Here’s something which has been fucking me off for a while, so while I’m mildy intoxicated I’ll vent my anger over my less than commonly used blog.

For a good few months I’ve had a LCD with a reflective coating on, the coating makes blacks appear much darker at the loss of more glare, which is acceptable considering their prettyness. I like it. But what I don’t like is how people seem to have a need to physically *touch* the screen when pointing out something then leaving a massive, greasy finger print on my otherwise sexy display. Don’t do it. There’s no reason to do it. The extra centimetre away from the screen you could point to with out any real discepency about what you’re trying to show me means I don’t have to have a screen wipe handy.

This, I imagine, is going to get a lot worse until I start telling people off from it with the purchase of my new macbook, which also has the reflective screen. Seriously people, there’s no need to touch the screen.

Last night after the earthquake, Uilleann informed me that my good friend Jesse Dylan Barwick (or Taco/Too Cool To Quit) had died. I’d not seen him around for a while, which I was putting down to me spending more time at uni than on IRC, but on finding this out I feel a huge void. I spent the remainder of the night flicking through blog posts and IRC chat logs remembering all the great times we had. I just hope you’re in a better place now, my friend.

I’m back at uni now, all settled in and very hung over - back to normal I guess. I’ve had 2 exams in the last week, the first one was so-so, the second I did really well on. As far as I know we’ll get the marks back on Monday so I’ll probably update this post with how well I’ve done =]

I’m thinking of having a LAN at my flat in a week or so, just depends on who’s available and when, I’ll be a bring your own box and I’ll see if I can borrow a switch from Freeside to get it all LAN’d up. I have my wireless access point running again so if you want to connect over wifi you’re more than welcome to. Bring guitar hero controllers too

I’m heading off back to university this Saturday morning after a pretty eventful (and expensive) Christmas. I’m trying to find something to do Saturday night if anyone’s up for doing anything, and Sunday night we’re in the Old Gray Mare (by we I mean Lawrence, Ben, Dan and Ollie) - anyone’s welcome to tag along.

I decided to buy my self a double duvet for my uni room considering I have the two single beds to my self, I’m going to take some duct tape or something and try and tie the beds together, should be good fun. Hopefully now the beds wont part in the middle of the night and I end up in a pile on the floor.

So yeah, this semester I’m going to try and be less antisocial and go out a lot more, which means Spiders every Saturday. Also I need my hair sorting out, it’s annoying me with the state it’s in now. Do I get it all cut off?

So something stupid/funny/expensive happened to me today. I’m coming near the end of the programming project I’m doing for work, it’s down to a couple of tweaks to the GUI, testing and publishing to the web, so today I decided to get PayPal and credit card transactions added and all working right. The system basically allows you to order prints from a football club, customise the job in several ways, then pay for it.

It was all going pretty well, things are dropping into place nicely, so then I place an order. Just a simple thing, photograph in a frame for delivery. Got to putting in my credit card details “Card Rejected”. Oh. The credit card system is stupid to setup anyway so initially I thought I’d just configured it wrong. After playing around for a while with POST objects I’d decided it was right and my card was just being stupid - it is just a Visa Electron and I know some stuff doesn’t accept them, never mind.

So my boss was behind me, so I nabbed his card and tried it. HUGE SUCCESS!, the order was placed, then the recept popped up “£2950″. Oh fuck, I missed the division.

This is incase I don’t get the chance to say it before the big day! My christmas shopping is almost done, gotta grab something else for a family member and then a couple things for someone very special to me

I’m back at work this week porting some software to work on the net, I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say, but I can see what I’m programming being used a lot by a lot of people, plus the amount of experience this has given me in PHP and SQL is invaluable. It’s nice seeing a lot of the programming techniques and ideas I’ve learned this semester at university having real world applications rather than just sinareos provided by lecturors.

So yeah, my christmas list to Santa: - one MP3 player to replace my dying 3g iPod (perhapse a first generation Zune?), one nvidia 7950GTX2 or a 8800GTS (depending which is better, besides DX10 support I really don’t know), and a new battery for my Tablet PC because mine is fubar. If anyone fancies buying me one of these I won’t say no =]

At the request of various people on IRC, I’ve decided to start spamming this blog with my random thoughts instead of flooding #freeside and #vendetta with useless crap about my life when I think out loud - by out loud I mean through my keyboard.

