New Years Eve

An exciting day for me today because it is one of the first new years eve's that I have actually quite enjoyed. Most of the time I get dragged to adult parties with my parents and some kids that all end up being my brothers age. Tonight however, with friends and friends of friends I have been watching the TV, looking out of the window and having a generally good time. It took a long time to work out how to get the movies from my laptop onto the TV mind, I was supposed to bring my DVD player (it plays from USB drives) but typically, I forgot - along with the power cable for my laptop.

Review of the Year (Part 1)

This will be the first of two (possibly more) blog entries dedicated to reviewing the past year (and maybe decade if I get bored).This first part is all about the year in music and has been made very easy thanks to Last.fm because I can just take all of the data straight from here and shove it in a table.They were initally going to be the top ten artists and songs but the last three songs tied with 26 plays each and I thought it unfair to omit the last one so I have the top 11 songs and 10 artists.I have also removed Michael Giacchino from the artist count because all of his music is TV/movie soundtrack of which I have about ten albums and playing his whole collection just once would dwarf most others and I wouldn't really call him a favourite artist anyway, it's more background revision/work music.

Purest Green

After making some mini mince pies the other day, there was a lot of leftover pastry and so it was decided that the surplus should be used to make a treacle tart. My mum had the impression that it would be a simple task of filling a blind baked pastry case with golden syrup and then covering it with a sprinkling of dessicated coconut (in place of the breadcrumbs). As soon as I started mixing the two together, I knew something was wrong and suspected that several more ingredients were necessary, mainly melted butter and after failing to find a recipe in the huge collection of cook books, the internet confirmed by suspicions. Not only was butter needed, but an egg and some cream (although I suspect the latter is optional).

More Visitors

I suppose it isn't such a bad thing having more people to visit but when you have lots of people in succession, the "what have you been up to then?" story starts to seem very repetitive and even if I've told the same stories over and over again for the past few days, I still forget what I've done in the year. It's much easier if you have a hobby / interest that keeps you full of stories so that you can tell of the sporting achievements for example. For me, most of my life is spent programming (which no one is interested in, fact) or watching the telly, something that only really works if the other person has seen the same programme. Otherwise you end up with the awkward succession of "did you see xxx?" "no" "oh" and after a few of those, you tend to give up that line of questioning for fear of embarrassment, not only of yourself for being a TV hoar but for making the other person fell like they are missing out.

Jenga

Today has been a surprisingly enjoyable day thankfully because there was very little on the TV to keep me occupied and I haven't yet managed to get back into 'work mode'. Some friends came round for the afternoon/evening and we ended up playing Jenga and Wii for most of it after the initial boring catch up chat was out of the way.

Boxing Day

Apologies for the lack of imaginative titles here but they seem relevant and it's getting late. Nothing really note worthy today except a lot of TV watching and turkey eating - which will continue for a long time at this rate seeing as mum bought a bird big enough to serve 16 people (there are four of us!). A noteworthy programme was the story of slapstick, narrated by Miranda Heart (somewhat of a Marmite comedienne) which showcased the story of slapstick from the very early years of Laurel and Hardy up to the modern day uses through Vic and Bob and Lee Evans. If you are looking for a chuckle this holiday, check it out on the iPlayer. Something else I started watching was "The Noughties... Was That It?" The first two episodes are a staggering two and a half hours each and countdown 100 things that defined the decade and amazingly the entries are mostly sensible ones although the 'celebrities' they used to comment on each one are very questionable. If you do have five hours to spare though, again it is quite an interesting countdown.

It's Chriiiistmas!

Well it was at least, I will apologise in advance for any omissions as I am writing this several days after it actually happened. I decided to ban myself from the computer for today and spend the time eating/sleeping/doing general family stuff and it actually went quite well. So much so in fact that I think this has been one of the best Christmases in a while!

Christmas Eve

Not the most eventful of days, I finished wrapping my presents and realised that someone might end up with the wrong one tomorrow. I wrapped two 'things' (I'm not stupid enough to reveal what they were) soon after I got home and have only today realised that I didn't label these two identically shaped objects so I not have no idea which one is for which person and my only clue is that they are wrapped slightly differently. If I remember correctly, the slightly better wrapped 'thing' is my step-dad's but as that is the only thing I have to go on, I just have my fingers crossed for tomorrow's grand unveiling.

Some early preparations for tomorrow's feast have been made so that tomorrow isn't too much of a stressful day although as my mum is having a Christmas off this year, I suspect something will go wrong. Other than that, I wish any readers out there a very merry Christmas, I will probably end up writing tomorrow's blog on boxing day and will post my Christmas single up then as well (which gives me something to think about tonight!).

Tig on Ice

Today was time for Christmas activities number one and was designated 'boy's day' due to an unwell mother. The decision was made to go to the SnowDome and we were trying to decide between tobogganing/tubing or ice skating. In the end we decided that there was no contest between half an hour of the former and up to two hours of the latter for about the same price. After wisely checking the holiday timetables however, it turns out that the ice rink at the SnowDome has been converted into Santa's grotto for the Christmas period. Damn. Thankfully there is another ice-rink not so far away in rival town Solihull so we decided to go there instead.

More Finales

I've managed to get a bit more work done today and I'm almost half way through my text processing module notes now. These holidays seem to be presenting a real struggle to find the level of concentration needed to do any work at all and I don't suppose I'm helping that by not getting out of bed until midday but I'm blaming that on forgetting to pack my alarm clock rather than laziness.

Something Something Something Darkside

Not an undecided blog title but the name of the feature length Family Guy episode/movie that I got round to watching today. After the huge success of their Blue Harvest episode Star Wars spoof, they decided to go the whole hog this time and turn it into a spoof movie and they pulled it off quite well really. You have to know the basic storyline and characters of the original film to understand a lot of the more subtle jokes but even if you haven't there is something in there for you.

A Bad Idea

Someone had the bright idea to go to the supermarket this afternoon, bearing in mind tat it is only five days before Christmas now, the only sensible time to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time is to take advantage of the 24 hour opening times and go at some silly hour in the morning. It as absolutely crammed and coupled with the unfamiliar layout of the store meant that we must have done about three or four laps of the place before we filled the trolley. I spent most of the time trying to curb my step-dad's spending spree trying to 'save money' by taking advantage of some of the special offers not realising that the best way to SAVE the money is to not buy them in the first place. As expected when we got home my mum got a little bit cross that we had ended up with duplicates of the same thing. Since I've been home there has been some sort of bizarre role reversal going on whereby I end up trying to stop my parents arguing when usually it is them stopping me fighting with my brother.

The Final Showdown

It has got to that time of the year when the highlight of my day is going to be centred around what is on the box. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the box is broken - well sort of anyway, it has a nice red line just off centre that runs down the top half of the screen all the time and sometimes down the whole length of the screen. Thankfully though Saturdays mean Merlin and although it was the last ion the series, it was probably one of the best episodes so far and it has been confirmed that it will return for a third series!

Home Time

Home time today and I'm actually quite looking forward to it. Not that I don't like Sheffield but at Christmas time it's nice to spend some time with the family. Thankfully the snow didn't hit hard enough to disrupt all of the travel and even the bin men were out in force bright and early this morning so I'd have no trouble getting home. Once I'd finally finished packing the car (and all of the other little additions that I'd forgotten), the car just about started first time - although it did seem a little bit annoyed that I was waking it up in the cold - the SatNav got working on the first go (although it took a while) so I knew that today was going to be a good day. It's those little signs that reassure you that the day ahead will be free of disruptions and things will happen just as you want them too.

Snow

Amazingly, when the weatherman predicted last week that we would have snow today (based almost entirely on the fact that America had just had some and that sometimes when this happens the UK gets it about 7 days later) it actually happened! Totally unexpected however as the BBC had been predicting it to come on Friday for most of the week and until about two minutes beforehand, the sky was clear and sunny, almost no clouds in sight. Then within a few minutes, it turned to a blizzard and the snow just came. about 10 minutes later, I could no longer see out of my window because it was covered in snow (I'm in an attic room with a sloped window) so the rest of the day was quite dark for me.

Happy Union Christmas

Yes, you read right, because in the world of Sheffield University, today is Christmas day. Sadly no presents or Christmas meal this year due to a complete lack of organisation but I'm hoping we can make up for that after the January exams. At this time of year, people start to go a bit doolally through overwork and today is a day to forget about everything and go on an 20 hour binge, Bar One opens its doors bright and early in the morning with some people having been there queuing since about 6am! Various offers on food and drink throughout the day keep everyone entertained as well as some special guests. This year we were treated to James Buckley (Jay from the Inbetweeners) who apparently was rubbish, he was doing a DJ set and pretty much stood there and watched the music playing (so I'm reliably informed). He doesn't strike me as a particularly charismatic person but you'd have though that if he is hiring out his services as a DJ then he would be able to perform to the crowd and get them going a little bit more.

