w0000t

Just got five stars on Free Bird on Hard. This means I'm better than you.

New Year's Resolutions

1) I will not leave my Internet Banking number on my clipboard.
2) I will not click the same bookmark twice within 5 minutes out of boredom.
3) I will not screw with my friends' lives for fun. Unless it's really good fun.
4) I will not delete peoples' forum posts that are disparaging of myself or my previous posts.
5) I will not write code with absolutely no design anywhere to be found.
6) I will not wear socks and sandals.
7) I will not get so drunk that I have to be carried to bed more than once a week.
8) I will do more to hurt and debilitate those who do not use proper grammar.
9) I will not start or end any text messages with 'lol'. Neither will I reply to any sent to me that start or end with 'lol'.
10) I will not force women to do every task for me that I consider to be some form of cleaning or housework.

Just kidding about that last one there. And most of the others really.

Xx

Tasteless

Taken from http://trampolinelol.ytmnd.com

Making myspace viewable

I've always treated any url that even hinted at myspace like a French leper, extreme evasive action. However, thanks to the joys of userscripts and Flashblock they're now pretty much bearable (myspace urls, not French lepers).

The two main problems I always had were the tons of horrifically bad embedded flash objects in a page, and the awful custom styles that retards who should never have been let loose with html would create. Flashblock takes care of the flash, and Greasemonkey takes care of the rest for me, when it's using this script.

What you see:	What I see:

Firstly, note that in the 'what you see' screenie, you're missing out on the fact that there's an embedded music player that auto-plays a song I probably don't want to hear. Secondly, that advert at the top is, of course, a piece of flash that probably tells some annoying story. Thirdly, that in the bottom right, you can just see a set of pictures, these scroll around without my asking them to, preventing me from having a nice static screen to look at. Lastly, but by no means least annoyingly, if you view that page without having suitable protection, you'll see that background image constantly moving around the page - horrific I'm sure you'll agree.

No offence to Gen though, was just the worst myspace page I could find without spending too much time browsing.

Xx

No comment

I'm sure I've eaten this before...

FDA approves cloned meat

Finally! I think my first comment on seeing Dolly the sheep was "Great! More meat!" so naturally I'm very pleased about this one.

Firstly, we're going to (when mass-production becomes economically viable) enjoy the benefits of very cheap meat, as there will be no wastage of food and time spent on animals that produce meat which cannot be used. This will help massively with humanitarian aid schemes, and more importantly, will mean I can afford to eat more wonderful meat.

Secondly, the overall quality of food will drastically increase with this one. You know how Marks & Spencer will spend months searching for the most sublime cattle to carve up and put in a little foil tray for you? Well, once they find that animal, they'll be able to clone it off a few hundred times, and soon every 80p ready meal will contain meat of that quality.

Sure, it may look like I'm being a bit heartless here, but I think we crossed the line at the point that we decided to keep animals in captivity for the sole purpose of murdering them and using most of their body parts for our own pleasure and needs. It's a small step from there to screw with their natural breeding cycle (which we pretty much do already, I don't think the animals in stud farms to get forge meaningful relationships). People complaining about the health aspect are being completely stupid too - the FDA has banned plenty of things that had only a 1% chance of causing harm, so if they give this the go ahead, I'm not too worried. Admittedly they're Americans, but they do have a good track record so far.

A Song Of Stone

Just finished reading A Song Of Stone by Iain Banks, and I don't mind admitting it took me a while to get through it. On a very basic level, you can't just skim through the book, absorbing the main points of the story, because it's not that sort of book. It's a fiercely poetic novel, with extravagant monologues and descriptive passages that almost flow like free-form poetry or sonnets.

Banks really utilises the full extensity of the English language here - I had to pop to the dictionary four or five times during the reading for words I'd never heard before even! Anthropopathism (the assignation of human emotional characteristics to a non-human subject) and Solipsism (a metaphysical belief that the universe is entirely the creation of one's own min) were among the more exotic words used.

Quote from a reviewer on Amazon:

I imagine it as the literary equivalent to having been raped.

