho. Would I choose not to go? No, because I want to see everyone for one last time. That's important to me. But as far as I'm concerned, they could hold the ceremony in the pub and I'd be just as happy (probably happier, truth be known!)

09/07/2002 - Bad Day

Today seem to be one of those days where I'm not going to get any peace and quiet to myself to do anything. I was supposed to go over to Birmingham to help Chas edit some stuff down, but what with waking up late and then getting not getting ten minutes to myself to do anything that I wanted to get done today, all I want to go is hide away somewhere with a book or something and get away from all of the demands.

I've got my nephew pestering me about HTMl every ten minutes, I've got my mother dropping hints all the time about getting a job - and there is precious little else I can do more than what I am doing, which is looking on various sites and applying for them., whenever my aunt comes in the first thing she does is ask me a bunch of questions about her computer, and she expects full answers there and then, and when you tell her the answer she doesn't understand it, and expects everything to be done for her. Which would be fine, except that I am helping in my spare time, and I have lots of other important things that I want to do in my spare time, like searching for jobs, learning new skills to improve my CV, coding which puts some weight behind my cv, etc. etc. etc. and when you consider that I got burnt out doing Burn FM voluntarily, people don't seem to understand how much it stresses me out. There is nothing I can do to stop getting stressed out about it - people just have to leave me alone for a while. Instead they get impatient and angry and start trying to lecture me, and on days like this I just can't stand it.

I'm feeling guilty about not going in to help Chas today, as he is the only person at the moment who doesn't get impatient when I have other things to do. So I'm feeling stressed out, guilty, and wound up at the moment and still haven't managed to get anything done that I wanted to get done this morning.

Perhaps I should just go back to bed and pretend today hasn't happened.

07/07/2002 - Busy Day

It's been a strangely productive day - sort of. Or at least it feels like it. I woke up, planning to make a start on the dynamic web pages for gtvreunited. I asked first which scripting language/database was preferable and was told JSP/postgresql... so I have spent the rest of the day looking at JSP and trying to get it installed on my home computer. In the meantime, discussions on exactly what needs to be on the website have broken out, which seems to be fairly productive and make me glad that I didn't get around to starting anything today.

Throughout the day, my 11 year old nephew discovered my website and decided to make his own (hi Daniel) so he's been pestering me every ten minutes about it. Saying that, he's pretty much got the hang of the basics, now. I suppose I'm quite proud really - I'll get him hooked on Java or C++ next I think ;-)

Tommorrow I'm going back to GTV for the day at least, since Chas has come down to do stuff. I'm not sure how much we will get done, but I can continue job hunting whilst I am there, I suppose.

30/06/2002 - Meditation

I woke up around ten o'clock today, the earliest that I have woken for some time. My sleep went all scewed around about the time uni finished, and I surmise that it's because I have no pressing urge to get up at the moment. I am trying my hardest to interest myself in my projects and to be productive, but I am having limited success. Perhaps I am trying too hard?

I put my waking up early today down to a rather pleasant experience last night. It has been a while since I last tried practicing deep relaxation properly - I always tend to get the problem where you can't stop yourself concentrating on how hot you are getting, or on your breathing, or on the urge to swallow. For the first time in a long time, I managed to hold off all three thoughts long enough to drop into the energizing rush that comes when you reach a certain depth, and it refreshed me. I slept better than I have in weeks. I remember dreaming, but I didn't think enough about it until I had already forgotten it, so can't write it down.

Do out of body experiences exist? It's still a question I ask myself. On a rational level, I would have to say that it's a foolish fantasy, and yet... there are some feelings that you get as you fall into deep relaxation which I don't understand. If, once you get the vibrations, you try to move your conciousness into them, it's an almost surefire way to bring on the upward surge which can be quite scary the first time you experience it. And once the upward surge has happened, sometimes you drop straight out of the meditation. I've had it where I have been completely unable to sleep afterwards, feeling completely restless and ill at ease with myself, unable to get comfortable and sometimes aching. And then... another surge arrives, this time though, feeling as if it is coming into the body. I have grown used to it arriving now, sometime between five minutes and half an hour after the initial expereience. It feels almost like some warm, fuzzy wave of energy is slowly moving itself into position until it encompasses your body, and with it, all anxiety drops away, and usually sleep is soon to follow.

28/06/2002 - Catching Up

Bumped into Andy Doyle yesterday - well I say bumped into, I arranged it by calling him and asking him if he wanted to go for a drink. First time that I've been out drinking since uni finished, and though my tolerance hasn't dropped yet, my stomach wasn't very happy about it, though to be fair they were not the nicest pints of Worthingtons that I have ever drank, but what do you expect for £1.10?

