Recently in Life Category

Yesterday Christine and I went to our first proper music festival: Bingley Music Live. It's certainly not one of the biggest festivals, with only 15,000 tickets available, and it doesn't draw many big names. The main acts this year were mostly bands that were at the peak of popularity some years ago, namely The Buzzcocks, Public Image Ltd., Reef and James.

Bingley Music Live is in its fourth year and is organised by Bradford Council with no corporate sponsorship. Despite this, tickets are only £30 for the full weekend, and the Friday event has free entry as well. The small size of the festival means there's only one stage, and there's no campsite, but then I think most people who go live locally.

I'll be going back today for the Sunday bands, although this time I'll be bringing more of my own drinks. £2 for a small bottle of cola is frankly scandalous.

Exactly 5 months ago today, I entered a distance relationship with Christine. I didn't intentionally look to enter a distance relationship - it just sort-of happened, as many things in romance do. 5 months on and we're still very happy together, even if 'together' means that there's 70 miles between us most of the time. I wanted to use this entry to talk about my experience of the relationship and the things that have helped to keep it together.

The pros:

There are some upsides to being a distance relationship. The distance means you have a bit more freedom when you're not in the same place, so you can go out on an evening for example and not feel so guilty if the other party doesn't want to go. You need to have rules though, and be able to trust your partner not to do things that you wouldn't approve of them doing.

I've also found that we try to make the most of the time that we are together. While we spend less time together than other couples, the time we do spend is quality time.

The cons:

The travelling can be a drag. Blackpool is just under 2 hours by train from Bradford, however, weekend engineering work can lengthen this to a 4 hour replacement coach journey. While I'm able to take part of Monday morning off to travel, Christine often finds herself on a depressing journey back home on Sunday nights. We're also fortunate that train tickets, even when bought at the last minute, are cheap for the journey - over longer distances, transport costs may make it prohibitive to see each other regularly.

Saying goodbye after each time you see each other is hard. Even if you know it'll only be a few days before you see each other again.

If you live alone, it's very easy to miss the other person. Thankfully I have a couple of housemates, and a generally busy lifestyle, so I have less time to miss Christine. I still miss her though.

Tips:

• Skype is your friend. You can have long conversations without it costing anything, provided both of you use it.
• Make the most of the time you are together, but don't feel like you have to do something all the time - it'll wear you out.
• If you travel to see each other a lot by train, get a railcard (if you're 25 and under) or book your tickets at least a few days in advance to save money. Also consider the coach (especially Megabus).

Around this time last year I wrote a somewhat optimistic post about what had happened in 2008 and what I expected to happen in 2009. While I was right about there being a lot of change, 2009 proved to be a very eventful year and not always in the good sense.

January started well, despite my unemployment - I went to Edinburgh for a job interview and took a few photos while I was there. The interview sadly didn't lead to a job, but upon my return to Bradford we ended up with a houseful of people - Hari's little sister and her then boyfriend, and one of our friends from World of Warcraft. As it happens, World of Warcraft would be the thing that would keep me sane for the first few months of the year.

February was when things started going downhill. I was still unemployed, and was struggling to find work, despite being registered with two temping agencies. Then I heard that my grandmother, who had been ill since September 2008, had passed away. While it was somewhat expected, as she has been very ill, the funeral was a big shock. I didn't write about it publicly at the time but even 9 months on I still miss her. She was 86, and is survived by my grandfather. Also during February, Hari went to Scotland for 2 weeks.

In March I went on a weekend trip to Dovedale and Sherwood Forest with the University Hiking Club - despite no longer being a student or member of staff there I was still involved, and my parents offered to pay for my place on the trip. As I was still unemployed, the Bank of Mum and Dad came very much into play at this time. To pass the time while unemployed, I started walking more often on my own, and did a couple of canals and disused railway lines near Bradford. Hari was still in Scotland, and eventually came back after 4 weeks. It was then that we agreed that things weren't working and that the time we had spent apart only came to prove this. On Saturday 21st March, after 3 years and 5 months together, we split up.

During April I tied up the loose ends at the flat Hari and I rented in Bradford, and I moved back in with my parents over the Easter weekend. The loss of independence took a lot of getting used to and I can't say I enjoyed it a lot, especially as most of my friends were still back in Bradford.

Come May, and things started brightening up. I managed to get a new short-term employment contract back at the University in Bradford, so spent a couple of months staying in people's spare rooms. I also reached the grand old age of 25, and spent my birthday up a mountain in Wales.

At the end of June I moved to where I live now, in the Undercliffe area of Bradford. While it's a bit further away from the University, I have good housemates and the house is very nice (and cheap!).

The first 2 weeks of July were spent on my first foreign holiday in 6 years, which was in France, around La Rochelle. I really enjoyed the break, which after the ups and downs of the preceding few months was very welcome. There were some really memorable moments, such as riding on a tandem and seeing Fort Boyard.

While my employment contract was initially quite short, it was extended a few times (and now runs until the end of February). August and September proved to be very busy at work, although the latter month resulted in a 23" screen which I posted about quite a bit.

In October, I visited a friend who had recently moved to Blackpool (she was my travelling partner in France and had been a shoulder to cry on over the preceding months) who introduced me to one of her new friends, Christine. A week later, and Christine and I became an item. We went to see Ash play in Bradford, which was awesome, and have since tried to spend every weekend together.

A sign that the job market was improving was that I started getting interviews again - one in September and another in November. Despite getting very positive feedback, neither resulted in a job, unfortunately. Also in November I visited Halifax town centre for the first time - not a very interesting event but it's somewhere I've passed through a lot but never really visited.

And finally in December I was diagnosed with an arselump. December was also the first month for several years where I wasn't overdrawn on my bank account - just in time for my bank to raise the overdraft charges to £1 per day. While I'm not rolling in cash at present, I'm much better off financially than I was in 2008. Christine and I are planning to spend New Year together in Blackpool.

And as for 2010? Well, I'll be starting it on better footing than last year, with more money and a job. I also have 2 interviews lined up for January, and a weekend break in central Scotland. If all goes to plan, I'll be getting myself a new computer (probably a Mac Mini again but still not fully decided), and a new mobile phone (probably not an iPhone as they're expensive, but maybe an Android phone). And hopefully Christine and I may be able to afford a weekend trip somewhere outside the UK, such as Paris, later in the year.

Hope you all have a wonderful new year and that 2010 brings you everything you could ask for.

Today I went to my local GP regarding a lump which I have had at the top of my natal cleft (or 'arsecrack' to you and me) for a number of weeks. It turned out to be a pilonidal sinus, a somewhat rare condition affecting 0.026% of the population, but one that is thankfully curable with minor surgery.

Although I have a diagnosis from my GP, it will still be necessary to have an appointment with a consultant at one of our local hospitals (in this case St Luke's Hospital). Until very recently, arranging an appointment with a hospital consultant involved:

1. Your GP sending a letter (or sometimes a fax) to the consultant's secretary
2. The consultant's secretary then writes to you asking you to make an appointment
3. You then telephone the consultant's secretary to make the appointment

Reliance on the postal services means that this can take a week.

Thankfully we now have the NHS Choose and Book system, part of the much-delayed and massively over-budget NHS National Programme for IT, described as "the world's biggest civil information technology programme". All of the backwards and forwards with letters has been replaced with a web site, which allows GPs to book appointments with consultants instantly online, often with the patient present like I was to day. This is especially welcome at this time of year, where the postal service is recovering from a series of strikes and has the additional burden of Christmas deliveries. Consequently, I was able to choose an appointment before the Christmas Holiday; I also had a choice of hospitals. Furthermore, I also have instructions for accessing a web site which will let me cancel my appointment online, should I need to.

This is a clear example of a change which has reduced the administrative time of both my GP's practice and of the hospital consultant, and has resulted in the patient being seen more quickly. And it's exactly the sorts of issues that a good IT system should aim to do.

I'll let you know how my I get on with my 'arse lump'.

Looks like I've been a bad blogger and not posted here for a while. Oops.

Here's what I've been up to:

• The slightly cryptic last sentence in my Blackpool post last month refers to the fact that my new girlfriend lives in Blackpool. Her name is Christine (that's her actual first name, not a pseudonym), we've been seeing each other for about 6 weeks and I'll probably say more about her as time goes on. It's a distance relationship but we've managed to make time to see each other most weekends.
• In October I went to see Ash when they played a gig at Bradford Gasworks. They were awesome. They're also releasing a new single every 2 weeks over the next 12 months, the first 3 of which are out. You can buy all 26 for £11 which isn't bad.
• I've recently bought some noise-cancelling headphones, which actually do seem to work - my walk to work on a morning is now quite tranquil as I don't have the noise of cars and the rain in the background, and can instead have my iPod at a lower volume. I only bought a relatively cheap Philips unit for £20 - the sound-cancelling unit is almost as big as my iPod nano - and bar some minor sound distortion they're good for outdoor use.
• I visited Halifax on Saturday - another local place that I've never really been to before. The Piece Hall is well-worth a visit for the small, independent shops. The rest of the town is nice but mostly full of typical high-street shops, so not worth spending much time visiting. And I'm a bit old for Eureka!, even if it is made of wall-to-wall awesomeness.
• Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 is out. It's noticably quicker than 3.5, although on my Mac it fails to start if Nightly Tester Tools is enabled. So right now I'm running with barely any extensions enabled.

Although I've been back in Britain since Monday, I haven't yet said publicly that I'm back, so...

I'm back.

There you go.

France was fantastic - we had really good weather for most of the holiday and went to lots of cool places. I'll write in more detail soon although I've managed to return from holiday during a very busy time at work so it'll probably be at least the weekend before I upload anything. I also have around 300 photos to sort through and upload to Flickr.

Those of you who don't follow me on Twitter can read what I've posted while away as a brief overview of what happened on my travels.

This post is pre-recorded and by the time it goes live I should be on the first leg of my journey to France, which will involve a coach, a train, the London Underground, another train and finally a plane, with some walking peppered in between.

I'm backpacking around western France, focussing on La Rochelle and the islands in the bay surrounding it, but we may stray out to places like Rochefort if time and money permits. I'm travelling with a good friend and fellow hiker so there will probably be quite a bit of walking involved.

This does mean that the blog will be largely silent for around 2 weeks, bar some scheduled posts that I have written which will appear automatically while I am away. Despite my request, no-one volunteered to guest post while I am away and I'm not whether I'll be in any internet cafés while I'm away to post any blog entries.

I will, however, be tweeting now and again so keep an eye on my Twitter feed for updates, which will also probably make their way to Facebook as well if you are friends with me on that. Note that updates will be essentially one-way - see aforementioned potential lack of internet cafés - so I won't be able to read comments or replies.

I'm taking my camera so should have some nice pictures and stories to tell upon my return in 2 weeks. See you all soon.

On Saturday I moved house again, although this time the move should be a little more permanent. I'm now living in North-East Bradford, rather than in the western area around the university, in a refurbished Victorian stone-built terraced house with two other lads. It's a nice house although it does mean a longer walk to work.

Unfortunately we don't yet have internet - that's a story I'll leave for another entry - so I'm using the opportunity to watch some of the films that I own on DVD which I haven't seen before.

Thus far I have watched the remaining episodes of Torchwood Season 2 that I haven't seen - previously I have watched the first 4 and last 4 episodes, but missed those in the middle of the series. This included the episodes 'Adam' and 'Dead Man Walking' which are quite important to the overall story arc - having watched these episodes now, the final episode makes more sense. I also watched Baseketball, a film starring the creators of South Park, which I enjoyed but would only recommend to those who enjoyed South Park or Team America. Otherwise you'll find it puerile and immature.

On my list to watch next are:

• The Dark is Rising - a film that Hari wanted to watch and that we rented from LoveFilm, but haven't yet got around to watching
• Nacho Libre - kids film starring Jack Black that I picked up cheaply in a sale
• Hellboy - heard mixed reviews, some people say it's great, others hated it
• Robots - another kids film
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian - Thought the first film was very well done, but never managed to see this in the cinema.

Incidentally I posted a similar list this time last year - so a year later and I still haven't seen Hellboy or Nacho Libre.

I also have various DVDs like The Simpsons Movie, Shrek the Third and most of the Matrix Trilogy which I have seen in the cinema but haven't since watched on DVD. I'm going on holiday a week today and at the current rate we won't have the internet installed by then, so I have another week of keeping myself busy.

I'm back from Wales, likely slightly more tanned and with a camera full of pictures of various hills and mountains. I'll be sorting them out tomorrow, as today I'm venturing into the terrorist nuclear state of North Yorkshire for a barbecue.

Today is my 25th birthday. Hard to think I've been alive a quarter of a century, but there you go.

Presents included a new walking rucksack, which is being put to use straight-away as I'm off on a walking holiday in North Wales this afternoon. I'll therefore be beyond the reach of the internet but may be using good old SMS to update Facebook and Twitter.

See you on Friday.

For the first time in 6 years, I will be going abroad on holiday this year. In fact, it'll be the first time I've been away properly for a 2 week period in as many years - best I've managed recently is 4-5 nights away in places like Wales and the Lake District.

As those of you who follow me on Twitter may have guessed, I'm going to be spending the first 2 weeks in July in Western France. Flights are booked from Stansted to La Rochelle, although unfortunately they're with Ryanair.

I'm going with a good friend who I've been walking with a lot and we're now working out what to do when we get there. There's the cities of Nantes, Poitiers and Bordeaux within travelling distance so we may visit those, and I've head Ile de Ré is also nice. And there's Futuroscope which I haven't visited for many years.

At the moment I'm focussing on travel insurance (best quote so far was just under £17 from Endsleigh) and how to get to Stansted, which will probably involve getting a Megabusplus from either York or Bradford to London and then the Stansted Express. Ironically the Megabusplus, which is actually a coach to East Midlands Parkway and then a train to London St Pancras, may only cost me £1 all in compared to the £13 for the Stansted Express.

I'm also away next week, on a 4 night walking holiday in North Wales with a larger group of friends, which should be fun hopefully.

In any case, if you have any suggestions for fun things to do in Western France, especially if they're not too expensive, please let me know!

Today I moved the last of my things out of my flat in Bradford (there were a few things that we didn't have space for last weekend), so I've had chance to find things that I thought were either lost or couldn't remember where I'd put them.

Things I'd lost and have subsequently found:

• Parker pen
• 2 USB ADSL modems
• €30 in cash (now worth more in sterling than when I exchanged them originally)
• Photos of me in a suit having attended awards dinners last year and the year before with the university hiking club
• My student union life membership book
• A Jack Daniel's whisky glass (which I got free after drinking rather a lot of Jack Daniel's during a week in September 2005)
• DVD player remote control
• A pack of nail files
• 2 pairs of trousers

Things I'd lost and then couldn't find:

• My York Library card (which also gets me free entry into many of York's museums)

I'm sure more things that I'd forgotten I had will turn up as I sort through it all...

I've previously mentioned that I was aiming to move back in with my parents for a bit, and so as of Friday I'm now living back in York, for the time being at least. I'll probably move out once I have some more money and a job, but until then I'm enjoying my mothers' cooking and not having to worry about paying rent and bills.

I'm gradually adjusting to being single again - Hari and I were very close for the time that we were together so obviously it's a big change. We're still talking although I haven't seen her in person since we split up.

So, to follow on from my previous entry, some of you may want to know what's next for me. After all, with no job and no girlfriend, the world is largely my oyster - I'm not really tied to one specific location.

Right now, there are 4 career paths that I'm looking at for this year:

1. Find administration work. This is what I have been trying for a while and haven't been having much luck, but there are many local businesses in York, Leeds, Bradford and the surrounding area that seem to be recruiting so hopefully it's just a matter of time.
2. IT graduate training programmes. At least 1 big local employer is looking at recruiting graduates with Computing and IT degrees for a paid training programme and what seems to be a guaranteed job at the end of it. Being graduate work it's likely to be reasonably paid too.
3. Seasonal work in Europe. As a kid my parents took me camping with Eurocamp every year and they are currently recruiting for couriers to work on their sites for the summer months. This would be a somewhat drastic change - another country, new people, and very little internet access, but I may not got many chances to try this in life and right now I have nothing to tie me down.
4. Teaching. There is still a national shortage of teachers and so, should I qualify, there's a pretty-much guaranteed job at the end of it. There's also a lot of money to train and no fees to pay. Best of all, I'm looking to do Maths and there are many extra financial incentives to train to teach Maths and Physics.

Quite what will happen over the next few months is up to chance. The plan is to move back in with my parents in York for a month or two while I get a job sorted; once that's sorted I'll be living wherever the job is. Though I'm focussing on West Yorkshire at present, I'll take any good job that's going anywhere in the UK and Ireland.

I'm aiming to have moved out of Bradford by the easter weekend - 2 weeks away.

I'm going to keep this brief, but at the weekend me and Hari made the decision to end our relationship. She's moving back home to be with her family in the West Midlands, and I'm going to move back to York in a few weeks to stay with my parents while I search for jobs.

We're hoping to stay friends, but things just weren't working out between us.

In the past I've done an end of your quiz (see 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004 and 2003) but I've chosen not to do it this year and write a brief entry summing up 2008 and what 2009 has in store for me.

2008 has been mostly a consolidation year after the big changes in 2007. Up until mid-December I was working for the university in Bradford, where I saw my contract move from casual work to a salary, my contract extended, and then subsequently finding in November that it wouldn't be renewed. I had a couple of job interviews which unfortunately proved fruitless (and with hindsight I wouldn't have wanted one of the jobs anyway) and I'm now currently unemployed.

Hari and I have also had a good year together. We moved in properly in summer 2007 and have been happy together - for the most part at least - in a rented house that we're sharing. 2007 was our third year together and while we didn't pass any other major milestones the future looks reasonably bright for the two of us.

Financially things have been a little hard, as almost everything I have earned has been spent on rent, bills, taxes and groceries leaving little left over for luxuries. Thankfully I have some savings and supporting parents so I'm not drowning in debt. This is why, as much as I'd like to buy a new computer, I'm having to hold off until I have more money left at the end of the month.

2009 is looking to be a year of change, maybe more so than 2007 was. I have already got a job interview mid-January and looking for other work as well, but as I'm not limiting myself to the Bradford area it may well mean moving; the job I have an interview for is in Scotland, for example. Hari is still at university and will be there until the end of May, so it may mean living away from her initially. We have agreed that we want to move away from Bradford - I have been here for over 6 years, she has been here for over 4 - and this would be good time to do it.

Provided I find a new job, and one that isn't fixed-term and has a decent salary, financially we should be somewhat better off than right now, in spite of the current economic climate.

In terms of how the world will be in 2009, we're at an interesting point in history. America has elected a (comparatively) young, intelligent, charismatic person as its next president, who is currently "talking the talk" when it comes to sorting out the problems in his country and overseas. This year will prove whether he can "walk the walk", or whether his bark is weaker than his bite, as it where. We, once again, have unrest in the middle east, due to a minority of idiots with weapons throwing weapons at civilians (I'm talking about both sides here); we have the continuing collapse of Zimbabwe, as well as other ongoing problems in other African nations such as Somalia, Sudan and Congo; and of course there's the world economies which may well get worse before they get better. For world affairs, it will be an interesting year.

Hope you have a good New Year celebration - I'll be spending it with a few friends in Bradford - and see you in 2009, whatever it may bring.

I came home this evening after work to find our* garden had been dug up by the gas board, so there are now big holes with uncovered pipes leading right up to the front door. And then later on this evening we had a power cut, which seemed to affect the whole street.

* = I say our garden, but actually we share it with the flat above us and it may actually be owned by the council or housing trust.

We've entered 'Week -1' at work; essentially this is the week before all of our new students arrive to enroll (most of whom will arrive on Sunday). I actually worked on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons and will almost certainly be putting in extra hours this week, so it's unlikely I'm going to have much free time as I'll be late home from work and also bloody knackered too (went to bed at 2230 last night; normally I go closer to midnight). Therefore, blogging may well be very light again, after the increase of posts over the past few days. Sorry to build your hopes up.

Unless I can find some time before then, see you after the end of 'Week 0' (i.e. next week).

It's not even 9am and I've already been on the phone to two separate customer service departments:

1. Virgin Media - our internet has been timing out for extended periods of time over the past few weeks, which is especially annoying if you're playing a game like World of Warcraft which has very poor timeout detection (it's only when you realise that you can't use any spells/abilities and that no-one else is moving that you noticed you have disconnected). So the first phone call was to them. Virgin's customer service has improved since its NTL/Telewest days, even if the quality of service hasn't improved dramatically, and the guy at the other end of the phone was able to deduce what the problem was (excessive noise on the line) quite quickly. We've been promised a fix in 24 hours.
2. British Gas - on Friday night our gas meter failed - seemingly because the battery is flat. We have a pre-payment meter (legacy from the previous occupants) so it's a bit more sophisticated than the bog standard ones that just tick over as you use gas. There's someone coming this morning to look at it, which is good as right now we're without any heating, very limited hot water and no cooker.

Well, that was interesting. As you may already know, most of England was hit by a small earthquake last night. Though it was in the early hours of the morning at around 1am GMT, I was awake at the time (yes, I know, on a school night...) and felt it.

At first we thought someone had slammed a door, perhaps in the flat upstairs, but as Hari and I were both on World of Warcraft at the time we soon found out from friends that they had felt the earth move too. Turns out it measured 5.3 on the Richter scale and was the strongest quake we've had here in almost 25 years.

Bradford is far enough away from the epicentre for it not to have caused any property damage and I've certainly not heard of anyone having any problems - just lots of people being curious.

Interestingly though at least 25 of my friends on Facebook now have status messages mentioning something about the quake. These include some exchange students from California who never realised we had earthquakes here (which we don't, usually), those who were woken up by it and were begrudgingly posting before going back to bed, and those worrying about the aftershock. Which I managed to sleep through, incidentally.

Since I've finished work now until January, I'm going to make the annual visit to my parents for Christmas. However, I'll be also going elsewhere, and so, thanks to Google Earth and Skitch, I present you a map:

In a nutshell, I am:

• Going home from Bradford to York today;
• Going to visit the grandparents in East Yorkshire tomorrow;
• Going to see Hari after the Christmas break (she's spending Christmas with her family near Birmingham);
• Going across to Hertfordshire for a New Year's Eve party in a country cottage;
• (Probably) going to visit Hari's cousin in Surrey;
• Spending a final few nights in York;
• And then returning to Bradford to start work again on the 7th January.

It adds up to at least 6 train journeys, some with several changes. But, have railcard, will travel.

As I'm going to be on the move I may not be blogging here much (but then you're probably used to that these days) so in case I don't get chance to write anything in the next 3 days, have a Merry Christmas.

I had my first ever emergency admission and overnight stay in hospital on Monday night. Basically it was an asthma attack, but one that was so serious that my own medication couldn't tame it, so Hari and I took a taxi to the A & E department at Bradford Royal Infirmary, where I was nebulised and stabilised.

I ended up spending the night, and most of the following day, at the hospital, and for a lot of the time I was on oxygen. But thankfully by yesterday afternoon I was good to go home and was discharged in the evening. I'm now feeling much, much better and my asthma symptoms have subsided dramatically, so I'm all well again.

As this was my first hospital visit, here's the good and bad things about my visit:

Good:

• A lot has been said about hygiene in NHS hospitals. All the rooms I was in looked very clean, and there were anti-bacterial handwash dispensers quite literally everywhere you looked. Hygiene is obviously taken seriously here.
• The staff were, for the most, part very friendly and helpful - the A & E staff especially.
• Food wasn't bad - better than I expected at least.
• All the beds had Patientline terminals, so a payment of £5 for the day got me my own personal phone number, about 20 Sky TV channels plus some radio channels, and internet access. It certainly helped to pass the time and let me update my friends via Facebook.
• And this is the NHS so all of my treatment was free. When you're hyperventilating and waiting to be seen, at least you only have to worry about getting better and not whether you can afford the treatment, or whether your insurance will cover your treatment. We're very fortunate to have the NHS in this country and I don't think everyone appreciates just how lucky we are to have it.

Bad

• There was a shortage of beds, so when the decision was made to keep me in at about 1am, it wasn't until 3am that I was on a ward. And then I got woken up by the ward doctor at 4:30am to go through my symptons, and with all the beeping machinery and people being moved around I didn't get an awful lot of sleep while I was there.
• There were about 25 people on my ward, all in the same room, and it was a mixed ward. I'm not too worried about this but there was a patient who was being quite loud and abusive, which isn't quite what I wanted. But hey, it's free treatment - can't have everything.
• It took about 3 hours from the doctor saying I could be discharged to me actually being able to get my coat on and leave. Admittedly the staff were busy but it would have been nicer to be back home at 5pm, not 8pm.

Still, on the whole I had a good first hospital experience, and I'd like to thank all the staff there who helped me get better. Especially the A & E staff who were very friendly and helpful. And thanks to Hari who was very supporting during my time of need.

Yesterday was 2 years to the day that Hari and I first got together, so we went out for a meal and then saw Ratatouille at the cinema (since for some reason Pixar decided to delay the UK release by several months). It's a film I'd thoroughly recommend seeing.

2 years on and Hari and I are still happy together (and still living together) - and hopefully will be for several years to come. I might even reveal her real name at some point, for those not reading this on Facebook.

Last week, I said:

So, with a bit of luck, within the next couple of weeks I could have a full driving license and a proper, decently-paid full-time job on the cards. We’ll see.

Unfortunately, I failed my driving test (although I dispute my score) and came 'a close second' in the job interview. Which isn't much when there's only one job position available. So I'm still a learner driver with part-time casual work.