A-Z of Music

Inspired by the Gadget Show's countdown of the best gadgets of the year, I have decided to spend the rest of the week attaining to a similar task. Mainly it will be to combat the tedium of having no work (or more accurately wanting to do no work) but seeing as it is the end of the decade and indeed the first decade of the millennium, it would be nice to reflect back on what has happened not only this year but in the last ten. This is likely to be the most memorable and activity filled decade of my life, from starting school in 2000 to starting university, holidays and adolescence.

Gadget of the Decade

The early start this morning turned out to be not as bad as I had anticipated - which is always good and the rest of the house was up as well for one reason or another. After I'd handed in my assignments, I went to give blood. They have sent me about three reminders even before the date they had asked me to go which I think is a bit of a waste but I suppose they will be pretty desperate for the stocks at this time of year with a lot of people unable to donate because of colds and flu.

Nearly There

So the final deadline is tomorrow and as you can probably imagine, today was spent pretty much attached to the computer other than meals etc. After looking at the output of my text processing assignment more clearly and comparing it to the 'gold standard' provided by the lecturer, I wasn't fairing too well. Although some of the outputs matched, they were in the wrong order and didn't seem to take into account some of the queries. After playing around with the regular expressions for about five hours - at one point I left the program to build the index after modifying it and decided to give up after it had not generating anything after two hours. I ended up back at square one having decided that the regular expressions were not the problem and that it was my calculations of the document vectors (the ranking calculations) that were the real cause of the problem. By this time however it was approaching 03:00am and I had only just managed to get my head around the equations the first time around so attempting it again in this state would have been fairly futile. I resigned to the fact that I would pick the marks up for the code and that the lecturer would notice the mistake I made (which would hopefully be a small one) and I wouldn't lose out on too many marks. I just hope he's marking it on the code and not the report which I cobbled together, not quite understanding what I was meant to write and what the numbers output by the comparison program actually meant. Maximum of three pages was the brief and so I made two big graphs and stretched the content out onto two with the graph analyses as vague as they could be, pretending I knew what they meant.

Looming Deadlines

As expected, today has been mostly taken up with assignment work. Ordinarily these things don't take very long but in this case, both are based around text processing with large datasets and running the Python code can take a very long time. Today has mainly focused on the machine learning assignment which is all about classifying movie review into positive and negative. There are 2000 reviews (1000 of each type) and using the Weka package, we have to find the best attributes (words) to classify the documents. Once we have the machine readable text which maps the reviews to the attributes and class, we run the algorithms over the data to classify them. This bit also takes a very long time, especially the tree based algorithm C4.5 and the lazy IB1 which take between 5-10 and 15-20 minutes respectively to run.

A Sleepy Friday

It wasn't an especially late night last night but for some reason, most of today has been spent in a state of semi-awakeness and I've been unable to concentrate properly on anything. This didn't bode to well for the impending speech assignment due at midnight tonight but I have managed to complete it to a reasonably level I hope. The premise of the assignment was to create a voiced/unvoiced detector for speech (voiced speech occurs when the vocal chords are vibrating). It actually worked reasonably well and once you get started using PureData it's actually quite simple and straightforward. There are a few peculiarities however and I am yet to discover how to generate a help file for the sub-patches. Bonus marks lost there then but seeing as this was another program where we received very little formal tuition, I don't think it was too bad.

The Flaming Dragon

It's good to get out of the house occasionally isn't it. What with lectures all done and dusted now, there is very little incentive to actually leave the house so when I received an invite to a 21st birthday gathering I was delighted. Not only would I be leaving the house but I would be having fun at the same time. We went to Valley Centretainment to the Flaming Dragon Chinese restaurant.

It's All so Quiet

You can tell it's coming to the end of the year when suddenly the house becomes very quiet. The rest of the year is relatively carefree but as the term draws to a close, so do the deadlines and so most of the time people are busy working away in there room. Well you know what they say, when the cat's away the mice will play. And so I have been. I'm quite a way ahead with my assignments compared to my peers and so all the hard work that I've ended up doing in the past couple of weeks has paid off and now instead of being in a mad panic about how much work I have to do, I am reasonably relaxed and fairly confident that I can get it all done in time. That said, I'm still very much looking forward to Monday when I will be done for the year - save for one last assignment due in late January and my exams.

Beef and Potato Week

This week has become beef and potato week, for the last two days anyway. You know when you need to go shopping when you eat what is essentially the same meal two days in a row, yesterday was cottage pie and today was chilli con carne and jacket potato. Not that I'm complaining, but I'm wondering what to do for the rest of the week now because the only thing we seem to have left is beef braising steak.

Sound of 2010

Today the long list of candidates for the BBC's sound of 2010 were released here. Last years top ten have gone on to have great success and a lot of them have gained a permanent place in my music library and in my all time favourite artists. La Roux, Little Boots, Passion Pit, Florence & The Machine, White Lies and VV Brown have all made superb records this year and are amongst some of my most listened to artists. High hopes for this year then and already a few familiar names.

Printer Failure

Today has been a mad rush to get the rest of my dissertation done. I've had the final draft of it done for a while now and had sent it off to my parents and tutor for some feedback. My tutor said she couldn't comment on the detail as she might be the one marking it however, she did give me some very useful feedback on the general layout and some key extra information to include which couldn't really have come from anyone else. I only got the feedback from my step dad yesterday and with his help, I managed to decipher his writing and make the corrections. Unbelievably, the most difficult part of the whole thing was getting it to print!

And... Relax

It is such a relief after yesterday's mayhem that this whole accommodation thing is done and dusted. We looked around two properties this morning and thankfully after the viewings we all unanimously agreed on which one was the best and went and signed for it there and then.

From Bad to Worse

I'm usually a fairly optimistic person but after today, I'm finding it very difficult to justify this sunny disposition. After yesterdays pre-emptive bout of success, today has brought all of that crashing down to the floor with a total disregard for whoever might happen to be underneath.

Success!

Well that wasn't too bad then. As the day draws to an end, a decision has been made as to our place of residence next year. In the end, my preferred choice won with a 4:2 majority so I'm happy and tomorrow we will try and get the official seal of approval from the agents.

House Wars!

House hunting comes around again, we saw two yesterday and four today. After yesterday, I was feeling much happier because we had found somewhere nice that wasn't too expensive or far away. Today we saw two more very nice houses and one of them managed to top yesterdays find. Now we have a dilemma, we have to decide which one to go with. We've been debating (arguing) about this since we got back and the split is almost 50:50 at the moment and no imminent signs of that swinging in any one direction either... Hopefully it will all be sorted by tomorrow though and we will finally have a house next year.

Marathon

No! Not that sort of marathon, it would be nice to say I was running a marathon but being exercise averse (as I like to put it)I opted for the other type of marathon, the TV marathon. After the air now seems to have cleared after the outburst the other day, I took the time out to catch up on the six hours or so of TV sat waiting for me on the Sky+ box.

Another Experiment

Having another look at the BBC Labs page I came across the Brain Training experiment that I remember having heard about on Bang Goes the Theory - not to be confused with the American sitcom with the similar name The Big Bang Theory. I initially assumed they wanted us to all go out an buy a Nintendo DS and brain training games in order to participate but I now understand that the BBC have kindly put all of the necessary equipment online. There are several flash games to choose from and once you have signed up and completed the initial training to get a benchmark and answered a few questions, you are all set to go. They ask you to train at least three times a week in order to participate and some of the games are actually quite fun. If you are looking to kill ten minutes or so a day then this is a good way to do it, it's fun and you are taking part in a proper scientific experiment. I scored 180 on my first set of games which shouldn't take too much effort to beat but I suppose it depends which games you get picked to play. I'm hoping that that score will get higher as I practice more and who knows, it may even make me cleverer. Give it a go, what harm can it do? https://www.bbc.co.uk/labuk/experiments/braintestbritain/

Warning, the Following Post May Offend

I have been internally debating whether or not I should do this for a while now and have eventually come to the decision that indeed yes, I should. I've said this several times before now but I'll say it again, this blog has evolved from another silly method of procrastination to something more, a diary of sorts but with some little added extras for those of you who can be bothered to read it. What I'm now deciding shouldn't change that too much and I will endeavour to prefix any new such posts with a warning of the content that may follow thus giving the choice as to whether or not you want to continue reading. From now on, I will be including posts that let me say things I wouldn't want to say to someone directly. Not because I'm a coward (well actually it probably is some of that) but because I don't want to offend any one and this way I can get things off my chest without the people in question having ever heard it. So, here goes!

My Personality

Whilst catching up with the overnight blogs this morning, I came across this experiment linked to from the BBC Internet blog. It is called the big personality test and has (apparently) been running for quite a while now. It was probably mentioned on the One Show at some point but I must have missed it. Anyway, I normally go for this sort of thing, if not just to waste some time then to satisfy some underlying interest in the subject and I usually end up killing two birds with one stone. It didn't take too long to complete although the way it was structured meant that - as with most online questionnaires - you had to answer some questions that didn't have the appropriate answer. Even the questions themselves suggested that the response was dependant on the previous answer i.e. if yes... implying that you should only answer the question if the answer to the previous question was yes. Either that or I'm missing something because skipping it resulted in being red flagged and asked to complete all questions. Shame really because other than that the page was really well laid out and styled beautifully.