We got talking about "the old days" and stuff, about back at school, etc. Andy now works at the airport behind the bar, and has a receeding hairline which I can't tell if he's touchy about or not, though he doesn't like being told that he's starting to look like his dad! Apart from the receeding hairline, he hasn't changed much - except that he's gained the habit of pointing at women and saying "I'd do 'er" which doesn't seem to fit with the kind of person I always knew him as, really.

On the whole, today has been boring and unproductive. I keep trying to do some coding but don't get around to it, because I need to read up a bit before I can make an educated choice about how to proceed, but I haven't been able to concentrate on reading my book. Trouble is that none of the chairs in the house are comfortable reading chairs, and I'm not in the mood for reading computer books in bed at the moment, my other usual reading haunt. Oh, and the book is too heavy and expensive to risk reading in the bath. So instead, I'm sitting in front of the computer writing my diary and watching news sites update story by story... Quite pathetic really.

Actually, stuff it I am going to go read in the bath. I need to relax at the moment and get away from this computer screen for a while.

26/06/2002 - Broke my computer

Oops, was having such a good day as well, getting lots of coding done, watching movies, reading the news, keeping up to date with my email, searching for jobs, and updating my computer all at the same time when oops - the update went wrong, my computer stopped working properly, and I spent the next half hour trying to fix it. It's going to be another couple of hours before I get it up and running properly again (_big_ download), but those are the breaks for running bleeding edge (Well, Mandrake Cooker to be precise). I could settle down with a nice stable computer, but no, I have to be bleeding edge, don't I? Still more stable than Windows 9x though :-P

24/06/2002 - Stuff

University is over now. I got a 2:1 in the end, which I can't really grumble with seeing as I did sod all more than I had to in the final year. I don't know how to say how I feel about it being over. The last day of term hit me quite hard - you always know when you've feeling emotional, cos you get a good nights sleep. It hit me when after GTV week had finished, Chris, John and myself were in Joes chatting with people. It didn't hit me then - it was when we met up with his housemates and wandered over to the clocktower. It was quiet - for a place that is always bustling in term time, it was quiet, with one, perhaps two people walking past the library. John and his housemates were taking pictures and having a bit of a laugh, but everything seemed to be winding up about then.

But even though I was sad, it wasn't a depressing kind of sadness, more a change in your focus, the past few years becoming part of history, let's see what's coming up next sorta thing. The only thing I've really decided is that whatever happens, I need to move away from the Midlands for a while. I've been here for almost twenty one years and I really want to move elsewhere, if only for a short while.

I haven't got a job yet, I'm still looking. I'm eager to get one, but it's not really something I'm particularly worried about at the moment. I've got a hundred and one different projects that I can get on with the meantime, but I'm only finding time to do one or two of them at once cos all my projects take up so much bloody time!

Oh well, I'm tired, it's one o'clock and I've got a cold. I'm going to go to bed and see if I can get up bright and early. To think, this time last summer I was getting by on 4 hours sleep and almost passing out because of the excitement of working on P==NP? This year, I'm finding it hard to get out of bed with any less than 10-12 hours sleep.

02/06/2002 - Exams gone, GTV week looms

Whee! I've finished uni! I'm not sad, I've started to get frustrated at not being able to write any software which is of any use to anyone (with a couple of exceptions, such as sabbgraph). I want to actually start writing stuff which matters, even if it's only to a couple of people, rather than writing stuff which only every gets used to dictate whether I get a 2-1 or a 2-2.

Of course, with exams out of the way, that means that gtv week is coming up soon! In my usual style, I've come up with a todo list with a gzillion things on it, and will then probably only get around to doing 3 of them... And that's not counting getting back to development on kdenlive, and recompiling sabbgraph, and writing the autocue software, and... and... and... THERE JUST AIN'T ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY! (SOB SOB)

Bollocks, and it's not started to kick in yet that there are a lot of people who I'm not going to see again anytime soon. We are supposed to be doing the Harbourne run again on Monday though, so that should be quite nice, and Chas is coming down sometime this week, which is also going to be groovy.

26/05/2002 - One exam to go

Well, it's not gone as well as I hoped, to be honest. Out of the four exams I've had so far, I can only honestly say that one of them has gone well. Inbetween thinking about exams, I'm also trying to get some more work done on kdenlive, which I haven't had the time to work on recently, mostly 'cos Mandrake Cooker seems to have broken KDE 3.01 in the process of updating to GCC 3.1.

15/05/2002 - Exam half-way mark

Well, a bit past halfway mark. I have done three of five exams now, and the last one actually felt half-decent when I walked out of it!. So now I'm up at 2 in the morning revising for the exam I have tommorrow afternoon. Hmmm....

Meeting with Anna about the show tommorrow again. Dunno why, but it's really bugging me that whenever I talk to anyone about it, people automatically seem to call it my show, rather than the joint effort that I see it to be between me and Anna. I don't think I've ever referred to it as my show to anyone, they've all just assumed that I'm the overall producer of it, and I don't like that cos for me it sort of defeats the point of co-producing a show if both people don't have equal say in what happens.