Well it's October now (already...) and the first 2 weeks of it look to be quite interesting. On Wednesday this week I have my driving test - my second attempt, after narrowly failing my first attempt back in May - and then next Monday I have a job interview.

So, with a bit of luck, within the next couple of weeks I could have a full driving license and a proper, decently-paid full-time job on the cards. We'll see.

I appreciate things have been a little quiet here, and unfortunately that may well be the way they stay for the time being, as this week is going to be somewhat hectic Chez Turner.

Work is busy - as you may know I'm currently working for the university, and this week is when the A-level exam results are published so we have a lot of work to do with that, and then the start of Clearing on Thursday, which I'm involved with for the fourth year running now. It's going to mean some very long days at work this week and next.

And as for out of hours, it's a crucial couple of days for my guild on World of Warcraft. I haven't blogged about WoW for some months now but I'm still actively playing it with Hari, although we're both in a different (and more progressed) guild now. Last night we made our first ever attempt on Lady Vashj and so we'll be trying to get her down before the server restart on Wednesday morning. If we do, we'll be moving on to Kael'thas Sunstrider.

Things are going well, but as I've been rather busy with work and such I haven't had much to report. I have managed to see The Simpsons Movie twice now and can confirm that it does hold up to a second viewing, even if it was only a couple of weeks after we first saw it. It's definitely worth seeing if you haven't already.

The people from Virgin came and went (in just over half an hour, as it happens, and they turned up early) and so Hari and I now finally have internet, a phone line and more than 5 TV channels. The phone and internet seem to be okay, but some of the channels (namely BBC1, 2, News 24 and ITV) are a bit flaky so I'll be ringing Virgin up about them on Monday - the sound and picture breaks every few seconds, a bit like Freeview does when you don't have a very strong signal.

Hari is now spending a couple of weeks at her parents' house down south, and I popped over last night to see them. Since Virgin Trains haven't followed GNER's lead and put Wifi on their trains, I decided to experiment with using Google Reader offline, using Google Gears. It works quite well, although you can only view the contents of feeds and not anything peripheral to them, so you don't get to see any of the embedded images or videos. It's also only possible to read those feeds which provide full text (like this one) - you can't click through to read the rest of the article if the author has chosen to merely provide excerpts. Nor can you add new feeds or unsubscribe from existing ones.

While I can see offline storage being useful in a few cases like this, with mobile internet becoming ever more pervasive it's likely to be largely unnecessary in a few years time. I could, for example, have used the internet via my phone using Bluetooth (though I've no idea of the settings I need so I've never tried), and other train operators like GNER already offer Wifi on their trains.

Since I last posted:

• My asthma is all better - I don't even have the cold symptoms anymore.
• Our gas card arrived (a day after I called up for it) so we now have hot water, central heating and a working cooker.
• Virgin confirmed that they're coming to install cable this Saturday afternoon.
• I bought a new router to share the internet between the computers - a Netgear WGR614, the same model my dad has (but we paid considerably less)
• We bought a double mattress, for our currently matress-less double bed, though no date for delivery yet.
• I went hiking around Grassington on Sunday - was nice to get out after all the moving last week.
• And I completely forgot about Fathers' Day.

This week I'm working as much as I can to make up for last week, although I'm taking long lunch breaks so that I can use the internet. So if you send me any emails in the afternoon you'll know why you won't get a response until the following lunchtime.

What do you get if you cross an asthamtic, with lots of dust, residual pet hairs, a cold and some damp weather?

The answer: An emergency trip to the doctor, 2g of oral steroids and one very weasy Neil. Thankfully the steroids are doing their job, and I'm feeling quite a bit better, but I still have a very low peak flow and my chest is tighter than it should be. But it should get better very soon.

The good news is that Hari and I have (seemingly) passed the background checks for the new house and we've signed the contract and picked up the keys. We're moving Hari in tomorrow, and some of my stuff will go too; however as we're well behind on packing we won't have time to move all of my stuff tomorrow. We were waiting for some storage bags to come from Tesco, which we were expecting on Saturday but didn't come until yesterday lunchtime, so packing was mostly on hold until then.

While the stress of getting a house is over, it now means I have the stress of changing all the bills and utilities. I live with two other people in my current house who are both staying on, so I have to transfer control of the gas, electric, phone and internet bills to them, and then set up new accounts in the new house. I also need to get things like the TV license transferred and the insurance changed and renewed. Fun, fun, fun.

For phone and internet we're going with Virgin Media, rather than BT and PlusNet. It's mostly an economical decision as we can get TV, internet and phone for £21/month for the first year, whereas internet alone from PlusNet will cost us £22/month - we need their premier package for the extra data transfer allowance. Though we're only going for Virgin's basic TV package, which is essentially what is already available on Freeview, it does mean we avoid the lousy DVB-T reception that Bradford currently suffers from.

As for other geeky stuff - because that's what you're interested in, isn't it? - the smaller of the two bedrooms will become the study and will house Hari's XCcube and my MacBook. The Mac Mini will probably make its way into the main bedroom as a compact media centre, and the living room will have the big TV, standalone DVD player, VCR (yes, we still have one, even though it's almost 20 years old) and cable set-top box. I'll also need to invest in a new router, since the one I currently own only works with ADSL connections, but it means we can take a look at some of the draft-N Wifi systems if they're affordable.

Some life news for you - me and Hari have just put a deposit down on a flat to rent from next week. This means that we'll move from the 'dating' phase to the 'co-habitation' phase.

We're still yet to sign the contracts and may be subject to credit checks/references etc. but hopefully we'll pick the keys up in a few days time.

Well, I'm going away for a few days, as I mentioned earlier in the week. I'm heading off to North Wales with the university hiking club tomorrow, and coming back on Thursday evening. During that time I will be only reachable by mobile phone (and even then only when I'm in signal range) - I'm not taking anything computer-related so no email or instant message contact until I get back. This will probably be the longest time I've been without internet access in almost 4 years.

We're staying in a self-catering camping barn in Snowdonia, and will be going up Mount Snowdon at some point, amongst other things. Should be good fun and hopefully the weather will be nice too.

So, I'll be back on Thursday. Until then, I've turned off automatic approval of comments unless you use TypeKey or OpenID and I've marked you as trusted - I don't want to come back to find I've been spammed to high heaven in my absence.

And, incidentally, next Friday (25th) is my birthday.

To cut a long story short, I've had to buy a new mobile phone. My decision about what to buy was based on what decent unlocked phones were available on eBay at the time for a reasonable price, which ended up being a Samsung E370.

This is the first Samsung phone I've owned, and is the first time in a while that I've owned a phone not made by Nokia. It's a slider phone which looks a lot like most of the other Samsung phones out there, but despite being on the cheaper end of their range it still packs a 1.3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, media player and support for GPRS/EDGE. It's not a 3G phone but that's really not something I find important at the moment, since I never use the internet on it nor do I ever feel the need to make video calls.

Compared with my previous phone, a Nokia 6230i, the E370 is far smaller and lighter. It also has a bigger screen, and as it's a slider phone unlocking the keypad is as easy as sliding the keypad open; you can even have it make a noise when you do this but the novelty quickly wears off and after a while it'll just annoy you. The menus are quite easy to navigate, although they take a little getting used to when compared with Nokia's system. The camera is about average for a cameraphone - not horrible but still worse than a proper digital camera.

Things I miss? Unlike the 6230i, there's no FM radio, and no slot for an expansion card - the 6230i had a MMC card slot to add extra storage so that you could fit more clips of chavs happy slapping innocent pensioners on it. Also, the E370 isn't supported by Apple's iSync, so while getting my numbers off my old phone was easy, I had to enter them manually into the new one. Smart alecs will probably want to say that I could copy the numbers to the SIM card but many of my contacts have more than 1 number and there's over 100 of them so it's not really an option for me. Still, gave me a chance to prune those people I no longer speak to, such as old landlords.

As for battery life, I've only had the phone since Monday so I can't really say how good it is. My 6230i could do a week on a full charge with light usage, and the phone I had before that (Nokia 7250i) could do 10 days, so we'll see how this fares.

Overall I'm really happy with the E370. It doesn't do everything I want, but until someone invents a phone that is able to write your dissertation for you while making it look like your own work I don't think I will be totally satisfied. It certainly is good value for money and easy to use, and has a good range of features.

By the way, if someone wants an unlocked Nokia 6230i that works but needs a new screen, cover and battery, drop me a line with an offer.

So, London. We caught a late train out of Bradford (one of the direct Bradford-London trains) and got into the capital about 10pm on the Friday night. The great thing about London is that the public transport systems don't stop at about 7pm like they do in most other places and so after meeting a friend in a pub near Euston and leaving at closing time we could still get to our hotel, which is near Canning Town and is a good half hour away by tube/DLR.

We had intended to do some sightseeing over the weekend but when we mentioned to various of our friends that we'd be in London they were all keen to meet up with us so we ended up spending the afternoon socialising. We went to the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes, again near Euston, which is an awesome place - a pub which does nice food and decent beer, but also has a 10-pin bowling alley and karaoke booths, as well as retro arcade machines. Very easy to kill a lot of time there.

Saturday evening was the main reason for going to London - to see a musical in the West End, which is something neither of us have done before. We've seen musicals at theatres before - we both went to see Jerry Springer - The Opera when it came to Bradford in May last year - but there's something special about seeing it in the West End (which for those unfamiliar with London is a bit like Broadway). The musical we went to see was Avenue Q - I bought the soundtrack late in 2005 as the songs are hilarious, but it was only last year that it came to our shores. You may remember a song called "The Internet Is For Porn" being passed around the internet a lot some time ago - that's taken from the musical and is quite a good example of what you can expect from it. If you're easily offended then you'll hate it; if you're not then you'll be rolling in the aisles laughing. Even though I knew most of the songs off by heart, to see it live was an awesome experience.

We went to the matinée performance, which had the benefit of being quite a bit cheaper than the later Saturday showing; we didn't buy the cheapest seats since they were right on the balcony and didn't have a good view, but the ones we did buy were quite good for the price that we paid.

Afterwards, we went out for dinner - we had to walk around quite a bit before we found a restaurant which was in our price range, but we settled for a nice Italian restaurant juts off one of the main streets which was actually very reasonable. We then had another late night tube journey - it's surprising just how busy the Jubilee line is at 11:30pm on a Saturday night.

Sunday was also supposed to be a sightseeing day but we didn't really do any - instead, we had lunch at Yo! Sushi (which I'd promised Hari as she has taken a real liking to sushi) and perusing the food court at Selfridges, which is the only bit of the shop we can actually afford. We came away with a big box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Oreo cookies - believe it or not, these are considered premium brands here and are hard to get hold of, with a standard packet of Oreos costing up to £3 (which is about US$5.50). They're expensive, but sooooooo nice.

The journey back was okay, bar the fact that the train was 20 minutes late leaving London. All in all we had a really good weekend and although we did spend a lot of money it was worth it.

Unfortunately we've both been ill with colds since getting back :( .

I've had a relatively busy week, hence the general quietness here. Most of it has been preparing for London - we go tomorrow evening. Though we booked the important stuff like transport, accommodation and theatre tickets well before Christmas, as soon as our southern friends heard that we were spending the weekend in London we got lots of requests to meet up so that's probably what we'll be doing for most of the daytime on Saturday.

Obviously the main reason why we're going to London is to go out on Saturday night at the theatre, but we are intending to do some sightseeing and moseying around too; that will probably be what we use Sunday for. Hari has only been to London a few times so there's lots of places she hasn't seen yet, and she's quite interested in the British Museum and the Natural History Museum so we may be going to one of those on Sunday. She also wants to see Harrod's as she's never been, and I can't say I've been there much in the past decade either. Not that we intend to actually buy anything there.

Of course, our limited budget and the fact that I'm now rather overdrawn means that we're doing this trip on a tight budget. We wanted to stay in a reasonable hotel, so we're staying at the usual venue out in Docklands, which is relatively cheap for London (£120 for both of us for the entire stay). Obviously we could stay in a hostel if we really wanted to save money but we're prepared to pay the extra to stay in a proper hotel. The train tickets were promotional fares booked well in advance and the train fare down is a mere £9 each; unfortunately, we couldn't get quite the same deal coming back, but they're still quite cheap. We also both have Oyster cards since our first journey (from King's Cross to the hotel in zone 3) would cost £4 each without one, but £2 each with one, and the cards themselves cost a £3 deposit.

All in all, we're both really looking forward to it and hopefully it should be good fun. I'll be taking my camera and should hopefully have a nice set of photos to upload to Flickr (seeing as I don't see what all of the fuss is about) upon our return on Sunday evening. Have a good weekend everyone.

Just like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas :) . I hope Santa brought you everything you wanted and that you have an enjoyable day.

A brief overview of what arrived for me this morning:

• Pass-plus lessons (extra driving lessons for when I pass my driving test)
• A new shirt
• A new electric razor
• 2 boxes of Turkish Delight
• A bottle of Spanish Cava
• A sonic tapeless measuring thingamabob
• A handful of books
• Money
• Christmassy sweets

And socks, of course. It wouldn't be Christmas without a pair of socks.

My parents' toaster blew up yesterday. No flames, just a blue/white flash and a small bang. Thankfully it was just before we went shopping so we were able to pick up a new one along with our groceries - surprisingly Tesco actually sell quite a variety of own-brand toasters.

And yes, we did brave Tesco yesterday. We got one of the last few parking spaces, could barely move around the shop and had to wait almost half an hour in the queue for a checkout. This was yesterday morning... heaven knows what it would have been like that afternoon, or today. And tomorrow especially, what with most shops closing at 5pm or earlier... suffice to say we're avoiding all shops like the plague for the next few days.

Went to see the family today - I didn't take my camera, which was a shame as there were a number of instances where I could have taken some really nice photos. I managed to get a few on my phone camera though so once I get them cleaned up a bit I may upload them to Flickr.

Tomorrow will be a quiet day - no real plans. I'm currently down with a rather nasty cold (as usual for Christmas) and it's been particularly bad over the past few days so I'm going to take it easy and suck on some strepsils.

It's been a while since I dusted off the trusty bullet points and briefed you on what has been going on with me lately, but here goes:

• As previously mentioned, I'm back in York for Christmas. The decorations and the tree went up at the weekend - I'd post a picture but it basically looks the same as last year, except we've forgone the multi-coloured lights in favour of low-voltage red ones.
• Over Monday and Tuesday, I travelled on no less than 7 trains (plus 4 taxis), and passed through Leeds station 3 times. But I also got to see Hari and her family, which was nice - she's with her parents for Christmas too. We went shopping yesterday and bought Jelly Tots, and I ate a KitKat while travelling past the Cadbury factory in Bournville which probably makes me the anti-christ or something.
• I had my haircut today, for the first time since the summer. Its gone from being longer than it ever has previously to being quite short - possibly a bit shorter than I wanted it, but hey, it's hair, it grows. Hari is having her hair cut and coloured tomorrow, and paying about 5 times as much as I did for the privilege. Being male has its advantages sometimes.
• If any of you are still keeping track, this Friday just gone was mine and Hari's 14th monthiversary. We're still very happy together and are trying to stay in touch as possible over the Christmas break even though we're over 100 miles apart at the moment.
• My parents had a bag stolen from their hallway last night, while they were in the house - the front door was unlocked and someone must have snuck in and taken it. It didn't have anything important or valuable in it thankfully, but we're keeping the front door locked from now on.
• Despite being home I'm carrying on my driving - I drove my parents' Ford Focus under my dad's supervision on Sunday and have been having lessons with a local instructor as well. Driving in York is a very different experience to Bradford - there's a lot of narrow roads and slow moving traffic to deal with that I'm not used to, but on the plus-side, far fewer hills. I should still be on track to take my test at the end of January or early February.

You know this dissertation that I'm doing for my MSc? The one that I've been panicking about because it's due in a week on Friday? The one that is worth 1/3rd of my entire assessment for my MSc course?

It turns out it's not due in on December 15th.... but January 15th next year. I am one relieved student.

Incidentally I had a driving lesson today where I drove all the way from my home in Bradford to the outskirts of Skipton in the next county, and back again. What's more, I drove on big roads - dual carriageways with 70mph speed limits - and actually had the confidence to drive at the speed limit and overtake people. I also nearly crashed into a bus, so it wasn't all good, but it's progress.

Hari and I recently signed up for Amazon DVD Rental By Post - where you are able to rent DVDs through a monthly subscription and have the discs sent to you through the post, which you then send back when you're finished. There's no limit to how long you can hang onto the DVD and no late-return fines, but you're limited to a set number of discs per month and can only have 1 or 2 discs out at a time.

So far we've watched The Producers (third time I've seen it, but it's a good film) and Æon Flux, which was a film we'd seen advertised but had never got around to seeing at the cinema. This is in fact a trend amongst the films we've put on our rental list - they're all films which we probably wouldn't buy, but either looked interesting or that we'd missed at the cinema. We're only paying £6 per month for 2 films, and £3 is roughly the price of a cinema ticket here, except that you don't have to get a taxi there and back and can watch it as many times as you want. You can also rent any one of the thousands of DVDs that Amazon have in stock, not just what happens to be on at the cinema or available at the local video rental shop.

As for Æon Flux - not a bad film; initially very confusing but it all gets explained at the end. Probably a 6/10 from me - very nice visuals but not the best acting I've seen.

Good news - I passed my theory test! :-D

My score was 33 out of 35 for the multiple choice questions (the 2 that I got wrong were the ones on Safety Margins, apparently) and 55 out of 75 for the Hazard Perception section - not great, but more than enough to pass.

So, now I just have to pass my practical test sometime in the next 2 years, and I'll be a fully-qualified driver :) .

A year ago to the day, Hari and I had our first 'date'. Today is our first anniversary.

There wasn't an exchange of cards or gifts - we're too disorganised/broke for that - but we did go out last night for a meal and to go to the cinema to see Children of Men. And no, there was no marriage proposal - that's some way off yet, although I'm sure more people will be asking now.

A year seems like a long time but it's something that's crept up on us - I personally can still remember the first date quite vividly and it doesn't seem that long ago that we first started seeing each other. Still, there's no sign of it ending any time soon - we love each other more than ever. Roll on anniversary number 2.

My bank seems to like me at the moment. They've increased the interest rate on my savings account by 0.5% AER, and also increased the credit limit on my credit card to £800. So I can save more, and also borrow more. They haven't reduced the ridiculously high interest rate on my credit card yet though so I may apply for a new one sometime in the near future, although thus far I've always paid off the full balance before the interest kicks in.

Went hiking on Sunday - we went up Whernside, the second of Yorkshire's Three Peaks. I've done Pen-y-Ghent before but not Whernside, and we had very good weather for it considering that it was early October. Sadly I didn't take my camera, so no pretty pictures of the hill or the nearby Ribblehead Viaduct.

Not much going on this week - we've been trying to find Hari a full-time job as she's not taking any modules until after Christmas (she unfortunately did not pass her resits in August). So far we haven't had much luck but we're trying again in Bradford city-centre tomorrow. I've also been at work quite a bit, which is good as I'm a little strapped for cash right now. That overdraft is looking like it might get used again.

The weekend is a big one for Hari and I. Sunday is our 1 year anniversary (scary, I know), so we're going out for dinner on Saturday night - provided we can actually get through to the restaurant to make a reservation which we've not managed so far. On the Sunday itself we're on a ghost walk in the centre of Bradford, and Monday is the dreaded Theory Test, which I'm semi-confident about.

I now have a date for my theory test, and it's 2 weeks on Monday, at 10am. Which is slightly annoying considering that the day before is mine and Hari's first anniversary (yes, it has really been almost a year), so I have a feeling we'll be going out on the Saturday and not the night before my test. The Theory Test now includes a section on hazard perception, where you use a touchscreen system to point out potential hazards during some short video clips, so I need to be alert that day, which means no drinking the night before.

My instructor is confident that I'll pass and if I do well on it, it'll set me up well for the practical test, whenever that comes around. My aim is to be a full-qualified driver by the end of January, when I formally finish my studies.

• Spent most of the weekend asleep, to be honest, as well as playing World of Warcraft, though Hari and I did go out on Friday night. Upper Street, the boyband formed out of spare ex-members of other pop groups for MTV 'sTotally Boyband, were playing at the student union - they were okay but only had two of their own songs and apart from a few girls at the front most people boo'ed them off stage. And then 3 young male chavs propositioned me and Hari, which was rather strange and somewhat scary. We declined.
• WoW-wise my paladin is now level 49 (and a half), and has his first epic item which dropped in Maraudon. I'm trying to level up to 60 now so that I can join the rest of the guild in raiding - we brought down Ragnaros twice this week (after failing for weeks before) and Hakkar yesterday. There was also a Ruins of Ahn'Quiraj run today where we beat our previous best and killed two bosses - but to be fair we haven't been concentrating on it much lately.
• I was also invited to an illegal rave in a disused pub near campus last night. We didn't go, due to the high likelihood of it being shut down by the police.
• Term starts again properly tomorrow, so theoretically I need to get my dissertation started this week. I passed all of my resits, by the way, which I'm obviously pleased about.

Today was the Freshers Fair, an annual event where various local and national businesses try to court students into visiting them/signing up to their services by giving away copious amounts of free stuff. I was volunteering to help run the event this year, so as well as getting first dibs on all of the stuff at the start I could also get lots of stuff leftover at the end (which is why I have 3 t-shirts from the local Australian bar). I did manage to get some good stuff - some nice glasses, lots of money-off vouchers, posters and year planners - and some weird stuff, such as a spatula, islamic diary and an inflatable surfboard.

Of the more useful bits and bobs, I have a calendar detailing all of the religious festivals and awareness weeks for the next 12 months - as well as the main religions it also has Baha'i, Paganism, Voodoo, Rastafarianism and Zoroastrianism. But no Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. Or Scientology, for that matter.

I also have a poster of Boris Johnson, a couple of Pot Noodles, several tea bags and a pair of boxer shorts with 'I Love Vodka' on them. Not bad considering I didn't pay for any of it.

I did pay for some things though - I joined the National Trust for a year, and invested in a National Express NX2 student discount card, since I may be using coaches more often in future. Annoyingly I also got a discount voucher for lessons with BSM, which is for new customers only - it could have got me a free lesson which is worth £20.

Today I had probably my most enjoyable driving lesson yet. Some of them have felt like a chore; this one felt like I had achieved something. We moved off the quiet housing estates onto busy main roads, starting at the far end of Crossflats and then driving through Bingley on the old A650, then up through Cottingley, Sandy Lane, Allerton and then into Bradford, stopping short of the Victoria Morrisons on Thornton Road.

It's a major change for me - instead of driving around in circles and having little more than a few park cars to move around, we now had traffic at 30 and 40 miles per hour, traffic lights, pedestrian crossings and dual carriageways. And bar a few minor issues I actually did well. Best of all, this was the first lesson where I didn't stall the car once.

About the only major problem I had was finding 3rd gear - I kept wandering back into 1st instead, which the car really did not like since I was travelling at 25-30 mph at the time. That's something we're working on next week, apparently.

But my driving lessons have gone from being something I've felt that I've had to do to something I've really wanted to do - my confidence has been building and I'm now actually looking forward to my lessons rather than dreading them.

Once again, I'm apologising for it being quiet here. In between being at work, helping out the student union, spending time with Hari and playing World of Warcraft I just haven't had any time for anything else, and with it being Welcome Week this week I'm going to be staying busy too.

Hopefully it'll be blogging business as usual soon (I know I keep saying this...) but right now I'm rather rushed off my feet and blogging (and reading other blogs) are low on my list of things to do.

It's the middle of September, and that can only mean one thing - Welcome Week! And like the past two years I'm doing the airport pickups. Though most of the students don't arrive until this coming weekend, a few are turning up this week. My first pickup is in about an hour's time, so I'm heading off just as soon as I've finished blogging...

My driving's progressing well - we went back to a place that I went to on my third lesson (which had lots of steep hills) and I did a lot better, with uphill and downhill starts being a lot neater. Still managed to stall a few times but I'm feeling a lot more confident. I'll also get a date for my Theory and Hazard Perception tests soon.

On the Windows Vista front, I now have a working iSight camera, thanks to a bit of computer-fu with the temp folder and Universal Extractor. It's not for the faint-hearted though. I think that means all of my hardware is working on Vista now, bar the Apple remote, but then Apple doesn't have a Windows driver for that anyway so no big deal.

One problem I have had is getting the CD-ROM version of Monopoly to work - Vista stops it, saying it's incompatible since there's no Indeo codec (which is strange as I'm sure every Windows version since 95 has had Indeo...), and indeed it crashes if you try to run it. I'll have to acquire a copy of the codec and see if that makes a difference.

Hari's back in Bradford tomorrow and we're going out for a birthday meal with (some of) her housemates. I know it's been over a week since her birthday but we're pro-longing the celebrations a bit.

Anyway, I have a minibus to chaperone, so I'll sign off for now. Until the next time, here's a strange advert showing the benefits of drinking milk, courtesy of YouTube.

Once again, I'm apologising for not saying much lately. I'm starting to regret being a more prolific blogger in the early days since I now feel bad about not posting for a couple of days.

The main reason for the lack of posts is that I've been staying over at Hari's parents for a few days - it was her birthday on Saturday and I'm staying on til Wednesday, which will make for a nice break after all the stress of Clearing, exams and also the death of Hari's grandfather 3 weeks ago. This is something I haven't mentioned here before for a variety of reasons but suffice to say we're all starting to move on again.