The story itself is the nihilistic, violent and depraved tale of a post-apocalyptic world, told via an elegant mixture of the first and second person perspectives. The central figures are a guerilla lieutenant, an ananchronic castle and our protagonist and narrator, the thoroughly odious nobleman, shunned by society for his depravity and completely detached from the common man by his philosophy. Banks' real masterpiece here is to conjure up sympathy for this man whilst constantly showing us his sick and twisted view of the world, through his thoughts and actions.

This story isn't light reading, in either sense of the phrase, but I do highly recommend it if you want something to really sink your brain into. I'll certainly be re-reading it in a year or so.

Remote Record

Really impressed by this little number. If you have Sky+, then you can set your box to record even when you're away from home. Out with friends, and one mentions that a great film is starting soon? Just pop onto sky.com via a computer, or using wap and browse through what's on, and pick whatever you want to record. Or, if you haven't got access to wap or a computer - you can even do it with a text message! Brilliant.

Firefox Plugins

Now, being a Microsoft kid, I should probably be plugging IE7 here instead, but in my eyes, it's still just Not Good Enough. It's about as secure as Firefox now, and probably even more so once you're running Vista, but the usability is still a bit of an issue for me. It seems almost as though they've just copied the best features out of Firefox - and I've got no problem with them using an idea that works, my qualm is that the copy is just slightly worse than the original.

The other great thing about Firefox is the fact that it's so, so much easier to write your own plugins for it. Here's a couple I'd highly recommend:

1) FoxyTunes
This nifty little plugin installs a set of controls for the media player of your choice straight into the browser window. This saves on precious desktop real-estate, meaning you can pop your player into the system tray and just select your controls whilst browsing the web. Particularly useful if you're wandering around the internets and you bump into the odd video or soundclip you want to listen to - you can pause and restart your music collection without ever having to alt-tab. Now I really can counter every argument people give me to update to one of these fancy new keyboards stuffed with extra controls. Except of course, for this one.

2) Download Statusbar
This one's my favourite Firefox plugin - a very simple idea well executed. You know that annoying downloads window that pops up? Well, this pretty much just moves it down into a small statusbar at the bottom. Now you don't have one extra window cluttering up your alt+tab display and your startbar, but you still get to see how your downloads are progressing, and to open up your recent downloads (as well as rename them, and a few other cool things). This bar obviously needs clearing a lot more than the download manager window - which might have been a bit of a drag, as I love being able to go back 50 downloads and find something I put somewhere on my hard drive that would take 6 precious clicks to reach. Fortunately though, the old window can still be reached with Ctrl+J, or Tools > Downloads, so that's still there if you want it. Highly recommended.

3) Clear Cache Button
A very simple little button, that lets you clear your cache with a single click. Nothing fancy, but this is something I couldn't find in Firefox 2.0, and anyway - I fairly often have to clear my cache for one reason or another, so it's nice to have a button right there on the toolbar.

4) IETab
The other problem with Internet Explorer (pick any version you want) is that it simply won't conform to web standards! If you don't believe me, then go run it through the Acid Test and see for yourself. This plugin allows you to open a website using embedded Internet Explorer...from Firefox. So now you can see how that webpage you just made looks in both browsers from one window, or you can browse some Microsoft created pages without having to go and find that IE shortcut! Great for me.

5) Tab Mix Plus
I've still got my doubts about this one, but it's growing on me. When the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 2.0, they were so busy making it work wonderfully, that they forgot to give us the hundreds of options we all love. With this addon, you can specify pretty much anything, from silly things such as what to do when you shift+click a tab, to very useful things, like how a long string of bookmarks should be displayed. I ignore most of the options, but there are a few things that I'm really going to appreciate, mostly the mouse gestures and being able to use my scrollwheel on tabs.

6) ReloadEvery
Are you sitting on this page, refreshing every 10 seconds just to see if I've made a new post? If so, I recommend suicide, fast. If, on the other hand, you do need to see when a website's been updated, or you're cheating on a game or doing something a bit more (or less!) sinister that requires a lot of refreshing - try this addon. Does what it says on the tin really, you tell it to reload every... and it does. Lovely.