Anyway, I started writing a script for it. The main trouble we seem to be having at the moment is getting our head around exactly what the show is, what it is about, and how it's going to work. Hopefully we'll get a better grasp of it tommorrow, but I'm hoping that by actually getting some form of script together, it will kick start us into discussing the show a bit more.

05/05/2002 - Too many Crap Movies

That DVD player came with 10 DVD's, and I have now watched all of them. That includes about 6 hours of robocop, 4 hours of Mortal Kombat, The PeaceKeeper, Red Scorpion, and Legend of the Mummy 2. Then on a spree today, I watched two DVD's from blockbusters - Cannibal Holocaust and Dude, Where's my Car? Well, after all those piles of total shite (well, Cannibal holocaust was ok 's'ppose but it's not worth watching again) I have reached by quota of crap movies for the week. To make up for it, I watch Seven.

Why are so many movies made such utter crap? Do directors and producers look at scripts and not realise that if it looks bad on paper, it's gonna look bad as a movie as well? Do they get so lost up in "yeah, let's make it look good" that they realise that that a) only works if you have a big budget, and b) that if there's no plot your movie will look dated in a couple of years.

Oh well, back to revision...

30/04/2002 - Tech Support Day

After coming home on Monday from Uni, I find that my mother has bought herself a DVD player. Great! But with one drawback - she'd spent an hour trying to get it working, and failed. After calling simon over from across the road, he also couldn't get it working, so I think I my mom was a bit suprised when I got it working in under 2 minutes...

Sometimes she forgets I've spent the last three years down in GTV

Anyway, I bought the latest version of Linux Format today, and it had Mandrake 8.2 on the cover. Now, if you recall from a few days ago, I was getting annoyed with Debian because it did not have KDE 3 yet. Mandrake does, so I spent the evening neatly backing up everything I needed, taking note of the little details I would surely need, defragging my Windows partition so that I could allocate an extra gig to linux... and then set to work installing Mandrake in place of Debian.

It almost went completely smoothly - the only problem I have is that it appears that my graphics card is no longer supported in XFree86 4.2, so I've been relegated back to an older version which doesn't support anti-aliased text :-( On the other hand, at least now I have a system which has KDE 3 available, so I am now downloading it and installing it. So as soon as my exams finish, I can get cracking on the user interface again.

Anyway, after finishing the installation and messing customizing it to just the way I like it again, I realised it was 6 in the morning. So guess what - I didn't get up for my revision lectures today :-(

28/04/2002 - A day of recovery.

It was Mark Lucas's birthday yesterday, but since he wasn't around on Saturday we all went out on Friday instead. I remained pretty much sober - I had 2 pints all day. Mark didn't (obviously). In fact, after having several pints of guiness he started drinking Jack Daniels. Doubles. Neat. That was at about 4 o'clock, and since it was his 21st, me and my mates made sure that his glass never emptied... Apparently he doesn't remember anything after 8:30 which is probably for the best! (Don't worry, we carried him home)

I went to Fab yesterday where I didn't stay sober. I ended up on the dancefloor with Chris from my java team of last year and some of his mates. I had a few gloomy spots, but overall it was a decent night. I got a taxi home and spent the journey talking about the problems with school league tables and possible solutions for schools in special measures. (Don't ask why...)

I've spent most to today feeling exhausted. I spent the day conversing with Christian about kdenlive, reading news sites and sleeping. I'm going to get an early night, me thinks.

25/04/2002- Where did today go?

I got up late - I know that. It was another 12:00 day, but... for the life of me I seem to have managed to go through an entire day without doing a single constructive thing. I spent about an hour or two trying to get this VRML project done, which is going incredibly slowly, as I just don't seem capable of focusing on it, and... well I don't know. I hate days like this, I feel that there's something that I am doing wrong. I don't understand why I am having such difficulty focusing on anything at the moment. I never used to be like this, I used to be able to get shitloads done.

Neill said yesterday that this project doesn't have to be in for tommorrow, but I'm going to force myself to do it tonight anyway.

24/04/2002 - New Show in Progress

I suprised myself today and got up real early (well, nine o-clock). I went to uni early, and got my hair cut - something that I really needed to have done! Anyway, I started trying to get some VRML done, but it never quite happened. I did a little bit, but I was working over telnet and the connection died suddenly, so I gave up.

I sat in on the Burn FM meeting, since I didn't have anything better to do, and gave a few pointers about the log tapes, as well as a long conversation with Adam about the merits of a Quake 3 map of the guild - oh yes, that was the other thing. I spent a good hour this morning swearing at myself, cos I got all the dimensions of the guild wrong. I'm going to have to redo the map from scratch if I want it to look good :-( On the other hand, it was good experience though.

