Blog - November 2004

30/11/2004 - Happy Harry -

Okay I'm a lot happier now. I've copied up almost all of my mechanics notes and I'll finish them tomorrow afternoon, and I have finished my assessed problem sheet, which is the last one I have to do this term =D. (I do have to do one over christmas though, but shhh!) Also in the less than 10 days my site has been up on this domain I've recieved over 20% of the visitors I'd recieved in 9 months at my old site! I think I officially have a bigger 'e-penis' now ;), oops that key word'll increase my site ratings again!

While I'm talking about the site I promise to at least try to have the Ely mIRC page up by tomorrow night, but I have to work first. I also have to rearrange the menus because I'm going to be adding a new month to the bloggage bit. I may also add 'the blog ring' while I'm at it, because although I'm not a member of 'the blog ring' I'm hoping that I soon will be. Check SimonGs site on the left hand side of his front page to see the blog ring now if you can't wait for tomorrow =P.

30/11/2004 - A-fucking-ddicted -

I have an addiction this computer and to video games, I do seriously, and it's fucking up my working and general happiness. Thing is, the stuff I do on the computer is all that I'm finding interesting at the moment. So it's stupid to think about stopping using my computer completely (especially after how much I've spent on it).

My solution is that this computer is going to be off whenever I'm not using it. So if I want to work on my website or do some mapping, I turn it on, do it, then when I get bored or finish, I turn it off. I'm only going to allow myself to play video-games as either a reward for doing university work and on weekend evenings as rexalation. Simply put I've got to learn control, when I need to work to work, and to play about on the PC when I've done the work.

I guess this blog sounds really sad. Well yeah I guess it is, but there we go. I'm going to turn this thing off now and go make lunch. Might see if I can do some work on the problem sheet before going to lectures. Oh yeah I know I can't write poems or doing anything english (in the accademic way) like for toffee.

29/11/2004 - 'Poem' -

My earlier upbeat mood should be compared to a beautiful snowflake, in a desert.

	My soul is drowned in meaninglessness,
	I am alone in the day & the night,
	separated from the one I love,
	life devoid of responsibility,
	my independence has been lost,
	surrounded by atheists,
	cold, helpless and suffocated.

How are you Harry? "Oh I'm just fine."

29/11/2004 - General Update -

Writing such a long blog the other day seems to have taken it out of me! Well I was extremely lazy over the weekend and did pretty much nothing. In fact I was in a bad mood for the majority of the weekend, being very 'What's the point in doing anything?'. I feeling a lot more upbeat this week. I have lots of work to do though, including a new assessed problem sheet, weyhey!

One of the few vaguely constructive things I did over the weekend was sort out the bugs in ElymIRC and re-wrote the installation script (well I in fact pretty much removed it, now you just have to replace mirc.ini), I'll be putting up Ely mIRC v2.12 page reasonably soon and then start work on a re-vamped version, v3.00!

I'm planning to go to the Shotokan Karate Union Club sometime this week. It's not my style of karate, but it's similar and I'm going to be asking if it's okay train with them but not change my style, katas, and just keep my Wadoryu grade. The clubs I've actually already joined seemed to have died, so I'll just have join some more. While I'm talking about Uni stuff, I've also decided I'm going to be spending more on food, cause simply, I don't like being hungry.

Anyway going to go have a look at the assessed problem sheet and then go to meet my seminar group to do some work for the afternoon. Sorry that this was just 'what I'm up to' blog, I'll try and think of a more interesting topic for my next one.

26/11/2004 - Hard Trances pwns -

I've been coding for this site for the last few hours. The result is that my vinyl collection is now viewable in the collections section, the date is now aligned to the right border and there are some more menu options in misc. I was randomly interrupted by drunk people, who don't live here who wanted to talk to me, yeah, that was fun =/.

I've just been reading other peoples blogs and it seems everyone else seems to talk about their opinions or possibly their thoughts on abstract ideas or concepts. I on the other hand seem to talk about what I've done, what I'm doing and what I'm planning on doing in the real world. Perhaps I'm too goal orientated, the number of to do lists I write has to be unhealthy. So I think I'm going to try to alter my blogging style somewhat. The thing is, I change my opinion quite often, and am often embrassed about what my opinion previously was. I don't like writing down my opinion on something because then I can be quoted. A very useful tool in a dicussion is the "oh but I meant this, you must have misinterpted what I said" which I can't really say if I write down clearly what I mean and think. Perhaps I should be less obessed with being right all the time too.