Hari also had relatives over so I've been trying to spend time with them, although I've also had my MacBook with me so there has been the occasional game of WoW and I've been keeping on top of my emails. We're going in to town today for a bit of shopping (and to put money into the bank) and then I'm taking Hari out for a birthday dinner at her local pub. And tomorrow we're going out with the rest of her family for a meal and an evening out.

• Some of my neighbours seem to think that leaving bread out for the local pigeons is a good idea, so this is a common sight in my neighbourhood. This of course means that we have lots of pigeons in the area, and also lots of mice. Some months ago, at least a few of these mice took up residency in my bedroom. However, of late I appear to have mastered the art of catching the mice - we're using the standard Little Nipper mousetraps but placed in slightly darker areas of the room and using bits of Mars bar as bait, which the mice seem to like and it also sticks to the trap better so that it's harder to pull off. Thus far, I've managed to catch several mice over the past few days, so hopefully they'll be gone soon. At least for the time being.
• Health-wise I'm feeling much, much better. I'm now reasonably convinced that I have in fact not got glandular fever, which is a huge relief considering how long it takes to recover. My asthma is back to normal, as is my appetite, and I'm not getting the headaches either. Unfortunately it would appear that Hari may be going down with what I have, poor girl.
• 
  As I mentioned I've been playing World of Warcraft quite a bit lately. Hexorious, my paladin, is now level 41 and so is duly equipped with a Warhorse. Right now I'm mostly concentrating on improving his fishing skills and making money, which as an alchemist and herbalist is quite easy, thankfully. If you are into selling things on WoW, then the Auctioneer addon is well-worth getting as it'll tell you how much you can expect to sell things for.
• My latest driving lesson was this morning - I've been learning right-turns (having mastered left-turns last week). Should be due to take my theory test in a few weeks time.
• Hari is off to her parents' house again this evening. It's her birthday this weekend and so I'll be joining her down there on Friday, and then returning on Sunday. In the meantime I'm at work all week. Not particularly exciting, but there you go.

For those of you following my health, it's been 11 days since I last posted and unfortunately I'm still not at my best. I went to see the doctor last Wednesday and she decided it was either an outgoing viral infection or glandular fever.

It's been almost a week since then and unfortunately I'm still not well - and it is starting to look like I do have glandular fever. If it is that - and a blood test will prove if it is or not - then it could mean a very long and slow recovery. It's a viral infection, so anti-biotics won't work on it - about the best I can do is take cough syrup and paracetamol to ease the symptoms and slog it out. It can be over in a matter of weeks but a friend of a friend was ill with it for the best part of two years, which I'm really hoping won't be the case.

I'm going back to the doctors early next week if I'm still ill to see about getting a blood test. With a bit of luck it'll be something minor that will have passed over by then, but since the symptoms have been around for some time already I'm not too hopeful. We'll see, but considering I also have exams at the moment this is not really what I want right now. It's also quite likely that Hari will have caught it too.

The exam went reasonably well, even if I did answer a question using Alice and Bob and their trusty friend Kevin the Kerberos server. There were also lots of questions about PGP, which is good since I know quite a bit about PGP, but it didn't need to be a whole third of the paper.

I've also had more of a chance to play with the MacBook - the essentials such as Firefox, Thunderbird and Adium are all on there, and I've removed the trials of iWork and Microsoft Office. Whatever that Mac advert said about Macs being ready out of the box is not entirely true - you do get a lot of updates to install and some trial software to remove first, just like on some Windows PCs. Thankfully though said trial software isn't on your desktop and in your face, and there's certainly no downloading new drivers (but then I don't think I've had to do driver updates when setting up a new PC before anyway).

The keyboard is nice but may take some getting used to - the caps lock key is huge compared to my old laptop and the enter button is quite small, so I keep TYPING IN CAPS when I mean to press 'a', and pressing '\' instead of enter. It's also closer to the US layout, with the @ symbol on shift+2 instead of shift+', and certain special characters are in different places too. There's also the lack of a right-click on the trackpad.

But on the whole, I'm really happy with it so far. Now back to revision...

My MacBook, and Hari's iPod, are apparently in Nuneaton at the moment, according to UPS's tracking system. With a bit of luck they'll be in Bradford on Monday.

Things have been busy lately, and continue to be so. Last week I was manning the university's Clearing helpline again, and this week I'll be doing a bit of that as well as re-sitting some exams. In other words, if I've not been working, I've been revising (or finding a reason not to revise). The first two exams are relatively tame but the latter two are quite evil, especially the one I have this Thursday. I'll have to resist spending all my time with the new laptop too if to pass them.

Hari's going to her parents' house for a couple of days for family reasons tomorrow, so I won't have her around for a while which is a shame; unfortunately it's not something she can really avoid going to. I'd be there too, if it weren't for these exams.

I've also just spent $5 on a program called Disco, via macZOT!. This is despite Disco not being ready for release, and its features are mostly secret, but it's only $5 and it's by the same people as AppZapper which I've reviewed in the past and liked. It could be a complete turkey, of course...

The good news is that my MacBook is finally on its way. It should have been shipped last Thursday but wasn't shipped until last night - presumably due to a post-WWDC rise in orders and because I wanted a RAM upgrade and not an off-the-shelf model. It's due to arrive sometime early next week.

I can also reveal what I'm buying Hari for her birthday in September: an iPod Nano. It's the 2 GB model, in black, and I've also had it laser engraved. You may be wondering how the hell I can afford such a thing, but it's because Apple have an offer on which means that if you order a Mac and an iPod at the same time, you can claim a £100 rebate. Combine this with the student discount, and you can essentially get a legitimate 2 GB iPod Nano for £19, directly from Apple. I think the offer is only being promoted to students buying through the NUS, UCAS or their HE institution though.

It's a pretty sweet deal (especially as the laser engraving is free too) - after rebate, I'll have paid £735 for both the MacBook and the iPod. At full price they would cost £963, so I'm saving almost £230. Which is awesome, especially as I'm not swimming in cash at the moment.

Of course, I will probably get iPod envy when Hari's iPod arrives - though my 2-year-old iPod Mini is still working fine despite being dropped several times I'd still love to get my hands on a Nano for myself.

There's a few reasons why I haven't blogged lately. The first is that the random bug that hit me at the weekend returned yesterday and so I spent most of the evening asleep (and will be going to bed when I finish this, even though it's not even 10pm). I've also been busy with work, what with Clearing starting next week, and will be busy this weekend since I'm going with Hari to my parents' for the weekend.

There's also the fact that I currently have to use a Live CD of Linux on this laptop since the hard disk has essentially pushed up the daisies. Because it doesn't store any settings between sessions (Mandriva won't let you save configuration data) it takes a long time to boot up and isn't as nice to use as Windows or OS X, so I tend to get bored/frustrated with it after a while.

The MacBook should be here in a week or so, so I'll have a decent laptop to use soon. But until then, don't expect a lot here :( .

Today I did my first hill start (i.e. starting the car and getting it to move on a hill). It wasn't the greatest hill start ever but I got the car started and moving in the right direction, which, considering it was only my third lesson, makes me quite happy :) . Hill starts are taught early in Bradford anyway, I believe, mainly because there are so many hills here and not many flat roads to learn on.

My laptop's hard drive is now essentially dead. The system can read from it sometimes, but Windows now won't boot. So I'm stuck with a Live CD of Mandriva One for now.

And 'for now', I mean 1-2 weeks, because I have now ordered the fabled MacBook! For budget reasons I've stuck with the 1.83 GHz model instead of the 2.0 GHz model, but I have opted for a memory upgrade to 1 GB MB and a mini-DVI-to-VGA adaptor since it might be useful. I also bought Hari's birthday present yesterday, but more on that soon.

Although I went shopping yesterday, truth is I'm recovering from some random bug that's been making me a bit ill over the past couple of days. It first came about on Friday night during the curry, and got to the point where I had to go home to lie down (and sleep). I was better on Saturday morning but by about 6pm I had to go back to bed again and slept for a few hours before being woken up for dinner.

I've been getting progressively better today and haven't been as tired, or had such bad headaches, so I'll probably be back at work tomorrow morning, providing that I still feel okay in the morning.

Quite what it is I've had, I don't know. It's not a cold, because it came on suddenly and seems to have almost gone already, but then it's not nearly as bad as the 'flu (long time readers may remember my last bought of 'flu back in October 2003). Here's the symptoms that I did have:

• Nose was runnier than usual, but not as bad as with a cold.
• I had a heavy cough, and my asthma has been much worse.
• Headaches and stiff joints.
• General lack of energy and not being able to eat as much as usual; feeling very tired a lot of the time and a little disorientated.
• Temperature fluctuations - one minute I'd be really warm, the next I'd be really cold.

And what I didn't have:

• With 'flu you can barely bring yourself to get out of bed - I could. But I've still taken it relatively easy nonetheless.
• I've been eating reasonable meals - not as much as normal but lots more than when I had 'flu and could manage little more than a jaffa cake one day.
• No sore throat, and my nose hasn't been very runny.
• The symptoms have started wearing off already, which means it's unlikely to be a cold.

So quite what it is, I don't know. I did have the 'flu injection before Christmas so it could be that I've caught a slightly different strain of 'flu which I've had partial immunity to. Or it could just be some random bug. Who knows, but anyway, it looks like I'm on the mend. Touch wood.

I now have a nice comfy chair, bought from... Staples. Yeah, the trip to Ikea wasn't particularly successful as their cheapest nice computer chair was £60 - more than I was prepared to pay, especially as I'm intent on buying a computer from a certain fruit-inspired computer company next week. And no, it isn't Apricot.

The chair was £40 and is nice and big and comfy. In fact it's the exact same chair that Hari's parents bought her for her birthday from Staples... but hers was £30, and not £40. Which is annoying. My parents also invested in one as well since their computer chair was in a bad way too.

We did buy some things from Ikea - a wooden fold-up chair for Hari's room (which should allow me to play WoW on my laptop when I get it at her house) along with a rather nice seat cushion; some batteries and some energy-saving light bulbs. And a new shower curtain.

We also picked up some mini Oreo cookies. They're really hard to come by in the UK and tend only to be sold in shops like Selfridges for ridiculous amounts of money - a box of Oreo cereal can sell for up to £7, or $13 in US money. Unfortunately I managed to get Hari addicted to them, so I may have to do a deal with someone in the US to send me some, in return for something not generally available over there, such as some of the Dairy Milk varieties or Mars Delight. Let me know if you're interested.

Tonight is Curry Night - so me, Hari and two other friends are all off out for a curry (well, more specifically a Balti) later this evening. It's not to celebrate anything, it's just that it's been a while since any of us went out for a curry (April in my case) and since we're in Bradford it's a shame not to.

Tomorrow we're off with my parents to the Emporium of Swedish Flatpack Furniture, or Ikea as it's more commonly known. We're going in the morning as it's usually quite murderous in the afternoon. The main purpose of going is to buy me a new computer chair, since the one I have at the moment (which, ironically, is from Ikea...) is in a rather poor state. I'm also envious of the chair that Hari's parents bought her for her birthday next month.

Lunch will be in a mill in Dewsbury, apparently - I'm trusting my parents on this one - and then we're off shopping, either at the White Rose Centre near Leeds (since Hari has never been there before) or at our local Tesco, depending on how much we buy at Ikea and therefore how much boot space we have left. Considering my parents are also looking for a computer chair as well, the latter is more likely.

And on Sunday, I'm intent on doing very little, since I have a series of busy weekends coming up which take me into early October. Joy.

I had my eye test today. Normally you're supposed to have your eyes checked at least every two years, but for me, it's been over 4, so high time I had one. Thankfully, I go to a university which has an optometry department, so I went to its eye clinic to have my test - not only is it closer to my home but at £7.50 for students it's also very cheap.

It also means you get a very thorough examination, which in my case took the best part of an hour, making my eyes feel like they had taken part in a decathlon afterwards. But it does mean that a whole range of potential problems can be picked up, including some that may have been missed.

Anyhow, though I don't have absolutely perfect vision, it's still pretty good and I have no need for glasses (and shouldn't do for the foreseeable future) - which is good since Hari had to pay over £100 for a new pair of glasses a couple of weeks ago, though her eyesight is considerably worse than mine so she needs very thick lenses.

The one warning I was given is that I perhaps sit too close to VDUs when working with them (something which I do a lot of, as you know) so I've been advised to move the screen back or sit further away. It's not affected my sight thus far, but may in future so obviously I need to be careful.

Today I had my second driving lesson, and the first one in Bradford and with BSM, who, after last week, have been fine. Though we did have to spend some time going over what I did and didn't know from the previous lesson, we were soon back to the hands-on stuff, practising on a bit of straightish, flat road outside Bradford's Abundant Life Centre which was very quiet bar about 5 other cars from different driving schools.

My stopping and starting has now improved greatly and I only stalled a couple of times over several practice runs. We also did a bit of turning left, which is something that I do need to work on. But overall my instructor seems to be pleased with my progress. It's unlikely that I'll be sitting my theory test for another couple of months yet, and the practical test will be some time after that, but I'm getting there.

Yes, another apology for not blogging enough - something I'll put down to having to balance a near-full-time job with a fledgling World of Warcraft addiction and a relationship with Hari. In particular, the last of those led me to spending another weekend in Hari's home town near Birmingham, but we're now both back in Bradford.

Coming back wasn't so eventful, but I made the mistake of travelling down on Friday, when some of Virgin Train's staff were on strike over, um, something. Consequently some other trains had been cancelled and so my train was carrying two train-loads of people. I ended up spending two hours stood up in a (thankfully air-conditioned) carriage with lots of other people - and this was First Class. I felt especially sorry for the woman who had paid £350 for a First Class seat - only to have to stand for her entire journey.

So other than spending lots of time sitting (or standing) on trains, here's what I've been up to lately:

BSM are testing my patience at the moment. They've changed my instructor and all of my lesson dates, and yesterday told me that the lesson I was supposed to be having today was cancelled. However, it looks like they didn't tell the instructor as my housemate said he called today to pick me up for a lesson.

I phoned them up and they assured me that it had been cancelled and that I didn't have to pay for it, but when you're as nervous as me about driving it's not what you want to happen. Still, it could be a lot worse - at least I was able to speak to someone about it.

Not much else has happened really - I've been playing World of Warcraft a bit more (level 44 now) and been at work. I also finally got around to ordering season 1 of Coupling, to go with seasons 2 and 3 which I already have - mostly because Hari has never seen it and the latter seasons will probably make more sense to her once she's seen it.

And my copy of Family Guy season 4 arrived too. I have downloaded all of the episodes for that season but since the DVD sales were one of the main factors in its revival I thought it would be a good idea to buy it and hopefully stop it from getting cancelled again. You also get better picture and sound quality and extra features.

Yesterday I had my first ever driving lesson, something which I was apprehensive about to say the least. Driving is one of those things that I've put off for some time, mostly because of the money involved, but also because I'm scared that I'll fluff it up hugely and end up breaking the car/myself/some innocent pedestrian.

Thankfully my instructor was really kind and helpful, and after going over the basics I went behind the wheel for the first time and drove a car on a public road. In fact, we managed at least half an hour of driving time, going along some of the quiet country roads that border York. Though the roads were narrow and bendy (testing my steering abilities) they also had fewer cars on and so less people to hold up.

Towards the end of the session I'd begun to get used to using the clutch and doing gear changes, and was able to hold a good position in the road. I also only managed to stall the car 3 times and was able to stop reasonably well by the end, something which I put down to learning how sensitive the pedals are.

My next lesson is on Tuesday, but it's in Bradford and with a different instructor. We'll see how that goes.

Hari and I are now in York for a couple of weeks, house-sitting for my parents. We aimed to come through yesterday, but actually did so on Saturday night.

As well as bringing clothes, I needed to bring my entire Mac home with me for a reason I'll mention soon (which is also why this post is coming to you today and not Saturday night or yesterday) - which is easier said than done, since neither of us can yet drive and so we had to take the train. So that's not just the desktop unit (which admittedly is tiny and fits snugly in my rucksack, but also the screen, keyboard and mouse. In fact, in all, this was all of the electronic equipment that, between 2 of us, we took on the train:

• 1 x Mac Mini
• 1 x Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
• 1 x Corded mouse
• 1 x 17" LCD screen
• 1 x Laptop
• 1 x Digital Camera
• 1 x Dell PDA
• 1 x Bluetooth mini-keyboard
• 2 x mobile phones

If that had all gone missing, we could probably make a £2000 insurance claim, which is scary. That all managed to fit in one large case and two large rucksacks, as well as all of our clothes and things. I also had over £100 cash on me too, just to make things even more edgy.

We're not doing a lot this week, which is deliberate since we've both had several very tiring and stressful weeks at university, and just want to get away from it all. But we will hopefully have some friends coming over at the weekend.

• Tomorrow is the last day of week 16 of semester 2, which can only mean two things - it's the end of term, and it's the third annual student union beach party. Our special guest this year is Mary Ann Hobbs (Radio 1 DJ) - past guests included Bez from the Happy Mondays and some guy off Neighbours. Should be good and I'll be taking photos just as soon as I get hold of some batteries which work.
• Last night Hari and I made Skittles cookies - literally cookies with Skittles in, instead of chocolate chips. They're sublime, if a little sticky. We followed this recipe from BBC Food - you need at least two normal packets of Skittles.
• We also attempted to make profiteroles, which didn't go quite so well - they were a bit too big, a bit burnt, and the cream was too runny - but they still tasted okay, which is important.
• The latest chapter in my gripes with the Royal Mail concern the extortionate fees it charges for guaranteed delivery. After the Royal Mail lost my original application for a provisional driving license (I sent it recorded delivery and it never arrived) I had to get the replacement off pronto since I was intending to start learning to drive on Monday. To have its delivery guaranteed by 1pm the next day - which is essentially what first-class mail is anyway - costs £4.10 for one letter. In other words, if you're willing to risk your item going missing or arriving late, it's about 40p to post, but if it must get there and on time, you have to pay 10 times more. A bit steep, don't you think? Especially as it's surely the Royal Mail's fault if items go missing while it's carrying them, so we're just paying extra to cover their own incompetence. As it is, the form did indeed arrive on time, which is a relief.
• Lately I've been getting quite into MySpace - having signed up there only a couple of months ago, I've managed to amass 39 friends - most of whom are people I know from college or university, and the rest people I know online. My not-so-snazzy profile is here - if you know me, add me as a friend.
• And finally, I really want the hot weather to come back now. It's been rather dull these past few days and although the cooler temperatures have been welcome I actually liked it being really hot and sunny. Today started out really nice but it's become somewhat overcast now - hopefully we'll have nice weather by tomorrow. I'm now off to eat cookies.

As anyone else in Britain will testify, it's been bloody hot of late - we haven't had any rain in several days and hardly any clouds either (apart from this afternoon, as I write this...). So the reason why things have been quiet is partly down to me spending a lot of time outside, enjoying the sunshine. And being away from a computer.

One of Hari's housemates is going away to Canada for 3 months towards the end of this week, so we had a big barbecue on Friday as a final get-together. We then went out - which, if I'm correct, was the first time I'd been out on a Friday night since December. This is what happens when you date a girl with a World of Warcraft addiction.

The weekend has been somewhat quiet since it's just been too hot to do anything - I watched the England game yesterday, but other than that I've been taking it easy. Right now in my room it's approaching 30°C (that's 86°F, which is pretty hot for around here). Hopefully the hot weather will stay - the forecast says it will. Friday is the big end of term party here and with most of the events being outdoors some hot sunny weather will be great.

I've now finished all of my assessment for this semester so I don't have any academic work to do this week. I'm involved in the filming of a short video tomorrow, which I should be able to tell you more about in future, and later this week I need to go shopping for some new rechargeable batteries, since some of my current ones don't hold charge too well; suffice to say, on a full charge my digital camera will only take a couple of photos before conking out with a 'low battery' warning.

Today is my fifth and final exam - Computer Graphics. Though it's only an hour long, it will require writing out actual C++ code in the exam. It's closed-book too, so I can't cross-reference with existing code for the structure.

I also haven't been able to do so much revision for it since I had another exam yesterday (Security, Privacy, Data Protection and E-Commerce... what a mouthful...) which was worth considerably more - 16 credits, as opposed to just 6 for the exam today - so I've been concentrating on getting a good mark for that. Thankfully I reckon I've done rather well on yesterday's paper so hopefully that will pull my average mark up somewhat.

On Saturday me, Hari, some of her housemates and friends (including Mr Ben) had a barbecue outside, since the weather was glorious. I also managed to get rather sunburned and was in a bit of pain during most of Sunday. I did take photos but they're still on my phone - I haven't been using my camera lately as I managed to lose it in the depths of one of my bags. Thankfully I've found it, as it's the student union annual Beach Party next Friday and I'd like to take some photos while there. You can see the photos from 2005 and 2004 on Flickr.

Though after today I'll have no more studying until September, when I'll be starting my dissertation project, I'm back at work from tomorrow. I'm part time for the next couple of weeks, and then full time from the beginning of July. The extra money will be very much welcome, especially as I'm looking at buying a new laptop before the year is out.

• I'm only a day away from turning 22 years old, which means I'll disappear into the vague age range of being a twenty-something. Which is quite scary. Hari and I are hoping to go to a concert, have a meal together and then go to an 80s night with some friends, however I'm also supposed to be at a four-hour-long student union meeting during the day. Fun...
• I'm also going to Leeds on Saturday, which should be nice - I haven't been there for a few months (well, not outside the station anyway). I'm meeting my parents for lunch and probably doing a spot of shopping too.
• On a completely unrelated note, Six Apart are due to release the public beta version of Movable Type 3.3 on May 31st. The beta period will last for 3 weeks, so there will be a final release in late June. It'll be the first public release since 3.2 came out in August - the fact that there's been no minor releases in the time since shows how solid MT's codebase has become, and only a handful of bugs have been reported since. Details about the new release, such as its new features, will be coming in the next week.
• I'm now running NeoOffice 2.0 alpha 3 on my Mac, which brings full compatibility with OpenOffice.org 2.0.x. Unfortunately it's still very slow, but it's a better experience. In any case, I have Abiword for reading MS Word and OpenDocument Text files quickly - it loads up match faster than NeoOffice, but isn't quite so stable. Currently NeoOffice is for PowerPC Macs only but an Intel mac build is coming soon.
• Yesterday my bank balance dipped below £200 for the first time in 3 years, which was a bit of a shock. I need to get back some money I'm owed (a total of about, um, £700...) but I may need to be having kind words with my bank manager soon. On the plus side I'm having another reasonably good month with the advertising (though the extra adverts for Firefox and Picasa which occasionally pop up have brought in a grand total of 25 cents) so I should get a nice windfall when Google pay me, and I have a summer job sorted too.
• And finally... I still don't think Hari has bought me a present yet. Oh well.

As I keep mentioning, it's my birthday on Thursday. Hari still hasn't yet decided what to get me as a present (though she's promised to take me out to dinner... somewhere) and I seem to be stuck for ideas, so I'm appealing to all of you with male partners (whether they be husbands, boyfriends, fiancés, slaves, whatever) to give her some suggestions. Note that it can't be too expensive. Please post any ideas in the comments.

Incidentally I haven't mentioned Hari in a few entries, so I'd just like to say she's fine and we're still together. We're going to see Jerry Springer The Opera on Monday night.

I'm about to start the final two weeks of lectures on my course - after that, it's all exams and dissertation. Before then though I have a rather large piece of programming to hand in - a virtual environment, written in Visual C++ and OpenGL. It's not particularly easy work and is taking a very long time to do.

I've also managed to lose my USB memory stick. I'll ask tomorrow to see if anyone has handed it in, but to be honest I'm looking for a new one as it only had 256 MB of space and was only USB 1.1 - nowadays, you can get 1 GB USB 2.0 sticks for £20. There wasn't anything on there that isn't saved elsewhere, thankfully.

I'm also considering the purchase of a Bluetooth headset. I'm intending to learn to drive this summer (will be applying for my provisional license this week) so to be safe I'll need some kind of hands-free kit. My phone does come with one but it's not very good, and I'd like one that would also work with my Mac and laptop, so that I could use it for Skype or TeamSpeak conversations. Any recommendations welcome but my budget is a maximum of £30.

Update: A regular reader, Daniel Watson, sent me a Jabra 205 headset - thanks!

• The common cold has once again decided to take residence in my body. The past two days have seen me work through half a box of tissues and today I've not felt too well - I was supposed to be walking up to Undercliffe Cemetary with the hiking club but I didn't feel well enough. Hopefully I've passed the worst of it now.
• Other than suffering, I've spent the day working on essay about wireless network security. The essay should also be the result of some practical research, so I'll be spending tomorrow dipping in and out of Ethereal to compare the effects of no encryption, WEP and WPA-PSK. I had also considered trying to crack WEP encryption to show how weak it is but it's not hugely straightforward and apparently requires at least 3 wifi-enabled machines on a network to do it properly.
• When I wasn't writing an essay, I was re-implementing something on here that I used to have enabled but for some reason it's not anymore. You probably won't notice it, but now most of the pages on here are GZip-enabled, which means that they are around 60% smaller in transit. Though this leads to a slightly-increased load on the server, it means that I use considerably less bandwidth, and should theoretically mean that pages appear faster for you.
• Hari is still busy on World of Warcraft. She joined a new guild last week who seem a very friendly bunch and she's been managing to do some of the high-level instances such as Molten Core and Zul'Gurub. So she's happy. One day I will probably start playing WoW but it won't be until I've finished my dissertation and is therefore likely to be the back-end of December at this rate - having seen how it can dominate peoples' lives I'd rather not have it to distract me when I have more important things to be doing.
• I made trifle on Friday night. When I say 'made', I meant that I followed instructions on packets - it was a 'some assembly required' kit from Bird's. It turned out okay, but I did manage to burn custard onto the bottom of one of my pans. Which was clever.
• This will be the last post in April, and one of 37 that were posted this month. I've noticed that since October the number of posts I've made has dropped quite a bit - and it was October that I met Hari. Maybe I need to issue a warning, i.e. "Girlfriends seriously harm your blogging" or something.
• Finally, I've started phasing out the use of my university email address for things. It still works but it now forwards to neil [at] neilturner.me.uk, instead of it being an account in its own right. I will almost certainly lose use of this address in the coming 12 months so I want to make sure everything is transferred over so that I don't lose emails. So far the only problem I've had is with Google Adsense, which doesn't let you change your email address, nor does it link with my Google account.