After the Burn meeting finished, it was off to the GTV meeting which was held in mermaid square, though I suprised myself because I didn't drink anything stronger than coke. Still, it's cheaper. After the main meeting, Anna and I discussed what to do for the music show we've been planning. We started off badly - we couldn't think of any particular idea that we could get our teeth into so to speak, we had lots of ideas for where we could do the show, what bands we could bring in etc, but no convincing idea for the show - then it hit us. Well, it hit Anna actually but she shared her idea and suddenly everything we had been discussing seemed to fit into place... I'm not going to say much about the plan yet, as it's still in the very early stages, but if it works it's going to be really good. I've spent the last hour or so thinking about it, and starting to write stuff down.

(Incidentally, this ties in with the dream I had on 21/04. Coincidence? I think probably.)

23/04/2002 - I got carried away...

Oops - I have spent the entire day working on the model of the guild I started building yesterday. I now have the majority of the Main wing done, and the floor plan for the otherside as well as Berlins is complete, but man is it a time sink. I computed the necessary stuff for the bots, added a couple of weapons and let 'er rip! It's quite fun, even though it's not finished yet. There are a hell of a lot of narrow corridors, so this map rules if you get the rocket or the rail gun, but the open spaces aren;t used by the bots much at the moment - probably because everything east of Mermaid square is desolate :-) Oh, and there's only one way into Berlins at the moment.

But I'm feeling guilty now - this is YET ANOTHER DAY where I got no revision, and no (proper) work done, though this map is going to be really cool when it's finished. Tommorow is going to be taken up with the GTV meeting, I'm meeting Anna afterwards to discuss the music show that we are going to make, and I'm going to try and finish my VRML

And maybe, just maybe, I'll manage to get some revision done.

22/04/2002 - Unproductive Day

Well, what can I say? Plans for the day go completely tits up. I didn't manage to drag myself out of bed until 11:0'clockish. and after getting to uni for 1 o-clock, I spent the first hour in the games room playing arcade machines, the second hour in the labs talking about VRML (but not actually doing anything constructive), and then the revision lecture that I actually turned up for turned out to be useless, so everyone left after 10 minutes. I finally got home at 5 o-clock or so, and have been messing around building a Quake 3 Arena map of the guild for the past 8 hours or so.

On the plus side, I did manage to do a bit of combinatorial optimisation revision on the way to uni, and resisted the urge to go to Joe's out of sheer boredom

Hey ho, I'll try again tommorow. I'm gonna have to concentrate on my VRML, but I really want to try and finish this Q3 map now - it really will look sweet when it's finished. I think I'll aim to do a bit of Computer Networks revision tommorow morning before I set out to uni, that might help me get into the mood for the stuff, and I need to find some examples for Comb. Opt. so that I can practice them - I've decided that I want to go into that exam prepared by actually KNOWING MY SHIT. It's never failed me in the passed :-)

21/04/2002 - Productive Day

Today was one of those days that I like - I woke up (admittedly at half-twelve, but that's going to chance for tommorrow) to a phone call by John who needed the password for the computer in Burn FM, followed by getting up and my usual routine of a nice cup of tea whilst browsing the 50 or so emails which have accumulated over the night. Once that's out of the way, I had another quick stab at dethtrap, the doom 2 level which I rediscovered yesterday, and then I started adding more stuff to this website. Oh, and I had a nice relaxing bath, and feel better now.

Saying that, I got no revision or work on my VRML done at all - I don't understand why, but I just don't seem to have any interest in uni work anymore, and I really need to snap out of it by tommorow. After I've written this, I'm going to go to bed with a good book, and have an early night methinks. I'll set my alarm clock for 6 in the morning - that always does the trick. Well - it does something at any rate, even if it doesn't get me out of bed. If I can get a good mornings work in, revising combinatorial optimisation, then I can call up IBM and let 'em know when I want to go to a graduate selection day.

20/04/2002 - Waiting for Debian

Ok, Debians pissed me off for the first time ever. You see, Kdenlive has just started to need the most up-to-date version of KDE to work properly, or I'm going to have to start copy-n-pasting funcitonality from the main libraries into my program so that it carries on working. Which I'm not prepared to do, period. Unfortunately, it's going to be at least a month before KDE 3 makes it into Debian Unstable, so in the meantime I'm going to have to download an compile it myself from CVS. There goes another night of coding :-(

I saw a couple of movies with Ace, Marcus and Kevin recently - Blade II, which is a very good martial-arts style movie, and The One, which a not-very-good martial arts style movie. Yeah, it had bullet time in the first 10 minutes or so which looked cool, but then they ran out of budget.

