and many more here.

Oh man, that rocked my socks off. Highlight of the weekend has to Orbital live on the Sunday night. They played all the favourites including Halcyon And On And On, with new Darkness remix action! Their kick-ass Dr Who theme remix was in there aswell. I had to go see it on my own which was cool as everyone else was seeing The Pixies on the main stage. It all seemed pretty well organised, no troubles getting in or anything. Had to queue a while at the bus station in Edinburgh but even there they had loads of staff on-hand. Other people who rocked were: Black Eyes Peas, Faithless (uber rocked), Electric Six. Lots of folk on the Sunday clashed and on the Saturday the main stuff I wanted to see was in the Slam tent which was ridiculously under-sized and therefore always full. It completely filled up for Basment Jaxx, Felix Da Housecat, Chemical Brothers and Groove Armada, which sucked. Now, on with the ass-tastic camera-phone photos:

Told you they were good…

Hey everybody! Just eaten a very nice pie with mash and peas, mmmmmmmm. Just a quick blog from the virgin tent-thing here at t in the park. Laters!

Toot! toot! T in the park today tody and tomorrow! Need to get ready soon or we’ll be a bit late…

My main man Brad has had a very funky redesign which is inspiring me to get my ass into gear and clean this place up. Anyway, go check out his much less eyeball-melting look.

I am now officially Oliver Jackson Bsc Hons. At frickin’ last! Only took five years! Yesterday seemed like the longest day ever, stuff just kept happening. I woke up far too early as I was all excited and nervous about the day ahead. Kerry and I got all dressed up and then went to Favorit for breakfast, where I could hardly eat anything. Then we met my parents and I went and got robed-up and chatted with my buddies. At about 10:30 we decided we’d better go in to McEwan Hall and take our seats.

There was an organ recital and then they got down to the task at hand. What follows is basically an hour of clapping and shuffling along seats. Getting their degress with us was the Engineering school and they all went before us. When your name is finally read out and you’ve successfully shuffled along to the end of the row you march up to the stage (without tripping) and get hit on the head with a ceremonial hat. You then exit stage left, get your certificate and shuffle back into your seat.

After graduation there was lots of milling around outside while everyone’s Mum cried and the family took photos. We eventually managed to organise a group of us into a photo, not the easiest of tasks. Check out the gallery for the photos. After I’d handed back my hired robes (not cheap!) we went back to Favorit for lunch where they managed to annoy my parents by completely forgetting their orders, pretty dumb if you ask me. They did eventually get served, needless to say the tip was a big fat zero. We now had time to kill before the reception in the afternoon so we mooched along to the Royal Musem where I sat down and spaced-out for half an hour.

The reception in the afternoon was in Surgeons Hall which is pretty impressive on the inside, filled with interesting paintings and rooms. It was a fancy affair with canapes, champagne and little sausages. There were some prizes awarded and we were told to have a good time. At this point we were knackered so we went home for a wee rest and then got changed for dinner at the grainstore at seven. The grainstore was very, very nice. I had smoked haddock and pea risotto to start and then aubergine, courgette and something lasagne with red pepper fondue. Both were fantastic and didn’t leave me room for pudding. Kerry and I then took my parents on a mini pub tour of Deacon Brodies, Whistle Binkies and then finally Beluga. My parents then went off back to the hotel and we went to find the new-graduate gang. There were still at the pear tree where we rapidly formulated a plan to go to Why Not? on George street. After much faffing and two almost bar fights we eventually got taxis there. Quite a few of our number were too pished to get in unfortunately but they’d had enough by then anyway.

Kerry and I were still sober enough to get in (of course) and had a great time with the gang. Kept seeing more and more people from c.s. through the night. Kev and Rab were busting some legendary moves on the dance floor and Ian and Daniel was splashing out on some £50 a pop champagne. We lasted until 3am when we got a taxi back with Kev and collapsed into bed. Only for both of us to get up for work this morning. Ouchy.

graduation gallery

Yesterday was my last day working at waterstones. I will miss the retail shenanigans. Mainly the other people at work and the nice customers. Working in a bookshop is a pretty good job for the retail sector but the pay and prospects are pretty non-existent. It was just my summer job anyway, the stuff I’m doing at scotweb I actually, like, enjoy doing. So, I’m getting paid for doing stuff I enjoy, which is the whole point I think.

In other earth shattering news I’ve had a haircut. My parents are up tomorrow for pre-graduation stuff and then the big day on Wednesday. Good news is that Kerry got a ticket in the extra ticket lottery thing. She jumped around for a bit giggling when she found out .

