Blog - February 2006
15:55 - 28/02/2006 - Flex!
Ooo, first proper blog on the new site, how exciting... or possibly not. Got a few things I want to tell y'all so I'll just jump in and say em. Getting the net back as predictably brought my work level down significantly, mostly caused by me spending all day saturday and sunday evening watching the second season of Battlestar Galactica. Although on sunday I played in a 2v2 Counter-Strike Source tourny organised by Subs over at PUB. Here's a nice diagram of the results (me and Guardian won, just so you know). My favourite part was probably auto-sniping bATTER (the PUB Clan Leader) through a tree, so much so, I made a gif of it and it's now my sig on their forums, ehehehe.
After being a complete geek for this weekend, hopefully I'll do something slightly more adventurous this week. Last wednesday I went indoor climbing (Tom dragged me along), it was good fun, though it made my forearms ache the next day, the guy supervising me and the other new person wasn't too thrilled about us randomly turning up and I missed a weights session (though I probably got more exercise), so I don't know if I'll go again tomorrow. Now I'd better see if I can get myself to do some work!
11:45 - 15/02/2006 - Feeling Good
I had a pretty damn good weekend, stayed in on friday so nothing interesting happened there. On saturday Tom R. and I went to virgin to take advantage of their 5 for £30 offer. I bought a CD of Daft Punk Remixes, Muse - Absolution, Mylo - Destory Rock & Roll, Röyksopp - The Understanding & The best of R.E.M. I'm most enjoying Mylo, though the Muse is good too. There was to be an big outing to Frog that evening, but Gordon decided he wanted to sleep, Ross was going to a house party, Tom S. decided he didn't really want to go out and Paul felt ill, so me and Tom went out by ourselves!
On the tube there we invented Shrumu, the way of least apathy, and tried to follow it at all opportunities through out the night. We were acosted by a crazy christain man in the queue to get in, who I only presume was trying to save our immortal souls, not to much effect. We got in fairly early for once which was damn surprising for us, I tried Red Stripe which is kinda odd but nice. Also tried to talking to a girl who'd asked for a cigarette in the cloakroom queue 'because it was her birthday', not very effectively... I don't know the name of the band that played, but they were pretty good, much better than anything we saw at the museos (not hard though... lol). Me and Tom took a breather at 2:30ish wondering if we'd call it a night (club didn't shut till 4), pointed out a Japanese girl to tom as "damn fine", we decided we'd stay for a while longer and some how a little later, when Tom had gone to get a drink, I ended up dancing with said girl and ... well it was good decision to stay.
We still managed to get out before the rush and spent about 10 minutes walking round the streets trying to find the direct bus to Fulham that tom swore existed. He was right, though we had to sprint to catch it. We thought we were being fairly quiet chatting when we got in, but apprantly everyone in the house heard us, oops. I spent Sunday with a hang over because although I didn't drink much, I forgot to drink any water before I went to bed, or in fact any water for most of the first half of Sunday. Since the weekend I've managed to actually do a classwork and at least start work on some problem sheets. Also gave Tom an arm westle last night, when we did it on my Birthday he beat me in less than half a second, last night it was so close after 2 minutes we just called it a draw. So I'm feeling pretty good, just have to keep up the work now.
14:27 - 11/02/2006 - Still Netless
I'm writing this offline as we still have no internet. I think it's fairly evident now that the router is permanently fucked, and it's going to cost us £100 to get a new one off 'be there'. If we can get in contact to tell them that is. Paul has agreed to pay a share of the cost, so it's going to be £20 each, could be worse. You might have thought, what with no internet, that I would get some work done... or if you actually know me you wouldn't and you'd be right.
I've just finished Need for Speed: Most Wanted, or at least beat #1 on the blacklist and evaded the huge cop chase afterwards. Earlier this week I decided to make a quick demo of me in a 5v5 with hard bots (as I've got no internet), just playing till I died, then trying to make a movie out of it. It took me 18 minutes and 41 kills before I died, pretty good for a first try. However the startmovie command in CSS doesn't work properly, so I've spent several hours trying to convert it to a movie (recording it with digital camera & webcam pointed at the screen!) though my plight would be greatly aided by the net (mainly because the generated sound file is 16 minutes long so gets out of sync by the end, so I need to chop it up and re-sync it, but I have no sound editor).