Well, I now enter the last ever term of unviersity. Scary, huh? I really must remember to find out when all my exams are still, and revise for them - I've been relaxing for the last week or so, and getting work done on kdenlive and stuff, and I've still got to get my VRML project finished for the 26th. I'm doing a fairly simple lunar lander. Well, I say simple, but you know me ;-) I got an email from IBM letting me know to book a date for the graduate selection days. I'm going to book a day first thing on Monday, I think. This selection day is for a place at Hursley Laboratories, and the more I read up about the place, the more that I feel like it's the absolute perfect first-job for me, so finger crossed, I'll get in.

Either way, it's going to be the last term of GTV as well, I'm hoping to do something big, like last year, to go out on. I asked Anna a couple of days ago if she wants to collaborate on a music show of some description, and she's interested so hopefully we can come up with something really good together.

13/04/2002 - Nasta Verdict : Yippee!

Wow, it's been a week now since I got back from Nasta and I haven't written anything about it yet, so here goes!

It all started a week last Tuesday. I met up with Andy, Neill, Antonia and Vicky at New Street to start the two and half hour train journey to York. We were all spread out about the train, and it was packed to start with, so we couldn't talk to each other much, so I consoled myself by reading Linux Format for most of the journey instead. When the train started to empty towards the end of the journey and we actually could start talking to each other, we bumped into this random guy who turned out to be from York uni. We all got in a taxi together and headed over to York uni, where we arrived at exactly the same time as Anna pulled up in the car. We could shove all our bags and stuff in her car instead of lugging them on the 10 minute trip across campus - perfect timing!

Well, Random York Guy showed us where YSTV was, and then went on his merry way, out of this story, leaving us to collect our keys and wait for everyone else to arrive. Chris, Helene, Amy, and Alice didn't take too long to arrive, giving us a bit of time to browse around YSTV's studio looking at all the cool equipment that they've got and stuff. We headed off to grab our stuff out of Anna's car again (who in the meantime had driven over to where we were staying) and headed up to our rooms - Chris's ploy to go to the pub didn't work cos nobody from YSTV would tell us where it was till after the intro talk! The rooms were your standard halls of residence fair, except that they were new and thus, really nice :-)

Well, we went to the intro speech, where there was free beer, and it didn't drag on for too long. Anna and Alice stood up to give a quick "Hi, we're GTV", and each station found out what they had to do for their golden bodge - each station has 30 minutes to make a 5 minute video, which has to centre around randomly picked topics, themes and include a randomly picked phrase. We got to do "Mountain climbing in East Anglia" in the style of David Attenborough, including the phrase "Look at all the green duck shit. Anyway, after that we all walked into York itself, with the usual ambient grumbling that you get whenever you tell students that they have to use their legs for 20 minutes... When we got to York we went to some pub for food. I didn't have anything myself - I wasn't that hungry. I just had beer. Then we headed to the local Varcity, and then onto a club, which I've totally forgotten the name of. For some reason (almost) everybody from gtv decided to leave at midnight, and not realising their were still people about who I knew, I went with them. Bugger, wish I hadn't now because I wouldn't have trapped my finger in the taxi door, Doh! Anyway, it bled a lot, but at least the alcohol flowing round my system stopped me from feeling it, and it turned out not to be as bad as it first seemed.

I woke up at the nice early time of 7:30, perfect for making breakfast which only got served between 8am and 9am! Not many people made this breakfast, but at least everyone turned up for the Techie Challenge, a simple quiz to test out techie knowledge. We were up against the combined talents of btv and Lust, (because between the 2 stations they only had three delegates at the conference), and... we lost. But it was real close. And hey, I answered one question correctly, identifying RAID as Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. John & Joe arrived later that day, and in the evening we headed off to the Minster for the start of a Ghost Tour, hosted by John's brother. It was pretty cool, and when it had finished, we headed off to the pub until closing. Yet again, Helene decided to go home and everyone decided to follow - except for me and Andy anyway, who wandered off to the club, where we met up with Anna and Alice who'd been talking to the Gusties all night (Gust being the TV station in Glasgow). Terrible - out of the 20-odd people who turned up, only 4 managed to make it to the club. What does that say about the staying power of GTV, eh? Anyway, I ended up drinking lot's of redbull & vodka and bottles of VK Ironbrew, before hitting the dancefloor. with all the other stations until closing, though Andy vanished at somepoint in the night, returning when I texted him to say that the remaining three of us has gone to Anna's room for vodka.