7) Flashblock
Saved the best till last here, I really can't speak highly enough of this addon. Lately there's been a trend to put flash all over webpages, in the adverts, in an embedded preview of a movie, very notoriously on myspace to play you the user's out of tune guitar recorded straight through their line in...everywhere. This addon doesn't block flash entirely, but merely stops it from loading until you want it, one click and the flash is there for you. Infinitely useful, and along with Firefox's pop-up blocking, you'll never be annoyed by a site again once you've got this installed. Well, nearly never.

Hope you enjoy the addons, let me know if you find any more I might like. Although I love all of the above, and I suggest you get them all, IETab and Flashblock are the most useful for any user, and you really have to get them.

Xx

Seems I'm not the best Guitar Hero in the world

Took part in a Guitar Hero competition today at Only1Music - a drum shop in Cardiff, and it was great fun. The full 32 people didn't turn up for the tournament, so we managed to get it all finished in one day, as opposed to in the expected three days, but that just made it more fun.

I got through to the final after a very fun semi-final - due to an odd number of entrants there were three of us through to the semi-final, so we all took a go each at Bark At The Moon, I came second in that with a pretty nice 96%, but the other guy who progressed to the final had 98% of notes hit, ouch.

For the final, we played Free Bird (of course), but only on hard mode, because no-one in the room wanted to hear the solo butchered. I was happy to top 200k points for the song, and didn't show myself up, but lost by about 4% on percentage of notes hit, so I was only the runner up. We both got a standing ovation at the end of the solo from everyone else in the room though, which was nice (and deserved! - my arms were aching after that solo) and I had a great time. Even got myself some swag on the way out, so I'll be decorating my room in Guitar Hero memorabilia when I get back to Brum. Didn't do too badly overall, considering that all but one song I played was from Guitar Hero 2, and I only got that on Christmas Day!

I love Christmas!

Phew, my posts are getting a bit one-track recently aren't they? Well, screw you guys, I love Christmas! Today was awesome, woke up and had breakfast and then opened up my stocking full of joyful prizes. Many cool things in there, and the obligatory ton of chocolate and sweeties. Took our turns opening presents then, and although we all got some sweet stuff (I finally got Red Dwarf series 5-8!), everything was really just a low key build up to the real present of the day.

Guitar Hero II

Oh, my God. If ever anything could possibly be described as being better than Guitar Hero, this was it. I spent 5 hours or so playing through the entire thing on medium (5* on nearly every song, I better win that tournament on Wednesday!), just so that I could unlock Free Bird. I then decided to see just how awesomely hard Free Bird would be on expert mode. It was then that I found out that Guitar Hero 2 has decided to add three note chords to the songs, great. Got through all that lovely rhythm pretty fine though, singing along with Lynyrd Skynyrd, and then came the guitar solo. I'm going to be generous to myself and say that I lasted about 20 seconds. 20 seconds out of the three or four minutes of crazy-ass guitar soloing. One day, I'll beat that song on expert. One day.

Christmas dinner was predictably ace, and once we'd finished that I was dragged kicking and screaming away from Guitar Hero to watch a film with the family. Film was The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (the modern version), and I noticed for the first time just how tied up with the story of Christianity that is, quite scary that I've never noticed it before - but in my defence, I was a fair bit younger when I read the books. It's all the there, from the leader of the men being called Peter, the sinner, the sacrifice and the rising from the dead to save the soul of the sinner, the women at the feet of the cross, everything. Still trying to work out which bit of the Bible contains the phrase 'and lo, the women didst ride upon the back of the great lion and then kick some minotaur ass'. I'll get back to you on that one.

Xx

Christmas Eve! (A virtuous woman)

Well last night was predictably great - spent the end of Christmas Eve and the early hours of the day itself (ie, just past midnight) round Lucie's opening gifts, after we'd watched NBC the night before (as always), she got me some kickass stuff, including a proper copy of the Kama Sutra. I say proper copy, because you quite often find some rubbish like 'The Ann Summers pop-up guide to the Kama Sutra' which only contains..well, you can guess. This book is the actual full version, full of customs and philosophy - as well as the slightly less appropriate pictures. One line I particularly liked was:

A virtuous woman, who has affection for her husband, should act in conformity with his wishes as if he were a divine being, and with his consent, take upon herself the care of his family. The house should be well cleaned, the floor smooth and polished, and decorated with flowers to make it neat and becoming.