Panic!

Yet another assignment has found itself flying my way which brings the total to a gut wrenching four on the go at the moment. The latest one comes courtesy of my speech processing module and the only thing that makes me feel slightly better about this hideous workload at the moment is that at least I don't have an exam in this module. I do however have another assignment for it and have no idea at the moment how the lecturer plans to fit this in without intruding into the Christmas holidays which makes it as good as an exam anyway as that's the time I would be spending revising. The other problem with this assignment is that upon seeing the brief I thought it was impossible and initially had no idea where to start. After getting over that initial panic however, I went through the notes and found a decent starting point so with a bit of luck it shouldn't be that difficult although balancing all of these assignments is going to require a bit more effort than I'm used to.

Comedy Day

Today seems destined to be a day of laughter and general good spitritedness. This morning got off to a much better start than I imagined it would as I was due to meet my replacement dissertation tutor as the original one is going on maternity leave before the end of the term. I was slightly panicking because I seemed to be getting on quite well with this one and the meetings were informal and relaxed so I set myself up for the worst. Turns out that that was completely unnecessary as the new one is just as nice and the meeting was taken in all sorts of directions and tangents from dentists to a discussion about whether Google is truly evil or not. He even seemed to be impressed by what I had done so far which is always reassuring.

Humdrum

About the only major event that happened today was going shopping but I suppose after the last two days that's fine. I think a part of me has gone in to hibernation recently because I just cannot be bothered to do anything any more. I was only motivated to go shopping today because I had a petrol voucher that was due to expire and am currently horrified that the petrol prices have snuck back up to where they were last year.

Fairwell to the Fairground

Don't be fooled by the slightly sombre title, today was in fact a rather good day as far as things go. The title of course relates to the song of the same name by White Lies who I went to see in concert this evening. More about that later, but first off, Paradox started on BBC One this week so I'd better give that a quick review first.

I'm in the Quicksand

Stop the press, I went out tonight, hurrah! Okay so it was only to Bar One (the Student's Union Bar) and we spent most of the time on the games machine but it was nice to get out the house of an evening for a change. I shouldn't really have gone in the first place, I have a lot of work to do in the coming weeks but I felt I needed to go out to get it out of my system so I can settle down and start writing. I managed to win £1 on the Pub Quiz game and in fact the machine paid out about £5 during the night so we were quite happy.

Up

So I finally got round to watching Disney Pixar's Latest flick, UP. Being a fan of pretty much every movie that this duo have produced, I had the usual high hopes for this film - and boy did it deliver. I wish I'd have seen it earlier now, and it probably would have been fantastic rendered in 3D but in standard definition it was brilliant. Not at all what I had expected from the trailers, it was a really heart warming story showing that even though the man old man didn't manage to achieve his dreams and had lost his wife, he was still trying to reach his goal. Even when he finally gets to meet his childhood hero who turns out to be evil, he carries on and chooses the right path, turning on his former idol and keeping the promise he made to his young companion to protect the bird affectionately known as Kevin - which is a work of comedy genius in itself. A nice twist on the tale are the talking dogs, not the usual talking dogs that you get in animated movies but to add an added 'realism' to the story, the dogs can only talk thanks to a special collar that translates their barks into English speech. All of the dogs have been highly trained with their primary 'mission' to capture Kevin yet because they are dogs, their canine weaknesses are still embedded deep inside and whilst they are talking or concentrating, they will be very easily distracted by the sight of something moving to which they respond with the outburst of "SQUIRREL". The adventurous duo use this weakness to their advantage when the dogs are set on them, shouting "SQUIRREL" distracts them for long enough and throwing a tennis ball attached to Mr. Fredricksen's walking stick. Overall, a highly entertaining film with scenes of uplifting highs coupled with very moving scenes with the potential to bring a tear to the eye.

My 100th Post

I cannot quite believe it, this is actually my 100th blog post! Never in a million years did I think that I could keep this going for such a long time. Something that started off as little more than a way to keep myself occupied during the long and boring summer holidays has turned into an everyday habit. Okay, maybe not quite everyday - sometimes I have to catch up with some missed days but it turns out that this has become actually quite useful for remembering what I did. I've actually had to refer back to posts on several occasions and each time it has worked.

Children in Need

No lectures today so I can get on with the pile of work that has creped up on me suddenly. Very tired at the moment as I was up at 9am again this morning trying to buy a Muse ticket for a friend. Much easier today than yesterday because now that they are on general release, I could go down the Ticketmaster route, in fact I was done by 09:01 and you can't say fairer than that.

Tickets Please

An unusually early start for me this morning as I had to be in front of the computer at 9am to buy my Muse ticket for their date at Wembley Stadium next September. Whoever came up with the idea of releasing them this early is some kind of maniac but I suppose it is nicely timed for Christmas. It was surprisingly easy to get hold of the ticket actually even though I was using the Seetickets website (with which I have had several bad experiences previously) but thanks to a tip from my housemate who had a code for yesterday's pre-sale I got in early and got to the booking screen after only a couple of page-refreshes.

Temptations

The day got off to a bit of slow start courtesy of the Royal Mail. I didn't want to make the same mistake of having a shower just as the doorbell rings so I decided that this time I would simply wait it out. Kinda wishing I hadn't now because after about an hour of waiting, I decided to start watching yesterday's James May's Toy Stories (more later) and about fifteen minutes in, the doorbell rang. I had to finish watching the programme of course which meant that I didn't really 'get up' until around about midday. The only consolation was that I received two parcels instead of the one I was expecting. I was half imagining having to traipse up the road again to the sorting office to collect the other one but they've impressed me with their organisation. Shame they haven't got a computer that can tell them that someone else in the house has a parcel waiting as well and perhaps they could have saved themselves another redelivery.

3D TV

As you know by now, I like my telly and probably spend far to much time watching the gogglebox for my own good however, I can say that for the last month or so I have rarely been bored which is more than most! This week, Channel 4 marks a new era in television viewing history and is showing a weeks worth of specially commissioned programmes, all filmed in 3D. Of course because none of us have 3D TVs, they are using the age old technique of anaglyph steriograms (the red and blue glasses) or at least I though they were red and blue glasses, whether it's because they have to make the programme viewable to those without the 3D glasses or whether its for some other reason, they seemed to use dark blue and yellow. I don't know whether the Channel 4 glasses are more compatible with the pictures than other glasses because I am using a pair that I kept from here so the rest of this blog may not apply to anyone else (although I suspect it will because it would require a lot of pointless effort to manufacture special glasses for this occasion).

The Lost Symbol

Well that was an expensive two days activities then... book is now finished which hopefully means that this time tomorrow I will have done some actual work but never mind. I'm no literary expert but if you want to read my opinion then you are more than welcome and I shall begin below. Warning, this is a review and WILL contain spoilers!

More TV and another Single of the Week

Just what I need at this crucial time of the year when work is piling up and assignments are being handed out like flyers outside the student's union. I can't really complain I suppose, but I know that in a couple of months time there will be a complete TV and work vacuum and I will bored out of my mind. Winter has properly set in now, the sky starts getting dark at about half past three in the afternoon and it seems colder inside the house than outside.

Getting Slightly Philosophical

So after last night, I thought I deserved a bit of a lie in, although I didn't expect it to run until 2pm! Turns out I wasn't alone however and I was joined in slumber by two fellow co-habitants which made me feel slightly better about my over indulgence. Sadly this extra long sleep meant that I felt ridiculously tired due to that strange phenomenon that induces more fatigue after a given period of time - which for me seems to be around the ten hour mark. That resulted in the rest of the day being given up to playing around with the website - for which I have now fixed and updated all of the relevant areas in time for its review later this month. I did manage to cross another assignment off my now fairly substantial 'to-do' list so at least now I can concentrate on everything else for a couple of weeks until the next one comes along.

The Storm Beckons

What a horrible day! Windy, rainy and actually quite mild considering. So I finally got round to collecting my parcel from the sorting office. It arrived last Thursday but it has taken me this long to get round to collecting it. It was the new Dan Brown book - The Lost Symbol and I'm hoping that I will have some time to get to read it in the near future. At the moment, I can't see that happening any time soon what with work and having to watch all of that wonderful TV that they keep churning out. Maybe it's because its the winter...? It certainly seemed that in the summer it was music's turn to shine and now that the colder months are upon us TV had taken its place. I'm still yet to get through the current bedtime reading, The Atheists Guide To Christmas which has so far turned out to be mostly very entertaining with a few unusual or boring chapters that have been skipped.