Lovely - day of the awards dinner and yet again, I made breakfast. Andy didn't make an appearance till well after dinnertime, which was when we started to plan our golden bodge in the Junior Commom Room. It didn't go too badly, all things considered. We made great use of "putting the camera sideways to simulate mountains", and a fab little Jurrassic park joke at the beiginning (Richard Attenburough, anyone?). After we finished, we went to the village for dinner, and then onto a couple of talks. The first was talking about TVYP, and the second was by Nick Elliott, the Drama commisioner at ITV I think, who also reminded me of the old guy sitting by the fire on the Fast Show (the one who says "Of course, I was very, very, drunk..."). Went to the shop to get some supplies for the inevitable party after the awards, (4 cans of Boddingtons, 4 cans of Red Bull - yay!) and then it was time to don my tux and wait for everyone else to get ready. Ian, Francine, and Ed & Dave arrived around about now, just for the dinner. (lightweights! :-P)

The awards ceremony was at the Merchant Adventrures Hall in York, which is a nice looking medieval building of some description (I have done no research into this whatsoever - can you tell?) We started off with dinner, which IMHO was pretty rank (Ed will back me up on this. Probably). Several pints of Tetleys and some wine later, (and a hair full of sugar, courtesy of getting caught in the crossfire between Ian & Helene vs Dave & Ed), the awards themselves started. Oh - we decided to do a sweepstakes as well - everyone on the table put in a quid, and picked a random number between 0 & 7+ by choosing from the teared up number. Whoever had the same number as the number of awards we won got the pot. I had 0, so I thought I had a good chance of winning ;-) Anyway, the awards ceremony started with the Best Ident, and not suprisingly, the lacklustre effort that was the one that I entered came absolutely nowhere, but hey, I still had my serious entry to go, and I was still in the running for the sweep stakes. Oh, and Ed & Dave were heckling throughout the night. It should be mentioned somewhere.

Then disaster - John got highly commended for his Guild@home! Out of the sweepstakes I go, but hey - kudos to John, and that was just the start of our awards. Next alongs comes comedy - the one which I had entered that comedy ident which I never could make my mind up whether or not I liked, and which made people wither laugh hysterically or cringe... The one that I entered on the principle that, well, any entry's better than no entry and the chances are that it won't come anywhere... Which I then spent the three days at Nasta worrying that it might come somewhere...

It got highly comended.

Well after the shock of that, we carried on not winning anything until we reached Best Title Sequence - My serious entry. I had entered the Later with GTV title sequence, which in all modesty was very good. Before the award was announced, we got to see clips from all the title sequences, and I knew straight away that this was going to be a fight between Later & the entry from Nerve. So when Nerve came in as Highly commended, I was basically just waiting for them to call out for me to go up. And they did!

Well, the awards finished, and then it was downstairs to start dancing... and boy - did I dance! (Well that's what I like to call it anyway). Picture this - I had half the dancefloor to myself and was still bumping into people! Theres nothing quite like a natural high! Oh, and I remember Ian doing forward flips quite a bit so I think he was enjoying himself...Well lot's of pictures were taken and I haven't seen any of them yet. Hopefully Chris will follow his normal habit and put them all up on his website (hint hint if your reading :-)

Well at around half twelvish we had to leave the merchant adventurers hall and head back over to the JCR to continue the jollities. Unfortunately... no music. Well, there is an organ in the corner of the room though.

Heh!

Well, after people egged me on for oooooh all of thirty seconds I gave in to demands and went over to the organ. (It should be noted that this is one of those quaint old organs - this one's bass pedals went more and more out of tune the longer you played, and on B above middle C on the upper manual was a bit tempremental... Oh, and the Volume Pedal was broken, meaning you could only play at FULL VOLUME.

Two songs later, someone turned me off, because security had come over... but before I had chance to move off the organ, Andy came over and said it was OK to carry on if they shut all the windows. I played a couple more songs, then someone shouted over that I could stop because some music had arrived. Well... it had... sorta. It was a crappy little ghettoblaster type thing which you could just about hear if you was within a metres distance of it, so very soon I was back on the organ again. I must have played for about an hour in total, before the organisers finally got back with some speakers worthy of the venue, at which point I was happy to give up the organ, seeing as how much I'd sobered up. Can't drink whilst playing, see?

Anyway, I continued drinking, remember people dancing on the pool table, the music stopping till people got off the pool table, kind of a bit of dancing, and then the porter arrived. She didn't look very happy, as she went over and made them turn the music off, before singlehandedly announcing to the 100-strong partying students that this was an Unauthorised Party, and the it was three in the morning and that it had to stop. Then she walked out, with people laughing at her, before someone piped up "You know what this means? It's an UNAUTHORISED PARTY!!!" and the music continued for a good ten minutes before she turned up again with a couple of security guards. Ah well, we all went and hid in the kitchen of one of the blocks, whilst arrangements were sorted out, and then most people headed up to the top floor of one of the other blocks (me included), where we carried on talking till about 5:30, when we all slowly returned to our seperate rooms for a good two hours sleep before brekky!

