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.