A Long Day

This morning began very early, about half past seven in the morning, yes, in the morning. Now, by now you should know that I don't do mornings and so having to wake up this early makes the rest of the day look pretty bleak. The reason behind this strange behaviour was because I had arranged to meet the man who ultimately has the decision to accept or reject my website proposal. Over the summer I started on this project, sort of as a job and sort of as an educational exercise. I had just learned a bit of PHP and had re-learned HTML during the previous semester and was itching to put it to some good use. I've designed websites before but most of the time I've been a WYSIWYG whore and haven't really bothered to look at the code. When I found out last semester that I was going to be writing the code without using any sort of design package I was terrified. I couldn't even have written the outline for a basic page let along get some W3C compliant output. Thankfully the people at W3 schools had made a brilliant and very coherent tutorial which I highly recommend for anyone wanting to dabble in this world. What did surprise me during this project was actually how simple most of it is and only starting out with a little bit of knowledge, that tutorial and some Googling meant that I had come up with a very presentable and functional solution to a problem that I had been aware of (but lacked the expertise to solve) for a couple of years. I won't go into the specifics yet because I still don't know how this will turn out. My system is being compared to several off the shelf solutions and I wouldn't want to jeopardise my chances.

Home

After a late and thoroughly exhausting day yesterday, today was very much a rest day, signified by not getting up until gone midday. The rest of the day was spent trying to upload my pictures from last night which proved surprisingly difficult. The problem arises because I have an SDHC card for my camera, (like an SD card but it supports higher capacities). I've always had trouble with this but it had completely slipped my mind when I was packing and so I left my camera cable in Sheffield. I have an SD card reader in the house, I have an SD card reader in the printer, I have an SD card reader in my other camera (for which the cables are kept in Birmingham) and yet NONE of these support SDHC cards. I was racking my brains to try and find something that could read it because a) I wanted to know if the pictures were any good - its quite difficult to tell on a small screen - and b) I wanted to look at the videos I took.

MUSE!!

So today is all about going to see Muse at the NIA in Birmingham. I managed to get home without getting lost and even avoided the roadworks on the M1 save for about 3/4 of a mile before my exit junction so I made good time. I was treated to a fish supper by my Gran who has come to stay and keep my mum company for a week now that she is home alone. As usual, my timings are completely off and I missed the train I was planning to catch into town. Thankfully they were still running quite frequently and I got there with about ten minutes to spare. What I didn't realise was how far away the NIA was from New Street (the way I went anyway). I'm pretty hopeless with directions and still don't really know my way around Birmingham City Centre despite living here for most of my life. I managed to find it eventually though after following the crowds of people dressed to go to a gig. Just as we got into the arena the Big Pink came on stage and started playing. I had been forewarned about the excessive use of strobe lighting throughout their performance but thankfully we were still quite near the back at this point so it didn't matter too much. After they'd finished there was a complete mood kill when the safety announcement came on and explained about the emergency exits etc and the house lights were raised. About half an hour later (after several false cheers from the audience) they were once again switched off and the magic began.

Just Another Manic Monday

Not so much manic really but Bangles song popped into my head and I couldn't resist. In fact today was pretty calm really, we still have no food in the house so none of us could be bothered to cook anything. We decided on a take-away as the usual fix to this kind of problem and this week we were a bit more adventurous and decided to go with Indian. I can hardly remember the last time I had Indian, I think it was during the summer sometime. Thankfully this place was a bit posh and so had pretty much everything on the menu, I went with my usual Lamb Sag (that's with spinach) and a garlic naan. I'm getting worse at finishing meals for some reason but at least this time it meant that I had some lunch for tomorrow.

Catchup

As a reward for my hard efforts yesterday I have decided to bestow upon myself the TV catchup morning. Well not so much of a morning, more of an afternoon due to my out of sync body clock. In this house it seems that the morning runs from somewhere in the region of about 7 O'clock for the early risers - cursed with the misfortune of the dreaded 9am lectures - to around about 2pm to 3pm. The day can then extend to the early hours of the morning - and does so more often than not. This suits me perfectly well as I see myself as more of a night person anyway.

An Unusually Productive Day

Saturdays are always fairly boring and I usually end up trying to work and failing miserably. Today however, there must have been something in the air that sparked me on and encouraged me to put pen to paper (or fingers to keys) and start looking a bit deeper into the MatLab GUI capabilities. I spent the first couple of hours getting rather frustrated at the differences between the MatLab syntax in comparison to that of Java, a language I am much more familiar with. I suppose it is a slight disadvantage not having learned C++ on which MatLab is based but that's not my fault because the university decided that Java was a better starting point. Whether they have got this right or not I am yet to find out but thus far, it has served me well when picking up other languages although for the majority of them I have had formal instruction. It was only PHP and HTML that I have so far self taught and that is widely helped by the availability of free resources on the internet. PHP and HTML being the backbone of a vast number of websites on the internet and PHP being open source means that there are hundreds of thousands of books and tutorials available and one of them is bound to fit your programming style. MatLab on the other hand, whilst widely used in education is very expensive and although the Mathworks website does have documentation, often the examples can be quite difficult to comprehend and go into far more detail than you would ever need.

A Bit of Nostalgia

I was feeling a bit nostalgic today and for the past few days we have been having a 'Phrase of the Day' on the wall in the lounge. Inspired by my Walkman yesterday walking down to lectures, I decided that there could be no better phrase then "Hakuna matata", no worries. I have since found out it is an actual Swahili word and does indeed mean no worries. Previously I had always assumed it was made up for the Lion King but it's nice to know that they put a bit of thought into the lyrics. Apparently that didn't go down so well and along with my previous phrase of the day, was given a low rating by a housemate. This one was in fact rated "gay" which I thought was a bit unnecessary but I suppose everyone is entitled to their opinions. When I was wondering what to do for a while, I came to the only logical conclusion. I had to watch the Lion King. So I dug it out and put it on. It was quite nice remembering all the events that happened in the film and it reminded me of my childhood and simpler times. When Hakuna Matata came on though two of my housemates decided that this was too much and left me to watch it alone, I think it's a shame that they have gone past the barrier that lets them embrace their childhoods again. I enjoyed the movie anyway although I'm pretty sure there was a new scene in this version and neither me or my housemate recognised it which seemed odd. Not sure it fitted either and I think we get quite annoyed when people decide to change the classics. I remember watching a CBeebies episode of Postman Pat once during a teacher training day at school and thinking how much of a mess they had made of it. Maybe I'm just being stubborn and resistant to change but maybe they have ruined it. Clearly it's not as popular now as it was twenty years ago and if the Tweenies can beat it then there is definitely something wrong. Bring back the old school classics I say!

Fireworks

Remember remember the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. Yes that's right, it's Guy Fawkes day and that means fireworks and bonfires. We are all too lazy in our house to go out and buy fireworks and the landlord would probably kill us if they found out we had built a bonfire in the garden. Thankfully, the other house that we are close friends with are more bothered about the whole thing. They had a roaring bonfire (in a bin) and some wonderful fireworks that made the evening. We even ended up in a competition with the house behind who were also setting them off. They won in the end and probably spent a lot more on theirs that we did but it was nice to get a free viewing nonetheless. You can't have bonfires without marshmallows so that was my contribution to the evening. It's strange how something can change so drastically when cooked when you think about it, not just marshmallows of course but they do taste 100% nicer when they're nicely toasted on an open fire. The rain put a bit of a downer on the evening and we got a bit wet waiting for the very last "super" firework which turned out to be very noisy but not all that pretty.

Wrapping Things Up

It seemed like today was a bit of an admin day really, I normally get Wednesdays off but had to go into town to finish off my ISA application. Before that though, the graduate recruitment fair was in town and taking place yesterday and today. What I didn't realise was the reason for it being held over two days was so that they could fit all of the companies in. There were seventy in total so I got to see thirty five of them at least but missed out on a few key businesses in my field which was a shame. Also I was disappointed with the freebies because normally if you make the effort to speak to someone and seem genuinely interested then you get to take away some of the promotional items - pens, pencils etc but this time only one company gave me something. I didn't see many people because most of the exhibitors were either finance based or charities but I did get to see 3M - whose name I had seen on a diskette so assumed they were technology related but it turns out they are "so much more than that" and I was lectured for five minutes on the wide range of products made by the company. I won't bore you with the details but apparently you come into contact with about 30 3M products every day. Who knew? I got to see IBM who are obviously key players in the IT field but I also got to see someone I didn't even expect to show up to these sorts of things, GCHQ.

Second Time Lucky

I've been thinking about doing this again for a while now but it's taken this long to pluck up the courage to do it. A couple of years ago I decided to open an ISA. I did my research on the internet and found the best interest rates and decided to open an account. It was all fine for about a year until this whole damn recession business kicked off and suddenly, the safest place to keep you money was no longer the banks but under the mattress! I had decided to open an ISA with IceSave, an Icelandic bank which just so happened to be the hardest hit by this whole thing, so much so that it went under and for a while there was the distinct possibility that I'd never see my money ever again. I can't afford to lose that amount of money, especially not at my age because I won't be earning for another two years and every penny counts. Of course the government did the right thing and stepped in to make sure that everyone got their money back; and whilst I lost out on a bit of interest, I was still up compared to leaving it in a standard account. Since then I've been a bit nervous about the whole ISA thing but if I don't start saving soon then I will have to start paying tax on the interest I earn and I don't think I could stand that!

