The extended exam celebrations have finally finished. With everyone finishing at different times we had multiple nights out as groups had their last exam. Last Friday has to be the Keraziest though, Kev invited me to the pub at about noon where we proceeded to drink the afternoon away in the sun. Then went back to Kev’s and drank more of his alcohol mountain and watched Challenge TV whilst drunk (highly amusing). We somehow went for lunch amongst all that which was comedy, what with kev almost dopping all his food and then forgetting we’d paid and then looking for our (non-existent) coats.
Native State was the agreed meeting point for the rest of the possee and we had lots of expensive drinks in there before moving on to Honeycomb. Which rocked, in fact for most of Saturday I still had the ringing in my ears from the massive drum’n’bass beats. Just remembered about Native State today and immediately checked my bank balance (ouch), bad places to buy rounds.

Started my full-time work shenanigans yesterday aswell and found that I’m working Wednesday-Sunday this week. Friday-Sunday being HARRY POTTER JUDGEMENT WEEKEND, that is going to be harsh. :/

Festival fever is also hotting up, with most of the programs being released this week. Should be a good summer 🙂

olly out.

Windows XP has broken.
Again
Or it could be just that IBM drive…..

/me eyes HDD suspicously….

Time for a m-m-m-m-monster update.

Friday was the dealine for the aformentioned System Design Project. I would say this last week has been one of the most stressfull and emotional of my life. Late nights, junk food, my insane team, JCMB basement, lego, robots, the cs3 possee, making friends/enemies, team-working and alcohol make for an ‘interesting’ time.
I feel like I’m awakening from a dream, this morning I bolted awake in bed, my mind screaming:

Then the ThursdayFridaySaturday blur washed over me and I realised it must be Sunday. Not sleeping on Thursday night didn’t really help either. The project revolves around builidng a robot that can perform shopping for a web site user (stupid, I know). So we had built a large-ish model of a supermarket complete with toy packets of food for the robot to navigate around. At 1am Friday morning we realised the model was fundamentaly flawed and our genius conveyor belt idea would not work, unless we pullled everything apart and rebuilt it. Which we did. I don’t know where the time went but it was suddenly Friday 7am, demonstration in 2 hours. Somehow we managed to pull everything together, go home and get dressed up, and come back and do the demo, without falling asleep. The ‘board’ were very impressed and actually ran over they’re alloted time quizzing us about a certain ninja feature we had worked 😀 After sitting through hours of sales presentations in the afternoon we were all dropping off so we decided to go the pub, what a great idea. This turned into a marathon session which ends in my head at about 10pm but actually continued in real life until 3am (I’m told).
Anyway, today is Sunday, that means work.This helped to ground me a bit more in the ‘real world’.

I’m still not comfortable with pouring my every whim and fantasy onto my blog (I ain’t some livejournal user) so I’ll just say that I seem to have reached a point where I really think I need a girlfriend, a real one.

Speaking of points, I was thinking that there were two points where I felt I’d reached another stage in life, both can be connected to books. The first was reading a dog-eared hard back copy of Neuromancer (William Gibson), borrowed form the council library, whilst on the train to Edinburgh. I think I must have been still 18 and was visiting Edinburgh University for the first time and seeing Edinburgh as a city for the second time. I finished the book in the journey. Ending up going to Edinburgh uni and have lived in this fantastic city for almost four years.

The second point was reading Generation X (Douglas Coupland), again on the train, but going home for xmas this time. I think ‘being 21’ was finally sinking into me, and the character in the book was visiting his parents for xmas aswell. It just fell nicely into place. I think I felt it was time to ‘grow up’, don’t know how successfully I managed it though…

(Do not fear brave readers, monkeys have not taken control of my mind)

We were out last night for flatmate Petes’s 22nd birthday, crawled in at 1 am with bag of plasticy doughnuts purchased from 24 hour shop. ‘Awoke’ 8 hours later feeling not that great. Downed some ibuprofen, finished off doughnuts and went to work, blinking at the morning sun, remaining blister of ibuprofens stuffed in back pocket. Summery, easy and quiet day at work, made better by starting Pattern Recognition and taunting Garry the security guard. Pattern Recognition is good so far and Gibson’s style makes me remember reading Neuromancer for the first time. It was on the train coming up to visit Edinburgh University for the first time, back when I was still doing A-Levels. Its like an old friend visiting for tea and recalling his stories, but with style. Got unhealthy kebab on the way home, with all the extras plus kitchen sink, and chillis. Came home, made coffee, ate kebab, drank coffee. Remembered have handin tomorrow, groaned. Attempted to do some work on it, just read PR instead. Liver is still trying to wash out last nights poisons, decide to sleep instead and give it a hand

good night

Back again!
see how quick that was!