Changing the subject somewhat, I now have a rather strong desire to buy 12 or so vinyls off tidy.com, because I decided to have a browse of the new releases after checking if my soundbytes on my vinyl collection page worked. I love this music, and just to listen to, I don't really know why, it's hard to explain. What annoys me is when people just claim it's the same thing repeated over and over. Yes, the riff is repeated, it's dance music, but listen to the bass, the other synths and the build, they all change and develop, almost all hard dance music is 'progressive' so it can't possibly be all the same by definition. I personally find that after listening to hard trance, almost everything else sounds boring and repetative.

I put it to you that 'rock' where the same bar is repeated over and over and over but with different lyrics each time is far less skilled and far more repetative than the hard trance I listen to. I know serval people who can write good songs in the rock style (well I think it's rock, I'm not too good on the different music genres, but it's the stuff almost everyone seems to like and seems to think they are indiviual because they like it) but I only know one that can knock out a decent dance tune (Matt-e-h. I salute you). I agree that groups like U2 and Radiohead are something special and don't fall into this 'less skilled' catoragy, but I think the vast majority of groups in the gerne explained above have far less of a unique skill than your average DJ/Producer.

Oh and if you're at Imperial College and like the kinda stuff on my vinyls please e-mail so we can get in contact, I need to talk to some like minded people on this before I go insane.

25/11/04 - Recovery in sight -

As you may or may not have gathered from my previous blogs, I've been rather tired over the last few days, and quite stressed because of the huge amount of work I have to do. Thankfully recovery is in sight. I'm going to bed early again tonight, in the hope I'll be refreshed by tomorrow. I also managed to finish my Lab Report and I'm now quite happy with it, I also manged to copy up 3 sets of mechanics lecture notes, so I only have one left to copy up. Although I'm going to be given another tomorrow and I still have to do all the classworks and problems sheets, but I think if I work hard over the weekend I should be able to either finish them or make a large dent in them.

In other news, I made my first box map for CS Source earlier (a box map is bascially a box with a light and a few objects in, just for you to get the basics for the editor), I'm planning to re-released my first ever map, cs_assault_hzd for CS Source, thankfully the original has been lost forever, this version should be reasonable, hopefully, and as cs_assault probably isn't going to be released for CS:S it's not so bad. I do plan to do other stuff like, update this site (I may port my vinyl collection page over the weekend), write ElyBot and update ElymIRC, and write another CSS design in a different format just to see that I can. The thing is I generally just do what I feel like doing, so nothing ever seems to get finished. Oh well!

24/11/04 - Lab Report! -

I have a lab report in on friday (26/11) I did the first draft of it today, but there is a problem, it sucks. The thing is, I don't think I've actually missed anything out. I mean I've missed stuff it says you should say for your experiment, but only when it doesn't apply to my experiment because it's computing lab, not electronics or optics. For example, there is section entitled results, errors & discussion. The thing is I don't really have any results, what I'm measuring is the accuracy of something, so I only have errors, but those are in the technique not the experiment, so what do I talk about? The main problem is, the program is designed to test your programming skills, not test anything experimentally, so the idea of writing a lab report on it is flawed.

Anyways, I'm very very tired, due to staying up and watching Rambo 2 (although if I'd gone to bed I'd have been woken up at 12:30 am so it's okay really) last night, so I'm going to go to bed as soon as I've written this blog. I removed the tracking account from here because i) it wasn't working properly ii) it makes the whole site invalid HTML (now that I've removed it it's all valid xhtml 1.0) iii) I have stats with my webhosting. I may make that public and put it on the site information page, but for now I'm just going to sleep. Good Night.

22/11/2004 - Headache -

Yeah, I've got a headache, I had it before I went to a lecture at 5pm given by the world's most boring man (our new relativity lecturer) on stuff that I already know, so my headache is worse now. I haven't got any work done today (except going to my lectures) which isn't good because I've got loads of work to do! Including a Lab Report I'm not sure how to write for friday. So I'm going to go to bed early in the hope I'll be able to think straight tomorrow. Sorry that wasn't much blog, I'm going to be writing my opinion out in several small rants about various topic in the near future, then you'll have some thing (slightly more) interesting to read.