PANIC!

A major panic spread across the house this evening as a drastic situation arose. I was quite happily sitting in my room trying to work away at my dissertation when I got a distinct wiff of gas. I assumed someone had just not noticed that the gas had gone out on the cooker because there was someone in there making dinner. After a couple of minutes, the smell seemed to be getting stronger and I couldn't ignore it any longer. I had fears of my computer exploding and fires popping up out of nowhere. I saved my work online just in case and went downstairs to investigate.

Single of the Week

Totally forgot about this for a moment and this week I am slightly breaking the rules a bit. I first heard this on Fearne Cotton's Radio 1 show and whilst it pains me to say this, for once she may have been right in choosing this as her record of the week. To make me feel better however, I only realised I liked this tune so much when I heard it on Zane Lowe's show in the car on the way to Tesco the other week. The reason why it breaks the rules slightly is because it isn't officially released until November 9th however it is already available to download from iTunes and seeing as that is where most people download their music from anyway, I figured I could make an exception.

Crisis Talks

Monday marks the beginning of a much needed reading week for some of my modules, so I only have four hours of lectures. This should give me a chance to catch up with note taking and get a decent draft of my literature review in before my meeting on Thursday. I'm actually in a much better position this year than I have been for the past two years, I have a pretty good set of notes for one of my modules and have done the lab class assignments for the other which should put me in good standing for the upcoming assignment. All this and yet I feel really behind; I can't work it out but I have that gut feeling of panic and disorganisation. Oh well, new month, new attitude. I've only missed one lecture so far and if I can keep up a decent attendance and keep up with the notes then I will be happy. More work needed this month and then perhaps that feeling will go away.

Hallowe'een

Well that has to be one of the most disappointing Hallowe'ens ever. I expected something to happen, anything even but it turns out nothing did. I just sat in the house gradually building up rage which has subsequently been partly expressed today and I expect the rest will soon follow tomorrow. Its a bit frustrating really because I hate seeing myself like this. 99% of the time I'm a happy go lucky sort not really bothered by what goes on around me. If something does annoy me or a do get angry, it doesn't last more than a couple of hours before (most of the time) all is forgiven. However this week has been particularly bad and the consequence of letting one small annoyance build upon another has lead to the state I'm in currently.

Football

This is probably the only time that I will ever mention this topic on here so make the most of it. The last week seems to have been particularly filled with football and it's starting to get to me. It is one of my pet hates - along with most other sport to be honest, I simply cannot understand the attraction of watching a group of grown men kick a ball around a field. Obviously there is something to it because it is the most popular sport in the country and millions of people tune in every week to watch the games - not only for their own teams but for other teams as well.

A Schoolboy Error

I cannot believe that I made this classic mistake this morning, I was all set to go for my dissertation meeting at 11:00, and arrived slightly early for the meeting. When I arrived, there were a group of students standing outside the door as if they were waiting to be seen and my tutor was in her office talking to someone. I thought that they might just be waiting for their friend who was just finishing his meeting but after a couple of minutes, when he was done, another student went in to be seen. At this point I felt really stupid, had I got the right day? I had got it into my mind that my meeting was at 11:00 as it had been on the previous two occasions. What I failed to check was whether it was any different this week - which it was, 11:30. I had made an effort to get out of bed and walk down to university and I was half an hour early. Nevermind I thought I've got a few errands to run so I can do those beforehand rather than afterwards as I'd planned.

A Somewhat Productive Day

Either due to some unknown mystical black magicesque influence or something dodgy in the water, something has given me the strength do finally do some work. It wasn't much but its a start and from here on in - as Yazz would say - the only way is up. I've finished my machine learning assignment and it's not even due in until Monday; I've done some more research for my dissertation and soon I might even be able to put pen to paper and actually begin to write some of the expected 20 - 25 pages that are expected from me before the end of the semester. I've found about 20 research papers and journals on the topic and have spent this afternoon trawling through them - first of all to find out whether they are relevant to what I'm doing or not and secondly to understand them and inwardly digest the content. I also spent some time trawling through the vastness that is Google Scholar trying to find the papers that have been referenced by the most relevant papers I have seen so far. Its really quite annoying trying to gain access to them though because whilst the initial search is fairly simple - especially if you know the title of the paper you're looking for - actually viewing the PDF is almost a degree in itself.

Pizza and Good TV

Well I managed to survive the horrific two hour lecture this morning, still suffering from last nights disturbance. It wasn't actually as bad as I thought it was going to be and I think I managed to take in some of the information. I found myself daydreaming rather a lot though and it seems to be happening more and more often recently. One minute I will be paying attention and then the next minute my mind will have gone off on a tangent and I will be thinking about something completely unrelated like pizza or tigers. At some point during this daydream I regain control and realise that for the past goodness knows how long I have been in another world and have missed everything the lecturer has said. Thinking about it, that's probably why this lecture didn't seem so bad; I spent most of the time daydreaming without any conscious perception of time so it seemed a lot shorter.

An Unexpected Visitor

Today has been a catchup day somewhat, getting a few jobs done here and there, avoiding work (again) and generally being quite lazy. I'm getting slightly concerned about the amount of work I've been doing (or not) for the past couple of weeks. I have a meeting with my dissertation tutor on Thursday and in the two weeks that will have passed since our last meeting I have accomplished absolutely nothing.

The Dangers of Memory

I've never had a particularly good memory but on the odd occasion I do remember something, it is usually a piece of completely random information that wouldn't be of any use other than a particularly obscure pub quiz or its a vivid memory of something entirely unimportant. I tend to associate the strangest of things together for example over the summer I was being driven down 'the Bristol Road' for the Brummies (the A38 to everyone else) and I had a really strong memory of being on the road before going to Cadbury's World. The last time I went to Cadbury's World must have been about ten years ago at least so why I would remember that piece of information amazes me. Other things similar to this happen all the time and it tends to be the smaller pieces of information that I remember and I don't recall the bigger (and generally more important things).

XFactor and FlashForward

As an advanced warning, I am going to be discussing FlashForward and therefore, the following few paragraphs may contain spoilers. For this reason, I have hidden them by default and with a bit of luck, clicking the show link will reveal them. I will be discussing episode 5 so if you haven't seen it yet, you have been warned!

Royal Mail

I'm finally starting to settle down into my timetable now, I can actually remember my timetable - something I'm not sure I managed at all last year although seeing as I have less than half the number of taught hours that makes it a lot more reasonable. The weather has been pretty miserable again today and Autumn is definitely on its way yet the cold hasn't begun yet. This is slightly annoying because if it is tipping it down with rain then my first instinct is to reach for my coat but I know that if I wear it I would die of heat exhaustion before I got to the top of the hill. It's a catch 22 situation really and either way I would end up dripping wet! Not that I want the cold to come mind, I quite enjoy being able to walk to the shops in just a hoodie without needing to wrap up in hats, gloves and scarves.

Question Time

I couldn't really not mention it could I...? This whole week has been leading up to the controversial decision by the BBC to allow BNP leader, Nick Griffin onto Question Time. First of all, I cannot see a reason why they could have made any other decision. We live in a democracy where everyone is entitled to their point of view and hence free speech. It is one of the most fundamental underlying policies of the modern age and restricting this would only be a step backwards. Obviously you have to be careful not to confuse free speech with verbal abuse or breaking the law because if someone is shouting racial abuse at the top of their voice in the middle of London then clearly that should not be tolerated but they are quite within their rights to have their own opinion on the matter. I still believe that as a society as a whole, we are becoming far more racially tolerant but the generation where this is not so common is still around and they are unlikely to change their minds so easily. It is very easy for the youth of today to accept multiculturalism as the norm because that's what they've grown up with and they don't know any different. Unless their parents / guardians attempt to force their views upon their children then they should grow up in a multicultural society and learn to accept it as how it is going to be.

Finally Finished (for now)

It has taken me the best part of a week, but I have finally caught up with my Machine Learning notes. I have condensed 9 lectures worth of material into 20 typed pages of beautifully formatted notes, complete with professional equations and whilst it all looks very nice, I am not sure I have understood any of it. Ah well, that will be the task for the Christmas holidays.

I can see!

A fairly lazy day today by all accounts, I failed to make my 10 o'clock lecture after yesterdays late night but that was to be expected. I had every intention of going but simply couldn't bare it when my alarm clock went off at half past eight. For some reason I had a particularly restless nights sleep and remember tossing and turning and I seemed to have a purpose to it if that makes sense. It seems weird even trying to describe it now but it felt like there was a good reason for this strange behaviour as if I had to turn over and shuffle around in order to achieve something. One thing I definitely didn't achieve was a decent nights sleep thats for sure and I am paying for it today. I have now broken my record of 100% attendance but four weeks is pretty damned good taking into account my previous form.