So, yet another day of the shakes, having breakfast (I managed to eat a good mouthful of cornflakes before giving up) and then it was off to hand in our keys, and go to the AGM. We decided in the end not to host next years NASTA and so next year everyone will be off to Glasgow. Should be fun, and hopefully I'll be able to go. Anyway, after everyone else had left, Those of us catching the train - myself, Ian, Neill, Antonia and Vicky - wandered around York till 3ish. and then caught said train.

I eventually got home around 5:30pm, and after wading through some 1500 emails (I'm on a lot of high volume mailing lists, mostly to do with KDE), I went to bed, andi didn't wake up again till 3pm the next day :-)

23/03/2002 - End of Term is Past

Sigh - term's finished. Lot's of people have gone home, others are still around but have lots of work to do, and I fall into the latter category. After really enjoying myself last week, I came down off the end of term high about an hour after Burn FM finished at 6:00, and felt exhausted. Now I've got to concentrate on my writeup for the next couple of weeks till Nasta. It's worked out kinda nice though - I couldn't concentrate on work whilst I knew that everyone else was about doing stuff and having fun. Now they've gone, I can sink totally into myself and focus solely on work.

I've still got to get round to finding a job as well. Think I'll plan now to write up my CV tommorrow, then I can go into uni to get it printed off and photo-copied a g'zillion times or so.

Oh, and I've learned to appreciate deadkeys! So from now on, I can type é, æ, Ã and other weird and wonderful characters real easily! Yeah, yeah, I know it's just a toy since I don't speak any language other than English, but it's still cool.

20/03/2002 - End of Term is nigh

Woohoo, my final year presentation is now in the past, I just have to write up everything I've done and I'm home and dry. Almost. Anyway, I had to do a marathon programming session to make sure that everything was in tip top shape for the demonstration, and it's really put me in the mood for programming, so on that note I have now, after three weeks of almost 0 activity, started working on Kdenlive again.

Well, term ends on Friday, and then I lose all social life until the 2nd of April when I'm OFF TO NASTA! Yeehar! Ok, Nasta is the student television awards, in which I am rather humbly (and, in retrospect, in some cases embarassingly) entered for three awards in total. Of those, I reckon one has a chance of winning, one will make everyone cringe, and the otherone is a bit dull really. If I get a chance, I'll stick 'em all up on the web.

Oh yeah, but since my write-up has to be in on April the 8th, until then I'm still not going to have as much time as I would like to work on Kdenlive, so although development is continuing, it is doing so rather slowly... I am hoping to be able to load audio files and preview them over the next couple of days, and then I shall start work on the timeline.

I've been in a strange kind of high recently. Sorta like the feeling I usually get in summer after exams. I think it's 'cos I'm starting to realise that there really is not that much time left at uni, and I'm going to miss it once it's gone. Not a lot to add to that really.

07/03/2002 - Stuff happens

Had a great time yesterday with the GTV crew, started around dinnertime, went for a Balti and then went and chilled down the pub

I have REALLY got to start concentrating on coursework again

Anyhow, I haven't had any time to work on kdenlive or SABBGraph the past couple of weeks, and don't think I'll get any time till the end of March now. I have managed to put SABBGraph in cvs now, so I just have to update the homepage so that everything ties together.

Oh, I'm going to start playing organ at a pub near me (The Merry-go-round, by the Jesson Park in West Bromwich) on March 24th and every Sunday there-after, between 8:00pm and 10:30pm. Come and see me if your in the area :-)

26/02/2002 - Long time no entry

Hmm... no entry for three weeks, think I'll get round to writing one! The Sabb Elections was last Friday at the guild, and I have to say that it was the smoothest Sabbs show of any I have experienced. Big credit to everyone involved!

Well, my check is in for Nasta, so I'm definitely going, even if it is going to leave me broke :-) Still unsure as to whether or not I'll be entering anything though - Since we aren't going to be able to have a meeting to vote on anything before the deadline, it's going to be down to the whim of the station manager.

Well, in other news, I had to write an election graph display program for Sabbs. (again, but let's not get into that...) I'm going to shove it up on the downloads page as soon as I get a chance. Oh, and I have started a new KDE project - Kdenlive! It's going to be a non-linear video editor when I finish writing it, but that could be some time, since I'm writing it on top of aRts, which as of yet, hasn't got video support! Fingers crossed, it will be useable by the time I get to the stage where I can use it. Anyway, you can check out the link on the left.

07/02/2002 - Back down GTV

Well, it's been almost three weeks since I last wrote anything so I thought I'd better get round to it. I've read Look to Windward now - great book, I shall be bying some more of My Bank's books I think. I've read The Truth as well - interesting but not one of the more humorous Discword novels IMHO. I'm not going to review them here - other people can do a better job than I can.