Off home for a few days, byeeeeee

Hrm, its worrying when the blog page starts looking sparse as MT archives old posts. I’ve been “busy” trying to finish my Individual Programming Practical which is due in on the 16th. We have to program a peer-to-peer file sharing system, which sounds really cool! But, believe me, its not. Although I just haven’t put enough time into it becuase of my lame-ass attitide towards uni work and spending too much time online…
wait…
I’m always online, maybe that could be it…
surely not

Also my sister is visiting tomorrow, mainly to visit Heriot Watt university on Wednesday but also so we can catch up and have a few drinks etc. After that I’m catching the same train home with her to visit the folks.

Although, andrew, the kind soul has lent me his laptop so I can do some work at home. I also tend to get more work done just sat looking at the laptop than when I’m at my desk in front of my main pc, always checking of my downloads, irc-ing, email ppl, faffing with setttings, etc…

That was the sound of my show-off horn. We managed to get on the blueyonder two megabit trial.
This means our one meg line gets upgraded to two meg for a month, free of charge.

\o/\o/

PS I’m currently getting 190 kb/s off bit torrent.

Me, Ian and Alex decided to go on a trip to the coast today. Utilising alex’s l33t bus route skillz we hopped on and off buses with the skill of a bus-riding grasshopper. We got off the bus at Portabello, a coastal town just east of the whole Edinburgh sprawl. We headed for the promedenade and found the usual mess of gaudy amusement arcades and decrepid, ramshackle buildings. It even had a ‘Fun Fair’ that had ‘F*cking Shit’ spray-painted onto its sign, oh we laughed.

Anyway, we walked practically all the way along the promenade, in the fantastically sunny weather. We stopped to photograph all the nifty urban decay we found around the place, a disused outdoor swimming pool proved to have lots of nice angles. We spent quite a while here, taking lots of photos. Alex even whipped out his SLR.

Hunger was setting in by now, so we hopped on another bus to get down to Musselbrough hopefully for some fish and chips. After mincing about trying to find the high street we found an alright hotel/pub and had a reasonable lunch. Steak pie and beer, mmmmmm. We staggered out of the pub and immediately spotted an ice cream shop across the road, it was the famous Luca’s of Musselbrough. After queueing (queueing!) under the very flashy canopy/shop front we entered a cavern of ice cream goodness. We came out into the sunlight grinning like children and licking the already melting ice cream. After digesting all of this we were feeling very full, so we got on the next bus home.

We got off the bus on Princes street and found ourselves in the middle os a mass of mounted police, cycle cops and ordinary police. The anti-war march was plodding down the street and heading for the police station 🙂 We took a few pictures, alex headed home and me and Ian went home via Cockburn Street. In Fopp I finally bough As Heard on Radio Soulwax. We then visited tef at work and thus the story ends.

Made a brilliant chilli con carne yesterday, just polished it off tonight and am feeling very full.

I think I’m putting on weight. This is practically the first time, ever, I’ve though this and I eat like a pig. I’m the annoying guy that can just eat and eat and never seemed to get any wider. “Higher metabolism” I’ve heard it called.

Anyway, I blame all the junk food I’ve eaten over the last few weeks at uni, oh and living off farmfoods frozen pies for about a week.

Rock on, Ian just hooked us up with some tickets for Amon Tobin at the Bongo Club tomorrow \o/
Never been to the Bongo Club but always heard good things.
Should be fun, I will report back!