From one of the golden ages of civilization eh? Can't fault it - though I'm a liberal kind of guy, I won't react too harshly if I come home and my floor isn't perfectly smooth. Also, note the usage of the Oxford comma in the above, you know that's taken straight from the original text ;)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everybody! Mine's started already, been round Lu's tonight for our annual watching of the Nightmare Before Christmas (man I love Danny Elfman), followed by gifts - she got me some pretty awesome stuff (will post more on that later). Then, I get home to find two Christmas presents in my inbox! An amazon gift voucher and someone's given one of my gp5 tabs 5*s and a nice comment, aww. Anyhow, I'm off to bed now to see what Santa brings me, but given that I'm sure he'll be bringing me Guitar Hero 2, don't expect any posts in the next month or two.

Enjoy!
Xx

LAN!

w00t - time for another CompSoc LAN methinks. And, whatever I think goes when it comes to CompSoc, given that I generally end up doing most of the work. I've decided to make the next LAN coincide with winter-een-mas, so that we can celebrate the festive season properly. It also happens to pretty conveniently occur after all our exams are out of the way too - which is when we'll need a bit of mayhem and fun.



Going to see if I can convince the uni to let us have a two nighter this time, starting around 8pm on Friday the 26th of January, and finishing some time very early on the Sunday morning, with a roomful of bleary eyed gamers stumbling onto the minibus. Microsoft have generously offered to give us a bit of sponsorship as usual - they'll be donating a rather cool prize, and might be helping out with the food budget too. In return I'll be running a Microsoft-themed competition as part of the usual prize tournament, along with a couple of other things I've got up my sleeve. I'll also get everyone brainwashed for the Vista Launch Event too, so that I'm not speaking to a lecture theatre full of thin air when launch day comes.

If you're at Aston, then there's no excuses not to come along, and if you're not, then follow the link above to find out some more information on winter-een-mas and see if there's any events near you to celebrate the holiday!

Xx

Deprived

It's now been a week since I last played Guitar Hero. The nausea and cramps have stopped but I'm still twitching every now and then - this is worse than when I quit playing WoW. On the upside, I know that tomorrow, for Christmas, I'll get getting Guitar Hero 2 (and other presents, food..whatever, Guitar Hero is life). Better get practising too, playing in a Guitar Hero tournament on Wednesday! Whoop

All wrapped up

Wow, it's not even Christmas Eve yet and somehow I've managed to buy and wrap everything I needed to! Feels a bit weird now, not sure what to do with it all - and Smudge is already going crazy and trying to get into all of the presents. Fortunately, he's mostly concentrating his efforts on some treats that we bought for him and wrapped up, he'll chase them all around the room, but still hasn't got the hang of unwrapping the paper yet.

Another thing that's unfortunately wrapped up is my Ka, but that won't be getting taken out again in two days time. Decided that I can't really justify spending £900ish to renew my car insurance for the time I'm at uni, especially when you consider that I've got a bus pass already paid for. So, sorry guys, but you'll have to make your own way to the supermarket etc now. Also, I hate the stereotypes I get placed into for car insurance - the cheapest quote I could find this year was £900, but I used my trusty back button and queried insurers as to how much I'd pay if everything else was the same...but I had boobs. That takes me down to £600 - which, incidentally, is also the price I'd pay if I was 7 months older. If I was fully 21 years old and had boobs then:

a) I could marry a rich 50-year old City businessman and be set for life.
b) My car insurance would be a lovely £400.

God knows why they do this - we all know that your eyesight and reaction times deteriorate with age, and let's face it, whenever you see a car drive in two lanes at once before pulling out into oncoming traffic, it's always a woman who's angled her rear view mirror so that she can get a better view of her lipstick. Sexism aside, why do they calculate costs based on full years? Someone with their 21st birthday tomorrow would pay dramatically more than someone with their 21st birthday today - are insurers incapable of adding a little pro-rata equation to what must already be a massive series of relatively complex mathematical functions?