Coudal Partners were always very slick and their latest redesign is particularly tasty:
Coudal Partners

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…

It is done, my dissertation is handed in. Three shiny copies all bound up with Edinburgh uni covers. We all went and played rounders in the meadow on Wednesday afternoon which was a lot of fun. Glorious weather for it aswell. We went out that night and got rather lubricated aswell, I think the gang ended up in the Cavendish but I wussed out before then.

The final version is now with my supervisor! Hes giving it the once over tonight and then its handin-orama tomorrow. I think I’ll lie in for about a week after that. Final word count: 13,319.

It’s almost done, I’m pushing 9k words at the moment. It needs to be around 10k with a few more tweaks to the code, shouldn’t be impossible….

Sorry for the lack of updates, the current programme will return to normal when I got this silly dissertation out of the way (1st of June).

BBC NEWS | Politics | Editor sacked over ‘hoax’ pictures

I actually wore my shorts today, the first time this year. I wore them whilst sat in the computer lab for five hours, woooo. I though it was kind of like bringing the sunshine indoors. Or something…

…is the overly elaborate title of my final year project and hence what my dissertation is about. Not many updates recently as it is due in on the 26th. Yikes!

This project has saved my final year project from a lot of complications. This Richard Bergmair chap has taken wordnet from its normal storage method and converted it all into mysql/postgres compatible stuff. Now, I simply create a new tables, download the data and wham. Instant lexical/semantic database. I’ve a feeling I’m killing the university database server though, queries are getting very slow. But, I guess they will be on tables with ~140,000 rows :).

The very, very nice people at blueyonder have given all their customers a free cable upgrade! We’ve not got 1.5Mbps (~190kb/s) down, which is a nice boost, especially for free. If only they’d increase our upstream (a measly 32kb/s), thats the one that gets clogged at the moment and kills any online gaming you want to do.

Last night was Beltane night, a celebration of the start of the summer. About 15,000 people all pile up onto Calton Hill in Edinburgh. Its a pretty amazing experice, this was the 3rd time I’d seen it and theres always something new each year. It was ticketed for the first time this year and it seemed to go very smoothly, no over-zealous security or anything. Anway, I took lots of photos. You can view them here.

Went out with the cs boys on Tuesday night and got very, very drunk (hence the two-day blog gap). We had a couple straight after the exam, all went home for a breather and then started again at about 8pm. For some very strange reason we ended up in shag-tag. *groan* This is the lowest of the low student nights (ok, theres always subway…) but its cheap and we were all too sloshed by then to care about, well, anything much. Wednesday was spent mostly recovering from acute liver poisoning..

Kerry and I went for a mooch around the Dean Gallery yesterday. There is a very handy free ‘galleries’ shuttle bus that you can jump on to get around. Free bus and free galleries, lovely. The exhibition on at the moment was ‘the 1960s’ and had pop art, scottish art from the 60s and was jolly good.

Across the road from the Dean Gallery is the Modern Art gallery which we didn’t get time to go in, but I did take some pictures of the perplexing scuplture/earthworks in its gardens. You can view them in the gallery here.

Yes! Woo-hoo! Yeehaaaa!! Thats Computer Graphics thoroughly ninja-ed. Two pints later in the Pear Tree and I was feeling quite sloshed. Went with Kerry whilst she got her piercings put back in (ouch) and then went and got my hair cut! ye gods! my powers! My head does feel quite lighter now…and cooler.

Did you spot them? Yep, I’ve implemented the ala css drop shadow technique (described here). I reckon it looks quite nice, it needs some slight tweaking but I’ve proscrastinated enough for now.

Yep, had my Visualisation exam this morning. It was so-so, not great and kinda hard to tell how I actually did. Again, it was a very wordy, waffly one. Just one exam left now, Computer Graphics which is most definetly not going to be waffley. Its going to be bl**dy hard!

I had more exam shenanigans this morning. Computer Networking was on the menu for 10am. I felt pretty confident for this one, I had remembered loads of useless stuff that I’ll never, ever need again. The lecturer though, had other ideas. He obviously read my mind just before the exam and all the questions were on things that I hadn’t revised. Marvellous! Plus, all the questions were waffley tat, which normally I love, but for this I had actually learnt the details. But he didn’t want them! Arg! Oh well, I wasn’t going to get a first anyway…

ahhhhh, Computer Security out of the way. It wasn’t great, but then it wasn’t disasterously bad either. Lots of people seem to be kicking up a fuss about the difficulty of one question though.