Lots of fun was had last night. First off we went to Teviot Union, played some pool, drank the cheap pintage. Then headed over to tef’s place for kerazy party action. Spent about 3 hours there, drinking the ‘punch’ and chatting. Lots of people I vaguely know. Then headed over to Joe’s, got bored, Greig bitched like a ho, went home.

Woke up ~ 1:30pm.

Hola!

Had a meal on Tuesday night at International Starters with the Waterstones escape committee. Flippin’ miles out it was, had to get a bus, a bus. I don’t normally do buses.

We also has our major project deadline exteneded by about 2 months, which is very bling bling. Mainly due to the incompetence of the lecturer, oh and “the fire”. Got more work back, got another reasonable mark, happy.

The war against mice continues, we now have three cunning steel death machines of doom (mouse traps). Although the buggers just seem to run across them, pinging the bait off and then eat the bait as it lands a safe distance away.

grrrrrr we need a cat

oh yeah, soulseek is working again
\o/

So, we’ve heard scuttling and seen a few brown blurs in the kitchen and I’d had enough. I dragged out the washing machine and found a nice little mouse hole going up into the wall aha! Out comes the pollyfilla and 10 minutes later, no more hole. But then what do we find later? another of the scamps and even better, he falls in the sink! hee hee hee

http://www.cyber-junky.co.uk/divx.avi

see the above divx movie for cute comedy jumping mouse action.

Had uber-meeting-of-doom at work last night. It was rather tense in places but somes things got sorted (and others didn’t). Then we all hit ‘teh pub’ where management bought us lots of rounds \o/

Oh yeah and my main HDD failed 🙁
I managed to salvage all the important data though and now have a minty-fresh install of XP.

Can’t sleep

Well, I am now very full of haggis neeps and tatties, cooked by our flatmate Pete. Go Pete!
mmmmmmmmm
Also consuming two glasses of red wine and assorted whisky.

Sleepy…
Although I now have a seperates tuner, which rules.

olly out

Last weekend was mega busy.
We’ve all been playing Natural Selection, the hottest Half-Life mod out at the mo and kinda started a ‘clan‘.
We had a proper match against these guys we know. Needless to say, we lost, both games. But we gave them a good run for their money and they even said we ‘weren’t bad’. The best bit though was that the lead programmer of the mod was spectating on our game, which rocked. Even he said it was a ‘close’ game. Afterward we all hit the pub, which was fun as we were all still adrenaline fuelled and rather lively.
Yeah, so that was Saturday afternoon/evening.

Sunday was my one day of work-work, or as we like to call it: ‘Sunday Funday’. It was kinda quiet and I spent most of the day moving stuff up from the basement and serving some jolly pleasant customers. got home and realised I had to finish essay for today (Monday)

I lose.

anyhooo, essay is now finished and handed in. Had a great tutorial today, lasted ooohhh twenty minutes and the guy hadn’t prepared anything as he’d only been told 2 minutes ago he was taking us. Oh well. Such is the organisational genius of Edinburgh CS department.

LAN Partty!

\o/

I think a bit of an update is in order. I’ve been neglecting the site a bit over xmas/new year.
Where to start…
Christmas and New Year were fun. Lots of family and friend meet ups and eating/drinking. I went home for xmas where my Grandparents had also gone to stay for a few days. Got lots of foody presents and no socks! I did get a very nice monogrammed dressing gown though, so I now flounce around the flat on a morning thinking I own the place.
Also got some cash so I need to rack my brains and think of something sensible to buy. Not PC parts.
Took a ton of photos at home and a few of our drunken debauchery at new year. Once I’ve sorted them I’ll try and put something online.

The front page is still Not Right. I keep simplifying things as I realise all the useless tat I have on here. I mean, really, do I need a poll? Do I need ‘welcome text’. I really want to try and seperate the personal areas and the ‘professional’ areas aswell. If we ever get our other hosting off the ground I’m going to get another (more sensible) domain name and shift all the web design sections there. I very much doubt prospective clients want to read how drunk I was last night…
I’m also turning into a photo/blog junky and the site needs to shift in that direction.

me=full of good food

Lord Of The Rings : The Two Towers is released today! yay!
We are watching the special edition of the Fellowship before we see TTT 🙂
I’ll report back tomorrow on what it was like. Right now, I’m off to finish my xmas shopping.

look at the time!