</rant>

CompSoc down

Yeah yeah, I know the Aston CompSoc webby is borked, don't go whining at me or Stef though, looks like Tim's server has upped and died. He's pretty good at data security though so I doubt we'll have lost any/much data - it'll get fixed whenever I manage to get hold of him.

As a fairly well known deity once said (wrote) - Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: Apparently Tim had a bit of hardware failure (wink wink nudge nudge) - webby will be back up when he can get his er, server, up again. Ahem.

Urban Linerider

I'm guessing you've all seen Linerider - if not, then go find it and have a play. Although it's not the original, I recommend this version - as it comes complete with an undo button, massively useful, and sorely lacking in the original. The basic idea of the game is very simple, but also pretty novel and can be a great laugh. You just draw lines and watch your little character zoom off on them - add in a bit more detail and put some music over the top and you're ready to join a million other people in posting your little line rider video on youtube. There's some great ones already on there, and a hell of a lot of poor ones too, but I had to linkify this one just for being so damn original and well done:



Strange to think this started out as a very modest little post on someone's deviantart account..

I LOST MY YOU ESS BEE

Seriously, I marvel at the fact that some of the retards sending out emails to allstudents@aston.ac.uk and seas_ug@aston.ac.uk (Engineering/Sciences undergraduates) ever managed to get into a University. This past week there's been at least 5 people who've managed to lose critical work by leaving their USB memory stick behind in the library or in one of the computer labs. What sort of person has the only copy of their dissertation stored on such a fragile medium anyway? On the plus side, you do sometimes get an email that makes you fall about laughing - here's one of the best efforts of this year:

Geeky t-shirts

Just noticed that Splitreason has a section where you can contribute your own design, and if enough people like it, they'll make a t-shirt out of it - pretty sweet idea I hope you'll agree. I'm gonna find someone who's good at art and get them to knock up a 'When I was your age, Pluto was a planet' tee, I bet that'd sell like crazy.

Anyhow, here's a few of my favourites (which probably reflect the many hours I wasted away on WoW and various text adventures):



One thing which has always annoyed me - all the best geek accessory sites (thinkgeek, splitreason, zeestuff) are always based in America. This means I have to pay tons in shipping fees and customs if I ever want anything from them, which really puts me off most of the time (though I did cave in for the CtrlAltDel t-shirts and books one time). Why hasn't anyone set up a UK site that buys and resells all this stuff? Or even an eBay shop? There's an idea for one of you Business graduates, God knows you'll need an edge with approximately 18million students graduating in Business each year. And that's just from Aston.

Pitch your passion!

Sick & tired of filling out all those application forms for placements, and then going through telephone interviews, which if you pass will just lead to some randomly placed assessment centre? Microsoft have launched a new scheme called 'Pitch Your Passion' which will determine the lucky guys who get placements as one of the following:

• Developer Evangelist Intern


• Academic Marketing Intern


• Online Intern


• Events Intern

Basically, in 'Pitch your passion' you get 7 minutes to answer the question "Why should Microsoft give you a placement?" - in front of a panel of judges. This idea is all about offering the opportunity for you to shine, with little need for application forms or CVs - it's about you as a person and your passion first and foremost. It doesn't replace the traditional HR route for intern recruitment; this is still going ahead as planned for all other internships. You can find out more information about all their internships via this link. Good luck - already applied and had my telephone interview!

Edit: Apparently that bit at the end which I pretty much copy/pasted straight from MS is a lie, all the information isn't there. Try this link for full information on Pitch Your Passion!

That crazy cat.

That was a couple of years back, but we've got a new Christmas tree and Smudge is at it again. This year we foolishly decided to hang some silver baubles on the branches near the floor, and he's been having great fun knocking them off and chasing them around the room. Once they've all been killed, he starts on the little santa doll that sits underneath the presents - I think we might forego the tradition of placing presents under the tree this year, I can imagine the consequences.

On a vaguely related note; why don't people ever use the word 'cat' to describe someone any more? As in 'he's one cool cat' or the like. Did Danny John Jules confuse people by personifying the descriptive word 'cat' whilst being named 'Cat'? Are people just not that cool any more? One to ponder...

Shopping!