A Long Day

Today was always set to be a long day, as Mondays always are however today was set to be a particularly long day as it was yet another birthday. October seems to be a very popular month in my circle of friends and thankfully there are now no more until next year. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the celebrations but when you have one a week for three weeks on the trot, it can get a little bit exhausting.

The Spell

Single of the week time again and any one who has been following this blog might be able to guess at what this weeks single will be. Ever since I heard Fascination on the radio, I have been a huge supporter of this band. Pure pop perfection is how I would describe them, something that has been lacking quite a lot during this decade of music. In the 80s and 90s it was all the rage but something happened to music in the last 10 years, maybe it was the dawn of the millennium or just the turn of the decade that signalled a change in the music industry. Either way, I'm glad that someone has managed to bring back the fun from those times because some recent songs have lacked that fun factor and have become far too serious. The latest single from this wonderful band does not disappoint and although it took a couple of listens before I fell in love with it, I am now totally convinced that it is one of my favourite songs of all time. Right from the off, it just makes you happy and gives you the urge to get up and dance. The only way to fully appreciate this sort of music is to fully embrace the jollity of it all.

I Did It! (Warning Rant Alert)

I think a minor congratulations should be in order for me today as I successfully managed a whole days (virtually uninterrupted) work. In response to falling very quickly behind in my Machine Learning lectures, partly due to the fact that they are so very boring that it is difficult to listen to him drone on for any substantial period of time, the content is quite wordy and the appalling use of the projector.

Must Try Harder...

This week has seen a distinct lack of work and general concentration. I would love to be able to blame it on some external influence outside of my control but the truth is I'm just lazy. On the sort of plus side I have now come to the sensible and long overdue decision to dump my old sluggish laptop in favour of my sort of shiny and not quite so new PC. I think I've got everything installed on it now - my excuse before was that every time I tried to start doing some work, the piece of software I wanted to use wasn't installed. This meant that I had to then install it - which required me to go online - which meant I got very distracted and somehow caused several hours to pass unnoticed.

Sleepy

After another late night last night, I was regretting arranging an appointment to see my dissertation tutor at 11:30 this morning. The last thing I wanted to do was get out of bed and the weather outside was grey and miserable and it couldn't even be bothered to rain properly - instead choosing to drizzle all morning. After resorting to the old 'roll onto the floor' trick to wake me up I managed to get myself ready just five minutes late which seemed to go unnoticed.

An Unproductive Day

Why is it that sleeping for long periods of time just makes you more tired? Maybe it's just me but if I stay in bed for longer than about ten hours, sleep seems to have a detrimental effect on my state of alertness. Today was one of those days and I decided I needed a lie in - which I now regret because come 10 o'clock when we are due to go out, I was wanting to be tucked up in bed. After finally getting up, I decided it was about time to start on my chores list; I had to buy milk and eggs and a new bulb for my lamp that I broke a couple of weeks ago. The problem was that this is no ordinary lamp and therefore takes no ordinary bulb. The inventor of this lamp decided it would be a good idea to use a bulb that no one sells so after trudging around and visiting no less than three hardware stores the area, I still have no bulb and have now had to order one from eBay. Thanks to the forthcoming postal strikes, it is unlikely I will see this bulb until late next week at best.

Back to the 90's

Tonight I went back to the 90's - well sort of, in fact it was a visit to a 90's themed nightclub. Nonetheless, it made me realise just how long ago the 90's actually were. When I refer to the 90's in music terms I normally mean the late 90's as it was at this time that I was just at the age when music started to play an important part in my life but also because music has the wonderful ability of being able to form strong links with memories whether they be good or bad. Now if I were a scientist, I could pretend to understand how the memory works and how music strengthens the synapses and creates extra links but I'm not and I'm not even sure that last bit was any more than nonsense. The music of this period mostly bring back very fond memeories of primary school and how simple life was back then. The most complicated decisions we had to make were what to wear to the disco or what sort of sweets to buy. I also remember wanting to be older all the time and how horrible it was to be young; everyone always said that these were the best days of your life and to make the most of them - but you never do.

Windows 7

Haven't managed to get round to doing any actual work yet this evening and am unlikely to at this time. Only (slightly) early start of the week - 10am but I always find it very difficult to concentrate at that time of the morning. I guess I've got used to just waking up at about 10 o'clock so anything earlier than that is out of the ordinary. This evening I have been avoiding work like the plague, so much so that I've actually switched on my PC (rather than my laptop) and used it for an extended period of time. Why didn't I do this sooner!? Up until now, it has been acting as a glorified external hard drive and the only thing I've been using it for is storing backups and large files. I got a copy of Windows 7 the other week thanks to the Microsoft partnership with the university but only got as far as installing it without using it for any length of time.

Movie Night

Last night got pretty boring and I decided that I'd done enough work for one weekend. As a reward I decided to watch a film, G.I. Joe and it wasn't as bad as I had initially expected. I had a bad feeling as soon as I heard Christopher Eccleston attempting a Scottish accent in the fist scene. It's a shame because no matter how hard he tries I always see him as Dr. Who and it will probably haunt him forever, which is slightly ironic as if I remember correctly, the reason he left Dr. Who in the first place was to prevent being type-cast. Getting over that initial preconception, it turned out to be a half-decent movie. A few interesting characters popping up: Mr Eko from lost for example, this time sporting his native cockney accent and it was nice to see the UK getting some representation in what is usually an all American hero movie. I think they went slightly overboard on the tech front as well which made it slightly unbelievable, especially those blue ray guns and the super suits.

A Bit of a Slow Start

No lectures today! A good enough excuse to waste away most of the day then. Woke up at about 1pm, trundled into Crookes to get a joint of meat for tomorrow and some milk for breakfast. It was the first time I'd been into that butchers and he was very helpful and I managed to get a nice joint of pork for a fairly reasonable price. On the way back I came across a newsagents selling cheap milk as well so a fairly good start to the day really.

Thank Goodness It's Friday

And so ends another busy week, I still haven't done much work and I can't seem to work out where all the time has gone. The evidence is mounting very quickly that the third year isn't going to be quite so much of a breeze as the previous two have turned out to be. The problem with having two years of not having to put in too much effort and coming out with a decent grade is that it makes you somewhat complacent. I have managed to beat my record of lecture attendance, having not missed a single hour yet! That part I'm impressed with but I'm not sure how beneficial they actually are. If I don't end up doing any work outside of the lectures then the only way I will learn anything is to actually pay attention in the lectures. That is something that is definitely easier said than done and at the moment I'm relying on subconsciously absorbing some of the information in the hope that I will actually remember some of it.

The shower has been fixed today thankfully, a pretty speedy turnaround really and the letting agency have made their way back into my good books. That is definitely one of the major advantages of having a company handle everything because a private landlord can sometimes take a long time to get this sort of thing fixed.

I managed to get my dissertation handed in so I've got to wait until Thursday to hear the outcome of that. I've somehow managed to empty my iPlayer library during the course of this week, which may explain why the time has gone so quickly without having done any work. Perhaps I'll find some time to do some this weekend.

Disaster!

For the past week or so, there has been a strange smell of fish about the house every time someone has a shower. We have been scratching out heads as to what it could have been, naturally assuming it was the drains. We tried cleaning everything, pouring bleach down the sinks and drains but it just kept coming. Well today, someone finally put their sensible head on and decided to Google it. Turns out that smell was burning plastic and that the main shower switch was overheating every time the shower was used. Had we have left this any longer, we would be at significant risk of starting a fire. This sort of thing kinda puts everything into perspective really and one of my housemates is fuming that he didn't spot it sooner. I've no idea why, I wouldn't have expected anyone other than an electrician or plumber to spot that kind of thing and whosever idea it was to make this burning plastic smell of fish should be shot! That is probably one of the last things I would have thought of so I certainly don't blame myself!

Toy Story is Back!

Thankfully I had the radio turned on a just the right time last week and heard the announcement that Pixar were bringing Toy Story back to the big screen but this time in glorious 3D. To paraphrase Thin Lizzy, 'The toys are back in town'. It was for one week only and I actually managed to convince someone to come with me this time! This shocked me a bit because usually they can't be bothered or as was the excuse of the other two housemates, "Toy Story is for kids". That sort of thing really annoys me and even though I do sometimes consider myself to be a big kid, I think that most Disney films are suitable for people of all ages. Especially the new Disney / Pixar films because most of the time they have been written with both old and young in mind and there are jokes that only kids will understand but there are also plenty that only adults will get, double entendres and specifically adult humour. I also think that is important to exercise you inner child now and again because it helps keep you young and prevents you from being miserable all the time. Needless to say it was brilliant seeing a personal favourite in 3D and it was very well done as well. Some of the 3D films that I've seen haven't really exploited the 3D to its full potential so I was really glad that they had made good use of it.

A Bit Behind

As I write this, it is actually Friday. I have been that busy all week that I haven't been bothered to find the time to sit down and write. Now regretting that decision a lot because I've not got the horrible task of trying to remember what I did for the past week. Thanks in part to twitter updates and sms messages received and sent, I think I have pretty much pieced together what happened so lets get started!