Ok, just got in from celebratory-end-of-term drinkage with Pete, Neil and Doug.
We headed off to Doctors first, which was ok, if a little quiet.

Then off to Frankensteins which was packed (as usual) where the AI/CS department was having a ‘wake’ in aid of the recent fire at South Bridge.

Then we jumped across the street to Bar Kohl, which is just the best EVAR! We got a pitcher of some gin-vodka thing which was very, very dry. Noticed they had 79.9% proof vodka, left in a hurry before we had any ideas.

Next stop Finnegans Wake where there was the usual irish live music hi-jinks. good atmosphere, nice and busy. Ate a packet of crisps. Noticed big group of Japanese peeps with nice digi-cams.

Then headed down the scorched cowgate to Opium, Edinburgh’s ‘alternative’ club. Somehow managed to bump into Adam. Then the cs4 possee stormed in (on there end of term night out) and we proceeded to hurl insults at Sandy and Tim.
Something about Sandys Mum…
Oh yeah, I swear that group of Japanese folk followed us…

We then stopped for chips and spring rolls and clambered back up to our flat. Much Gamecube action proceeded, along with loud music. Then, bed. Which is where I am now headed.

Olly Out.
Currently Listening : as heard on radio soulwax pt. 2

Hold the Front Page!
Our power just went off for about 45 minutes, which was fun. We’d just got all the candles lit, chatted and I was just settling down with the hobbit when everything comes back on. So what do I do? Immediately go back to the warm glow of the CRT . 🙂

oh well, I’m now here, posting this for the world to see

(see here for explanation)

w00t!
Two Towers tickets booked already!

Scarily there was about a third of the seats gone already, looks like its gonna be busy.

Oh yeah, watched the first ep of this, not bad, strange plot twists at times but could be good.

Its December! yay!
Edinburgh is getting all christmasy at the minute, lights up, ice rink in the gardens, big wheel etc.
I have two, just two, deadlines left. Big group project due in on Monday and a very nasty Algorithms & Data Structures handin (of DOOM) due in that Wednesday. The same day my parents come up for some christmas shopping.
yay!
now, must do work

oh yeah, that ‘ultimate’ cyberpunk book is alright, unfortunately I seem to have read 75% of the stories already 🙁

24 – oh boy, 24 season 2 is just like a really good action movie, only about 15 hours long. It just keeps getting better and better.

Buffy – the old fave, buffy now in its 7th season is building to some mega-big-apocolyptic stuff at the minute. Joss Whedon certainly keeps you on your toes.

…and lots of other things, but its getting late and I have a 9 till 5 uni day of doom tomorrow

night

ok, finished Harry Potter.
Not exactly the hardest read in the world but jolly good fun. Has its dark moments aswell, not just a book for children. Now, to get my hands on the others…

Now moving onto the ‘ultimate’ cyberpunk, a collection of cyberpunk short stories by the usual crew: Gibson, Sterling, Dick etc..
Should be good 🙂

the weather – nice and crispy cold
food – food rocks
harry potter – yes I’m only just reading it
soulwax – as heard on radio soulwax, just so good

olly out

Ok,
getting really wired on caffeine so I can finish work for tomorrow.
This is good.
I like coffee.
Proper coffee that is, not instant muck.
Back to work I go.

woooooo!

Hmm, well, 3rd year is “fun”.
You know, there were times last year when I was like “Oh, I can’t wait to get back to uni!”.
ha ha ha
How naive I was. Now I’ve got three deadlines on the same weekend and I’m not exactly loving it. Some of it is interesting, some is not. I can’t really complain though, its uni, you have work to do, you get deadlines. Although all my firends who have either graduated or dropped out have a good chuckle at my moaning.

Anyhoo, onto other things.

Lord Of The Rings : Special Edition

oh
my
god

this is just the best dvd EVAR!
there is like six and a half hours of extras and then the film is 3 and a half hours with 4 commentaries. Madness, but good 🙂

selecta!

I’ve decided to contribute photos to a royalty-free archive and zuadobank is my fave. Check out my user page here: zuadobank.com