21/11/2004 - New Design... Argh!!!! -

I fucking HATE microsoft internet explorer! Argh!!!! okay... now that I've said that I think I can carry on calmly. I spent about 5 hours or so straight to produce this site design, I had it finished it was lovely. Then I opened it in IE, argh! I can't be bothered to explain, but I had to recode the css quite a lot to get it to look the same on Internet Explorer as Firefox. As a result it isn't dynamic, and I set the width for 1024*768, even though I use higher, because the majority who view my site use it, if you're using lower I really couldn't give a fuck anymore tbh.

I'm quite pleased with the look of the site, I might try to improve it and modify it but I think this'll be the look of the site for the time being at least. Oh I can't cook rice, I just discovered... anyway the background to the banner is taken from this manga pic of tifa from FFVII, and isn't my work I don't actually know's who's it is, oh well. I've put a new tracking account on the site, which will have been zero from about this afternoon, so let's see how many visits I get!

20/11/2004 - New address, new hosting, new site -

I bought www.spoonofdeath.com and some hosting to go with it from the nice people at 34sp.com last night. The new address should be working by monday hopefully, I'll be transfering across the site and putting a redirect page up here. I may still use my blueyonder space to host some files though. I've put up a small IRC page which you can probably tell by looking at the menu on the left. I won't be updating this site with any new content, except for news, untill I have the new design finished.

Yes that's right I've decided to change the design yet again! I wrote this site 'design' in about 5 minutes, with frames because they are easy to do. Thing is frames are quite evil, not from a maintence of site point of view, they are a gift for that, but for referencing my site from other pages, you have to go to the index page and then navigate to what you want. Now it's fuck backwards combatability and old browsers, I'm going to use CSS and XHTML the way it's meant to be used, if people don't have a browser that can cope, it's their problem not mine. I'm not going to wade through huge number of tables, rows and cells, just so someone on a crappy system can view my page and for it to look the same. I'm going use CSS, the future, which makes it infinitately neater and easier to work with! ... I'm going go make me some dinner now.

19/11/2004 - Half-Life 2 & IRC -

I just completed Half-Life 2, great game. Simply stunning to look at and the gameplay is superb, oh and did I mention the amazing physics? They are amazing. The ending is pretty cool, and much like the ending of Half-Life, can't wait for Half-Life 3, hopfully it won't take as long!

I'd just like to take this opportunity to have a go at the people who were endlessly bitching about having to use steam and being delayed from playing, threatening lawsuits against valve and other such through the steam support forums... to these people, get a grip, video games are great, but it really they aren't that important. If a company wants to use their online system they developed for free for the benefit of the Half-Life community to make piracy on their new game as difficult as possible I think it's perfectly reasonable! Anyway if you really wanted it you should have preloaded like me, there was no delay for users who bought it this way!

I'm surprisingly awake considering I had five hours sleep last night! I'm not doing any work tonight though of course, never work on friday nights. It's probably a bad idea to be writing my news entry while watching Touch of Frost on TV and chatting. I'm not really doing any of them very well oops! Well anyway, I should probably tell you I've created an IRC channel #\-\az on Quakenet. They'll be an IRC section up on this site in the near future, though I think I'm just going to go to bed early tonight.

18/11/2004 - Pink Limes -

I could say that while reviewing my work folder today I realised that I've done only one of four classworks, none of three problem sheets and copied up 7 of 13 lectures. While the amount of work stated that I've done is true, the implication that I was surprised to find this isn't. I've been quite aware of this mechanics mountain building up, I just haven't cared. Mechanics is both boring and simple, yet the lecture seems to be able to make it confusing, which once you work out what he's saying, it really isn't.

I have however decided it is time to combat this! So over the next few evenings and the weekend I will be doing about as much mechanics as I can possibly bear. Of course I have to write out the assessed problem sheet tonight before I do anything else, and I also have work for my seminar presentation to do but this is no excuse!

All this means I'm not going to have as much time to script/code/map for the foreseeable future. But! If I know me well (and I think I do) this will probably mean I get more scripting/coding/mapping done that I would otherwise, I just seem to work better when pressurised. I also have a small tendency to go slightly insane in these situations also, so don't be surprised if the site's colour scheme changes to bright pink and lime green.

16/11/2004 - No-Life -

At 8 am GMT this morning, Half-Life 2 was unlocked via steam. At 8:10 am GMT this morning, I was at my computer playing Half-Life 2. It is pretty damn great, dispite being delayed for over a year it still looks great! The gameplay is fast & fun. The puzzle bits are a little wierd, and some seemed impossible... I think I knocked the item I needed off a cliff, but I managed to get around it with some nifty useage of the 'gravity gun'.