I got round to watching the fist two episodes of Criminal Justice which I really enjoyed last year and I am really liking this new concept of showing a whole series in a week. Not having to wait a week for the next episode is brilliant (if you've got the time to watch it). They did it with Torchwood for the latest mini-series as well and it certainly helps when you've got a long story line so that you don't forget what happened.

FlashForward

I'm a little bit late to this game but after hearing a lot of hype about it, I decided to take the plunge. I am slightly regretting that now because as with most semi-decent dramas on the TV, I am now officially hooked. Not that this is in anyway semi-decent, I'm putting it up there with the likes of Lost and Heroes and from what I've seen from the first two episodes - it's going to be just as gripping and always leaving you wanting more.

As with the new series of heroes, I won't be putting up any spoilers so don't worry too much about that. I may from time to time post about how good or bad an episode was but I'll try not to reveal too much.

It was nice to see some familiar faces in the cast, something I've noticed a lot of TV programmes doing recently, pulling faces from other similar genre shows and putting them into their own. I had to check on IMDb to find out where I recognised Olivia from - turns out she played Penelope (Desmond's wife) in Lost; and a cameo role from the one and only Seth McFarlane (of Family Guy fame).

On an entirely unrelated note, I finally got my contact lens check-up today and I'm slightly worried that the new prescription won't be quite what I expected. I'm really happy with my new glasses and my vision has never been better but when the optician tried to replicate this with my lenses, I was still having double vision and was struggling to read the test card - something I have always managed to do without problems. They have ordered in a trial pair of the new prescription for me to try however, so with a bit of luck they will be fine when they are in my eyes.

The Morning After

When we decided to get up the following morning, his mum had laid on yet another feast for everyone. Toast, bacon, sausages and scrambled eggs - the perfect start to the day and a wonderful hangover easer. The journey back was a little bit better, following a decent set of directions and still managing to take a wrong turn when the SatNav took over. We got home in good time though and after a quick trip to the shops and a nice nap, I still feel shattered and my throat is getting progressively worse so I'm not at all looking forward to a very busy day tomorrow.

A Secret Event

As you may have read, it was my friends birthday on Thursday and his girlfriend had organised a surprise party this weekend at his family home. We set off at about 17:45 to aim to get there just before 19:30. Apparently the journey takes between an hour and an hour and a half but because I was following the SatNav (something I am not very good at) and we had no idea where we were going, we managed to stretch the trip out to an hour and three quarters. It was the most difficult journey I have ever driven on - not helped by the fact that we took about eight wrong turns in total causing the SatNav to play up and try sending us down a bridal path. It turns out that he lives in the middle of nowhere and the roads leading up were horrible to drive in the dark and were so steep and tight. At one point, just after ignoring the bridal path instruction, we came face to face with a bus. There was barely room for the bus to drive, let alone me alongside so I had to turn into a field to let it pass.

It was worth it though, a great night and the spread that his mum had put on was amazing. I discovered I like baked Camembert cheese and they had the most amazing brownies and meringues. We had a wonderful game of pass the parcel, something I haven't played in years and everyone drank far too much. I felt slightly sorry for his family when my friend decided to play the piano at half past three in the morning, just as everyone was trying to get to sleep.

The night didn't involve much sleep as half of my friends are suffering from freshers flu - something I have avoided so far this year but my throat is very sore at the moment. This meant that one of them was coughing all night and another was making the house vibrate with his snoring.

The End of Week 1

Well, that's it - the end of the first week of the third year. Already I feel like I have several weeks worth of work to catch up with although, after today's lab session I feel slightly more confident about being able to learn python reasonably quickly and without too many problems. Pure Data is something I am much less sure about, as the lecturer was explaining some simple examples, he kept mentioning words like "simple", "easy" and "basic" and the whole process seemed somewhat alien to me and I have never seen a program that works like this before. I don't really know a lot about waves and sound and that was always the area of maths that I struggled to understand, the only reason I picked the module in the first place was because for some reason, speech recognition fascinates me and I am very interested to find out how it works - whether I will understand and be able to replicate that is a different matter and something that I will probably find out very soon.

Birthday

Not mine yet but a friend of mine who I lived with in halls during my first year at university. He had come across a restaurant on west street that had a two for one offer on pizzas and had invited us all out for a birthday meal. Not only were the pizzas a really good price in the first place but they were really really tasty. Made fresh to order, the speed of service was much faster than anywhere else I have been and they managed to cater for the eighteen of us with no problems at all. The pizzas were proper Italian ones as well rather than the dominoes/pizza hut style we are used to. The dough was thin and crispy and the toppings were real rather than horrible processed rubbish. It also gave everyone the chance to experience a proper pizza (which it turns out many of them had never had) without the American influence and the garlic and herb dip.

Freshers Fair

My first day off from lectures and it's so nice to have Wednesdays to myself again. Last year, Wednesday afternoons meant Spanish lessons and whilst everyone else was enjoying their time off, I was stuck in the Arts Tower overlooking Sheffield from the eighth floor and not being able to enjoy the magnificent view. I was woken up by a phone call from my friend who was in the queue for the freshers fair, trying to find out where I was - expecting me to be around the university somewhere. I have gained a reputation, along with him, for liking freebies and bargains but I had completely forgotten that today was the day of the fair. He had been queuing since 10am when it opened and was still queuing at 11am when he phoned. After that I decided that it was probably time to get up and that I would go down after breakfast and hope that the queue had died down a bit.

Soooo Tired

Today got off to a pretty rubbish start, after going out last night and forcing myself to not drink anything remotely stimulating - something quite difficult when my beverage of choice is usually Coca Cola. Yes I know I'll rot my teeth, but it tastes pretty damn good and as I don't drink tea or coffee, I need some form of caffeine to keep me going late into the night. Well that bit wasn't so much of a problem, I managed to stay awake fine, despite only having about four hours sleep the night before. On mentioning my terrible nights sleep, it would seem that the whole household was affected by some sort of localised insomnia outbreak that night as well with all of my co-habitants reporting a sleepless night. Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, so after managing to avoid stimulating drinks all night, a quick stop at the local takeaway forced me to buy a chicken burger on the way home. It didn't even taste that brilliant and I wasn't even that hungry!

Day 1

And so it begins. Today marks the first day of university and I still can't believe that I'm actually in my third year already! I'm also counting my blessings that I decided on a four year course because at the moment, especially with the economic climate as it is, the prospect of going out into the real world and having to find a job frankly frightens the life out of me. So far the only way I've found to deal with it is... well not to really, I just try not to think about it because it doesn't accomplish anything more than scaring me.

Now on a lighter note, despite having three hour lectures in a row, the last of the trio was probably the best lecture I have had in my two years. I know it was only an introductory lecture so it is probably downhill from here but from what I have experienced so far, this year might not be so bad after all. I sort of knew what to expect from the first two lectures and they could have easily fitted into the first or second years courses but the third lecture was different. It is a fourth year module and fourth years outweighed third years significantly which was a shock at first. I thought I'd got the wrong lecture theatre because I didn't see any familiar faces but I was in the right place. After about ten minutes of the lecture however, I felt much better and the lecturer really seemed to know what he was doing. Unlike any other lecturers he also records the whole thing onto mp3 and uploads it to the course web page. It was almost as if he was trying to encourage us all not to come to the actual lectures and just pretend we are there at home - obviously that's not the case but I wish more people followed his lead. It's often very difficult to concentrate and even stay awake sometimes in lectures and being able to go through the whole thing again at home and make sure that you didn't miss anything is a fantastic idea.

This evening, we had an impromptu visit to Bar One, the bar in our student union. What was supposed to be a quick visit turned into a really good evening and despite wasting somewhere in the region of about £20 between us on the itbox style machines.

Seeing as I forgot yesterday, it's single of the week time again and this week it's Deadmau5 featuring Rob Swire (the frontman from Pendulum). I have been waiting for this track to come out for ages, and all I've been able to find are the previous versions without the vocals. I've no idea why I like it so much, possibly because I like pendulum and Rob's vocals give it a lovely haunting overtone. It's out as of today and as seems to be the norm for singles at the moment, the b-sides consist of several remixes and includes the original instrumental only version too.

NME Radar Tour

Today was the day of the NME Radar tour at the University's Student Union. I hadn't really heard of three of the bands playing but I really like Marina and the Diamonds so I was going to see them primarily. I think that they have great potential to be a huge success in the not too distant future and with the backing of NME, that is almost the equivalent of getting investment from a Dragon's Den dragon in the business world and you are likely to shoot to fame very quickly. She also revealed during the gig that her first single is coming out in about a months time (just found out it's November 2nd) and it will be Mowgli's Road which is one of my favourites. She was definitely the best performer of the night and kept the crowd entertained between songs and during the inevitable technical difficulties when the keyboard refused to make a noise. Also the crowd really seemed to enjoy her cover of Late of the Piers' Space & the Woods and it was nice to see her covering someone else's songs as well as just her own stuff.