I didn't manage to all of the Yorkshire Three Peaks yesterday, since I decided to pull out at the half-way point (mainly because my legs seized up somewhat when I sat down for lunch). I did manage the first peak - Pen-y-Ghent, and got as far as Ribblehead which is in the foothills of Whernside, the second peak, and covered a distance of 14 miles which is half of the total had I completed all 3. Considering that my previous personal best was about 9 miles I reckon I have achieved something, especially as those 14 miles only took a little over 5 hours.

I did have an enjoyable day and the weather wasn't too bad - we had a brief bit of sunshine and though it was cloudy for the rest of the day there was no rain and wasn't too cold or windy. Because it takes up to 10 hours for some people to do the whole course, we didn't get back to Bradford until 9:30pm (having left not long after 7am in the morning), and most of us were incredibly tired. Though not quite tired enough to avoid going for a curry at Omar's (who sponsor the hiking club).

Pain-wise I'm not too bad - a few weeks ago I was having problems with my left knee on hikes but that didn't flare up at all (either it's gone away or the knee support I was wearing helped), but the soles of my feet, my ankles and my shins were sore, as was my right hand and shoulder from using my walking pole - which proved to be a great help when climbing up Pen-y-Ghent. Last time I had a minor asthma attack and almost fainted, this time I had no problems.

Today has been a lazy day since I'm still very tired from yesterday. Hari stayed at home, and is finally close to finishing her Onyxia pre-quests on World of Warcraft - it's taken a good month and a half. Tonight will probably be spent watching one of the new DVDs I've acquired recently - either Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Coupling series 2 or Red Dwarf VIII. And tomorrow is the start of term. :(

I'm about to set off back to Bradford, ahead of the start of term on Monday. I'm going back early because I'm going to be doing a lot of walking on Saturday - 26 miles, no less. Myself and a few other students from Bradford are doing the Three Peaks - the three highest mountains in the Yorkshire Dales - in one day, so i want to be able to get back and be settled before then. I'm not doing it as a sponsored activity, just as a personal challenge since I've never walked that far before - my current personal best is about 9 miles.

Hari is also coming back to Bradford tonight, so I'll get to see her again. It's only been 6 days since I saw her last but we do miss each other a lot. If you're wondering what she looks like, here's a photo - she's the one on the right :) .

Things have been a bit quiet here of late since I've been kept rather occupied due to a computer mishap on my parents' machine. When I mean mishap, I mean that somehow the partition table or boot sector got corrupted and the computer would not boot Windows. And despite my best efforts in the recovery console, I wasn't able to fix it either, so I've had to reinstall Windows on their computer.

Packard Bell, in their infinite wisdom, do not ship recovery disks with their machines - or any disks at all, actually, and what with it being the holiday weekend there was no way I was going to ask for one to be sent to us. In any case, Packard Bell put a lot of gunk on their computers which we don't want (90 day trials of Norton Anti-Virus and Microsoft Office for example) and this would be put back on if we used their disks, no doubt. So I used the spare Windows disk from my dad's laptop to get the thing up and running again, and I can now say it's running well now. In fact, it's quite a bit faster than it was, and the hard disk is larger because it doesn't have a 5GB hidden partition where Packard Bell keep all of the uninstallers (so you can't uninstall programs without using their uninstall tool and only remove the programs it allows you to remove).

I'm downloading Doctor Who at the moment, having missed it this evening since we were over at the relatives.

• I'm back in Bradford after a slightly extended stay at Hari's parents. It's only for one night though - hopefully I should be back in York tomorrow for a week or so.
• Apple's release of Boot Camp should mean that when I contemplate buying a new laptop next year I'll be seriously considering an iBook or MacBook Pro, rather than a HP or something. That way I'll get my Windows (which will hopefully be Vista by then) and Mac OS X too. I probably won't by Toshiba again after the hard disk incident, or Dell, because their laptops suck donkey balls, apparently. Even if they do start at only £299...
• Speaking of Mac OS X, it has just notified me of version 10.4.6, which I didn't realise was out yet. Oh well.
• Today I bought a copy of Linux Magazine, since my usual techy read (PC Plus) wasn't on sale. I think that's the first time I've bought a Linux magazine. Interestingly though, most of its features were about applications which also ran on Windows and other operating systems - programs like Audacity and Firefox.
• Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection means that I can now play Sudoku on my Mac. Or my laptop, for that matter, since it's cross-platform. It's by the guy who made PuTTY so they should be well made. Found via Download Squad.

I'm afraid this ol' blog is potentially about to get quite a bit quieter over the next week or so. On Saturday I'm going down to the West Midlands with Hari for a few days, and although I will be taking my laptop I may not have much time to blog or casually surf the internet fot stuff. So don't expect a flurry of entries this weekend.

As it happens Hari and I are travelling down separately on Saturday - I'm taking the train while she takes the coach. It's purely for financial reasons - we didn't book her tickets until today and a single ticket on the train was going to cost more than a return ticket by coach. However, it still works out much cheaper if I take the train, so we'll see who gets there first.

Hari made it to level 60 on World of Warcraft on Sunday. She's now doing a hideously difficult pre-quest to get into a high-level guild who list it on their prerequisites. Half the fun is actually getting a group together to be able to do the instance (Blackrock Depths). The latest WoW patch has also benefitted her quite a bit - now, the XP bar disappears when you hit 60 instead of being frozen, and you get money instead of experience for completing quests (or extra money if the quest had a monetary reward). Which is handy.

I'm also not going to be re-installing Windows on my laptop just yet. My source for an XP Pro license fell through, so when I get back to York in a week and a half I'll just use the XP Home CD that came with the machine. There isn't much extra that Pro has over Home that I need, seeing as it's mostly for home use anyway.

Hope you all have a good weekend, if I don't post anything for the next few days.

• I really couldn't think of a better title for this post, sorry.
• Term is over now, so it's the start of the 4 week easter holiday. Which may be Bradford's last 4 week easter holiday as the university intends to cut it down to 2 weeks from next year. Despite the fact that this was decided in November, no-one in university management thought to tell the students, or indeed the academic staff, until a couple of weeks ago, hence almost 300 students turning up to a big meeting on Thursday petitioning the student union to do something about it.
• Interesting Winamp tip: open the About Winamp dialog, click on Credits and double-right-click on the moving image. It'll then show the credits full screen. Double-left-clicking hides the text.
• Hari's not well again - the 'flu's gone, but now her stomach isn't liking her. Hopefully she'll be better by tomorrow since we were planning to go out for the day. Since she's not been out much with being ill, she's been making a lot of progress on World of Warcraft - her mage character is now level 59 and 2/3rds of the way to making it level 60.

Health-wise I'm now feeling much better - my temperature is back to normal and I'm actually able to get out of bed for longer periods. I've managed all my lectures so far this week too. Unfortunately Hari got what I had be she too is now recovering as well, thankfully.

Almost everyone I know is ill or has recently been ill with something, whether it's been a cold, 'flu (and I mean real, heavy 'flu), glandular fever, tonsilitis or various other ear and chest infections. The winter bugs seem to be highly contagious this year.

I'm a bit under the weather at the moment. I'm not entirely sure whether it's a bad cold or mild 'flu, since it's much worse than any of the colds I've had over the past few years but not as bad as 'flu (i.e. I can actually get myself out of bed). I have a sore throat, heavy cough, high temperature (though I still shiver sometimes) and my head feels like lead. I also get very dehydrated, despite drinking far more than my usual intake of water.

Hopefully it's nothing major and it'll go away in a few days - though I feel well enough to go to lectures I can't see myself doing much socialising this week, and caffeine and alcohol are off the menu for now. Hari is doing a good job about fussing over me though.

I'm back in Bradford, since the roads were clear today and it actually stopped snowing. We had intended to leave at 10am yesterday, but as the snow was still falling quite heavily we reckoned any attempt to clear the roads would be futile since they'd be covered again within an hour or so. We were also in small city cars, not 4x4 vehicles which can cope with snow and ice better.

One of the three cars did manage to get back to Bradford yesterday, but this was mainly due to a stroke of luck, i.e. being behind a snowplow, but also that the car was better than the other two. It would have been too risky for the other cars to go, so we decided to spend another night in Grasmere and go back today. Though there was still a lot of snow around, it was not snowing and so the roads had remained clear, and so we managed to get back without any problems.

Other than the mild inconvinience the snow caused, I had a good time. I've taken lots of photos, despite my camera wanting to eat batteries for breakfast, and we managed to walk 7 miles on Saturday. Doesn't sound a lot but that included climbing 1800 ft up a hill.

This week is going to be heavy, since the union elections are on Thursday and Hari is in a show that opens this weekend at the theatre on campus, so she's busy with that every night this week. Still, only two weeks to go until the Easter break.

I was hoping to be able to post tonight about how well the trip was and upload all the photos I've taken. Unfortunately, we've had about 4 inches of snow, blocking the roads out of Grasmere. Consequently, we're stranded here, probably until tomorrow.

Thankfully the youth hostel is warm and has a reasonably-priced internet terminal (yay!) so we're happy to stay here another night. It also has plenty of tea and real ale, too.

In any case, I'll be back in Bradford tomorrow, hopefully.

Weekend

Got back from Hari's parents okay, though the trains between Leeds and Bradford were very delayed on both occasions. The first was because the train in front had broken down, and the second was that the train that the crew were on had broken down so they couldn't get to Leeds to get the train running on time. Getting down to the station on Friday was interesting too - we ended up taking a bus because it was too slippy to walk and the taxis were all stuck in traffic.

Server upgrade

Next weekend this site is due to be moved to a new, improved server, which should mean this site is faster and reduce some of the timeout problems I've been having with MT lately. This will mean that the DNS entries of the site will change so it's possible that you may have some temporary problems accessing the site on Sunday when the change is due to happen.

Smeg!

Red Dwarf VIII, the last series, is finally out on DVD on Monday 27th March. CD-Wow have it for £13.99, and Play.com are selling the limited edition with a scutter Corgi toy for £16.99. Naturally I've ordered it already.

New stuff

When making pancakes on Tuesday it occurred to me that I didn't own any scales, thus making the measuring out of 110g of flour a little difficult (turns out it's about 4 tablespoons). So yesterday I bought one, along with a cheese grater since I didn't have one of those either. I've already managed to grate my thumb on it though.

• At last, I have finally managed to pick the package up from the Bradford South Royal Mail depot. This was only because I happen to have Friday mornings off and had nothing especially important to do, so I could wander down there. Still, there were quite a few people queueing there so I'm guessing most people have realised that phoning them up is useless and that they need to pick it up in person.
• Hari and I are going down to her parents near Birmingham tonight as planned, though we're only stopping for one night as getting back to Bradford by 2pm on a Sunday is going to be impossible without leaving at about 8am. We've also got a friend with a birthday party on Saturday night so we'll be able to go to the end of that hopefully.
• And, as sod's law goes, as soon as we go away for a couple of days Hari's internet gets fixed. Telewest seemed to want to imply that the problem was that her and her housemates were using it too much, or that their modem was faulty, but it turns out there has been a problem with the router in this area which has now been fixed and everything is rosy again. incidentally Hari's been spending most of her time at my house this week so that she can play World of Warcraft without being disconnected every 5 minutes.
• And now I'm off for a pub lunch. Have a good weekend.

• I had my results for my January exams yesterday, and unfortunately they weren't good. I'll have to resit them come August, which is a bit annoying, and will need to work harder in the meantime to compensate. Oh well.
• On a lighter note I've booked tickets to see Jerry Springer: The Opera at the Bradford Alhambra on the 22nd May. I anticipate that it'll sell out so I've bought tickets now to get the cheap seats, but even then it's £14 per seat for the upper circle plus fees. That is, of course, if it even goes ahead - a 2200 name petition has been handed in to stop it being shown. This post by Richard is worth reading - Rich is a Christian but doesn't seem to see what all the fuss is about.
• I posted another entry over at SEB, this time about the Anglican church and the fallout from the decision to disinvest from Caterpillar due to their links with the Israeli army. It's up to nearly 50 comments already.
• Tomorrow I'm off hiking again, this time around Grassington and Conistone. Hopefully the weather will be good but I'm expecting it to be cold.
• Next weekend we're probably going to see Hari's parents but we're having a few problems trying to find trains to get back on Sunday. Hari needs to back in Bradford for 2pm and there are no trains from her town that get her to Birmingham for 9am. It doesn't fair much better by coach. We'll see what happens.

Tomorrow is Valentines' Day, and for once I'm actually looking forward to it. This is the first February 14th where I#ve been in a relationship, and so rather than sulking about the fact I'm still single, I can enjoy the fact that I'm not.

Because we're both quite busy tomorrow with various things, Hari and I are not doing anything special tomorrow, though we are planning to go somewhere nice on Wednesday instead. Wednesday also has more significance to us since it'll be 4 months since our first date. It doesn't feel like 4 months but I suppose time flies when you're in love.

(Feel free to throw up now if you like.)

We spent the weekend at my parents' house in York. Saturday was spent shopping, where we bought lots of chocolate, hot chocolate, and meat (over 2.5kg of beef mince between us), and yesterday we went around the Yorkshire Museum.

Getting back to Bradford from York today was interesting. Sundays are when Network Rail likes to close routes to do engineering work, since fewer season ticket holders travel on Sundays, but this of course means delays, diversions and replacement bus services.

In the past I've not had many problems but today we were hit by a triple-whammy of line closures north of York, between Church Fenton and Leeds, and from Bradford to Halifax. Though the second of those was the only to affect us directly, meaning our York - Leeds train was diverted via Castleford (and was standing room only), the latter meant that trains from Leeds to Manchester Victoria were going via Brighouse instead of Bradford. A fact we realised about 30 seconds before the train was due to depart. And the train to Bradford left at the same time from another platform, which we only just managed to catch.

On most other days of the week the trains are good and reliable, but Sundays are often difficult. This was perhaps an extreme example but it could have lead to us getting stuck in Brighouse on a Sunday night and having to pay for a taxi back to Bradford.

Hari and I are going to see The Producers tonight. I saw it last month but Hari hasn't yet, however I enjoyed it the first time so I don't mind seeing it again. Ideally we would have liked to go tomorrow night but the last showing of it at our local cinema is tonight so we don't have much option, short of waiting for the DVD.

This is a bit unfortunate because we both have exams tomorrow - mine is at 9:15am and hers in the afternoon. I'm reasonably confident about the exam as it should be somewhat easier than the last one - it's about networks and protocols, so I've been busy revising things like the TCP/IP reference model and ways of controlling congestion. Thankfully I covered quite a lot of this stuff 2 years ago so I knew a lot already.

Since Hari and I miss each other so much I went down to see her in Brum today so that we could spend some time together. We didn't do much - walked around a bit, went in some shops, had lunch - but it was great to see her again. It's going to be another 2 weeks until we're both back in Bradford so I might go to see her again next week, but it depends how my coursework and exam revision progresses.

My last visit to Brum 3 weeks ago was very quick - under a couple of hours - so it was also nice to see a bit more of the city now that it's begun regenerating itself. We had a bit of a root around Selfridges and the Bullring, and Hari got herself a copy of World of War-crack Warcraft, which I'm not entirely sure is a good thing. Hopefuly she won't neglect me or her studies...

Coming back was the usual Virgin Trains experience - the train I was aiming to catch was cancelled and so the later one was standing-room only and delayed. I ended up back in York a good hour and a half later then intended.

• I'm back home in York for the holidays. It's good to see my parents again, and not having to worry about cooking food, but I will miss having a double bed and most of all miss having Hari around. Though I may catch a train down south to see her, I may not get to see her again properly until mid-January.
• Still, we both have MSN Messenger. And webcams. And broadband.
• I've brought both my laptop and my Mac Mini home, along with the keyboard, mouse and screen. The Mac is now set up in my bedroom so that I can watch DVDs in bed - this is only possible with a small computer and flat panel monitor since my room is so small. My parents are intending to set up a wireless network in the house soon too so I should get internet in there in a few days (and no, there's no stray open wireless networks around to latch onto).
• My dad is also after a new laptop, particularly one with Wifi. He has my old laptop at present, which is now over 3 1/2 years old and is rather underpowered for even casual use. He's not after something all singing and all dancing, since they have a perfectly good desktop machine that does lots of things, just one that's reasonably quick and reliable and that can work downstairs in the front room or dining room. I'm sure we'll be looking at a few over the next few days.
• As well as moving back home, the reason why I've not been posting here has been down to socialising and spending time with Hari. On Friday a group of us went out dressed as characters from the nativity - I was Joseph and Hari was Mary, and we had a baby Jesus made out of scraps of material. There were also two shepherds, two kings and a sheep. We had a good time, even if my costume was a bit pathetic.
• We also put up the Christmas decorations here, including our new 6 foot artificial Christmas tree, which now dominates the dining room (will make Boxing Day lunch with the family somewhat more interesting...). Since going away to university in 2002 it's become a bit of a tradition that the decorations don't go up until I come back for Christmas.
• Tomorrow will mostly be spent sticking clothes in the washing machine and catching up on my feeds. I'm taking a few days off from coursework and studying.

I'm about to head off now, so this is likely to be my last update before I get back on Sunday. I'm not taking my laptop this time, just my PDA, along with my camera, iPod and USB pen drive.

Because I'm away, I've re-enabled comment moderation for those of you who aren't using approved OpenID or TypeKey accounts. This is just to stop any major spam or flamewars erupting in my absence. I should be posting again on Sunday, or if not, Monday, See you later!

Since things are now somewhat more concrete I thought I'd let you know what I'll be up to this weekend. On Friday we're catching a train (or rather 3 trains) to Hari's parents' house near Birmingham. This'll be the first time I've met her parents, so I'm a little nervous.

On Saturday, we're hoping to spend a bit of time around Birmingham - it's been 3 years since I went to Brum and a longer time since I've actually spent any real length of time there. I'd particularly like to take a look at the new Bullring. We're then catching a train to London where we'll be at the London Geek Dinner.

On Sunday we have tickets for the London Eye, and will probably spend a bit of time moping around London before heading back to Bradford.

I'm looking forward to it, though with the train not getting to our final destination until nearly 11:30pm on Friday and the geek dinner going on until around 11pm on Saturday it's going to be a tiring weekend. It does, of course, mean I'll miss the opening of the Meadowhall Apple Store in Sheffield on Saturday, but then I also missed the Trafford Centre Apple Store opening too. With a bit of luck Apple will open a store in Leeds soon but they haven't announced anything :( .

Anyhow, hopefully I'll see some of you at the geek dinner on Saturday!

Just got back home and now talking to my parents over Skype (since I have €9 of SkypeOut credit to use by December 16th April 28th - it got extended when I used it). Had a very good weekend away from computers and things and the scenery out there is wonderful - even when it's cold and raining. Managed to get very wet and muddy but took lots of nice photographs.

On the junk emails front, the numbers have tailed off to around 1600 over the two days but I've now disabled the catchall flag on my account so I shouldn't be getting any more for the time being.

I'm discovering the hard way that mobile phones and washing machines don't mix. I left my Nokia 7250i in my trouser pocket, and only realised it was still there when I heard it clunking in the drum, 15 minutes into the wash. Despite cancelling it and rescuing it, the phone appears to be dead.

Thankfully the SIM card is alright and I have a reasonably recent backup of contacts on my laptop so provided I get a new handset I should be okay. Presently I'm scouring eBay although Tesco have the Motorola RAZR V3 in silver for £170 which I'm tempted by - but really I don't want to be spending that kind of money.

I'd welcome any suggestions but I'm only after phones that are unlocked with SIM cards - I'm happy with my number and tariff and don't want to change.

Update: Just won an auction for a "virtually brand new" Nokia 6230i on eBay for £139, which I thought was a pretty good deal. Admittedly its predecessor, the 6230, is the ultimate chav phone but it's well-featured and quite small, and I think you can change the covers.

I'm taking tonight off from heavy drinking and going out, so I have a bit more time to blog and read up on blogs. So here's what I've been up to:

• I've naturally been playing with my new camera. Most of the shots have been taken at night but there's some good ones which I've uploaded to Flickr. All in all I'm very happy with it and it was well worth the price I paid. It even has some LEDs on the front that flash blue and red when it turns on for extra flashiness. Doesn't make the photos any better but it's cool nonetheless.
• Tim Westwood was alright on Monday but nothing special. He spent more time gabbering than playing records and never stuck with the same song for its whole duration. Still, the crowd seemed to like him. I couldn't get a photo of him but I did get his pimped-out ride.
• Tomorrow night is rock and indie which should be good. I'm volunteering for the union in the morning so I'll get free entry for it, fingers crossed. It's also the Sports and Societies Fair so I may pop down - I'm thinking about joining the Hiking Club. Might sound strange to you but I used to walk in the countryside quite a bit with my parents and it is nice to get out of Bradford from time to time.
• Although I haven't been able to log in to MT to clear out spam and approve comments much lately, it would appear that SpamLookup is doing a very good job of keeping the blog spam-free even without me. Though I've had over 100 junk trackbacks over the past few days, none of those leaked out onto the main site.
• Varsity, the chain of student-focussed bars, now sells something called the Dirty Burger. For £7 you get a triple-decker beef burger, cheese, bacon, chilli, onion rings, fried egg, jalapeno peppers and chips. And a side salad, just to make you feel less guilty about it. Seriously if that isn't a heart attack on a plate then I don't know what is. I want to try one but I'm worried I may not live to tell the tale - may need to share it.
• Talking of diets my summer diet has totally gone out of the window. Until last week I was eating quite healthily, but I just haven't had the time to eat properly so I've mostly been on takeaway food. Especially as Subway are now doing their daily special with a drink and a cookie for £2.99.
• There's a minor update to iTunes - it's now version 5.0.1, and has "stability improvements".
• Opera is now totally free. A great day for increased browser choice.

• What a weekend... I've been incredibly hungover and sleep-deprived for the past three mornings in a row, and my summer diet has totally gone out of the window. But I'm having a good time, so what the heck :)
• On Saturday I spent most of the day helping out with odd jobs - moving people in, sorting out second-hand clothes, stuffing envelopes, that kind of thing - then went to a house party where there was a punch fountain (literally an indoor water feature but with alcoholic punch instead of water) and a computer with over 1 month's music on it. And there were drinking games.
• I somehow managed to get myself out of bed and into the union before 9am yesterday morning, where I spent most of the day chaperoning one of the minibuses. We did a morning pickup at LBA since around 30 people all arrived about the same time - unfortunately only 28 of those 30 managed to get all of their luggage. One of the two only had his hand luggage - and all of his clothes were in the missing suitcases. He'd come from the west coast of America and this was the first time he'd ever been on a plane.
• We also did 3 pickups from the interchange, which is much nicer considering that the interchange is only a 5 minute drive at most whereas the airport is about half an hour away. And I just did some general helping in between all that. Mini fridges seem to be the in-thing for students to bring into halls this year.
• And then there was the pub crawl. Oh yes. We needed to recruit at least 50 people because we had phoned the pubs before and told them we would bring at least 50 (and in return they would give us free stuff). In actual fact we had well over 100, the vast majority being freshers. All in all it went really well and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.
• And in other news... my camera is now officially deceased. The motor on the zoom packed in last night so it now won't take pictures anymore, and therefore not of any real use (you can still view photos on the screen though). I might go into town this afternoon to see what I can pick up locally - if I can get one ASAP I'm willing to spend a bit more, but won't be at home enought to be able to have one delivered.
• I also got a link from the Guardian Editors Blog. Which is nice :) .