Anyway, things are looking pretty up at the moment; I’m going to be coming home really early this year because of coursework deadlines all being around the same date and cancellation of labs and lectures in the last week. I should be back in Barnsley around the 7^th or 8^th. All I have left at uni now is two pieces of coursework to hand in, one of them being pong which I need to write up a nice little usermanual for, and the other being some quantitative methods work on vectors and matrices.

The courseworks are coming along pretty well, I’ve spend an excessive amount of time fucking around with pong and from that I’m pretty sure I’ve getting my head around C# and the way it handles things, I’ve made lots of sexy classes and I’m toying around with namespaces, as well as integrating lots of stuff Rob mentioned in passing during lectures – they way I’m seeing it is if I can find an excuse to try something new in my program and provide a reasonable excuse in the comments to why I’ve used it I might get some extra marks. Who knows? Worse case scenario I’ve learned how to use them in case I ever need to.

So yeah, I should be in college next Monday, that’s the 10^th of December (am I even allowed to come into college now? I’m not a student or anything. I have my old student card still, purely for the hilarity of my photograph, John Harrison – the serial killer XD). But yeah, people best be there Monday second period!

I’m going to be meeting up with someone pretty special to me and hopefully heading off down to the Room afterward as well. Speaking of which I need plans for new years, me and Earny went to the room last year and it owned quite a lot, so that sounds like a good plan, but I want to know what everyone else is doing before I commit to being somewhere.

I was pretty ill all of last week thanks to a bad case of man flu so this next week or so will be über catch up here at uni, so expect lack of updatage.

 Things are going pretty well here besides that,  I break up from University for Christmas on the 14th of December, so I’m expecting to have some house parties to attend when I get back

If anyone wants to meet up I’ll be in Eastgate common room Monday to Wednesday on the last week of college because I’m seeing a pretty special guy (you know who you are ^^) and it’d be great to go for a drink with people I’ve not seen since Summer.

After eating a very bad lasagne at my halls of residence canteen a week ago, which I’m sure gave me mild food poisoning, I’ve been avoiding eating the pre-paid meals I have here at the Lawns, but a barron cupboard (I only went shopping Wednesday too) and an empty wallet forced me to go up. The queues from the first couple of weeks which lead you through the canteen, past the bar and down some stairs, had all but deminished to a few people stood outside, obviously a lot of other people feel the same way I do about it. So I quickly got in.

I was presented with a several soggy looking things bubbling away in hotpans in front of me, I couldn’t identify any of them. Rather than be rude I asked a woman stood behind them holding a plate what the closest thing to me was, “Cheese, ham and mushroom pasta”. That sounded alright, so I picked up a plate of that.

I then walked to the next isle where there was a selection of roast potatoes, minted new potatoes and sweede. None of it looks very appealing. I grabbed a couple of potatoes and a spoonful of sweed, which a girl stood behind me tried to grab out of my hand as I was placing it on my plate, it went everywhere.

The sweet was some kind of pale jam with rice pudding, which I gave a miss at and picked up a half frozen lemon cake slice, and a shot glass of orange juice which is apparently a starter.

So me and Naill sit down and start eating, the potatoes ended up being still raw in the middle, the sweede was tasteless and the pasta was hard. I ate as much as I could, leaving the potatoes. Why is it this bad? Back in Barnsley college the food in the canteen was amazing, they sold pasta pots to die for and they used to let the catering students cook for them, so you knew you weren’t eating mass produced crap. I’m really unimpressed with the state of the food here.

I’m going to email my warden later on and going to ask if I can become self catered. The only reason I’d applied not to be was because I liked the idea that no matter how little money I had I knew I always had a meal waiting for me when I got back, but they’re just not worth the money.

Pong! The name of my first real C# program. I managed to get it fully operational and, as far as I know, bugless in the space of an hour. I’m pretty impressed with my self. I snagged the beginnings of the source code from my lecturer, Rob Miles to get the ball rolling (or bouncing in this case) and ended up completely re-writing it, and during this weekend I’m going to sex it up a bit.

I’m hoping to convert it to XNA and get some Xbox 360 compatibility going, I fear I’m becoming more and more corrupt by Microsoft as this course progresses. Although the university does have freeside, I’m not up there as often as I’d like to be…