Been out shopping for most of today, which was surprisingly fun. Went around all the supermarkets first of all, and managed to buy over £100's worth of food for us all over the holiday period - all on loyalty cards and vouchers, which was pretty sweet. So, if you haven't signed up yet, I'd have to recommend you get a Clubcard and a Nectar card.
Went to town after that - but all the good shops seem to have dissappeared since I went off to Uni. Found a fairtrade shop with a bunch of funky stuff in it though, so wasn't a complete waste of time. Off to play some more Cannon Fodder now. Ciao.

Xx

Jerks can't read

Balls Of Steel:


Incidentally, I signed up to YouTube so that I could link this video here, and was amused by the image verification:



Also, someone should probably rethink the wording there. Not many people who can't read are going to get that far down the page.

Presenting: The Imagine Cup Digital Photography Invitational

...for people too retarded to write code. I'll be submitting this classic black and white photo - wonder if Microsoft will catch onto the fact that it was taken before I was born?

Logical Fun

Spent a good few hours today, and a bunch more this week on the Imagine Cup Algorithm Challenge - which is pretty damn hard, but also good fun - really makes you think. The first match is over on the 22nd of December, and I think I came in a bit late to have much of a chance of getting near the top 50, I'm currently stuck down somewhere near 300th (out of a couple of thousand) on the leaderboard, and I doubt I'm going to triple my score within the next day or two.

The precept of match 1 is pretty simple - you control a little robot, called Herbert, and you have to get him around a map as efficiently as possible. Each map contains both white and grey buttons, you complete the map by collecting all of the white buttons - but if you touch a grey button, all the white buttons become unpressed. I'm sure that on (at least) one of the later levels, I'll have to tell him to walk through a few grey buttons before going on his final run through the whites - which is a fairly novel gameplay concept, but currently those last few levels just scare me.



The catch, of course, is that the only things that herbert understands are 'turn right', 'turn left' and 'go straight', and that telling him any one of these commands requires using a 'byte' of information - and each level has a limited number of bytes you're allowed to use to solve it. So, lots of recursive algorithms and equations are called for to finish the level under the byte limit - very tricky at times indeed.

Good fun for those of you who enjoy maths, coding or just general logic puzzles, and there'll be three more matches coming up in the Algorithm Challenge, the last one of which ends mid-february, if you finish in the top 50 in any of them you get to go on to round 2, and if you're one of the top 6 in your country then, you get to go to Korea for the international finals and the chance to win a few thousand dollars. Nice. Just wondering if it's going to be North or South Korea though....

Off to listen to The Supremes and read A Song Of Stone by Iain Banks now, ciao.

Xx

2006 Awards

1) Drinking buddy
Would probably have to be Terra, bit of an odd choice as he doesn't actually drink, but on the plus side, that means he's able to get me somewhere near the vicinity of my bed when I'm too wasted to stand.

2) Lifetime service award
What? Erm, me. I'm great.

3) Newcomer of the year
Rachelle's probably the best newbie we've gained at Aston this year, though kudos to Babagu aka 'crazy greek guy' for getting prog rock jam sessions started up!

4) High point of the year?
Well, take your pick really..any of the jazz gigs, birthday weekend with Lucie, house Christmas party, any of the CompSoc LANs. Nah, I know what the high point was. It was the day Xander returned from London bearing the golden box of Guitar Hero.

5) Low point of the year?
Probably walking into my Comms & Info Skills oral exam, sitting down, and then realising that everyone else in the room had an entire powerpoint presentation and full set of notes with them. The examiner wasn't too impressed by my improv speech, though I thought I did a decent job.

6) Best holiday?
What's a holiday? Tenby with Lucie :)

7) Anthem for 2006?
Monkey Steals The Peach - Guitar Hero. ;) Or possibly Beer by Reel Big Fish.

8) Any regrets?
Don't be silly, I'm awesome.

9) Best night out?
If it was that good, I wouldn't remember it now would I. Let's say one of the Reading Festival nights though, they were all great. Or maybe Laserquest & bowling with CompSoc.

10) Worst night out?
Probably that time in the Sacks where I left before any of the good acoustic acts came on, and then managed to get the wrong bus and have to walk three miles home, and then stayed up all night doing coursework with Clush, before handing in the worst piece of crap I've ever designed and implemented. Free sausages were ace though.