• I'm trying to remember the last time I went two days without a post - must have been a while ago. I've been rather busy with work and stuff so I haven't had time to say much, hence the reason why there's been several posts like this one lately - when I do have time to write something, I tend to compress it down a bit.
• Until now, all comments, bar potential spam, have been accepted on the sideblog immediately. A comment I received last night, however, made me change that - now, like with the main blog, comments by non-TypeKey users or unapproved TypeKey users are moderated first. The comment contained information that is technically illegal in England and Wales, and for good reason. It was only up for around 15 hours but I'd rather not have that kind of information on here, nor will I say what it was because I don't want to encourage its reposting. I'm debating whether to talk to the commenters' ISP about it.
• ETA for broadband is now about 2 weeks - the BT line is being reactivated and I'll be ordering it soon. I will have dial-up again very soon so I might be able to post a little more frequently - and finally get on the net with my Mac.
• We're going with PlusNet, incidentally, since they offer unlimited 2MB broadband for £15/month (50:1 contention) and are quite good from previous experience. We've told Bulldog that we're no longer interested. They're now subject to an Ofcom investigation and were on BBC Watchdog last night - pity I missed it (more from El Reg).
• Spent yesterday afternoon painting the old Scrapie office in the student union - it's being turned into a second-hand clothes shop for students with the magazine moving upstairs pending a relaunch later this month. It was weird being in there with the room empty, bearing in mind how much rubbish is normally in there. It was also nice to finally get rid of the horrible off-yellow paint and replace it with powder blue, which looks much better.
• Since the Biko bar is no longer open for food, I've been resorting to taking a packed lunch in with me. Which is actually less effort than I though - it just takes 5-10 minutes the previous night to put it together. And in the long run, will probably save me a fair bit of cash - I was spending about £3 a day on lunch instead of making it myself for well under £1. Though I do miss being able to leave my desk and chill out for half an hour or so.
• The Open Rights Group is starting to show some progress. The ORG will take a role similar to that of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US and its advisory board includes a couple of EFF people such as Cory Doctorow and Danny O'Brien. They still, however, need money, so sign the pledge if you haven't already done so - we need another 180 signatures.
• Nothing too exciting for the rest of the week but I'll be meeting the parents on Sunday, and next week will be my last week working full time, since after that it'll be freshers week and then the start of term.
• And finally, iTunes 5.0 is out, or will be in the next few minutes, presumably with support for that elusive iTunes phone :)

• The general quietness here has been down to a rather busy few days. On Thursday I was out most of the evening since one of my friends has just finished her re-sits, and Friday was the closing down party at The Biko. Part of the reasoning behind the party was to drink the bar dry (no point in wasting the leftover booze) and indeed by 9pm there was no beer left. The vodka went not long afterwards (bar the odd bottle of Taboo, which is vile - avoid it) and we went from having 6 brands of whisky on offer down to just the one. I'll miss that place.
• Didn't do much yesterday as having been out 3 nights last week and also working 9-5 every day I was absolutely knackered. Today has been similarly quiet.
• On the site, I'm in the process of integrating OpenID support as another comment authentification option alongside TypeKey. All LiveJournal user accounts are OpenID-enabled and any Movable Type installation can become an OpenID server. The plugins are included in the extras/ folder in the MT zip file and just need to be dropped into place to get going. Unfortunately right now the authentification doesn't seem to be working - if you try to comment using OpenID or LiveJournal you're told that you are missing a name and email address. Not quite sure why this is happening but I've seen it reported elsewhere.
• Installed MySQL on my Mac. The installation was so easy it was practically a non-event. I particularly like the availability of a preferance pane to make it easier to start and stop the server. I'm also putting PHP on there so that I can use it as a development environment.
• I haven't said much about what is going on in New Orleans, mainly because a lot of other people have already said a lot of other things about it and that words cannot begin to describe the horror.
• I've ordered Series 7 of Red Dwarf from Play.com since it's only £16.99 at the moment. 7 and 8 were both longer than the previous 6 series (8 episodes instead of 6) so it's on 3 discs instead of two. And it's purple. It's due to be released in early November. I've also bought series 3, to go with 4,5 and 6 which I already have. I wasn't so keen on the first two series, but then Kryten is one of my favourite characters.
• Not a hugely interesting week ahead but two weeks today is Intake Day when all the new freshers arrive on campus, followed by Freshers Week of which I usually end up with very hazy memories of.

I managed to blag a free crate of beer today. I bought a 20 pack of Fosters from Tesco, but when checking my receipt, found I'd been charged twice for just the one pack - which, at £13 is quite a bit. So naturally I complained, and not only was I refunded the £13 that I shouldn't have paid, but the £13 of the pack I actually bought, meaning that I didn't pay a penny for any of the beer. Apparently this is standard procedure.

I've booked my flights and accommodation for the Irish Geek Dinner - it's not until the end of November but I wanted to book early to get the best prices. Flights from Gatwick with EasyJet cost £25 return including all taxes and whatnot, and a single room for one night in the Rochestown Park Hotel was €106.88 (£73). It's not the cheapest hotel in Cork but it's the one where the dinner is taking place so I won't have to negotiate an unfamiliar city in the dark late at night.

Unfortunately most flights to Cork are from London airports - EasyJet from Gatwick, Aer Lingus from Heathrow and Ryanair from Stanstead - and those that do fly elsewhere (Jet2 from Newcastle and BMI from LBA) don't fly Wednesdays thus meaning a longer stay. I'm sure Cork is nice but by November I'll be juggling the foundations of a dissertation, modular study and probably also a part-time job so even 2 days off is a lot.

I think there are unseen forces working against my ability to communicate with the outside world.

First of all, we have the problems with the internet. Then, BT cut our line off (and I think it is now cut off completely). And now my mobile phone is on the blink - it'll cut out and then won't turn on, but will mysteriously start working again a few hours later.

I'm going to solve the latter problem on Sunday, hopefully, but the others may take more time :(

Currently on my lunch break from Clearing. Since starting at 8am I've fielded around 40 calls so far and the number in general has been very busy; around 95% being for the same two courses...

Still got another 6 hours to go, though.

Update: We're all out of biscuits :(

Currently on a bit of a sugar high due to all the sugary drinks I've been having today, so I've been a little overenthusiastic on the phone, but hopefully it'll cheer people up.

One of those two courses I mentioned is now full so the calls are going through a bit faster now and I can take a slightly longer breather between calls (instead of the phone ringing again as soon as you hang up the previous call). Still got just under 4 hours to go, though... :-/

Normally I do these posts as bulleted lists, but I've decided to do them in a more Dave2-esque fashion and use definition lists instead.

Clearing

Today the university received students' results from the exam boards. The students themselves don't get them until Thursday, so it gives us time to decide who to give offers to and whether to put the courses in clearing. On Thursday I'm one of around 40 people manning the university's clearing call centre (along with many more departmental support staff). We're anticipating it to be much busier than in previous years. I start work at 8am that morning, and finish at either 5pm or 7pm depending on my rota.

Next weekend

Clearing duties mean I'm going to be working on Saturday as well this week. But considering I've just spent £400 on a new computer I do need the money.

Withdrawal

One of the student union bars, The Biko, is closing down in a few weeks. This is partly due to construction work in that part of the building, but also because of the student union's difficult financial position. Unfortunately it may well be 2007 until it's open again, so I'll have to go elsewhere for my lunchtime sandwiches, or - shock horror - start making them myself. I'm somewhat glad now that I didn't get elected as the student union treasurer...

Synergy

Synergy is now running properly on my Mac and laptop. I would strongly suggest to Mac users that they download SynergyKM as this makes running and configuring Synergy much easier and less intrusive.

Wifi

My new WPA-compatible Wifi card arrived from dabs.com on Saturday. It would have arrived on Thursday but no-one was in, or if they were they wouldn't have heard the doorbell as someone had accidently turned it off (it's one of those wireless ones that looks like a baby alarm). As well as supporting WPA and 802.11g, it's also smaller - the stalk doesn't stick out as much - and uses signed drivers in Windows, meaning that it's less likely to crash. The old one caused a couple of BSODs in its time so this is welcome. I'll probably sell the old one on eBay once I find the box and driver CD.

Drivers

Talking of drivers: if you buy a new piece of hardware, don't install the drivers on the CD straightaway. If you can, check the manufacturer's web site for newer drivers and install those instead. It's better to start afresh with the best drivers than do an upgrade.

iTunes Music Sharing

Had my first play with this at the weekend, playing my housemate's music through my Mac. Works pretty well although obviously you can't copy tracks to your machine. It's also very transparent - if another computer on your network has iTunes running and is sharing its library, it just appears in your folder list.

And more sharing

When using public hotspots, make sure you disable File and Print Sharing (you can do this in Windows by right-clicking your connection icon, choosing 'Change Windows Firewall Settings' and selecting 'Don't Allow Exceptions'). Otherwise the other people in the hotspot can see your files. The person sat opposite me with the Compaq notebook has a downloaded copy of The Passion of the Christ in one of his shared folders.

• I've now had an unconditional offer from the university for the MSc course, so I'll be starting lectures again on the 26th September - exactly 8 weeks today.


• Went go-karting yesterday - or rather, watched my friends go go-karting as I was rather hungover and had a dodgy stomach from being out the previous night. Here are the photos.


• Talking of which, we went out to Fibbers in York, which is under the hideously-ugly Stonebow building. For the purpose of any Bradfordians, it's quite a bit like Rios, except smaller, slightly classier and able to attract more well-known bands; Kasabian played there recently and they've had Feeder and Graham Coxon in recent years. One of the bands playing soon is called Spasticated Razor Masturbator. Nice.


• Still no news from Bulldog and it's been nearly two weeks since their previous email, which said they'd be in touch "shortly". Hmmm.


• Work is going okay. I'm carrying on as normal this week, then from next week we start building up for Clearing which kicks off on the 18th August.


• Steve, a regular commenter here and blogger at randomlog.net, has got a new URL. He hasn't got redirects working so if you were wondering why his feed has been quiet, now you know.


• Dave is getting ready to trash his RSS feed and just offer an Atom 1.0 feed now that Atom is a formal standard. I'm seriously considering this too, although I want to wait for slightly wider aggregator support first. Firefox and Thunderbird won't properly support it until 1.5 and NetNewsWire has only recently adopted it fully. That said, I do think that Movable Type 3.2 dropping Atom 0.3 in favour of 1.0 for new blogs is a good idea.


• Listening to The Now Show on headphones in public is not a good idea. People will wonder why you keep sniggering.

I'm now on my way to London for Open Tech 2005. It's been an early start - up at 6am to catch a 7:35am train.

The train is one of the direct Bradford to London services that GNER run early in the morning, and it has on-board Wifi so that I can periodically check emails. And blog, obviously.

Because of recent events I decided not to take my laptop, since it would mean taking a big rucksack on the tube. Lately Transport for London have had problems with young men with big rucksacks so I thought it was best not to bother. So instead I'm using my PDA and blogging using Pocket SharpMT
. It means that writing entries takes quite a bit longer and web browsing is a little more difficult but then apparently the on-train wifi isn't up to a lot anyway.

To give you some idea about how slow it is to write on this, I started this entry as we passed through Frizinghall station and we're now at Leeds. And that included a stop at Shipley. It is helped a bit by the predictive writing feature, but as I've not used it a lot its vocabulary is quite small.

Anyway, I'm rambling. I shall update you later on.

Update: For some reason I couldn't get SharpMT to post so this is coming via normal MT. Unfortunately the MT admin interface doesn't work so well on small screens so it's not quite so straight-forward to use. Progress report: just passed through South Emsall after stopping at Wakefield.

9:50am Not far from Stevenage now. The GNER wifi start page has a map showing the train's current location, which is nice. Typing on the on-screen keyboard is really starting to get annoying now; because the ride is a bit bumpy I keep hitting the wrong letters. I also keep hitting the Home button instead of the spacebar and so I've had to write this again.

Due into King's Cross in a little under half an hour.

This week looks interesting. Wednesday is the day of my graduation ceremony, where I get to pay £30 to dress up in a silly gown and mortarboad, listen to a speech by an honorary graduate I've never heard of, shake hands with Baroness Lockwood of Dewsbury who is the (outgoing) chancellor of the university, and get a little piece of paper. Oh, and meet up with people I haven't seen for in a few weeks and have a free buffet lunch.

Saturday is Open Tech 2005 and so yet another day trip to London is in order. I think I've pretty much decided which sessions to go to, although there is a clash at 3pm - do I want to listen to Ben Hammersley and Jeremy Zawodny, or Danny O'Brien, Cory Doctorow, Ian Brown and Rufus Pollock? Decisions, decisions...

incidentally, if like me you'll be taking the tube from King's Cross, you'll need to take the Victoria line to Victoria and the change onto the District Line - the Picadilly Line is still closed for obvious reasons.

And during the week, with a bit of luck, I'll have internet access restored, along with the arrival of my graduation present to myself. No prizes for guessing what it is :) .

My degree results have (finally) been made available today - I've got a 2:2, which, while I was hoping for a 2:1, is enough to get me onto the MSc course for next year. So, yay! :)

Some say that there is no such thing as a free lunch. There is. I had two of them today - one was part of my expenses at work and the other was due to a nearby department having spare food.

Of course it would have been better if one of those had been yesterday so that I wouldn't have had to buy lunch then, instead of having two lunches today. Combining that with a big dinner at my parents house this evening and I'm utterly stuffed.

And yes, I have gone back to York again for the weekend, and yes, it was mostly to use their internet connection seeing as we're still without one in Bradford. Thankfully the university is being increasingly endowed with Wifi hotspots, including some with plug sockets, so I haven't been totally disconnected from the 'Information Superhighway'. Bet that's a term you've not heard in ages.

Tomorrow we're going to Diggerland near Durham; one of my father's 60th birthday presents was a free day out there and tomorrow looks like a nice day. I'll be taking photos, as you'd expect, and I will eventually get around to uploading the photos I took last week in Edinburgh.

I'm off up to Edinburgh tomorrow for the Make Poverty History march. The coach leaves at 6am, and I'm not due back until about 11pm so it's going to be a loooong day. As you can guess, I'll be taking my camera and wearing a white t-shirt - no prizes for guessing which one :) .

Hopefully I'll see some of you there. If not, I'll have the photos uploaded soon.

I also had a bit of very good news today. More next week when it's official, but in a nutshell it means my plans for next year are somewhat more concrete now.

Tomorrow is the day I move house, so I'll be spending tonight doing the last of my packing (clothes, kitchen stuff etc.). I am looking forward to moving in though - the house is much better than this one and I'll have a bigger room.

Like my current place, the house is on ADSL, which means I'll have to call PlusNet and tell them to uncancel my account with them and then have it transferred. The house is currently on Tiscali but the person who pays the bill will be moving out in September so it's probably best that I take it over, and according to ADSLGuide PlusNet rank much higher than Tiscali for, um, everything.

Since this year we've been using a spare computer as a gateway (which wasn't mine), and the new house only has one USB ADSL modem (after a previous occupant took the gateway router with them), I've needed to buy a new router. I've settled on the Netgear DG834G, due to good reviews. As well as offering ADSL routing it also acts as a 4-port network hub and a 802.11g wireless access point, so I'll be able to use my laptop anywhere in the house. Not that the house is particularly big or anything, but still, it gives me that bit of extra freedom and it's only another £20 over an equivalent box without Wifi. The box also has firewall capabilities and supports UPnP.

Actually getting the box delivered has been a bit of a challenge due to a couple of problems with dabs.com - I was going to write a big ranting entry about it but I don't think it would be entirely fair on them - but it should be here tomorrow, which isn't too bad considering I ordered it yesterday.

If you looked through my York photos that I posted back in March you may remember this one of York College. I noted that the building was about to be demolished in the description.

And, it is. When I went through to yesterday I went past the college on the way back to station (hitching a ride with a friend who I went to college with) and took some photos. It's strange seeing places that I used to hang out be reduced to a pile of rubble - while most of the classrooms are still standing at the moment the library and cafeteria have been flattened already.

Once the site is cleared a new 'state of the art learning environment' is to be built in its place which will see the two college sites (the former York Sixth Form College and York College of Further and Higher Education sites) amalgamated into one site, with the other sold off for a reputed 8-figure sum for a housing development. While I'm glad to see the awful 1960s building bite the dust, it's also a shame to see the place where I spent a happy 2 years of my life destroyed so brutally.

On the other hand, it's likely that the halls of residence I was living in last year will be pulled down soon as well.

The photos are somewhat blurred since they were taken while driving past at 30mph and the sky was very dark since it was about to pour down with rain. With thunder and lightning and everything.

It appears that we're in the middle of a heatwave. Today has been very hot - temperatures in the high twenties and even now at almost midnight it's still 25 degrees in my room, even with the window wide open. Compare this with the beginning of the week when it was very cold (by June standards).

It's been nice and sunny today and it should start off that way tomorrow, but unfortunately thunderstorms are forecast for the afternoon. Which is a bit of a shame as I'm intent on popping over to York to do a few odd things back home, now that Royal Ascot has finished. The racecourse lies between the station and my parents' house and so I was intent on avoiding that general area if I could.

I'd stay the night but alas I'm at work from 9 the following morning here in Bradford. Now that term is over I'll be working full time (or near enough) for the next few weeks. It should mean I get plenty of money but will also mean I'll have less time to mope around on the intahweb.

I'm back home in Bradford now. Here's my writeup of the Geek Dinner - photos will come later, although you can view other peoples' photos here.

I'm back from the Geek Dinner. It was awesome - I got to meet several people, some of whom I knew already, others who I know but have never met in person, and some complete strangers too... There were over 200 of us, which meant that it was hard to talk to everyone and meant that I missed some people that I really wanted to chat to.

I'll post more, including the rest of my photos, later today. It's 20 past midnight and I have to be up at 8am, so I'll bow out for now.

It's all over. I've had my last exam (did alright, actually) and now I'm free!

You probably know by now that Apple are switching to Intel x86 chips from next year. You also probably know that I'm looking to buy a Mac soon. At the moment I think that will still be the case but I am a little concerned about buying into a platform that will soon be obsolete. I just hope that Apple and the various independent software developers retain compatibility with the PowerPC processors. I can't wait a year for a new computer - the cooling system in my laptop isn't too healthy which makes CPU-intensive tasks difficult, so I'd like to have a more dependable machine, and I'd like it to be a Mac.

On the plus side, at least Apple will bundling PowerPC emulation in their Intel-based machines, and it should mean that we finally get the equivalent of a G5 PowerBook. Not that I'd be able to afford one, even if the switch to Intel does mean lower prices as people are predicting.

In any case, I should be making a trip to the Apple Store in London tomorrow and I'm sure it'll be a topic for discussion at the Geek Dinner tomorrow. I don't know how frequently I'll be able to blog over the next couple of days but I'll try to keep you posted on what goes on.

Here's what I'm up to in the coming days, if it interests you:

Today

Revision, revision and more revision.

Tomorrow

My last exam. Of my degree. Woohoo! Followed by a drinking session, I imagine.

Tuesday

Work at 9am :( . Heading off to London at 11am, doing a bit of shopping and then off to the London Geek Dinner.

Wednesday

Off to The Guardian Summer Graduate Fair at Earl's Court. Catching a train back to Bradford.

Thursday

Back at work.

Friday

At work, then celebrating the end of everyone's exams.

• Went to Leeds today to have lunch with my parents; we went to Bibi's like in November. I didn't really do any shopping but I did have my camera with me. Photos on their way soon.
• While I was there, I got the rest of my birthday presents:
  • 2 shirts (both shades of pale blue)
  • a grey t-shirt
  • a signed copy of Tony Robinson's The Worst Jobs In History
  • a tie
  • a pair of cufflinks
• I also picked up my credit card, which I activated today (at around 4:55pm - just to really annoy the guy at the other end expecting a quick getaway at 5pm on a Friday). Will be useful for buying my TFT screen since it'll be over £100 and qualify for extra payment insurance - the main reason why I got the card in the first place. My initial credit limit is £500 which is fine for now.
• A few days ago I ordered the special edition of Forever Faithless, Faithless' Greatest Hits album, which arrived this morning. It's the limited edition digipack. I've always liked Faithless so there was no question of me getting this even if I didn't buy it immediately after it came out.
• In news that will have various people from work walking around with a spring in their step, Bradford is now the second-best university in the country for graduate employment behind Cambridge. We were 7th last year, and this year we're the only institution in the top 10 that is in the north of England; the rest are in the south or in Scotland.
• The university has also come to its senses and finally provided concrete slabs on The Ampitheatre so that in summer students can have barbecues without burning the grass. Having a summer barbecue on a warm day is a student tradition here and every year several more rectangular burn marks appear in the grass. Although I'm sure it's only a matter of time before some drunk students try to steal the slabs.
• Tonight I'll be tidying my room, since I can't see my floor right now, and then debating going out. Since the exam period started today there's not much really going on and I don't know if I can actually be bothered.
• It's a pity user signups at UKNova are turned off (there's a 3000 user limit and new accounts only become available when someone else gets deleted) because there's some pretty good stuff on there right now - the complete 1993 series of Have I Got News For You, featuring Caroline Quentin (the then Mrs Paul Merton) and Rt Hon Tub of Lard MP, and a complete series of The Now Show from last year. There's also the current series of Doctor Who and Doctor Who Confidential.
• This offer from play.com makes me sick. I paid £130 for something like that 2 years ago, and they're selling it for £18. But then that's technology for you, I suppose.

• It's the morning afternoon after the night before, and I'm actually feeling okay. I did drink a lot (by my standards) last night - mostly Southern Comfort, which, had I drank neat, would have seen me consume half a bottle of the stuff. I am somewhat hungover but I've been much, much worse than this before having consumed less, so, yay.
• I went into town today to put a birthday money cheque into my account at the bank. This is the first time I've had to put any cheque in for about 2 months now; normally I have my Google AdSense cheque and rent from my parents to pay in, however thanks to Google introducing EFT and my parents embracing the joys of online banking the money now comes through electronically.
• On the subject of money, now that I'm 21, I get access to a savings account that my grandmother has been keeping for me. I'm not quite sure how much is in there but it's not an insignificant amount of money. I don't need it desperately so I'm probably going to bung it into an ISA for a year or so to amass some interest.
• There's a surprisingly high number of Liverpool supporters in Bradford, as I found out last night. Trust me to have a birthday that co-incides with one of the most gripping cup finals ever. Well done to Liverpool by the way.
• I haven't yet got all of my presents yet, but so far I've had a box of Celebrations from work, a blue drinking t-shirt from my parents and some birthday money. And money to buy the TFT screen which I'll be ordering next week.
• And now I'm off to the pub for a much-needed cool, caffeinated, non-alcoholic beverage.

I've just got back from my 21st birthday celebrations, which, as you can probably tell by me being able to post here, means that I haven't managed to totally inebriate myself. I am pretty well-plastered, but on the other hand I have been much worse before. I'll blame it on the fact that we got kicked out of a club due to one of my friends reproducing the contents of her stomach, after which we decided to go home.

Thanks for all the 'happy birthday' comments and the TFT screen recommendations; I think I've decided on one now so I'll be ordering it in a few days time. But right now, I really, really need to go to bed.

Oh, on a totally unrelated note, congratulations to Lucio Buffone on getting a Sony Award and a contract with XFM. Lucio is a former University of Bradford student and was Communications Officer of the student union for a year as well as being a DJ on our radio station, Ramair.

If it interests you, I'm off to the London Geek Dinner. It sounds like it's going to be a pretty big event, with 80 people confirmed so far, including people like:

• Hugh McLeod
• Robert Scoble (from Microsoft, but you probably know that by now)
• Johnnie Moore
• Alistair Shrimpton (from Six Apart UK)

... and me, obviously. I'm down south then anyway for the Guardian Summer Graduate Fair.

I'm back from the demonstration in Bradford (well, actually it finished before 2pm but I've been doing coursework). It was reasonably successful - we didn't get the 300-or-so people necessary to get right around the town hall but we did have enough to get around Centenary Square, or at least the bit outside the town hall. I think around 150 people turned up in the end, and this was despite the fact that it was cold and raining.

It was a good bit of fun and great to see lots of different people coming together - local Christian and Muslim leaders, the Deputy Lord Mayor and Deputy Lord Mayoress, a couple of Bradford Bulls players and their team mascot, and around 40 students from the university. The local press were also there.

My photos from today are in this Flickr photoset - there's not many but then it wasn't a particularly long demonstration anyway. There's more general MPH photos in the Make Poverty History Pool.

So with projects due in tomorrow my poor little printer has had to work its socks off this evening, printing two copies of both mine and a housemate's 70-odd page projects. In all, it's taken the best part of 3 hours to print, including a change of cartridge and numerous paper misfeeds.

But, the big news is that my project is finally finished and ready to hand in tomorrow morning. Woohoo!

I think it's fair to say my final year project is now about 90% complete. The programming is done and seems to work well, the second draft is done and the appendices are sorted. I just have a few pages to expand upon and a couple of diagrams to draw and it's sorted. The whole thing is due in on Wednesday and I'm well on target to finish by then. incidentally, the phrases "badger", "mushroom" "snake" and "Nicholas Parsons" all appear in it.

This means that I can take tomorrow off for the Love Music Hate Racism event - it's quite possible that I'll be doing some stewarding for at least part of the event, too. I don't think I'll get to meet any of the acts playing but you never know. In any case, I'll be taking my camera.

According to the weather forecast, tomorrow should be the hottest day of the year so far for Bradford. The afternoon especially is supposed to be quite sunny, which will be nice.

It's a glorious sunny day outside - just a pity I have to stay in and do project work all afternoon :( . I did get chance to nip out briefly though and managed to get a couple of photos which will be on Flickr at some point soon.

Life-wise things are going okay right now - the deadline for my HCI project, which isn't worth quite so much as my final year project, has been extended by two weeks, which means I'll have much more time to concentrate on them individually. So that's good.

The house for next year is also all-but sorted, I'm just awaiting confirmation from the landlord. The house I've got is very nice - it's been well-maintained and comes with all mod cons, and the rent is only £38/week plus bills.

I've been approved for a credit card - my first one. It's not got a very good interest rate but I imagine I'll be able to get better ones in future, and in any case I'm mostly intent on using it for the extra protection on purchases over £100 rather than as a means of credit. It should come next week, hopefully.

If you can find a copy of The Guardian today, buy it since it has a free CD in today with songs by New Order, Morrisey, Embrace, Morcheeba, Depeche Mode, The Prodigy, Bjork and Royksopp. It's pretty good, and obviously it's free. The newspaper also has an article about the summer festivals which is also available online.

Now that I'm reasonably sure about what I'm doing next year, and have found someone else to live with, I need to find somewhere to live. This is unfortunately easier said than done, especially as most people who were looking for houses started looking a couple of months ago - most of the properties available for rent have all been taken.

