posts

Stuff I've been up to.

Yeah, one of these posts.

Well I read Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker yesterday, and really enjoyed it (well of course, I read it in one day. lol). He has the knack of drawing you in and not letting you put the book down, quite amazing. I also watched Exit Through The Gift Shop - the Banksy film, and Only Yesterday - another Studio Ghibli film, over the weekend. I should probably list what I got for Christmas:

• The Cat Returns (my favourite Studio Ghibli film), Grave of the Fireflies, Spirited Away, Only Yesterday, and Tales from Earthsea.
• Exit Through The Gift Shop,
• Brandon's Warbreaker and The Way of Kings,
• Dan Simmons' Illium-Olympos,
• a new copy of Tad Williams' War of the Flowers,
• t-shirts: '[pacman]//omnomnom' ,  'meh', 'keep out of direct sunlight', and 'I love vegetarians//more meat for me'
• a couple of jumpers and some trousers, and socks and underwear.

I got a book, t-shirt (the 'meh' one) and demotivation calendar off Meesha, and about £200 from relatives. Other than that I spent the weekend with my mothers family, and spoke at length (both Skype and gTalk) with Meesha. Twas a rather magical Christmas all in all. Oh, and we ate (and are still eating) plenty :D

Other stuff I've been upto? Well I've been at uni pretty solidly, since I'm really trying to apply myself this year to salvage as good a degree as possible. I've been working one day a week since the start of term (and worked the start of last week too), and enjoyed that, finishing up the Sonar, doing some C# and messing with Android etc. Now I'm on holiday I've going to keep the maths we did last term fresh for my exams, which means practising/revising, and also I have to write a File System for my Operating Systems course. 

I am so lucky

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away? — no, but it was quite a while back…before Uni, before A Level…before even GCSE’s. I aced a test (cant even call it an exam) in music. The music department invited me to an ‘obscure instruments tryout’ (at this point, I’d never even picked up an instrument, and had no intention of ever doing). I ended up taking the double bass because it was impossible to commute with, and also because I didnt think I’d do well at wind instruments.

So I chose the bass, learnt it for a few months, and then chose to take Music GCSE. I then got invited to a youth orchestra, and tried out there for a few months before finally joining. Which not only got me a whole host of friends, it got both my brothers into Music (and the orchestra) too:

The first one tried out the percussion section just after I joined proper, and he’s still playing both bass and drums now, 7 years later.

Since I was also getting bass lessons there before the rehersals, which were cool in and of themselves (the teacher was a dude! and the other students were awesome and awe inspiring), my youngest brother chose to take up the French horn (another ‘understaffed’ instrument), and got lessons at the same time as me. He shot through the ranks, and is seriously talented, playing the horn in adult productions and teaching himself the clarinet. He’s going to South Africa next year with his school’s music department.

My first love was from the orchestra, the most perfect young trumpetist, she made me go crazy for a time. Still would if she’d wanted to keep my friendship.

And then came university, the wonders of student life….I didnt pick up my bass in first year, in fact stowed it at the orchestra’s ‘lair’. I ended up wanting to branch out my social status in second year though, and so joined the music society and associated orchestras. I quickly found that some of my (mathematical) classmates were also musicians….and swiftly gained an ‘appreciation’ for one of them…and ruined any chance of ever getting to know her.

After this though comes the successes. I’m currently friends with a few girls from around and about and have successfully contained my appreciation as to remain contemporaries. Lets hope it continues.

This last part contains those that I’ve never really known, but am glad to have known. Thats right. The citizens of the internet: I’m extraordinarily lucky to have found and befriended those upon the internet that I have done. I only regret being foolish and childish, and losing touch with those that matter most to me.

And the internet itself has provided a vast (but still limited) array of musical produce to consume, my ears are literally bursting from the however much music I’ve streamed over last.fm and my other media sources.

To finalize, music is amazing, and I’m extraordinarily glad I ever got to experience it properly from both ends of the spectrum and am even gladder that my participation continues.

Finaly

Right, so you may have noticed…I’ve updated my blog, quite alot…I’m thinking of forgetting about tumblr…its nice and all, and its customizations are pretty good, buuuut not good enough. …meh scrap that, its good enough. laziness heheh edit: hmmm, maybe I will…tumblrs templating is bahhhhhh. would rather grab the rss feed and re-output it myself.

So yeah, I hacked my way back in to my tumblr account. Blame my previous fail on gmails over-zealous spam filtering…wierd that it started doing that, meh.

Finished the first of this years exams today; went well enough, considering how little I tried :D. Also have been thinking of a couple of ideas, hope to spew them out soon, if I remember.

Excuses

Yeah, I know, I havent been round much as of late…., too much doing shit all tbh. Havent had chance to program, havent had the motivation to do anything. I’ve read far too many books, spammed too many forums, and generally been too relaxed.

I doubt I will pass this year at uni and tbh, I couldnt care less… its doing nothing for me, I’m not even really enjoying music and computing societies THAT much. I didnt even attempt to go in for the last week of term.

I emailed my last summers work again, to see if he would take me up again this year. He hasnt emailed me back and its been about a month…guess that shows how good I was.

I’ve had programming tasks swimming round in my brain for a while, fleshing out. Some of them I would love to see made/used/etc. but I have absolutely no motivation to sit down and work it out. Whenever I do, I end up getting sucked into configuring my server a little bit, or writing a library to reinvent the wheel.

I also have tried to make a few scripts for things like exposing a forum database as json, and backing up a thread, but nobody wanted them, so I gave up and went home.

Man, I miss having fun.

Uni-eed to here this!

So, I went back to uni last week, (after like 4 months or something) and last year, after enrolling, I got an email saying I hadn’t enrolled on the right Computing modules. I do Computer Science and Maths, so there is two sets of modules to enrol on. I thought this strange considering that I just accepted the default set of modules, assuming that they would all be present and selected. It turns out I missed off two. Another problem was that I seemed to be over subscribed (I had too many modules), and this is where it gets interesting.

On the Friday before term started (a week and a day ago) I went and saw both the Maths and the Computing department administrators, The maths dept. said I was on all the right courses, and the Comp dept. said they would sign me up to the two missing modules once they had access to the system (it was down for maintenance..). So I though everything was fine, I constructed my timetables accordingly, and went to lectures and had a generally fun time.

I also signed up to the music society and its orchestra, and the computing society :D. I attended the first practice of the orchestra on Wednesday, in a slot usually taken by a Computing practical but which doesn’t start untill week 3, in two weeks time. This will mean I wont be able to practice with the orchestra at all…which is shit :(. They have the freshers concert tomorrow, where all the music groups go and show what they do, I believe it is mainly for the people that havent played in an ensemble before, but I cant wait :D. I also have an audition on Monday, which I have no idea how its going to go down…having no piece to play, and probably not being able to play anything anyway. I can only play whilst ‘behind’ an orchestra >.> but it will be a good time to bring up what the heck I will be able to do… it will be a pity if I cant do it because of a lab session :(

Then, yesterday, I had an interview with my academic tutor (I think thats her title), in the maths department, and she looked at my course listing, and found that I was on completely the wrong set of courses, AND I was over subscribed by 3 modules. So I dropped Probability and Statistics (YAY!!!!) and also Complex Analysis and took up the module I was missing and the following module. So now I hope I am sorted. :D

Well that’s about it. Bye for now