I did manage to go to my lectures and seminar although I'd rather not have. Other than that I didn't do any work though. To make up for this I'm going to go to the library after lunch tomorrow and firstly finish the assessed problem sheet, and then have a go at some of the lecture specific problem sheets I haven't done yet. Still got bags of other stuff to do, but I can't see much of it getting done =/. I think now I'm going to make myself some toast (because I'm quite hungry) and then go to bed (as it's 23:30).

15/11/2004 - Lonely Thoughts -

I had a great weekend with Rachel, lots of fun, thing is now, after having great company all the time for the last 48 hours, I feel very lonely, and I'm not sure what to do about it. *Sigh*. I've just been set the second assessed problem sheet, this will probably mean I'll now have to learn all that mechanics that I've been pretty much ignoring after learning what I needed to know for the first problem sheet.

Having spent all my time with Rachel this weekend I've not done any work, uni-wise or for my own interest. I want to start a map project, just to create something, I might go for a cs map where I'm familiar with all the entities, or a simpler co map for natural-selection. I really shouldn't start these yet though, with Mechanics to catch up on and this assessed problem sheet to do by Friday. Another thing I want to learn is some server side scripting, so I can improve this website, and make it easier for me to enter news via a web based system rather than me writing the HTML and uploading, I don't imagine it would be too hard to do. Oh and did I mention I need to catch up on sleep too.

I think I'm going to go to the library for a couple of hours and have a stab at this problem sheet straight off, the mechanics looks pretty easy this time, simple potential stuff, so I might be able to do it without going through all my notes. Maths is always pretty easy for me, I just need to stick at it, I probably should have done a maths degree (skills wise), but then again I'd probably rather be doing a computing course (interest wise), I think I've still made the best choice of degree I could have.

I'm really looking forward to Half-Life 2 tomorrow, I've already pre-loaded the game through Steam so it just needs to be unlocked, I might defrag my hard disk later. If I've got the problem sheet sorted before tomorrow it will mean I can play lots of HL2 without worrying about work for a while.

Talking of games, I did reach a decision that I would buy an Xbox, but now I've gone back that, I'm counting on Half-Life 2 to satisfy my gaming needs for the mean-time at least. I might consider the an Xbox again after I've played lots of Half-Life 2 and if that's the case I'll also have to investigate if Xbox live is available through my halls internet connection.

If you didn't guess I'm pretty much just writing down my thoughts at the moment, I haven't really had time to sort them out in my head and I'm guessing writing might help me get them clear. One thing I do know is that I'm going upload this and to go to library and do some work...

11/11/04 - Bar Duty & Site Update-

Well I take it back, working behind the bar was surprisingly fun, although to be fair I did play monopoly with 4 other people for about 2 and half of the 4 hours (because it was pretty dead). Pulling my first pint went surprisingly well, not very hard really is it? I did manage to cut my finger on the ice though, 'foretunately' the cut was disinfected when I got JD on it. I'm going to go to bed now because it's very early and I have lab at 9am tomorrow (at least it's not lectures). If I post later today I'll just put it in a new paragraph.

Oo! Two updates in one day, aren't you lucky! I've edited the menu slightly, essentially removed the valid html images and the firefox image and added a counter. The counter is a free one you can get one for your site if you click on it. I added the visits from the eXTReMe tracking which is why it's already at 800 ish. My pages are still all valid HTML 4.0 Transitional and I'm going to continue to validate them, but I doubt you care, so I've just put a comment in the source instead. I've edited the Half-Life Resources page slightly too. Only 5 days till Half-Life 2, oooo!

I've been doing quite a lot of mapping, mainly on my NS map, but I'm not particularly happy with the results I'm getting so I might try something else for a while, like making an unrelated map to see if I can get something I'm happy with. Anyways off to dinner now, and yey! 1 day till Rachel visits!

10/11/2004 - Web Tracking -

I've put the free 'eXTReMe tracking' back on my site, there's obviously going to be a dip in the visitors over the last few weeks as the script hasn't been on the site! If I change hosting I'm guessing I'll have to change it, though atm that doesn't appear to be happening. I'm gonna see if I can get me a free counter too.

