One Wheel Short of a Unicycle...

I'm now at home for Christmas (4 weeks off!) and after the chaos of the last 2 weeks I definitely need a break. The last few weeks have been spent mostly doing coursework (one day spent 12 hours doing c/w!), as well as sorting everything out in order to come back home. I stumbled across some photos that I must of taken on my digital camera (and forgotten about) when I first moved into the apartment:






Anyhoo, that's all for now, got to continue sorting the mess that is my room :-(

What a busy week. This is the first time since I got back on Monday that I've had a chance to write my blog. After getting back on Monday morning and dropping my stuff off at the house with half an hour to spare, I then had lectures until 6pm. Tuesday was even worse as I ended up spending over 12 hours of work, comprising of 8 hours of lectures and 4 hours of coursework! Wednesday was not as bad as after the morning lectures I went to watch the new James Bond movie in Leicester followed by fish and chips from the local chippy (which were both great). Today I've had some lectures this morning, and have a board meeting for my project group for 2 hours this afternoon.

Bit of a boring post, but I'll talk more about my interesting project in a later post as I'm getting hungry, so that's all for now. (Photos to follow once I have my camera from home)

Now that I have sorted everything out (house, internet, coursework etc) I have some time to write some posts. I'm now living with 2 of my mates in an upstairs apartment in the middle of Loughborough town centre. It is alot better than last year, especially the food. At first I thought that I would not enjoy cooking the food, (mainly because I'm lazy), but I have found that it is quite fun. Having ventured away from ready cooked meals (boo!) I'm now surprising myself by cooking Shepards pie, Chinese stir fry, spaghetti bolognaise etc and of course the mandatory pizza every now and then :-)

Part of the reason I've not been posting was because in the first 3 weeks I was on the phone to Tiscali most of the time, trying to sort out why they had not activated our line- (which in the end took over 28 days!). Then when everything with Tiscali was sorted, the wireless router decided to play up and make our network "disappear" for no reason.

So all in all it was a stressful first few weeks, but now that everything is sorted and I'm settled in I'm starting to enjoy my course more and the free time that I have (not that there is much of it!)

More posts on the way (with pics hopefully) after my visit to my Nan & Granddad's over the weekend.

Just a quick post to say I'm still alive. More posts on the way later this week, I promise.

Long time no post I know. It seems that doing nothing somehow takes up more time than working! Anyhoo below is a link to my new web album that contains photos from our hols etc.

Uploaded a bit later than planned but below are some photos from our trip to Germany- more photos will be available from our home website- which is another thing I need to sort out soon!

Just got back from my holiday to Germany (pics to follow tomorrow hopefully) and planned on making a short movie of the photos taken, but apparently according to Microsoft Movie Maker I might have to wait a while for it to be made...

Which is equivalent to 234999780 seconds, or 65278 hours or, 2720 days, or even better 7.45 years!!!

I've spent the last 4 days laying laminate flooring in the two upstairs bathrooms with my dad and can say that I won't be attempting to do it again in such a compliacted and small space. For a start, we tried to do it without the correct tools- no jigsaw, no workbench, no file. We soon discovered that it was very hard work shaping around stuff (like the toilet bowl) after spending 4 hours on just one strip of the floor! So after that palaver, dad decided to call a friend and he bought around all the right tools for us- including a mitre saw to do the beading around the edges. Without these tools we would still be laying the floor now!

On another note, today is dad's 50th Birthday, so Happy Birthday to you and may you have many more!

It had to be done...

Possibly the greatest idea since sliced bread, think of a snack and mega size it. Pimp That Snack "take Snacks to their limit, and show what they're capable of with a little ingenuity, a little cash, and a lot of imagination".

Tagged by Thomas

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag three people.

Here goes:

"Bureaucracy next. Researchers at the Harvard Medical School found that the administrative costs of the US system, public and private, exceed $1000 per person. In other words, when you count all the taxes, premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, the typical American spends as much on doctor's receptionists and the like as citizens of Singapore and the Czech Republic spend on their entire medical care."

Wow, thanks to the Undercover Economist (Tim Harford) that turned out ok. I didn't cheat either. I'm reading it at the moment (thanks to my dad) and believe everyone should read it because it certainly changed my view on how business works in the real world!

Here are some pics I took at the airshow this year:

It is official, I have neglected my blog somewhat!

Anyhoo, I have now completed my first year at uni and passed all my exams so am able to continue into the second year. I have been on holiday in sunny Reading and Wales- I know, really exotic places - and been to Nottingham a couple of times.