I actually quite enjoyed the set from Yes Giantess and they sounded quite a bit like Passion Pit, a similar style using synths and all of the tunes they performed were really easy to get into even if you hadn't heard them before. The only shame was that they started about 5 minutes after the doors opened, hardly giving us enough time to get drinks before the performance. It was a good start to the evening though and the simple but clever drum beats just made you want to start tapping and bouncing along to the songs.

Next up was Local Natives, another band from across the pond and whilst they had a couple of nice songs it seemed very samey and not especially unique. Golden Silvers were the last on the bill and were the ones headlining the event. By the reaction of the crowd, it would appear that these were the band they had most come to see. Seeing as that was the case, I was slightly disappointed. Most of the songs seemed to be very unpolished and tuneless, more akin to a group of people just banging on their instruments. There were a couple of songs towards the end which I recognised and the final song was by far their best and actually quite catchy - Arrows of Eros.

On a more technical note, the lighting for the event was superb. I'm not sure whether this was university property or belonged to the tour but it gave off very little heat whilst providing light equally as bright as it's hotter counterparts. The main problem at events like this, especially ones in such small venues is that heat can build up from the lights really quickly and make the whole event rather unpleasant and sticky.

The evening ended with the latest episode of Waking the Dead and *spoiler alert* it would seem that they could be writing Sue Johnston (Grace Foley) out of the series after it is revealed that she has cancer. I really like her character in the series and it would be quite weird without her in it, I'm still trying to get used to the departure of Stella at the beginning of the series but am just about getting used to her replacement Katrina.

Spoke Too Soon

Just yesterday I was saying how nice it would be to go without Sky for a whole year and that my housemates probably wouldn't be organised enough to get it set up. Well they certainly proved me wrong, as yesterday they did exactly that. I now have just four days to enjoy the TV with something other than football constantly stuck on its screen. I'm pretty sure that they don't read this blog but it does seem rather coincidently timed. If they do then "Hello, hope you enjoy it" but I have no idea how they would have found out about it short of Googling, the only people I have told are 3 friends from Birmingham for the specific reason that I am likely to say something unpleasant about most people at some point on there and I trust those people not to take great offence to it.

The only real event of today was a horribly unsuccessful shopping trip. The first mistake was probably taking so many people but at least if I did that then it might make the whole trip a bit quicker - or so I thought. I spent the first 20 minutes trying to keep up with the trolley that was speeding off wherever its controller felt rather than waiting for me to try and remember what was on the shopping list that we had left at home. When I eventually got hold of the trolley, I was the only one putting in the stuff we actually needed. Everyone else was running around finding stuff for themselves. When we checked against the list on arrival back to the house, it would seem that we had forgotten quite a few things and we will probably end up going back again next week to get them.

The End Of The Week

Just when I thought it couldn't get much worse, the night I had been looking most forward to didn't happen. It hadn't even sold out but everyone had decided that they couldn't be arsed any more and so we stayed in. I suppose the disappointment from the previous few nights would have got to them by now but union nights are different. I have never queued to get in, the drinks are all sold at very reasonable prices and its close enough to home for us not to need expensive taxis there and back. Tonight was even going to be a night where (I was hoping) I would enjoy all of the music which is the make or break part of the night for me.

So as I'm sure you can imagine, I was a little bit cheesed off with everyone and decided to hide in my room and sulk for the rest of the night, catching up with the every increasing missed TV from the week. Thankfully there were enough comedy gems to cheer me up slightly and after a couple of episodes of the Hairy Bikers and The Big Food Fight, I was feeling much better. I know I'm an easy person to please but sometimes it's the little things in life that bring happiness to us all.

Slept like a log this time and even found out (when I eventually crawled out of bed) that the aerial had been installed and that the banging that I thought I dreamt was actually the man on the roof hammering the cable in place. So we now had TV which meant that I could watch Derren Brown this evening and Peep Show afterwards.

Despite being overjoyed that I can now watch TV, it seems to somehow have got stuck on Sky Sports News, brining back bad memories of the last year. The other four housemates want to get Sky but thankfully no one has been bothered to do anything about it yet. It's not just the cost that puts me off but I could manage quite happily with BBC channels and Channel 4. I rarely watch ITV and the only reason I watch channel 5 is for The Gadget Show. Other than that I don't even watch other freeview channels and I know that if we do end up getting Sky then the TV - my TV - downstairs will end up showing the football constantly. It's bad enough them talking about it all the time without having to actually watch it, my only hope is that they will all be too disorganised to get it sorted.

Disappointing... Again

This week seems to be developing a recurring theme, disappointment. I don't know why I was expecting so much from this freshers week, as if it would be different to that of the past two years, but I'd got my hopes up and they are now slowly being crushed. I'm pretty sure if it wasn't for this blog allowing me a vessel on which to let out all of my pent up rage I would probably attempt to injure someone - which wouldn't be good.

The reason for the latest spate of disappointment comes from last night and as with most of these disappointing events, it was in the evening. We all were ready and dressed in our school uniform, looking mildly forward to a night out in one of Sheffield's dirtiest nightclubs where the vodka resembles watered down white spirit and you fear that you may contract some sort of disease by touching the walls.

We knew it was going to be busy but nothing could have prepared us for the queue that we met outside. Never in my life have I seen anything that comes close to that sort of sized queue for a nightclub. It had more in common with the sort of queues that you see at Wembley Stadium when a huge band are playing. We had even decided to go early to avoid this sort of thing but obviously the rest of Sheffield had the same idea. After an hour and a half of queueing, we gave up and it almost felt kinda good to have been released from the grasp of the building and escape. I felt free and full of energy, watching as the other students continued to wait in a fruitless quest. Rumours of a one in one out system were making their way down the line and it felt satisfying knowing that they were unlikely to ever get in.

We moved on to another bar and despite looking slightly silly being one of only a few people dressed in white shirt and school tie, managed to whittle away the hours until we were bored and the bar was shutting up. It was nice to see a few more school uniformers come in shortly after us - either having been turned away or given up like we had.

All of this and the day hadn't even started yet! The highlight of the night was the chicken and chips on the way home. Proper chicken which I was amazed to find a decent amount of meat on and some garlic and mint yoghurt on the top as they did not have any garlic mayonnaise - my topping of choice. I was surprised at how nice it was and I may decide to return to that takeaway in the near future.

After a fairly decent nights sleep (finally) the only thing planned for the day was my tutor meeting to discuss my dissertation project for the coming year. I even managed to get into the building this time after having my swipe card registered with security. Last time I had to sneak in behind the postman only to find that the meeting had been cancelled. This time it went ahead and I now feel much more confident about the task in hand. My project is about creating teaching aids for the more difficult concepts in computer science; specifically looping and arrays. I'm really looking forward to it now and even though it will mean investing a lot of time and effort, I'm hoping it will be enjoyable.

Disappointing

What was supposed to be the best night out of the week turned into... well the opposite really. The highlight of the night was stopping off at McDonalds before we reached the O2 academy and scoffing a couple of double cheeseburgers. Several of my friends didn't make it out, still plagued by the effects of the previous nights beverages. That sort of defeated the point of the bar crawl before hand, if no one is wanting to drink too much then it's pretty pointless just walking round a load of bars.

The other disappointment of the night was the headphones. The basic premise of a headphone disco for those of you who aren't familiar with the concept is that you each receive a pair of wireless headphones with a switch that lets you chose between two different wireless channels. There are two DJs - one on each channel - and they compete for your attention, each playing different genres of music so that everyone's taste is met and everyone is happy. The other thing is that as the music is coming from the headphones, there is nothing audible without them and so if you take the headphones off, all you can hear is the rest of the crowd singing along (often not in tune) to the song or songs that are playing, which can also be quite amusing.

Anyway, for most of the bars, there was only one channel playing and therefore no choice of music which was a shame but bearable I suppose, logistically it would have been fairly difficult to put two lots of transmitters and two DJs in each of the four pre-bars. Then we reached Varsity. Someone obviously hadn't told them that it was a silent disco as they had the loudest music blearing out and someone had tuned the acoustics in such a way as to make it almost painful to listen to. It was kind of sharp sounding and the music that he was playing wasn't brilliant either. From what I managed to hear through the headphones, they were broadcasting outside (where they could smoke) but the signal was appalling and if you moved your head even slightly, it was lost. It did create some rather amusing remixes however, mostly pop tunes in a drum 'n' bass style due to the mixed signals. We were all hoping for everything to improve when we reached the O2 and were expecting great things from the 3D side of it as well. Turns out the 3D bit was just some graphical visualisations that you would expect to find on Windows Media Player but in 3D and wearing the glasses meant that you couldn't really see where you were going in the darkened room. We managed to stay for about an hour before giving up through sheer boredom, lets hope tonight brings better things.

On a lighter note, all the paperwork regarding module swaps has now been sorted and we finally received the new vacuum cleaner - a blue Henry vacuum which we are hoping will be a lot better than the previous upright Panasonic one. They are well known for being hard wearing types and any domestic appliance with a smiley face on the front will want to make you use it more often.