We've found one that was still free (but apparently has several interested parties) but it's quite some distance away from the university and isn't that great, though the landlord has promised to fix some of the problems like light switches hanging off the walls and the lack of a bed in one of the rooms. It's £40/week each (plus bills), which isn't bad, and it does have cable wired in but without the equipment.

If it's all we can get then I'll settle for it, but ideally I'd like something a bit nicer. We're prepared to move in with others if necessary, so if anyone living near the university has two spare rooms for next year drop me an email.

There always seems to be a number of people who want to apply for a university degree, but who do not want to use UCAS, the national centralised admissions service that all universities use. All of Bradford's undergraduate applications are processed by them; we only deal with direct applications for postgraduate courses. An example of a conversation with a person reluctant to use them might go like this:

Student:

I'd like an application form for x.

Me:

For undergraduate courses, you'll need to apply through UCAS.

Student:

But I'm an international student.

Me:

You still have to apply through UCAS.

Student:

But UCAS is slow, I want my application to be processed directly.

Me:

You still have to apply through UCAS.

Student:

But I'm only applying to study here, not anywhere else.

Me:

You still have to apply through UCAS.

Student:

But applying through UCAS costs money!

Me:

You still have to apply through UCAS.

Student:

But couldn't you just make an exception for me?

Me:

You still have to apply through UCAS.

Student:

But...

They usually get the point after a while.

The next couple of days will see me going into tourist mode again. Tomorrow I'll be in London for the third time in 5 weeks to visit London Zoo - last time I went there it was the mid-80s and I was in a pushchair, and it's been a long time since I've been to a zoo of any description.

Then on Friday I'm off to The Deep in Hull, one of the largest indoor aquariums (aquaria?) in the country. It opened a few years ago but I haven't yet had chance to visit.

In both cases, I'll be armed with a camera and not afraid to use it, and the results should make their way to Flickr soon afterwards.

Dave's done it so I'm going to follow suit:

If I am in a permanent vegetative state, then please don't try to keep me alive forever. Pull the tube, let me die, and then salvage my organs for transplants. It's not like I'll need them anymore, yet it could be a matter of life or death for them.

There, I've said it. There's probably a more official way of doing that but this will do for now.

Just got back from the anti-war march in London - we had around 50,000 people (at a conservative estimate) out there, which isn't too bad. I have around 50 photos to sort through and upload so they may take a day or two to appear, but in the meantime here's some from the Beeb.

Overall I think it went well and I had an enjoyable day - met some cool new people and caught up with a few people from Unite. It was also good to be on the first demonstration to pass the American Embassy in London since the Vietnam war.

Anyway, having had minimal sleep these past few nights and a 6:30am start, I really, really need to go to bed now :) . I'm off back to York for a couple of weeks tomorrow so I need to be awake in good time to do some packing - it's the first time I've been home in 2 1/2 months.

I have to apologise for being very vague in my posts about the elections, and making one of my posts disappear altogether (the first time that's happened in a ver long time). Unfortunately the election regulations are very strict, especially in the realm of electronic communication - I couldn't post any publicity to sites not hosted by the university, nor could I use email lists. Furthermore any web pages I did post had to be approved by the assistant returning officer and the content must not allude to any other candidate running in the election.

I originally posted something which encouraged people to check out my election web site and vote for me, but having done so I realised that would probably be against the regulations and would have seen me reprimanded (since this site isn't hosted by the university and doesn't have a university domain suffix), so I removed it a couple of hours later. However, with Bloglines crawling this site hourly it meant that it indexed the post and at least a couple of you enquired as to the whereabouts of the post.

If it interests you, I got 23.2% of the vote, with the other two candidates tied on 35.2% and the RON - Re-Open Nominations - candidate on 6.4%. We use ATV - Alternative Transferrable Voting system - so RON was elminated and counting went to a second round. After the second round one of the other two candidates pulled ahead, I was eliminated and then the count went to a third round, after which a result was announced. All in all, about 1000 people voted, a turnout of around 10%. It might not seem a lot but that's up on last year's 7%.

Being a candidate has been a very interesting - and enjoyable - experience, though I'm not sure whether I'd do it again next year since it is a lot of extra stress on top of project work, which has suffered in the past 3 weeks. Thankfully Easter is nearly here (one more week of lectures to go) so I'll have time to catch up then.

On a not-so-related note, I received my semester 1 marks today. Or rather, most of them. The two that I did get were very good - 67% and 70.7% (equivalent to 2:1 and First Class honours), but the third wasn't yet available. And yet the module consisted of two 50% courseworks, one handed in in November and the other December. I think you'll agree that 3 months is a ridiculously long time.

And finally, here's another photo from last night.

Just to want to thank all the Bradford students reading this for voting for me - I got a total of 192 votes (plus 4 transferred votes) in the election today. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to get me elected.

The result was a bit of an inevitability as I was against two very strong candidates, however it was a good, clean contest with a higher turnout than previous years. I'm not bitter about it, though naturally I'm a little disappointed.

So, next year, it looks like I'll be a student again. Bring it on. :)

Today was one of Bradford's three open days so I had a look at my options for postgraduate study. While I'll hopefully be treasurer of the student union next day (I'll find out late tomorrow night if that is the case), I'd also like to carry on my studies beyond undergraduate level, so this is, if you like, plan B.

The course I'm most interested in is MSc Forensic Computing, which combines computing and forensic sciences for investigation of computer crime. It's quite a new course - should I start this in September I'd be in only the second year of students taking it. But it does sound really interesting and it's a bit different to what I'm doing right now.

As for my application, I've been assured that unless I make a right royal mess of my final year I can be largely assured of a place on the course, which is a relief. The academic staff, of whom I'm already on first name terms with anyway, seemed pretty keen to take me on. It's nice to feel wanted.

I'll let you know on Friday what the result was on Thursday. All I can say is that if you're a Bradford student, please get out there and use your vote tomorrow.

incidentally, today I saw an advert for the University of Central Lancashire in a postgraduate funding guide. Here's a quote from it (emphasis mine):

You'll also find you're studying in Preston, the city rated second most affordable for students by the Sunday Times HE Guide

Guess which city was rated the most affordable? :)

Posting has been a little light here of late for reasons that I'll have difficulty telling you, short of pointing you here. But anyway, here's roughly what's happening in my life right now:

Right now I'm very, very tired. It's gone midnight my time and I've been awake since 6am this morning. I've been down in London all day at the UAF Conference, which was really enjoyable and inspiring too. I'll write more tomorrow once I've had some much needed sleep.

And thanks to Andy for sending me a copy of Supernoid :) .

I've all but recovered from a cold (only the second proper one since September, which is impressive compared to previous years), however today's G2 has some useful hints for dealing with them. Such as:

...help doesn't have to be hi-tech: a hot toddy, while it won't prevent a cold, is certainly medicinal. "One or two units of alcohol in a hot toddy can be a great sedative," says Eccles. Doctor's orders, then.

Excellent. A trip to the pub is warranted, I think.

It's not often that I have two consecutive days without posting here, but whaddya know, I managed it. Here's what I've been doing:

• Getting rather drunk at an indie and britpop night
• Doing a presentation about my final-year project to my supervisor and fellow students
• Playing around with Nokia PC Suite now that I have a working Infrared connection
• Having a post-exams drinking session
• Having 5 hours sleep on Friday night
• Working all day Saturday
• Having a (small) house party on Saturday evening, then retreating to the pub
• Having considerably more sleep on Saturday night
• Finally gave in and ordered Franz Ferdinand's album
• Updated IcyBlue again

I'm now back in Bradford, and currently on a Wifi connection in one of the union's bars. This is beacuse there's no internet in the house at the moment. Or rather there is but the computer we're using as a router for the network isn't all there, and won't be until my housemate gets back this evening. So this is probably the only chance I'll have before then to check my email and what-have-you.

We're also without TV. The strong winds of late appear to have knocked our aerial off target (or off altogether, we're not sure), so we've lost all of our digital channels. On analogue, BBC1 sort-of works (you can get sound and a fuzzy picture) but that's it. That'll take longer to fix as it's the landlord's responsibility and he doesn't have a particularly stellar record of fixing stuff quickly.

Other than that, everything's okay. Considering term doesn't start at university until next week, campus is surprisingly busy.

incidentally, when I logged on to the Wifi cloud, I got this message (emphasis theirs):

You must not use this service to download and/or share music, films and other copyrighted material. We have received a number of complaints from representatives of various copyright holders who know that ResNet and RoamNet are being used for such purposes! We will fully comply with any legally valid requests for information about those who are violating copyright. In the meantime we are contacting individually, those who we have had specific complaints about to discuss the situation.

Right. Does that include material where we own the copyright, or where the copyright license permits sharing and distribution? Hmmm.

I'm posting this here for any non-US people who are considering adding Google AdSense to their sites.

Google sent me my first cheque last week. AdSense's terms of service mean I'm not supposed to disclose how much I earned, but, suffice to say, I earned enough to warrant a payment. Google pays by cheque (or 'check' as they're known over there), so to get the money that I'm now owed, I had to cash this into my bank account.

My account is with the Halifax, who on the whole have been good to me - relatively high rates of interest considering I only have a student current account, a very high interest savings account with easy transfer between the two online, and no major problems as yet. The increase in clearance time for cheques has been a little annoying - three working days, even if the cheque is from another Halifax account - but considering how some of my friends have been treated by their banks I'm generally pleased with them.

That said, they do charge extortionate rates for handling foreign cheques. While there is no fee for cheques under the Sterling value of £30, cheques above that and below £2500 incur a negotiation fee of £10 and a possible additional collection fee of £18. Google will only send you a cheque if you have earned $100 or more, so they will always be over £30. Say your cheque was for $100, which equates to just over £50 - your cheque will loose around 20% of its value. Obviously the costs as a percentage fall if the cheque is for a larger amount, but it's annoying how quite a significant part of the money owed to you is taken by the bank.

There is also the clearance times. According to the information leaflet I was given, this is usually 3 days, which isn't bad - some more basic bank accounts have 5-day clearing times even for domestic cheques. But in some cases it can take 28 days - a whole month - before the funds are available for withdrawal. Apparently I will be advised if this is the case, but considering the cheque is from a large, reputable US bank I imagine it's unlikely.

If you are considering taking on advertising from a company in another country, I would advise you to check with your bank first and find out what their procedure is for dealing with payments in foreign currencies or from foreign banks. Most of what I have written today wasn't a huge surprise for me as I'd checked prior to signing up for AdSense if this was possible, but it is a shame that it is so expensive. It's not like the banks have any problem making money.

Today was spent in the coastal resort of Scarborough, where I took these photos. It wasn't a great day weather-wise; we did get some sunshine but it was mostly dull, cold and very windy. Consequently I decided to forego the traditional seaside ice cream cone since I was already cold enough.

Considering this was a public holiday and in the middle of winter, there was quite a lot open and quite a few people about. Most of the attractions were shut until the tourist season starts at Easter but most of the shops, pubs and arcades were open for business. Still, I think Scarborough is best experienced in the summer. It's certainly much, much warmer and considerably less windy.

Beware the Bloke From Dixons, for he may offer bad advice.

Remember the DAB radio that my Dad got that didn't work? Well, we took it back to Dixons today, on account of the fact that we could only get it to work in one part of one room in the house. The radio also had FM as well as DAB and that didn't work properly either - no matter where it was in the house it would pick up inteference that no other radio we had could detect, even the ones that were 25 years old or more.

The bloke in Dixons who tried to help us wasn't the usual spotty 18 year old who has no idea what he's on about - rather he was a balding 50-something who had not much of an idea what he was on about. He was adamant that the radio was mostly fine, and probably just had an FM problem - according to him, the reason why we had no DAB reception was because we were out of the reception area. This was unlikely as we're not far from a major trunk road, on flat land and not near any tall buildings, and we already get very good analog radio and TV reception.

Anyhow, we finally managed to convince him that we needed another DAB radio, this time going for a Pure Elan radio. We took it home, turned it on and - whaddya know - we got perfect recepetion. The signal wasn't strong enough for some of the commercial stations or for BBC Radio Leeds, but we got all of the national BBC stations and the likes of Classic FM and TalkSport with an average of 95% signal strength.

So, beware the Bloke From Dixons. He may give you wrong advice. In my experience, the best thing to do with both digital radio and TV is to buy the set-top box or receiver and get assurance from the shop that you can take it back if it won't work for you (even if the device itself is fine), then try it for yourself. If it works, keep it, otherwise take it back and get a refund. I've done that before with a digibox from Tesco.

Hope you are all having a good Christmas! I got lots of presents this morning, including:

• A USB pen drive
• A new watch
• A DIY toolkit
• Lots of sweets and chocolate
• Some new clothes
• The new Harry Potter DVD and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Tertiary Phase on audio CD
• Some stuff for the bathroom
• and slippers!

My dad also got a DAB digital radio, although it only gets a digital signal upstairs for some reason (and even then can't pick up all the channels), which is a pity because he wanted to have it in the kitchen.Update: It would appear that the radio itself is actually faulty - it also has FM and while every other radio in the house gets perfect reception this one seems to pick up inteference from somewhere.

My grandparents got a Freeview digibox and a DVD player, along with some DVDs to go with it.

So tomorrow, it's Christmas Eve, as most of you are probably aware (I'd be worried if you weren't).

Been shopping today with my parents, and bought:

• A DVD player for me. £30 from WHSmith including SCART lead. It's allegedly multi-region, in that the sign in the shop said it was, but the references on the box and in the manual suggested that it was region 2 only. Either way, all my DVDs are either region 2 or region-free at the moment so I can't check. It does also support a variety of other disc formats, including DivX and MP3 CD-ROMs, which is nice.
• A new 56k modem for our old computer. It's going to my grandparents soon and will need a V.92 modem instead of V.90 - they only have one phone line and will probably appreciate V.92's ability to hold the internet while you answer the phone. It's an internal PCI one - almost certainly a Winmodem but then I doubt my grandparents will be interested in running Linux.
• A paper shredder. My parents decided they needed one.

I should probably create a 'miscellany' category, but for now here's a series of bullet points about my life right now.

You could say this is a sequel to Sunday's Miscellaneous. It's another collection of things that are happening in my life right now.

I'm now the proud owner of seasons one and two of Family Guy on DVD, with season 3 on order. HMV have a buy-one-get-one free offer on a lot of DVDs right now, which, combined with my student discount meant I got the first two seasons for £22.50. Then, thanks to Froogle, I found Filmnight.com which has season 3 for £10 including delivery, which I've just ordered. Admittedly I could have saved £2.50 by buying the first two from there, but, heh.

For some reason they're selling the box set of all 3 seasons for £50, which is silly since you can buy each one separately for a total of £30. Sure, you don't get the extra features, but come on... £20 for an extra features disc?

The success of Family Guy in the UK is a little surprising as, as far as I know, it hasn't been broadcast on any TV channels here. Most people I know who like it have heard about it through word of mouth, or they've seen it in the US. Still, it's a great series and well worth the money to buy the discs.

In the past couple of days, I have:

• Cleaned the bathroom, some parts of which haven't been cleaned since we moved in at the beginning of July.
• Mopped the bathroom floor for the first time since we moved in.
• Fixed the lock on the bathroom door that got broken several weeks ago. Yay for privacy.
• Helped out with a full week's worth of washing up (the sink was broken for a few days and things started to pile up).
• Washed the bathmat, again for the first time since we moved in.
• Cleaned the kitchen worksurfaces.

That said, my housemates have also done their part, and as such the kitchen is much tidier. We also now have a gate outside the house again, which confused me immensely when I came home on Thursday.

And in other news I think I'm coming down with another cold. On the plus side it'll only be the second one since September - this time last academic year I was on my third cold and had also had the 'flu too. Universities really are a gay bar for chest infections.

Since I started offering my templates for download last year, I've since raised no less than £40 in donations and royalties for commercial usage. I can honestly say I never imagined that I'd get that much in return when I originally started asking for donations, or that anyone would take notice of the need for payment for commercial usage. Maybe there are some kind people out there after all.

I think I've sent thanks to everyone who has donated but in case I haven't then this is a general thank you to you all for supporting their development.

I'm rather bleary-eyed this morning after staying up beyond 4am UK time watching the US elections on BBC1 - I left after the Congress result was called. The student union kept the bar open (serving non-alcoholic drinks) long into the wee-small hours and a surprising number of students turned up to watch the results being announced. The photo on the right was taken about 1am.

Checking this morning, I'm a little peeved that 4 states have, at time of writing, yet to call, but at least this is because of higher-than-expected turnout which means that the result should be more indicative of what the American people truly want. Also, I'm peeved that Bush seems to be winning but then I would say that. But it's not the final result so we'll see what happens.

Update: Kerry took Wisconsin. That's reassuring. Now, Ohio, New Mexico and Iowa would be nice :)

I'm now back in Bradford after my little adventure with a wheelchair user. On the whole it wasn't too bad and we didn't have lots of problems, but I still think an entry is warranted on the subject. Read on...

Tomorrow night I'm eschewing my usual plan of rolling up at the FND and instead travelling down with a friend of mine from university to meet up with a third university friend in London and go out there. Quite where in London we're going to I don't know but I do know it's not in central London and I have been assured a free ticket for it.

If that wasn't complicated enough, then it's worth noting that friend #2 is a wheelchair user and I'll be chaperoning him on the train both there and back. Although I have been on a few nights out with him I've never been on public transport with him, never mind a long-distance journey like this one, so it'll no doubt serve as an eye-opening experience. Already, unlike able-bodied passengers, it was necessary to notify the train companies in advance - admittedly this also means we will receive additional assistance at stations but it's not as if you can turn up and walk onto a train like I can normally.

I'll let you know how I get on. Hopefully it'll be a good night. I'll be back in Bradford on Saturday afternoon.

My work at the airport last weekend got mentioned in a press release earlier this week. I'm not mentioned or quoted but the students union did at least get a quote from Sarah, our comms officer which is a plus.

incidentally the airport isn't quoted and that's because they've been extremely pedantic about the whole thing. It was actually somewhat surprising the whole thing actually went ahead with their attitudes.

Today I'm choosing my final year project. I won't tell you what it is yet but I don't think you'll be all too surprised about what the general theme for it is.

Using wifi in the pub does seem immensely sad but it is a good way of being sociable and getting time to catch up on emails and blog. Although the union bars have had wifi for over a year, it's been with thecloud and costs 10p a minute- £6 for an hour's surfing seems a bit extreme in my opinion.

But over the summer the university extended its wifi coverage to include an access point in the Communal Building where the student union facilities are, including the bars, so now I can blog while enjoying a pint and the company of others. It's pretty fast too, certainly faster than I remember it being in other parts of the university.

Something tells me I'm going to be spending even more time in the pub than I do already.

This is one of those miscellaneous posts, but it's mostly about my life lately so if you're just here for the techy stuff you can skip this.

I hate uncertainty.

For some reason, whenever I'm not certain about something, I get really anxious and worried about it. While I'm not an insomniac, I worry about things that aren't certain, like whether future events will go ahead and what the consequences will be either way, or whether something I've done will be good enough, and so on.

Thankfully, one uncertainty just became a certainty. I passed my resits, so I'll be going into the final year of my course with honours. :)

Annabella, my Toshiba laptop is back from being 'fixed' and now has a spangly new hard drive. Right now, all she has is a factory install of Windows XP SP1, but I'll get her personalised over the next few days when I have time. Conviniently, Firefox 1.0PR and Thunderbird 0.8 were both released this morning so I have those to install. It now means I can use my iPod at its full speed and can finally watch the DVD of Spiderman that I bought a couple of weeks ago from eBay. I've seen Spiderman 2 but the first one.

Unfortunately, our network has taken a turn for the worst and as such only two of the four computers on there can actually see each other. We're not sure what's up and unfortunately none of us have much time to investigate it. Consequently, I'll probably be in the university using their wireless connection a bit more, which with the addition of a free hotspot in one of the union bars should make it a more pleasant experience.

While the details haven't yet been confirmed, I'm probably going to be spending 5 days (Friday through until Tuesday) sat in Leeds-Bradford Airport with a laptop equipped with a 3G wireless card so that students arriving from far flung places can send an email home to say that they arrived safely. And because the company that makes the cards wants some cheap publicity (if all goes to plan they'll be paying me and someone else via the students' union to be there), I may well be in the local paper. It also means I won't have to spend Sunday carrying peoples' heavy luggage into the halls of residence when everyone moves in :) . incidentally tomorrow it'll be two years to the day since I moved to Bradford to start at university.

I'm currently at work right now but as you may be able to tell from the flurry of posts to Smaller World there isn't exactly much going on right now. Still, yay for Bloglines.

Since my iPod Mini still hadn't arrived yet, I decided to check with the delivery company (TNT) as to where the package was as opposed to simply using Apple's checker. So I put the tracking number into the form on their site, and was told that there was a problem and that I needed to phone.

Turns out that Apple hadn't put the house number or street on the package, so it couldn't be delivered. Anyway, an amendment has been put through and I'll get a phone call later today to confirm when it can be delivered - I'll probably go for Friday as I can actually be in York that day.

I have to give TNT some credit though - not only was the phone number freephone, but it was answered by a real human after just one ring and was sorted very quickly. Although I suppose this was at 8am in the morning...

I realise I've skipped a few days but there's not been a huge amount to report until today.

So far, I've been coping okay with just having Knoppix on here and only being able to save files to an FTP server - it's not ideal but better than nothing. I'm impressed at just how fast Knoppix actually is, considering it's running off a CD, but then most of it is loaded into RAM and I guess with having 512MB it would be quite fast.

Exam results came out this morning, so as you can imagine, the clearing phone line was busy like you wouldn't believe. Between 8:30am and around 5pm, we fielded not far off 2000 calls from students/their parents/teachers. 800 of those were before 12pm.

During the heavy periods, the phone would ring again as soon as you hung up, giving you barely any time to breathe never mind clearing your screen for the next call - in total, I dealt with at least 40 calls throughout the day. While we had to turn away some, since they hadn't got anything near what we wanted, we were able to put many students through and hopefully most of them will have been able to get places.

Tomorrow is another busy day although hopefully not as busy today. That said, with so many calls to deal with, the day flew by. I'm on the lines from 8:30am until 7pm, so it'll be a bit of a long slog, but 10 hours pay equates to almost £75 so I'm not complaining :)

On a related note, the twin sons of someone my mum works with were on the local BBC news earlier - they both got 5 A grades at A-level and are both to do Physics and Maths at the University of York. And yet when they arrived in Britain from Iran at age 8, neither of them could speak English. And the news item was only the second time I'd ever seen the college principal, despite studying at York College myself for 2 years.

When you're half asleep and want to go and get a drink of water, the last thing you expect is to find a mouse sat in the kitchen sink. But that's what I found this morning.

The mouse was stuck in there and couldn't get out so I got this photo before I tried to dispose of it. Unfortunately when I tried to pick the little bugger up it jumped out and went to hide behind the washing machine. So, looks like I'll be spending this afternoon looking for a mousetrap, or poison, or something.

Update: Never mind. We got it.

I'm now properly resident in Bradford again. While ADSL isn't yet a reality in the house (more on that later), myself and all my belongings, bar one sock whose brother is back in York, are now moved in.

The house is now in a much better state. The wallpaper in the bathroom is now properly stuck down, and the awful curtains and broken blind in the front room are now gone which makes the room look instantly nicer (pity about the chairs and sofa). In my room, the delightful floral wallpaper is now mostly masked by posters and things, and it now finally looks like someone actually lives in it as opposed to a spare room/dumping ground. Although the latter is still true to some extent as it's not the biggest room in the world and like any student I have far too much junk to fill it with.

I'm posting this from the library mainly because I need some drivers for the ADSL modem. Our own modem hasn't arrived yet so my boss has kindly let us borrow his (along with a spare microfilter) until it arrives. Trouble is, to get the modem to work I'll need drivers, but to get the drivers I need the internet, which needs a modem. And to get the modem to work I need drivers, but... So I'm now sat in the corner of the library with a modem and a ridiculously long USB cable, downloading the drivers and looking rather suspect in the process.

Walking across campus today was eerie. I've been out on Sunday mornings before during term time and it's quiet then, but this was just weird. No-one was there. It was like the opening scenes of 28 Days Later. Oddly, there are quite a few people in the library though.

I'll have some photos of the house soon.

I now have my results from this year in full, and they're a mixed bag. I've done quite well in two modules (69 and 70% respectively), okay in another 3, and failed two, one by 6% and another by 13%. incidentally, the two modules where I gained the highest marks were 100% coursework; most of the others were 20% coursework and 80% exam. I will need to resit at least one of the exams but I think I'll resit both to be sure.

The good news is that next week the house will be ADSL-enabled, courtesy of PlusNet. I say will - there's a 99% chance that it will but it's still possible that it might not, but the line has passed initial checks.

The bad news is the installation cost. While all the lucky people around the corner who can get Telewest all get free installation for TV, broadband internet and telephone, for broadband alone we've had to pay close to £130.

Now admittedly we could have got it cheaper, but we're on a monthly, rather than annual contract (as far as I can tell this means we're not subject to a 12 month minimum contract, so if they're not very good it's easier to transfer), and includes a USB modem as opposed to a PCI modem, which means any of the computers in the house can be used and not just the desktop (we're all laptop users).

But it is nice to finally get the internet sorted. While it probably won't be up and running until the middle/end of next week, there's the possibility of dial-up or going into the university, which is only a 5 minute walk away.

My general state of business over the past few days means I'm somewhat behind on things - I have 19 unread Lockergnome issues, a sea of unread news items in FeedDemon and a list of work-related things that isn't going to get shorter any time soon unless I start tackling them pronto.