I went down GTV properly for the first time in ooh about 3 months today. Yeah, I go to meetings but cos of having so much to do for my course, I haven't been able to do much else. Anyway, I've spent the last couple of days running over ideas with people, and it looks like I'm just gonna have to start doing things again.

Oh, and I finally am starting to putting everything I've been doing over the last two years together on tape so that I can show it to everyone in ten years time and bore the pants off them. cool, huh? So far I've only got Later with GTV backed up, but I keep watching it for hours on end, non-stop. And i keep wishing that we had enough stuff to finish the series and that I had the time to edit it. Oh well, maybe I'll get fully motivated some time soon to do it.

18/01/2002 - Slow week

Not a lot has happened this week. I went to Waterstones yesterday and bought myself a new copy of Lord of the Rings, since my old one which I've had since I was about ten has been losing twenty pages of index each time I read it. As an afterthought, I bought The Truth by Terry Pratchett, and on impulse, Look to Windward by Iain M Banks. I thought it was about time for me to try and expand and read new authors again, so there you go - but it's also time I read up on the last couple of Discworld novels I've missed, and isn't it about time I read LotR again?

Well, I've got to get round to doing some more final year project work. I'm aiming to have a finished, working product by the end of the month, but I've had problems this week with lack of motivation, probably down to this cold that I've got. Gotta get my arse in gear again.

I've got a 21st birthday party to go to this weekend, followed by a Rugby match... which should be interesting since I haven't been to one before. I'll see how it goes.

12/01/2002 - I'm ill

Dammit, I've got a cold again. It's a sign I'm back at uni. Still, I've got some real cool lectures this term, so I should do well. Maybe I'll get that 1st I've been promising myself :-)

I've gotten myself into the habit of going to bed early and waking up at about three in the morning to get work done, since it's the only time when I can get some peace and quiet.. It's gonna be a bitch the next time I want to go to the pub all night though. Haven't figured that part out yet. But at last, it looks like my sister will be moving out and across the road soon, which means that I'll get my bed, my normal sleeping routine, and hopefully therefore, my social life back.

In the mean time, it's very likely that Later with GTV, a show that myself an d a friend produced for GTV last year might very possibly be entered for two awards at the up and coming Nasta awards in April. One for best Title sequence, and possibly one for best Music Show, depending on what competition arrives in GTV by the submission deadline.

6/01/2002 - Back to skool

Well almost, sort of. School being university, and I don't actually go back till tommorrow... Wow! final semester of university, and it only feels like I've been at uni for three years! Hang on...

Cos while looking back to say, the start of this (university) year, doesn't feel very long ago, if I think back to first year exams, they feel distant.

But what a great time those exams were :-) The first year, which attempts to level the playing field between those who have no experience and those who have. Sort of like the qualifying lap for a two lap race...

The best exam I took was the last one of the first year. It was a Java exam, and to be honest, I knew I was going to piss all over it from the moment I started University. So, when I found out that it was the last exam of the year, I wasn't too phased, and neither were any of my mates. So we started our celebrations before the exam... Went in merry, an hour later we all walked out and went back to the pub. I think it was my highest scoring exam, come to think of it...

But now the exams count, which is a real bitch, cos it means that I have to take them seriously. And the exams are a tad more difficult because they are about topics which I know less about. Better start revising now, really.

30/12/2001 -

Well, Christmas went pretty much as expected, 'cept that I got a rotten cold for Christmas. I've got over it now, but still... On the feel-good-factor side, I managed to reach one of my "major breakthrough" points with my final year project, which is great and means that I'm on track for finishing on time. On the downside, whenever I reach this stage in a project, I take a day or two to figure out what I've got to do next, and get my arse back in gear.

New Years will probably be a non-event for me this year. Since Daisy, my new-born niece is still too young to be taken anywhere, we shall be having a quiet little stay in at home. Hopefully my sister, niece and my other nephews and niece will be able to move into their new house (right across the street!) sometime soon in the new year, which will let me get back to a somewhat more normal lifestyle again. It's just starting to sink in that I am in fact an uncle again and it's a nice feeling.

22/12/2001 - Christmas bah humbug

Well, three days left to christmas and I am soooo not in a christmas mood it's untrue. Maybe it's because I remember what christmas actually entails - wake up in the morning with a hangover from the night before, pretend you like the token gesture presents which people buy 'cos they don't know what to buy, sit round the table as a family, having christmas dinner for a change and then... well... that's it until New years.

I finally got around to compiling the KDE source code yesterday - woohoo! So now I've got something else to distract me away from doing uni work :) I'm feeling my way around the source at the moment, trying out little changes here and there, y'know, learning from what I break...

...and I'm still waiting to see Lord of the Rings. I was going to see it on Thursday with my nephews but one of them came down with a cold, so we didn't go. Gonna go see it tommorrow with a couple of mates, then when my nephew get's better I've got another excuse to go and see it :-)