Sometime in August I'm heading off to Germany with my parents to stay at a guesthouse in 'die Schwarzwald' with some family friends (The Hechts). Apparently I'm supposed to get my German up to scratch to help translate for my parents, but I'd prefer to take a step back and watch my parents tell the that taxi driver "Normalerweise trinke ich Kaffee, aber heute trinke ich Tee. " or "Ah, ich brauche auch noch Motorenöl." The BBC languages website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/index.shtml) can be praised for such phrases.

Over the summer I was meant to get a job, but it seems that nowhere in Lichfield wants to hire part-time students, and M&S just messed me around for 4 weeks. So I'm left to selling items on ebay such as 355 of my parents LP's and my nice koi fish due to somehow being the cause of too many heated debates!!!

Whilst browsing the list of free software you can download from microsoft I found this cool drawing program where you can create amazing paintings- I can't of course because I can't draw to save my life. But for the artists out there, I would recommend it because it is fun and simple to use. I downloaded the free version which is quite good from this link: http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html

Some more pics edited via picasa:

Whilst watching the telly the other day, I discovered a new photo editing software that is free and is amazing. It's called Picasa, (http://picasa.google.com/index.html), and I would highly recommend it for people who have trouble using other software such as Photoshop, and just want to organise and edit all their photos instantly. It scans your computer and finds all your photos and puts them in specified folders in date order, and it has an extremely simple user interface- i.e. it is easy to use. Below are just some examples of what it can do:

Next year I will be moving into a newish apartment in Loughborough town centre with two of my mates from uni. Before we found our new home, we went house hunting around Loughborough and I can say now that what we have found is a golden gem compared to the rubbish that is on the housing market at the moment. The first house we went to look at had condensation on all the windows, the back garden was a mess, the kitchen was about 5ft by 5ft and the current tenants didn't seem to grasp the concept of "tidying up".

After frantic searching, I managed to find a newly built student apartment complex, so I booked an appointment to see as many of the flats as possible so we could choose the best one. It turned out that all the apartments were really nice, and we settled for an upstairs apartment on the end of the complex. It has 3 parking spaces, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms- one being an en-suite, and a kitchen. It is fully furnished with brand new furniture and will be totally repainted and cleaned- even though it is only 2 years old- before we move in this summer.

I can't wait to move there as I will get to cook my own food instead of eating the junk they are serving in my hall at the moment.

I may not have exams this time around, but I sure do have alot of coursework that needs to be done. I wish I could of thought of that million dollar webpage which a student at Nottingham Uni, (Alex Tew), created, then I wouldn't be so stressed! But every success has its problems as Alex found out this week, (see link below). In his case it was from so called "net criminals" who "knocked the site over with a massive denial-of-service attack.” Sounds scary but basically they forced the website to go offline for a period of time by overloading the network with customer requests.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4621158.stm

Good news: I heard from my lecturer this week that we will be having an extra day added to the Easter holiday in celebration of the universities 40th anniversary since it was granted university status! My lecturer then said he complained that a day wasn't long enough and that we should have a week off instead :-)

I started my course not knowing a single thing about programming in C, I am now at a stage in my course where I still don't know much about programming in C. This is due not having a lecture in programming for the last 4 weeks and won't be having any more until the start of semester 2- in 3 weeks time! For some reason the lecturer took it upon himself to only read through his notes- most of which are copied from a book by Ivor Hoton- and once he had completed that decided to cancel any further lectures. Might sound good, but it has left me in a position where I now have to design programs to produce lines between two points on a page, then circles, and finally the union jack- which must be perfect in all dimensions (see link below), and I have no clue what to do!

How to draw the perfect union jack: http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/union-jack/union-jack.html

It gets better... I not only have to learn to program in C, but VHDL and Matlab as well! That is the equivalent of 3 new foreign languages! O well, better continue with the coursework or it isn't going to be done!

Found some more funny pics:

Found this whilst browsing the internet today. It sums up the difficulty of my maths tests at the moment :-)

Happy New Year to you all! I hope you had an amazing christmas and new year like I had at home with my family. I arrived back at uni last Sunday to a nice clean room, which I found out from the cleaners wasn't used at all during the xmas holidays so i didn't actually have to empty my room at all! Anyhoo, this week I am overloaded with coursework that needs to be done, but luckily I don't have any exams like the rest of the campus seems to be having. I will upload some xmas photos to my blog when I go home next as I saved them on my parents laptop instead of my pc- big mistake :-)

I was shown the following link the other day. It's written by an eBayer and is a really funny storey about his car that wouldn't die:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4600692892&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&rd=1