Yesterday was mostly spent in the house again, although this time with the additions of three important factors: parents, car and money. This means that the house now has a smoke alarm (although it hasn't yet been fitted). Before you are too 'alarmed' (ho ho), it looks as if it did used to have one but somewhere down the line it was removed and never replaced.

Another thing that was removed and never replaced was the lock on my bedroom door, so a new one has been fitted. While I trust my housemates not to steal things I just feel a bit safer in the knowledge that things like my computer and stereo will be behind an extra lock and key.

The room has now gained some more furniture, thanks to the last gasp of the Ikea sale. Originally, its only contents were a bed, a desk with an iron-shaped mark in it, a chair, some curtains and a grotty lamp-shade - the latter two will be replaced with new items next week. To that, we've added some shelves, a wardrobe and a printer table-cum-bedside table. A better chair will also be making an appearance when I move in, which will be next Saturday, fingers crossed.

My parents' old TV is now in the living room along with their old VCR which I've had for the past 18 months or so. Again, next week, there will be something decent to stand it on - we bought a TV stand for £15 but didn't have time to erect it.

Today, I've installed Movable Type 3.01D, which is mostly a bugfix release. The templates page looks a little different, and there's a few template changes that you can make which should increase TypeKey security, along with bugfixes to the import/export tool. If you're one of those people who will never buy software that ends with zero, then this is your opportunity to upgrade.

Finally a bit of template news - now that this release is out I'll be updating some of my templates to include MT3-compatible versions that incorporate the new TypeKey code.

Life has been hectic of late, so here's a summary of what has been happening:

1. I've failed my second-year, sort-of. I have enough to proceed on an ordinary degree, but to do an honours degree (which I want to do) I'm going to need to re-sit at least one exam next month. The full results aren't yet out so I don't know which module it is. I'm not upset about it, don't worry - I was expecting it.
2. Work is going okay. We've now got some project planning software running which is making things a bit easier. I'm still going to be very busy with that over the next few weeks though.
3. The house is in a somewhat better situation. The carpet in the front room has been cleaned, as has the cooker. British Gas did threaten to take us to court over an unpaid electricity bill from the previous occupants (to the tune of £150 or so) but have accepted that it isn't us and were happy to set us up with a clean slate. The phone line is still an issue as it appears to have been disconnected - so that needs sorting out and then we can finally get broadband installed. And I finally have my own key for the front door. incidentally I'm in York again this week, but, fingers crossed, I will be finally moving in officially a week tomorrow.
4. Since yesterday, I have been from York to Bradford and back twice, on a total of 6 trains.
5. This morning I had training for my next job, starting on the 18th August which is working on the telephone hotline for clearing at the university. You could say it's a glorified call centre job, I suppose. Training was mostly covering how to answer the phone and deal with people, and how to use the university's student database software.
6. I'm currently bidding on a new mobile phone for my mum. She's decided that she wants something a bit smaller than her brick Nokia 5110. It's coming via eBay, naturally.
7. I hope Becki doesn't get evicted from Big Brother tonight. A lot of people hate her but I think she's just had a spell of bad luck. And despite what I said I have become equally obsessed with this series as I have with the previous ones. Shell is the housemate I most want to win, and the sooner Jay is evicted the better.

From one dodgy freezer to another. This one is at my parent's house and is somewhat cleaner, but with one fatal flaw. On Sunday, it decided it was no longer going to freeze anything. Which, as you can imagine, is a pretty major handicap for a freezer.

We had a man with a toolbox poke at it for around 10 minutes before declaring it a dead freezer. Apparently one of its pipes is blocked, but it isn't possible to unblock it. So, it looks like our 8-year-old freezer is in need of a replacement.

Yesterday was July 1st and the day that we could move into our rented house. Had everything gone to plan, we'd have all been settled in pretty quickly, but, alas, moving in wasn't going to go quite so smoothly.

The problems stem from the fact that the previous occupants had only left the house the previous evening, and not bothering to tidy up after themselves nor leaving time for the landlord to inspect the house and get it tidied up for us to move in. As such, the house was in a bit of a state. Here's just a few of the issues - click on the photos to zoom in.

Yesterday I started my placement in earnest, and had to hit the ground running. I've unfortunately got some rather tight deadlines to cope with and tasks that, while looking easy on paper, are turning out to be uphill struggles in reality. But, I am getting there, and in one morning I've learnt all manner of things that I didn't know previously.

While the stuff I'm doing for this placement is very similar to what I do anyway as a hobby, the attitude I've had to take has been very different. One of the tasks that I've been busying myself this morning would have been something that, had I done it as a hobby, I'd have given up on long ago due to its complexity and the woeful lack of documentation for it. But, alas, giving up is not an option here.

On the non-work side, although it is somewhat related, I'm not going back to Bradford as early as I'd thought. Now that I'm working from home, having internet access is a definite requirement, but unfortunately the house in Bradford may well not have it for at least the next week or so. So rather than making a quick exit tomorrow, I'll be sticking around and probably going back next weekend. I'm still (probably) going to be in Bradford tomorrow to sign the house contracts, and again on Saturday for work of a different form, but I'll be commuting there instead.

I've got myself an 8-week placement over the summer working for Inovolve, a Leeds-based internet marketing and development company who specialises in social software, such as weblogs, wikis and RSS - Infosential is one of their sites. I had the interview yesterday, with Tim of Timzilla, no less, and was told yesterday evening that I'd got the job.

As you can imagine, I'm pretty excited. I'd never have imagined that I'd get a job where I get paid for working with tools like Movable Type and Wordpress.

I haven't really said much about how I've been doing lately, so now seems as good a time as any to catch up.

Thankfully the BNP failed to win any seats in the European elections, but somehow managed to get 8% in the Yorkshire region. Over 125 000 people therefore voted for them in this region alone. incidentally, Yorkshire and the Humber will be represented by two Labour MEPs, two Tories, one LibDem and one UKIP MEP. Not great, but it could have been much worse.

The BNP and UKIP were the two parties making the biggest gains, with the Tories losing 12% and Labour losing 5%. The LibDems only made a modest 1.2% gain. Well done to the Greens though for getting 2 seats elsewhere in the country.

It was quite fitting that today was the last day of leafletting for Unite Against Fascism, what with it being the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the day of a crucial battle in the defeat of Hitler and his fascist Nazi party.

On Monday I posted about getting broadband installed and that we were going for Bulldog. As it is, we're not now, instead going for PlusNet since it's £3 a month cheaper and they seem to have a better quality of service too.

As for a phone, we're looking at Tesco Home Phone - they do a 'pay as you go' tariff with no monthly line rental and calls from 1p a minute. Bearing in mind that we all have mobile phones and most of us have free minutes, it's unlikely that we'll be making any calls anyway, so it's likely that we won't have to pay very much at all for the phone.

Of course, if you guys know anything cheaper, please speak up :).

With it being a month until I move into the house, it's about time to get the most important thing sorted - cable. That way, we'll have multi-channel TV and broadband internet pretty much from day one. Or at least, that was the plan. Trust us to choose to live on the only street in the whole damn area that doesn't have cable.

Just been to see Ninia Benjamin, one of the 3 Non-Blondes play at the student union (it's a TV show on BBC3 for the uninitiated). Admittedly she wasn't the funniest act of the night (she was somewhat outperformed by a comedy duo called Electric Forecast) but it was nice to have a minor celebrity down for once.

I think I'd better explain about my post yesterday. Yesterday was not a good day.

I can't really go into much here, but it relates to an exam yesterday morning, and the conduct of certain students during that exam. All I will say is that several high profile people in the university and student's union have emails waiting for them.

On a much lighter note, thank you to everyone who wished me a happy birthday :). It wasn't too eventful (but then it was in the middle of exams) but I had a good time nonetheless. And no, I didn't get a towel, nor was I abducted by a Vogon constructor ship and subjected to their "poetry". Although, some of the questions on that exam were awful...

Also, I'm selling my old digital camera on eBay seeing as it's now surplus to requirements. Starting bid is £1 with no reserve.

Today can be summed up in one word: Raaaar.

See you tomorrow.

Today is my first day as a non-teenager in several years :D . It's not been particularly eventful, mainly because we're all in the middle of exams and can't afford the time to either go out or recover from having been out, but it's been somewhat enjoyable nonetheless.

Presents were the camera that I've been talking about, a t-shirt with velcro letters (so you can change the message on the front as often as you like), some socks with my name on, £33 cash (in total), and O'Reilly quick reference books on PHP and Regular Expressions (thanks to Jeff Wright and regular commenter Chris Berkhadt for those :) ).

The cash is going towards a Sega Mega Drive for the house next year - we'll have a PlayStation 2 as well but you can't play Sonic on it.

incidentally, today is also Towel Day.

Remember me telling you that I had an exam on my birthday? Well...

The good news is that the exam has been moved to another day!

The bad news is that it's now an hour longer (taking it to 3 hours) and starts at 9:15am the day after :( .

Looks like my plans for a big bash on my birthday may have to be cut short :( .

Since it was such a nice day, I went to have lunch outside on the grass. I came back in about 10 minutes ago - it's now 20 past 11pm.

I also managed to get very sunburnt. And worse than last time, too. Unfortunately, Sod's Law dictates that as soon as I buy any sun tan lotion, it'll be dull and gloomy for the rest of the summer, which, seeing as it's only just started, would be a terrible shame.

In seriousness, it has been an absolutely glorious day with barely a cloud in the sky. I hope it's like this a week on Tuesday so that I can have a barbecue on my birthday.

Oh yes, did I mention it's my birthday a week on Tuesday? ;)

After almost giving up and defaulting to halls fo the third year, I finally managed to get together and get a house sorted for next year. I'll be living with a couple of friends off my course in a small terraced house on Fieldhead Street, which is just next to a small trading estate behind the university's science park. It's also near Haqs, a large, award-winning Asian supermarket, which will be handy - I've been there before and as well as being really cheap they sell all manner of specialist Asian food which is normally not so easy to get hold of.

The house is very small, although there is a kitchen, lounge and three bedrooms all in there. The rent for me is £33 per week plus bills (which will be an extra £6 or so).

Halls are fine, and are quite convinient in your second year since they're quiet and handy, but after two years in them I've started to get somewhat annoyed by some aspects of living there and would like somewhere to spread my wings a bit more. It also gives me somewhere to live over the summer as I'm intent on getting a job around here to top up my bank balance for next year. The only downside is that the contract starts on July 1st, whereas I think halls kick-out is in the middle of June, so there'll be about two weeks where I'll have to either take all my belongings home or store them somewhere intermittently.

In any case, the prospect of having cable on a large TV with non-sucky reception and broadband internet is a nice one.

This is a quick joke that wasn't forwarded to my by a female friend of mine, but was forwarded to someone else who read it out to me. You'll see why. Here's roughly how it goes:

A guy was involved in a serious car crash and suffered head injuries. At the hospital, his family were waiting outside the operating theatre, when a doctor comes out with the bad news.

"I'm afraid your son's head is so badly damaged that he's going to need a brain transplant", the doctor said. "We don't offer this on the NHS but we can fit a second-hand one for a fee. £15,000 for a male brain, or £400 for a female brain."

The mother asked "Why does the female brain cost so much less than the male one?" to which the doctor replied "Because the female brain has been used far more than the male one."

And with that, I bid thee goodnight.

I managed to get sunburn on my arms today. That can't be right.

Admittedly it isn't bad sunburn (just a bit red, not hurting or peeling) but considering this is early May and in Bradford of all places, there has to be something up. Global warming, perhaps?

In any case, hopefully it'll be nice again tomorrow, when, like the rest of the country, I get an extra day off for the May Day Bank Holiday. Unfortunately I'm probably going to be chained to the computer again doing coursework, since I didn't manage to do any today...

Oh yeah, and my team managed to come second in the weekly pub quiz. Which is good - the team that came first was Bradford's University Challenge team, so you'd like to think that they could do better than us. Anyway, I have a couple more bottles of Reef to devour at some point, which is always nice.

I'm in one of those situations where I have to get something done tonight, but all I want to do is give up and say "STIOTTP".

After lunch, I decided to sit down and do some coursework before my lecture at 3pm. After I'd been working flat out for a while, I looked at my watch. It was nearly half past four. Whoops.

Still, on the plus side, I'm on the closing stages when it comes to this coursework and I should have it finished tonight. Then I just have 3 other courseworks to tie up...

Okay. It's April. It's Bradford. And yet, yesterday, at least one person I know got sunburn. If that's not evidence of global warming I don't know what is.

The weather today hasn't been so good - this morning was very wet and although it's now stopped raining it is rather dull and overcast. It's probably a good thing that the university were out cutting the grass today because the combination of all this sun and rain is going to send the lawns knee high.

Still, if we can get a few more weeks of this lovely warm sunshine I won't be complaining. I just wish I didn't have to be chained to the computer all day with coursework.

Last night was the first time I'd gelled my hair for some weeks, and for some reason, over the course of the night, it seemed to change style.

I started out with a Gary Rhodes-style, all-up approach, since it's quite simple - you just shove all the hair up vertically. But then it somehow evolved into a John Travolta (a la Grease) look, before then changing into an Elvis-style quiff. Which was handy because the DJ started playing a variety of Elvis songs at this point.

As for this morning, it is merely a mess. I'll be washing it and returning it to its flat normality.

Now, wait a minute, have I just posted an entire entry on my hair? Oh my...

I am writing this post after having drunk 4 glasses of red wine and a vodka milkshake. As such, I'm rather drunk, and typing is not so straightforward at the moment, hence the short length of this post. And yes, I know it isn't even 9pm.

But, despite the amount of the work I have at the moment, this has been one of the happiest weeks I've had for a long time. It's been great to catch up what people have been doing over Easter, and it really has underlined why I like being at university so much - being able to hang out with so many people.

I just wish I could see straight and would stop giggling at even the most minor jokes.

The university has just published its exam timetable, and - joy of joys - I have a two hour exam on my birthday. Great.

It's almost the end of the Easter break now. Tomorrow I'll be packing my cases ready to head back on Saturday, in preparation for what looks like a right old slog of a term. Despite my efforts while at home to further my coursework, I still have plenty to be getting on with, along with exams in around 6 weeks time. There's also a group project that I'm involved in which needs to be finished pretty soon. And then there's my volunteering with the magazine, and my ongoing approachability as a course rep.

To top that, I have to get a house sorted for next year (I thought I had it done in January but it's not looking quite so straightforward right now) and make a final decision about whether to do a one-year work placement or go straight into the third year - I'm 98% sure about the latter but there have been some placements coming through that I might check out.

All in all, the next 2 months could be the busiest 2 months of my life so far. I would say that blogging activity may well reduce but past experience indicates that isn't necessarily what will happen - I tend to find blogging and reading other people's blogs somewhat theraputic so it may well prove to be a useful escape.

By the way, thanks for all of the question suggestions - I'll look over them either tomorrow or Saturday and put something together. I reckon we'll have a pretty good meme going here.

On Saturday, my new phone, a Sony Ericcson T300 arrived. I've had my Nokia 3410 for almost 18 months now and was starting to feel a bit behind the times as everyone else got newer and flashier phones. I decided now was about the right time to switch as the 3410 is still in very good condition and so I could potentially get a fair wad of cash when I choose to sell it on.

This phone is better than my 3410 in almost every way - it has a colour screen, multimedia messaging, a plugin camera (included), infra-red communication, better battery life, support for tri-band GSM and it's smaller and lighter too. About the only thing it doesn't have that my 3410 did have is Java support, which I never used anyway so no big loss there. It doesn't have Bluetooth but again I probably don't need that right now.

The phone is second hand, costing £60 plus £5 postage from eBay, which I thought was a good price. Admittedly the casing is a bit scuffed at the edges but it works. It was unlocked too, although I'm guessing it was previously locked to T-Mobile since the startup screen is branded and the WAP function has been renamed 't-zones'. Hopefully I'll be able to get Tesco's WAP settings in there so that I can use it for moblogging.

As I haven't yet got WAP set up I can only view images on the 256-colour screen, so naturally any images taken on the camera initially look pretty poor but I'll reserve judgement until I see them on a computer screen.

Overall I'm happy so far, but I'll be hanging onto my 3410 for a couple more weeks until I'm sure that I want to stay with this phone.

It's always depressing when you read through the recent court cases section of the local paper and read about people who are younger than you are getting involved in crime and getting sent to jail for it. It's more depressing when you used to go to school with one of them. The girl in question has just got 4 months for 13 counts of theft and non-appearance at court.

And yet she's only 19, same age as me.

So my random music function seems to think this would make a seamless mix:

Less Than Jake - The Science of Selling Yourself Short
into
Lyala - Time To Fly (Climax 69 Remix)
into
Lunik - The Most Beautiful Song

Hmmm. Yes.

On the plus side, at least they all begin with 'L'.

But not much. In fact I'm out again in about 4 minutes, so this will be brief.

Remember my to-do list? It's already gone out of the window. Today, I got called up to help out at the Open Day - it means standing around looking bored for 5 hours but it pays £25, so I'm not arguing. That took me on to 3:30pm, when I sat down to try and get somewhere with this sodding coursework - I'm now on plan B, which may or may not get me anywhere but we'll see. Then, I happen to bump into some friends, so I end up down the pub until 7:00pm, when I think I really need to go back and phone my parents.

So here I am. I'm about to go out to a comedy night, and then after that either sleep or finish this coursework, although judging by how knackered I am now the former looks somewhat more appealing.

Tomorrow has also seen a rather large change. As a member of the student union with no affiliations to any candidate who is standing in the elections, I got roped into manning a ballot box over at the halls I was in last year. Except speaking to someone who manned it last year, it looks like I'll have a very boring 4 hours since no-one voted there that time. Probably because that box closes at 5pm, and most students are still on campus at that time. But, hey...

As you can imagine, come Friday I'm going to very relieved that I have very little planned this weekend.

I seem to have lost Saturday and Monday. Does anyone know what happened to them?

Saturday was pretty much a non-event since I was in bed with a hangover until about 4:30pm (as mentioned previously), and today has gone by very quickly. It feels like 7pm, but it's closer to 10pm, and I've hardly been home all day. And, alas, today may well set a precendent for the week - here's my diary, of sorts:

I have a bottle of off-the-shelf cough syrup, which is great for relieving coughs and sore throats. It's also honey and lemon flavour, so it actually tastes nice too. Its active ingredient is glycerin.

Anyway, I was in the shower this afternoon (see below) and happened to notice that the shampoo I was using also contained glycerin. The concept of putting cough syrup on my hair amused me slightly, but the inverse - the concept of shampoo being in my cough syrup - was somewhat less than savoury.

The reason why I was showering so late is that I've been in bed most of the day with a very heavy hangover, which I put down to the availability of £1 pints in the union and me not eating enough for dinner last night. I'm somewhat better now but until about 4:30pm I was somewhat immobile. Thankfully, having a laptop means I can surf the interweb in bed.

Last night the student cinema showed Monsters Inc, which, depsite it having been out on DVD for quite some time now I'd never actually seen it. So, naturally I took the opportunity to see it on a huge cinema screen with surround sound, especially as it was free. It was a really good film, with a good storyline and excellent animation (especially Sully's fur, which is highly realistic), and there were some genuinely funny bits to it.

In fact, it was so good, that I've just ordered the DVD for Finding Nemo from CD-Wow.com, who have an imported version of the Collector's Edition for £14 (although I paid £13.49 with a CDWow voucher) - it's region 2 and 4 so it'll play on UK players. Apparently it's even better than Monsters Inc, so hopefully it'll be worth it. The university owes me over £100 in wages for various things and I've been good with my money this term so I decided to treat myself.

Apart from my a-z this morning, I don't think I've mentioned the fact that I've been on the radio a few times now. The student union has its own radio station, RamAir, which broadcasts on 1350MW across Bradford, and also on the internet as a RealAudio stream, though this isn't working at the moment. The show I've been doing has been Thursday nights between 6 and 8pm, which is run in conjunction with the magazine, hence my involvement. I've not been on every week but I did my third show this week, and I have to say it's pretty good fun.

I'm not yet a formal member of the station, but I am seriously considering joining. There's a gap on Friday nights that's screaming out for a pre-FND warmup show. Watch this space.

In other news, as well as appearing across the airwaves, I'm also in Bradford's 2005 prospectus. In fact, I have a full page photo on page 82. Look closely, and you may even see my chesthair sticking out of the top of my t-shirt (it's a v-neck, don't worry - I don't have that much). You'll also notice that at the time I hadn't shaved for 8 days.

Hang on... did I just post about chesthair? Oh my. Time for bed I think.

I'm in a good mood since I've just finished a coursework assignment that didn't need to be ready for another 12 days. Admittedly it was originally set a few weeks back and didn't require a huge amount of work, but I feel really good having got it out of the way.

The assignment was to create a basic working calculator in Java Swing, which could do the basic adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, as well as being able to toggle between having a positive and negative number and allowing decimals. Probably the main reason why I feel so good about it is that the hard part - actually getting the calculator to work - was all done by me; I didn't need to re-use code from anywhere else, other than a small bit from a textbook that I used for converting the number from negative to positive.

It's pretty robust too - it won't spew out a load of runtime errors if you try to divide something by 0, for example.

Of course, I still have two other courseworks that need doing, one of which is due in a week on Friday, and they're going to be much more taxing. But at least the pressure is off with regards to this assignment, which is a good thing.

Hope you enjoy that extra day we have to stick in every 4 years so that the seasons remain in order :) . No special plans, although I've spent almost half of it asleep now since I only just got up. And then when messing around with Real Alternative I realised I'd missed out on this week's Radio 4 comedy shows, so that was another hour wasted.

Thanks for the comments about the re-design, I'm glad to hear that all of you who have commented like it :D .

About 18 months ago, during my first week at Bradford, one of the events was a hypnotist from Canada called Tony Lee (doesn't seem to have a web site, but check Google anyway). The show was really good - my next-door neighbour at the time ended up being one of those hypnotised, which added to the fun. This was a Thursday night, and we had over 200 people turn up.

Anyhow, the union made the wise decision of booking the guy again (since he didn't do welcome week this time), and tonight he was supposed to be performing. I paid my £4 entry price, and went to take my seat, to find... well... no-one. Other than Tony himself and a those that were doing the sound and light.

As time went on, about 30 people turned up. And that was it. So, the show was cancelled (because the act required 20 people on stage), money was returned and everyone, including Tony, went off to the Biko bar where there was an free acoustic jam that was somewhat more popular. But why?

Firstly, Bradford is a curiousity in that no matter what the union tries, barely anyone will turn up to events on Saturday nights, with the possible exception to the Acoustic Jam and Comedy nights which operated on alternate nights in the Biko bar. This is at least the fourth event that has flopped on Saturdays this year. Then there was the ticket problem. £3 advance tickets were supposed to be available at least a week before the event. They weren't. Then the posters, which had to be modified last week when Ents realised that the world 'Hypnotist' was only in small lettering. Three different start times were given, all an hour apart.

On the plus side, the guy will almost certainly be rebooked, and he's been here a few times over the years so he knows this is an anomaly, but it will be a very embarassing - and expensive - mistake for the union.

Life's being a bit of a bitch at the moment. I've got 3 courseworks on the go, with another one on the horizon and a lab test on UML diagrams on the cards too, along with an ongoing group software development project which really isn't going anywhere at the moment. And on the personal side of life, things aren't going too well either, but this is a public weblog so I won't go into that. Sadly I'm running out of people to talk to about personal issues so if you see me around the university counselling service you'll know why.

And there's still over 4 weeks until Easter... :(

It's not every day that you get to take photos of two girls in a bath filled with mashed potato.

Honestly. Students these days...

The following will be familiar to anyone who has had to live in shared accommodation. This sign is now up on the wall in our kitchen:

Basic Kitchen Etiquette

1. Don't steal other people's food. It's not nice.
2. Don't use other people's cooking utensils, unless you ask them first. Make sure you wash them up properly afterwards.
3. Don't monopolise both sinks. Some of us want to wash up too.
4. Don't leave your dirty plates lying around for days. This is a kitchen, not a bacteria propagation lab.
5. Try to keep the place clean and tidy for everyone else.

Of course, the notice itself uses a bigger font with red and blue text, just to make it stand out a bit.

My CV (Resume) is now online, in PDF and Word Document format. If you're a company in the West Yorkshire area looking to take on an enthusiastic and socially active Computing student for a 12 month placement starting from July, August or early September, then please get in touch. I will also be happy to hear from other companies based in the UK, although West Yorkshire is the most convenient for me at present.

Just quickly sliding a blog entry in while I have a free minute. I've bearly had any time to myself all day, and with the union's General Meeting in half an hour it's going to stay that way. Normal blogging service should return tomorrow, but in the meantime I have food to get.

13 hours and still no power. There's a bit of juice left in this machine (enough to get me through the next hour) but after that I'm off to the library. If it takes much longer I may lodge a complaint.

Update: We have light! Took them a while though...

In other news, MT-Blacklist has been updated to 1.6.3 RC1, which adds comment throttling and a couple of othe features that should make despamming a little easier.

Well, it's a good 5 hours since the power went off and I'm still stuck with just the big light and nothing else. If it weren't for the pub, a few of my mates and a curry house I would probably have gone insane by now. Or, more likely, gone to sleep.

Hopefully it'll be fixed in the morning. The university estates department already know about it; whether they fix it before hell freezes over is another matter.

Whooops... looks like there's been a power failure. None of my plug sockets are working. The big light, which is presumably on a separate circuit, is fine, as is the telephone line, and this being a laptop means I have a battery (which is why I'm still able to post). But it's annoying nonetheless. It's affected my neighbours too.

So... looks like I'll be down the pub tonight.