11) Who did you spend valentines' with?
Lucie (I hope).

12) Best relationship?
Only got the one sorry.

13) Worst relationship?
So I guess it wins this prize too...three in a row for Lucie.

14) First gig of the year?
Playing - probably with my jazz band at an LMS gig.
Watching - couldn't tell you, memory's not that great.

15) Last gig of the year?
Playing - paid jazz gig at Sutton Coldfield Baptist Church Youth Group's Christmas Ball (that's a mouthful eh?).

Watching - Capdown, Buzzkill, King Blues & some local band at Birmingham Barfly. Great night, lots of dancing and good music. Really impressed by all three of the main bands, the local lot looked decent too.

16) How did you spend your birthday?
Went to Tenby with Lucie =)

17) Best decision made all year?
Joining the Microsoft Student Partner scheme. Buying a trumpet was pretty ace though.

18) What are your plans for next year?
Get a first on the second year of my degree, get & go on a good placement (Rare Game Studios, Microsoft or Google hopefully), play a bunch of jazz, play a bunch of Ultimate Frisbee and generally have a good time.

19) Most stupid idea when drunk?
Allowing Gib near me with a camera.

20) Biggest surprise of the year?
Waking up (insert humorous position/situation here) after a night out.

21) A phrase to sum up this year?
"EFFFFFFFFFFFFFF"

22) Most commonly used word/ phrase?
"What key are we in?"

23) Best film?
American Beauty - I'd never actually watched it through before this year.

24) Best album?
Roflcopter - Music to hoover to. Or, if you want a non-imaginary album; Mose Allison - Allison Wonderland.

25) Best kiss of the year?

Gib. Of course.

XNA Launch

A bit late posting this one I know - but in my defence, I didn't have a blog before! So anyway, last Wednesday, a few of us (Dean, Max, Terra, Yam & myself) went off to Warwick uni to see Microsoft's latest release - XNA. Actually, let me correct that - Max, Dean and Yam went to see XNA, Terra came along for the free stuff and I went there in the (admittedly unlikely) hope that Peter Molyneux would ask me to marry him.

We left nice and early, and got to the building in Warwick with minimal casualties (Terra sustained a minor head wound) - and the first thing I noticed was...there was a *massive* wall inside the building that appeared to be completely dedicated to Deep Purple. Now, anyone that has had the misfortune to mention Deep Purple to me will know that I can reel off the odd fact about them, but in addition to a plethora of album titles and members of the band I recognized on this wall, I'll admit there was the odd phrase or name that I couldn't quite place. I'm completely baffled as to precisely why Warwick opted to build this monument to the classic rock legends - but kudos to them all the same.

After breakfast and playing around on the 360 pods dotted around the room, Andy Sithers opened up the event with a brief overview - during which we found out that we'd all be getting $400 worth of XNA Creator's Club memberships, and that 5 of the 150 or so people at the event would be going home with a brand new XBox 360 and games. Seriously, you've got to love Microsoft events - so many freebies, I ended up with about 4 t-shirts and a very thick book on .NET.

Chris Satchel and Mitch Walker, who'd flown over from Seattle for the event were up next, and they gave us a really good insight into how XNA worked, and why it had been developed. The entire audience was completely hooked by the end of these two talks, which made the rest of the day (until the deity that is Peter Molyneux anyway) a bit redundant. From watching these two guys present and code, and seeing some of the demos everyone firmly believed that they could go home and write Mario, or at least Space Invaders within a couple of hours (it's actually a fair bit harder than that, but is honestly so much easier with XNA than coding direct through C+).

Next up was Nick Burton from Rare, and given that I've applied for a placement with those guys, I shouldn't badmouth him, but great speaker though he is, I think he went far too much into graphics considering the audience he had, and I'm sure most of us were pretty lost when he started getting excited about implementations of shader languages using XNA. Still though, he got his point across - you really can get extremely close to the machine using XNA, it doesn't take away any of the functionality of native code.

