Had a whole bunch of photos kicking around for ages. So, here they are:

Selkirk Common Riding

Easter At Home

Ian & Jen’s BBQ

Another fun packed week begins! Well, already Wednesday, somehow. Good times at scotweb with the boys, mainly smacking sandy down. I’ve linked the boys up over on the right there, should help their google rank a wee bit.
Have been organising myself for graduation aswell, got my white bow tie and a nice new white shirt. Booked a place for a meal on the evening, settled on The Grain Store after The Outsider was already booked up. The ceremony is on the morning of Wednesday next week, then its off the to the Informatics department reception at the Royal College of Surgeons in the afternoon and then the meal in the evening. Man, thats gonna be a kerazy day.
Its also Kerry’s birthday tomorrow, hope she likes what I got her. Alex and I have also got to find a new flat in amongst all the other stuff at the moment.

Just worked both Saturday and Sunday at waterstones. I’d forgotten how much of a killer that is, man I’ll be glad when I’m just Monday to Friday at scotweb.

Birthday meal on Friday night was good fun. Eight of us in the end went to Pancho Villas for a terrific feed. The plan was to go kerazy dancing at Evol afterwards but we were all far, far too full. Ended up mooching around to Opium (predictably) and then Frankensteins (which was uber cheese tastic).

This feels like the first time I’ve had time to relax since about last Tuesday. First I had the waiting and trauma of interview and then results on the same day. Then back to work, then straight off to Kerry’s parents. Then straight back to new job, all in between old job.

Waterstones have a ridiculously long notice period of four weeks, even for part-timers. While I work that off I’ve started at the mighty scotweb part-time 10-3 Monday to Friday. So, its scotweb for half the day then waterstones for the other half and then waterstones on Saturday and Sunday. Thankfully my shifts at the ‘stones go down to two evenings a week next week, which will make it a bit more manageable.

Scotweb is pretty cool, the day I arrived three brand new shiny emacs arrived. One of them is now mine, along with a brand new chair! woo! I spent today and yesterday installing all the software I need and getting to know their system. In a bizzare stroke of coincidence Alex who I work with there is the owner of this site which I blogged in the past as a ‘nice site’, curiouser and curiouser. Alex’s brother James also works at scotweb and has a blog here and was in the year above me at university, oh and then there’s sandy.

Kerry and I saw these chaps in the meadows last Thursday. They’re the Royal Company of Archers and had a whole section of the meadows cordoned off for their competition. They were firing proper hefty arrows an impressively long way at a wee target.

I got the job

\o/\o/\o/\o/

forgot to blog it in the pre-common riding chaos. More on that later…

Hey everybody,
To celebrate me hitting the big TWO-THREE I’m going to go for a feast of mexican fun at Pancho Villas.

This Friday (the 25th) at 8pm.

Hopefully with some dancing and shenanigans at Evol afterwards in the Liquid Rooms. Please email me to let me know if you’re coming to the dinner so we can book. Hope to see you all there.

Olly & Kerry

Off to Kerry’s parents in selkirk for the Selkirk Common Riding. Back on sunday. Laters!!

I also had a job interview today for ScotWeb. They’re a web design company that does some of their own e-commerce on the side. Very nice people and a very nice company. I should hear from them tomorrow at the earliest…. I want this job!

Today I got my degree classification. I got a:

2:2

huzzah!

The post below is incredibly boring.

Going to see Prisoner of Azkhaban tonight. Will report back tomorrow.

I was clicking around the new version of EUSA’s website and noticed they had a text-only mode that looked very similar to the bbc’s text-only mode. After digging a bit deeper I realised that the bbc actually released the source to the parsing engine for creating their text-only pages. How nice is that? This is just the thing I need for the project I’m working on at the moment. I was going to make an alternate “highly accessible” style-sheet. But this is a much more elegant solution.

BBC Education Betsie Site

BadAssMovieImages.Com which inspired me to give the images over there on the left a bit of a spring clean. I’ll add some new ones later but those four will do for now. You can click on the image to change to the next one. When you first hit the page it is supposed to randomly pick one of them to show.

Fairly busy just now with a large web project for a heritage trust my Dad is involved with. Other than that, I’m panicing about getting time off work for stuff with Kerry and general OMGNOMORESTUDENTLOAN.

So cool: WotR – Paper, love and glue – mmmm

I was working all of yesterday so didn’t see any of the daytime stuff but I did watch the docu-drama in the evening. It was rather good, I especially liked the bits where they merged the old stock footage or photos with the new drama. I nice touch was the way the veterans commentary was shown not with them speaking but just with shots of them thinking and remembering. It made the whole programme seem like their memories.

Kerry and I went through to Glasgow to see Horse Island a band that she knows a few of the guys from. We went through on the train where they have recently installed new “automatic” gates at Edinburgh and Glasgow stations. But surprise surprise the system is flawed. If you have the big style pre-booked tickets they don’t fit into the card reader….genius.

Anyway, when we got through we thought we’d walk it to stereo, the gig venue. We consulted multi-map on one of those BT internet-enabled phones and got a vague idea of the direction. Forty minutes later…..we’re still walking. Time to get in a taxi and leave pride behind. We did get there in time to hear the band. They were very good and had nice banjo and/or ukelele bits in most of their tunes. The venue was nice although I did bizarrely find a cigar wrapper thing in my pint of 80′. Needless to day I asked for a new one.

Kerry decided to take me on the ‘clockwork orange’ on the way back. It has to be the cutest underground system ever. The cars roar into the station and I thought I wasn’t going to fit in them. Thankfully they are deceptively small on the outside. We had a mad quick drink in McSleazy’s and then grabbed a steak pie supper in the Blue Lagoon (omg so cheap) before running to catch the 10pm train back. All in all, a great night.

Half-Life completed in 50 minutes: http://www.esreality.com/?a=movies.
Impressive.

This morning I had my final project presentation at the ungodly hour of 10am. I got a bit toasted by Alexander Voss but on the whole they seemed impressed. One bit didn’t work because I’m a complete muppet and was doing something wrong but I think I blagged it. Now, onto some tips:

• Self-Propose. Doing something you want to do, rather than something that some lecturer wants doing is overall much more satisifying. You also don’t end with something that you are proud of but its not quite what your supervisor wanted.
• Pick your supervisor wisely. Your supervisor has to be interested in your project and keen enough to want to help. I know lots of people whos supervisor was always away or busy and offered no help at all.
• Log your work. I should have been doing this from the start. Some kind of log is very, very useful. Written or online, it doesn’t matter just record everything you do. This is immensely useful when writing up the implementation and saying why you did something that way you did.
• Comment your code. I know we have it drummed into us from first year but it really is very useful. If you’re using something like javadoc do the comments in the correct style. It will save time later, time which you won’t have.
• Be honest. Don’t try and blag anything with smoke and mirrors. Three people who are most likely cleverer than you are going to look at your project. If you try some shenanigans they will ask you to show them X in your presentation. Then you’re boned…