It's been a while since I last posted when under the influence of alcohol, so I thought I'd repent and give you this entry. My reaction times are slowed somewhat, and my accuracy is almost non-existant - the fact that this has no spelling errors is quite frankly a miracle.

This week, I have no lectures, no labs, no tutorials, and no exams - basically a week off, so my intention is to take full advantage of that fact and go out most nights. Tonight was no exception, and I'm now quite drunk.

When I come around tomorrow morning with a hangover, I'll probably wonder why the 'eck I posted this, but, heh.

This bit of code pretty much sums up my day yesterday:

10 ENTER Pub
20 BUY Pint
30 DRINK Pint
40 IF Pint = 'empty' THEN GOTO 20

Although the exam isn't due to finish for another 15 minutes, as you can probably tell I left early. It didn't go too badly but I really wish I could have done better. Oh well, never mind, too late now...

Over the past ten minutes, we've had light rain, heavy rain, snow, sleet, then back to light rain and now snow again. I wish it would makes its mind up and do something consistent - snow would be fine, thank you.

Alas, it is only light snow - I doubt if it'll be enough to make a decent covering. A pity because I'll no doubt fencing going for an impromptu sledgeride at 2am on Saturday morning, knowing me.

Main task for this afternoon is to revise for my exam tomorrow. So far I've been excellent at procrastinating, but I really need to do well this year so I'd better get my act together.

I've had one of those days where I've got around to doing things that I've held off doing for months, including this entry on the ODP Weblog (prompted by this piece in LG Tech News Watch) and ripping a big stack of CDs that I hadn't got around to doing until now.

A conversation last night (or a rough variation thereof):

Friend: Do you know [so-and-so]?
Me: Oh yeah... unfortunately. Can't say I really liked her.
Friend: Oh well, I'm going out with her now. She's my girlfriend.
Me: Erm... * puts foot in mouth *

Okay, so 2004 is still well over an hour away, at least in my timezone, but I'll wish everyone a Happy New Year in any case.

2003 hasn't been quite as big as 2002 - it was mostly spent getting used to the big changes in my life that happened in 2002, and settling in at university. The end of the year has been a lot happier for me than last year for a few reasons that I won't go into, but I can see in the new year in the knowledge that my life isn't a mess and that I have many more friends around to keep me somewhere near sanity.

2004 will probably be a bit of a slog - the work gets harder and I have a placement to sort out for the next academic year, amongst other things. It'll also be the year I cease to be a teenager. Still, let's hope it's a good one and that this time next year I'll be able to write something positive.

I really hope all of you have had a good year, and that you have a happy and prosperous 2004 :). At least there's one thing - it's snowing over here so hopefully I'll be starting the new year under a blanket of white fluffy stuff.

I'm still rather full after a large Christmas meal, and off to bed - tomorrow, we're going to see the relatives again.

Unfortunately my parents both seem to have gone down with rather bad colds and have been coughing and sneezing all day :(. Looks like the Bradford Chest Infection Fairy came home with me.

Anyway, hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas, and, errr... Happy Boxing Day!

(oh come on, what else could I have called this entry?)

So it's Christmas morning, and in fact I have rather more presents than expected - I wasn't expecting that much since the new laptop was supposed to be a present.

Anyway, you can divide my presents pretty much into three categories: sweets, booze and socks. I have all manner of chocolate, Turkish delight and Kendal mint cake to devour over the coming weeks, plus a selection of mini-bottles of Absolut vodka and two pairs of socks. I also got one of those chargable mini remote control cars, a new top (which I'm wearing now) and, the main present: a tripod for my camera. It's quite a good one since it can stand around 5 feet off the ground - I've wanted one for doing decent night-time shots as I need something to keep the camera steady, otherwise the picture becomes blurred.

So, it's off for breakfast. I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, and I hope that you get all the presents that you wanted. And don't get too drunk on the brandy. ;)

I'm upstairs with my laptop, taking a breather from the relatives while they watch 'The Importance of Being Earnest' on the DVD player. I'm still not particularly hungry after a very large lunch, where my mother prepared far more food than was necessary, even for nine hungry people. I imagine Christmas Eve will be spent polishing off what is left over.

Although hopefully I'll have a bit of time to myself tomorrow to blog, I'll let you in on what we're doing for Christmas dinner this year. Traditionally, in the UK at least, we eat roast turkey with trimmings on Christmas Day - the trimmings being stuffing, chipolata sausages with bacon, sprouts and roast potatoes. I imagine it may be different in the US seeing as turkey is normally eaten at Thanksgiving which is (sadly) not something we celebrate here - I hear goose is the fowl of choice over there. Desert is usually a Christmas pudding, with plenty of brandy.

That's the general tradition, anyway, which would be fine in our household if it weren't for my mother's general hatred of roast turkey. We have had goose in the past, and while it certainly tastes nicer than turkey it doesn't make for good sandwiches on Boxing Day. As with last year, we're having a joint of roast pork, although I'm unsure what mum is serving with it, although I've been assured it isn't sprouts. I personally hate them.

If you're looking for an excuse not to eat sprouts, just say that you're on the Atkins diet or something. Unless you like roast potatoes, of course, since you won't be allowed to have them either I imagine. On a related note, have a read of Mark's wonderful piece about low-carb bagels that I came across this morning.

Subscribers to Smaller World will testify that I've been adding quite a few links today, yet I haven't found anything much to post here as main content. And since I'm spending much of this week slouched out on the sofa at home (laptops rule :) ), I'm not doing anything much interesting in my life either.

That said, I have almost finished getting my parents' computer back up to speed. You may remember that last month I realised it was nearly 18 months behind on critical updates, and although the critical stuff is installed, I didn't have time to update everything else. It now has a whole raft of recommended updates, including the .Net Framework 1.1, Windows Media Player 9 and the latest Windows Messenger (although I seriously doubt my folks would ever use that), along with an updated driver for the NIC. Quite what difference that will make I don't know but I installed it anyway, and everything seems to be working.

ZoneAlarm also got updated to the latest version, and I did a cleanup job to remove various temporary files, saving around 250MB of space. What took the biscuit was that most of that was hidden away in IE's Temporary Internet Files folder, which a standard clean didn't pick up. And to think 2.5% of my parents' disk was wasted on that...

It's now on its second defragmentation, since I can't honestly remember when it was last defragmented (may have been as much as two years ago). The first try went alright but some files were still heavily fragmented so I've sent it off again - it's been working for just over an hour now and still going. If that fails I'll stick Diskeeper on it and see if that makes any difference, but it tends to take over the computer and annoy you with nag screens every day so I won't install it unless I have to.

Tomorrow I'm briefly back in Bradford to pick up that DVD and go for an asthma checkup. I doubt I'll be staying very long though.

I'm back briefly from the pub after having been there for 6 1/2 hours. I'm intending just to freshen up a bit and get changed, and then I'll be back there until closing time, at which point I'll probably proceed to the FND as usual. Current alcohol consumption isn't too high, based on the fact that if I'm completely inebriated before 11pm I'm not going to get in. Even if I am on the guest list.

And yes, I am well aware that my mirror needs cleaning, before you ask.

In a little over 4 hours, I will have finished all of the academic work for this semester. From 3pm today, I have no more lectures, no more coursework, no more lab sessions and no more tutorials.

But before 3pm, I do have a sodding lab test on SQL. While my SQL skills aren't too bad, I'm really not likely to get really good marks on this because I'm hopeless at things like normalisation. But I'll try.

As you can imagine, however, I'll be in the pub from about 3:05pm.

By the way, there are 998 comments on this blog at the moment. Anyone want to do the honours and push it into 4 figures?

This is slightly depressing. I'm slightly hyper, after drinking a can of Red Bull, and I'm also a bit pissed. And it's not even 7pm. And I have coursework to do this evening. And revision for a test on SQL tomorrow. And, perhaps worst of all, I need to phone my parents this evening.

Darn pubs and promotional offers for Christmas.

(Actually, my parents have seen me in situations like this before. They have also seen me the morning after a heavy night out. So they probably won't care anyway.)

Today, I inadvertently thought of a rather cool new word: frequirement. It means 'something that is required frequently'. For example, 'emptying the bin is a frequirement' would mean 'I often have to empty the bin'.

I think it's a cool word. Maybe if I use it a bit more it might enter the dictionary in a few years time.

(and this time you don't need to donate any money)

You may remember I've been on the lookout for a new phone deal and settled on Tesco Mobile because it's pay as you go, quite cheap and very simple (20p/minute to all phones and landlines, or 10p/minute to 3 favourite Tesco/landline numbers). But I now have a dilemma.

I've got a Nokia 3410, which works fine and is in good condition, but I've now discovered the Siemens MC60. Not only does it look rather nice, but it has a colour screen, multimedia messaging, integrated camera, Java games and is a tri-band phone so it'll work in the US and Canada, assuming I ever go there. And unlike the Nokia 3650, it's not shaped like a rather flat, rounded brick so it doesn't monopolise valuable pocket space. What's more, Tesco have it locked to their network for £125, compared with the usual price of £170 for an unlocked SIM-free phone.

On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with my current phone, bar the lack of the features I mentioned above. It's unlocked already, so I could conceivably just buy a Tesco SIM card for £9.99 and get 500 free Clubcard points, equivalent to £5 of vouchers off shopping at a future visit to Tesco. Furthermore, I don't have that much money, although I could sell the 3410 to get a bit of cash back.

Decisions, decisions. Anyone want to help me decide?

I'm officially not the proud owner of a new DVD player, and it's all thanks to a reassuringly honest salesperson at the Leeds branch of Richer Sounds.

My foot is firmly in my oral cavity. After talking with one of the other course representitives for Computing, I sent out an email at about 7:30pm last night to all second year students asking them to rate one of our lecturers on the scale of 1-5, giving a few extra comments if appropriate. I also mentioned that I was aware of some issues surrounding a recent coursework assignment that was returned to us this week, and that i would be taking these concerns to the next meeting of the Student-Staff Liason Committee, which I sit on to represent the students.

Normally, when I send out emails like this, I get maybe one or two responses. By half past three today, I had 32. While there were a couple that said there were no problems, it's clear that there is a large degree of dissatisfaction among students, so much so my summary of complaints is already takes up a whole side of A4 paper.

The meeting isn't until Monday but it looks to be quite a showdown. I just hope the first and third-years don't have any pressing issues as it looks like we'll be monopolising the meeting.

I know it's been 4 days since my last update but my feet have barely touched the ground since Thursday evening. If it interests you, this is how I've spent the past few days:

Firstly, a belated Happy Eid to those celebrating the end of Ramadam on Tuesday. Next, a Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US celebrating it today. And a Happy St. Andrew's Day to those in Scotland who'll be celebrating it on Sunday.

And a belated Happy 19 1/2 birthday for me - it was on Tuesday. So in 6 months time I'll no longer be a teenager...

Although I'm sure I'll blog something tomorrow, I'm going on a training and teambuilding weekend funded by the university tomorrow. I don't know if I've said already but this year I'm one of the course representatives for Computing, and the university provides free training for it. This weekend is the final step, and is an all-inclusive trip to Ingleborough Hall, near Clapham in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. As I said, it's free, bar a £10 refundable deposit, therefore it's actually cheaper for me to go than to stay here, since I'd only go out and spend money tomorrow night, and then there's the cost of meals etc.

So yeah, I almost certainly won't be blogging on Saturday :).

I finally got around to seeing The Matrix Revolutions last night - the intention was to watch it on Monday night but I think you know what happened then. Overall? Not bad, not bad at all. I went with three friends and while we all agreed that the first film was the best of the three, we couldn't decide whether this or Reloaded was better.

I'll say more about what I thought in the extended bit so that I don't spoil the film for those who haven't seen it yet.

It's 11pm, and I'm in a computer lab. And before you ask, my laptop is perfectly fine.

The thing is, I've been here for over 3 hours now, yet it hardly seems like more than an hour. Originally I came along to keep someone company for a few minutes but a few minutes has somehow turned into a few hours. Admittedly I have done some work here, so it's not been a complete waste of an evening, but I just don't know where it has gone.

Oh yeah, I had my first play with Netscape 7.0 - sad I know but I've only ever used Mozilla and haven't touched its older brother since 6.0. I wasn't too impressed, to be honest - it looks like Mozilla with a load of extra stuff that I don't really need, and it somehow insisted that I set up a totalxsiva [at] netscape.net email address (yay, another account I didn't want). It also had popups enabled by default so on visiting the home page I was swamped with unwanted windows. I appreciate NS 7.1 will be better but that's not an option on here - it's not my machine after all, and I don't think it would co-exist with Mozilla on my own machine. That said, I do have Firebird and Thunderbird running out of my roaming profile here and no-one seems to mind..

My parents' machine is now up-to-date with critical updates, but still has 2 driver updates and 18 software updates that need to be installed. ZoneAlarm also needs updating, but when you consider that installing SP1 and a further 16 critical updates took a whole 2 hours last night I'm not rushing into it. Although my parents have broadband internet, having it connected to a 400Mhz AMD K6-2 with only 128MB means you don't get much of a performance increase. And it's running XP, which means it's not the fastest beast in the moor, although XP runs a darn sight better on there than 98 ever did.

The machine turns 5 years old in January, and in its time its only seen a few changes - extra memory, an ethernet card and the addition of CD-RW, along with a new monitor. It'll only be a matter of time before it's replaced, particularly after my gloating over the speed of my new laptop.

On the plus side, it looks like I inspired someone. I'll echo him - if any of you techies have relations with computers in need of a bit of patching, use the holiday season as a chance to sort them out. If not at thanksgiving, maybe at Eid next week, or even Christmas. You could make it a New Year's resolution. If everyone patched their systems and had a basic awareness of security, then worms and hacking will undoubtedly be much less of a problem.

No, there wasn't an echo - this was inadvertently posted twice. Apologies.

Okay, maybe he isn't, but I've got myself a copy of his book. Or rather, I have a copy on a one-week loan from the university library. Let's hope DWWS will be available from there too soon - I probably know it all already but I keep meaning to read more books. Even if they are non-fiction and about computers.

Had a mild panic this morning when I slept through my alarm. Instead of waking up at 8am for a 9am lecture, I woke up at 9:50am, thus missing it and then only just making a 10am meeting. Whoops.

I don't know what it is, but it appears all colds are belong to me at the moment. I think I have my third cold since coming back to Uni in September coming on, coupled with the October 'flu. I have a very sore throat and feel very tired and chilly (yes, my heating is alright and my room is warm enough). After I hit 'Post' I'll be curling up in bed and then debate going to lectures tomorrow morning. It's not 'flu but I really do feel like death warmed up at the moment :(.

Coursework is done, dusted and printed out ready to hand in tomorrow. It's not the best assignment in the world but apparently it's all I needed to do. And it's only 5% of one module, or 1 credit out of the 240 credits from my second and final years that count towards my degree, so even if I do badly it's not going to matter hugely.

Had a play with the wireless hotspot in the foyer of the main building on campus - it was strange to be able to do my coursework on my own computer while sat in a cafe. For someone who's used to having a multitude of wires dangling out of his somewhat immobile machine it's very odd to be able to take it around and still be able to do everything that I could in my room.

Now that my coursework is done I have a free evening. Admittedly I probably should probably work on my next assignment, which is due in on Monday, but I really don't feel up to it at the moment. Ironically, the subject of the coursework is... wait for it... wireless LANs - although it's no more specific than that I intend to write about the differences between IEEE 802.11a, b and g, and the forthcoming 802.16 standard for larger networks (MANs), along with WEP encryption.

Update: I decided that putting pen to paper for this next assignment was the most productive thing to do. I've now written nearly three pages.

I will try to shut up about wifi as you're probably all bored by now but I'm still feeling the effects of its coolness factor.

Ever had someone you knew really well show a completely different side to you? I'm going through this at the moment.

See you tomorrow.

You know, considering it's gone quarter past nine in the evening, the computer labs are surprisingly busy. I'm spending my time here because there's nothing interesting on TV and I'm lacking a good book to read. Remind me to buy a set of playing cards so I can play Solitaire again, albeit manually.

Seriously, I'm really worried about how much I'm missing the computer already. Admittedly today was (one of) my afternoon(s) off so I had a bit more time - normally I'd spend the afternoon and much of the evening doing something on the computer, but obviously that's not on the cards now. It's frustrating that as soon as I hit boredom, I turn to the computer for potential enlightenment, only to find it's not there. And I already have a list of stuff to do once it gets back.

I guess you don't know what you've got, until it's gone.

Here's some news on the laptop. I'll order the Toshiba one tomorrow on my father's credit card (I don't have a credit card myself and since it'll be more than £100 it will qualify for protection), and so hopefully that will be here next week.

My current one is now away in its laptop bag. For the time being I will hang on to it, and then debate sending it off to Dublin for repairs - yes, Samsung's nearest service centre is in Ireland. Because it's likely it'll take a while, and because I was due to get a laptop in 6 months time anyway, I may as well get a new one now. Assuming that the old one can be repaired for something reasonable, I can then sell it - it's unlikely I'll get much for a broken laptop, whereas one that works of its age could fetch £100-200 on eBay. With a bit of luck, the repairs will be less than £100.

On the plus side, not having a computer to play with did give me motivation to do a few things that I've been putting off for a while now - tidying and vacuuming my room (which now looks so much cleaner), sending off parcels to people who won my eBay auctions at the weekend (so I am around £4 richer), and reading bits of the Guardian I'd left aside from earlier in the week.

I also watched Art Attack on ITV, seeing as I had nothing much better to do - I used to watch the programme as a child and was pleased to see that in 10+ years it has barely changed. Same presenter, same format and only a few subtle changes - the addition of a web site for example. Sometimes a little consitency in life is good.

Hopefully everything will be back on track soon - in the meantime I'll be logging in from the computer labs and the library - the latter is open until midnight so it's convinient for the evenings. I really have the urge to play Worms and relieve a bit of stress, but, as you can imagine, that's not exactly possible. Ah well.

Great. It appears my fan has pretty much given up the ghost, so after using the computer for around half an hour it shuts down to prevent itself overheating. Just what I need.

And, naturally, none of the computer places I tried would fix it - either because they 'don't do laptops' or because the parts are too difficult to get hold of (apparently I need a whole new PSU or something). So it looks like I'll be needing a new laptop.

While this could have come at worse times, it's still pretty bad timing - I have two pieces of coursework in for either side of next weekend which need to be typed up, so it looks like I'll have to resort to using the university's facilities in the meantime. While the laptop still works (kinda), I don't want to push my luck so I'm not going to use it until I have a replacement, just in case it goes completely and I have retrieve everything off the HD somehow.

As for the replacement, I've decided I will get another laptop - I do move around quite a bit and a desktop would be too bulky. I decided against going for an Apple - although PC World have a few G3 iBooks at around £700 they are, after all, only G3s, so they're pretty old, and only come with OS X 10.1 thus requiring a costly update to Panther. The cheapest iBook G4 I've seen is £849 - way out of my/my parents' budget, even if it does include Panther pre-installed.

The best I've seen is £549+VAT (adding VAT brings it to around £650) - it's a Toshiba, which I gather is a good make, and has the following spec:

• Mobile Intel Celeron 2.2Ghz processor - better than the 'immobile' 900Mhz Celeron I have at present
• 256MB of RAM - again, double what I have now, and it's upgradable to 1GB
• 20GB HD - not huge, but still twice what I have now
• 8-speed DVD-ROM drive - my present effort only does CDs
• External USB floppy drive included - not ideal but I rarely use floppies anyway
• 14.1" display - same as what I have at present which is fine. Resolution up to 1024x768 - not brilliant but adequate
• 16-64MB graphics
• Li-ion battery lasting nearly 3 hours - better than my old Ni-MH effort which lost its ability to charge fully very quickly
• 2 USB 2.0, parallel, 56k modem, ethernet, external monitor and headphone ports - same as before but USB 2.0 rather than 1.1.
• 2x PCMCIA slots and 802.11b Wifi support
• XP Home and WinDVD 2000

View the full spec here. If I can convince my parents to contribute some money I hope to get it.

The lack of a (working) computer in my room means that blog activity will be reduced for the next few days. I hope this will get sorted soon but I can't promise anything. Blarg :-( .

I'm about to head off to the demo. I'll let you know how it was later.

For the first time in over four weeks, I'm not ill. The colds and 'flu have finally decided to leave me alone for the time being, so now my nose is not a gushing stream of gunk, my throat does not feel like it has been rubbed with sandpaper and my head doesn't feel like it has been filled with polystyrene.

On the other hand, I seem to have regained my appetite. As a result, I've had serious munchies all evening. Looks like I'll be shopping again on Wednesday. :-/

There's a saying that if you're the sort of person who picks up a TV guide for Saturday night and decides that there's nothing good to watch, then you are getting old. For me, this has been the case for some time. Should I have already ordered my tweed slippers, pipe and hearing aid?

That said, there is the The Big Read on at the moment but my brain is having trouble functioning this evening so it may be a little too high-brow for me to handle on this occasion. I imagine a combination of going to bed at 3am, having to get up at 8:30am and then spending the day back home in York had something to do with it.

Fortunately I have no specific plans for tomorrow so I have the perfect excuse for denying the existence of Sunday morning.

If you were wondering, I wasn't offered an interview for the placement I applied for. Looks like I won't be working for IBM next year, then. Still, plenty more fish in the sea :).

The film I saw last night was Ali G Indahouse, which came out last year. It was worth waiting a bit to see it - having spent a year living in Bradford I understand more of the visual gags than I would have done in my somewhat more protected life back in York. It wasn't a bad film, even if some moments did make me cringe and that the ending wasn't that great. But I did enjoy it, and it was worth spending £2 to go and see it. Next week is Final Destination 2 - I'm not really into horror films so I may or may not go to it. The films in the following weeks are both ones I've seen already (28 Days Later and LOTR: The Two Towers).

Tomorrow I'm (probably) meeting up with some friends back in York, so although I'm almost certainly going out tonight I'll try to take it relatively easy.

Thursday is the one day when I'm in lectures pretty much 9-5. Admittedly I managed to escape at 4pm today but it's a real drag since the subjects I have today aren't exactly riveting.

Today is especially hard because there's a rather spontaneous general meeting of the student union at 6pm (which I'm attending to oppose a motion that I don't agree with), and then a film at 8pm which I want to see. And then it's a 9am start tomorrow morning :-/ .

Still... at least I have something to do :).

I've just filled out and submitted my first job application for my placement year next year. I won't tell you who I applied for but you will have heard of them since they're one of the world's biggest IT companies. I'll let you know how I get on.

This isn't the last application that I'll make - although this is the job that I want the most, it's also probably the one I'm least likely to get, largely due to the potential competition I'm facing. But it's a start.

A couple of days back I decided to see if I was capable of getting Freeview, so I could watch 30 TV channels in high quality reception rather than 5 in mediocre-to-poor quality. Tesco are now selling Daewoo boxes for a mere £80 which don't rely on having a SCART socket on your TV, so I figured it was worth a try. And did it work?

Of course it didn't. Bradford has atrociously bad TV reception, which means analogue TV doesn't come out very well but digital cannot work at all - the digital signal is compressed so it needs a full stream to be able to decompress it, therefore partial reception is not good enough. As it is, I bought it from Tesco, who took the box back with no questions asked and gave me a full refund, so I've not lost anything financially.

With hindsight, I'd have checked the Freeview website which has a reception checker that works by postcode - and my postcode naturally says that I'm not in a Freeview area. Oh well, I tried. If it helps my postcode for last year also turned up blank.

Interestingly it also doesn't like my grandparents' postcode, which is a pity because they're the sort of people who might be interested in Freeview (as opposed to Sky which is the only other option for digital TV in their area, and that requires a contract). That said, their Channel 5 reception isn't good anyway so it's probably related to a problem with the local transmitters.

In the end, I did make it to lectures today, and seemed to survive them okay. I even managed a trip into town, to buy various odds and ends, namely three birthday cards, a box of tissues (you can probably guess why) and a two-pin AC adaptor so that I can actually have a shave.

Two of the cards are for an acquaintance in lectures who turns 21 tomorrow - one is from me and the other will be from someone else. Of course, I hadn't realised just how difficult it was to find a 21st birthday card that didn't mention alcohol, but in the end I managed to find something a little more subdued. The other is for my grandma who turns 81 next Tuesday.

The adaptor is down to the fact that, unlike last year, I don't have a separate razor socket, although I didn't actually realise this until I tried to have a shave today, realised the battery was flat and then realised there was nothing I could plug it in to.

I reckon I should be back to my usual self tomorrow but I'll take it easy over the next few days just in case.

Just when my cold was finally easing off, along came the 'flu. I've spent the past 12 hours cooped up in bed with a headache, sore throat, random fluctuations in body temperature, aching joints and a waterfall of snot coming out of my nose.

That said, thanks to a paracetamol tablet my aches have eased somewhat, so I've actually been able to get out of bed and tidy the mess of clothes, blanket and duvet on the floor. Half past midnight does seem an odd time to do it but then I have been asleep for the best part of 12 hours already.

The most annoying thing was that I had to clock out of helping out on the open day a good 3 1/2 hours early because of this - I basically made it midday before deciding that really this wasn't such a good idea. I will earn some money but not as much I'd hoped :( .

Hopefully I'll be feeling much better by Monday afternoon, when I'm back in lectures. The most annoying thing was that I was due to have a 'flu injection next week, which would have stopped this from happening in the first place. Ah well.

It's been a couple of days since I last briefed you on how my life is progressing so for those of you who don't visit just for the technical hoo-ha and are actually interested in what I do with my spare time, here's one for you.