Had a kickass buffet lunch after this, and met up with some of the other MSPs who'd attended the event, chatted to them for a while - and then wandered over to find the MSP bosses - Stu Leddy and Matt Duffin. I brought my little group along too, to get me some brownie points for signing them up to the Imagine Cup, and managed to con them out of some cube t-shirts for us all.

Next up was Rob Miles, a lecturer, whose presentation on 'teaching with XNA' was pretty fun, but a bit redundant for the student percentage of the audience - a pity really, as the student percentage was well over 75 that day. And finally...Peter Molyneux. For those of you who didn't spend your childhood cooped up in a small dark room, with only your Amiga powerbox for heat and your TV for light - this is the man who founded Bullfrog Studios (Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park), and then sold it and founded Lionhead Studios (Black & White, Fable). He actually got Populous up on screen and told us the story of how it was coded, which was a real treat, and then gave a really high-quality overview of how XNA would allow creativity to flow much more freely in games now, and also a good few tips on how to get into the industry.

The event finished up with some more goodies being given away, before we flew off home. Lots of fun was had by all, and I'll be knocking something up in XNA when I'm done working on my Imagine Cup entries for you all to play with.

Xx

The end of term LMS/Karaoke

Well, last Thursday was a night I'll certainly remember! But, not for a few more weeks I imagine, had a tad too much to drink towards the end. The Live Music Society here at Aston had their final gig of the term, which I believe was meant to be Christmas themed, and it was pretty fun for all.

I got to open up with some smooth jazz from the Tie-Dye Quartet (who, annoyingly enough, were actually playing as a quartet for the first time ever) - we ended up improvising most of it though, as we'd barely played with Julie-oh on the trumpet before and we were just trying to get a bit of practise in before our proper gig the next day.

Side note - the proper gig was great fun! We dressed up smart but still ended up outclassed by all the 14-18 year olds who were there for their Christmas ball. Had a class time - free Christmas dinner, and an hour and a half or so of playing jazz, with a crowd who were dying to dance. And we got paid for it! We had to change half of our set and play songs we'd never practised just to keep everything upbeat enough - we'd planned a lot of slower songs as we thought they'd be a bunch of shy, self-conscious teenagers.

Anyhow, back to the LMS night. Next up were the two external bands - Hampton St and Shattered Age. Hampton St featured the legendary Mez on drums, who didn't dissapoint, and it was good to see Whitty again on the vocals (he was still raving about the jazz too, which was nice) - he's a real showman. Wasn't too impressed with Shattered Age, but they weren't too bad either. The Clerks came on after that - and they were massively improved from last year, though my senses were becoming a bit clouded by that point. Allucinere finished up the support acts' part of the night, whilst I sat near the bar drinking away.

Finally, I got to go back on stage with Roflcopter for the last set of the night. Normally, I'd have relished the opportunity, but by now I was finding it rather hard to stand up, let alone stand up and keep my balance with a bass around my chest. According to photos, and witness accounts, I did actually manage this feat, and some deluded fools even seem to think I managed to play a couple of basslines too. I do remember pulling the lead out of the amp more than once, and wowing the crowd with multiple variations of jokes that weren't funny the first time though, so not all was lost.

What's red and not there?
No tomatoes. - Thanks to Rob Miles for that one.

What's orange and not there?
No oranges.

What's yellow and not there?
No yellows.

Next, so I'm told, came karaoke, and according to the photos of the night, I got my hands on a yard of ale, along with various other drinks. The next day I woke to see a flash video of myself dancing to numanuma circulating the internet, but that wasn't my primary concern, as I was lying atop my bed wearing only a furry purple glove.

Great evening and a nice round off to the year - especially after the weeks and weeks of pretty much non-stop work I'd been doing.

Xx

Welcome!

Well, given that I'm now on facebook (linky) thought I might as well go the whole hog and have a blog too (though there's no way anyone's going to get me on myspace, I still have some standards).

Not entirely sure what I'm going to be putting here, all the interesting stuff's over now, and I'm just lazing around at home for Christmas. Oh well, I'll keep you updated on all the thrilling stuff that happens as I sit around my house for two weeks, and I'll probably be pimping Microsoft's latest offers to you all too, as part of the whole 'selling my soul contract'.

Enjoy, comment, all that jazz.
Xx