In other news, I've spent a lot of today working on my ns map, called at the moment ns_darkfuture, but I want to change that if I can think of something better, but damn my lack of creativity I can't, least not at the moment. I've got to arrange to be stabbed in the arm (need an MMR vaccine) at some point which I technically could have done that today, but being stabbed in the arm isn't a terribly appealing idea so I didn't.

Rachel is coming to visit this weekend, yey! This means I probably won't get any work done (damn shame), or any update to this site (oh well). The week is dragging a little now that I'm looking forward to the weekend, but only 2 days to go. Tonight is going to drag even more because I've got to work in the hall bar, which I used all of once... great!

8/11/2004 - Boredom -

  Seriously, work wise, I'm totally bored. I thought going to university would mean that I no longer had to listen to people go on and on and on about stuff I already understood, but it's actually just as bad if not worse. It'll probably pick up and prove too difficult for me now, lol.

On the point of non-physics work, I've changed the menus on this site and spilt the news into month sections. I've got my hands on the Source SDK, so I may try making a scoutknivez map for CS:S and then try remaking some of the original maps that won't get ported (nuke, estate, train, backalley). I also should get on with my NS map or it'll never get done. Although instead of mapping or coding I've been playing FF7, Halo on legendary, Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike Source, oops!

7/11/2004 - Lazy Weekend -

I haven't updated my site in ooo days, so I thought I'd let you know what I'd done this weekend, which is, absolutely nothing. Today I've spent 10-11 hours playing FF7 and that was by 7pm. I've cooked myself a couple of sweet and sour stir-frys which were lovely and ate ham-cheese in raisin and cinimon bagels for my lunchs, also very nice! I have a 'horrible' desire to buy an x-box so I can play Halo 2 and Halo co-op and Project Gotham Street Racing 1 & 2. I am seriously considering buying one although I vowed never to buy a console again after my dreamcast (sega ftw).

I haven't spent the now £155 surplus I have, though that maybe be going on an x-box, I said I'd buy a domain name and hosting for this site, but my addition of content has dropped dramically recently and unless it picks up again, it's not going to be worth forking out the cash to be honest. That said I feel quite guilty about doing nothing productive over the last couple of days so I may write some content soon.

3/11/2004 - Javascript Changes + Problem Sheet -

Well I've worked out answers for all the problems on the assessed problem sheet, I'm not entirely sure about my discription of how an astronaut in orbit can tell that he's not in an inertial frame, but oh well. I'll be checking my answers with couple of others then copying them into the answer book and handing it in. I haven't finished copying up section 2 of mechanics, but now that I don't need to know it for the problem sheet the boringness of it is too much to get it all done in one go. I haven't written that letter yet, I'll start it now before I go to dinner.

There's been a very small change to the site, in that I moved the javascript for displaying the current date to an external file, I also wrote a file that would say if it was a special day of sorts but I was having problems with displaying some default text if it wasn't a special day so I haven't included that at the moment. I also corrected some spelling and grammar errors lower down this page, though there is probably still some down there.

2/11/2004 - Physics! -

Well I've done next to no coding of any kind over the last few days, mainly because I've been doing lots of physics (I realised I knew no mechanics, had done none of the maths problem sheets, and have been set an assessed problem sheet for the end of the week)! I have thankfully work out how to do all of the problems on the acessed problem sheet, so I'm going to write that up tomorrow. I'll also write up section 2 of my mechanics notes (I've done section one today and yesterday). I have however learnt a pretty nifty thing I can use in a mIRC script so I might have to do some mIRC scripting this weekend.

I'm going to try and write some more info in the about me section of my site this weekend, maybe start work on the new links section, though I cannot promise anything on the front of the latter as that's quite a big job. There is also the chance that'll I'll just to absolutely nothing over the weekend while I still have chance (the work is slowly getting harder and harder, not that I mind). Oh I got that Maths Mastery Test back, got 100% but then again if I'd dropped any marks I'd have be appalled as it was so easy. I had really better write a letter to Big Jim the head master of Adams' to apolagise for not being at speech day, but I meant to do that a couple of weeks ago. I'll do it tomorrow (he says).

Oh #dehRootsl33t on QuakeNet is a l33t chan =), one of my new idle places, scary thing is I'll get G-lined from the network if more than 5 people from my halls connect to Quakenet as we all have the same ip. Well no G-linage yet so I don't think there 5 Quakenet users in our halls. Oh and I found my sock I won't have to go knocking people out anymore.