I've done some more work converting this website to the new design, including altering the design adding little grey boxes around the different parts, so it almost looks like I'm using tables. I've also ported across the blog from my msn space and Livejournal that I made when I couldn't be bothered updating this site (though I had to get the text off the net in Uni and bring it back home to do so...). Now I'm gonna go do some weights (yep, still following the plan after 3 weeks), and maybe once I've had lunch I'll start some physics, as I had to do an assessed lab report I did for friday and whilst I remember that I can work I might get started on my actual courses.
08:57 - 06/02/2006 - Death by Water
I had done quite a lot of work porting my website to the new design, unfortunately one's Tom's mates (Paul in fact) split about a litre of water on the router... so no internet for 102 Farm Lane. Hopefully it'll dry out and work again, or we'll be paying 90 something pounds for a new one. It's a good job I went to investigate really, they were going to leave the soaking wet router on "to dry-out", what you study physics and engineering and you're gonna leave a soaking wet electrical device on and think it'll help? ... right.
02:26 - 05/02/2006 - Can't Sleep
I couldn't sleep, so I decided to think for a while. Things seem so different when you stop and really think about them, I think it'd be a fairly impossible task to describe what I'm talking about to anyone that didn't already know what it is I am talking about... The problem I have when thinking deeply is I'll get stuck if my train of thought takes me anywhere near death or my own mortality, it's just something I don't know how to cope or deal with, I just have to try to ignore it. The problem in deciding not to take account of it is it's very easy to just degrade into living on total automatic, just doing what you feel like doing, guided only by your desires, learnt taboos and your in-built set of rights and wrongs. This rather shallow approach, while probably resulting in the most enjoyable experience for the short-term, isn't how I would like to think people (myself included) should live their lives. I would hope that 'depth' and forethought would be best approach, unfortunately for me (and would guess many others) too much thought will either get you hung up on mortality which generally leads to lonelyness & depression, or you'll start overanalysing the little details of your life, looking for patterns and then seeing evidence for them even if they're not really there. I guess it's a question of finding the middle ground (as it seems to be with everything in life, the viture between the two vices...), just finding that middle ground isn't exactly easy.
16:10 - 04/02/2006 - XFM or not
Tried to go to XFM last night, but we didn't leave the house until 10, which meant we didn't get to Angel Station until about 11:30, and then didn't get to the door until 12:30 by which time it was one in one out, so the three of us that didn't have tickets, said fuck that and went home. Spend most of my night chatting to Paul which was quite fun as I don't him very well but he seems safe. We then watched Battlestar Galatica until everyone that had got in came back. Oh I bought a Hotdog off a street vendor too, it was really nice, though you'd hope so for £3. Also when we got to Angel on the way there I ran all the way up both stationary escalators, every else died about 3/4 of the way up the second one (the second one was god damn long), but I made it all the way! I did then feel a bit sick for then next 30 minutes, but it was okay I was waiting in line to eventually get turned away so it was a fairly good use of my time perhaps.
I nearly said "sod it" at 11:30 because of the size of the queue and because I was feeling ill & tired... I really should have, I could have then caught the tube back instead of the bus. Then again I wouldn't have got to chat to Paul. So swings and round-abouts. Now I'm gonna go do my weights for today, then see if I feel guilty enough to do some physics. (In a separate note, I've manged to hook up a non-wireless internet connection at last, had to steal Tom's Port on the switch to do it, but his computer is fucked so it's okay... =p).
12:02 - 02/02/2006 - Need to learn Physics
My resolution to get my ass in gear and start working fell at the 'Lost' hurdle, but I'm quickly running out of episodes (3 more and I've watched all that are available net or no) so perhaps I'll be able to start work soon with hope of minimal distraction. This of course is highly improbable as I seem to always find something to distract myself with, so I'm going to have to make myself through willpower / possibly *wanting* to work, not just not having distractions. While I maybe failing one of my resolutions horribly, I've have kept my weights schedule for a week and a half and I'm enjoy doing it, so I can see myself keeping it up.
I missed my first lecture this academic year on tuesday, because Gordon convinced me it had been canceled when it hadn't, so it doesn't count obviously ;), plus I'd copied up the notes within an hour of learning that I'd missed it. Of course now my notes are circulating through my housemates who obviously also all missed the lecture because of Gordon.
I'm at Uni for the next few hours because I've got a tutorial at 15:00, so I'm gonna go get me a lunch, and then go review my maths methods notes in the library, I think I can manage that, and if I'm feeling intelligent I'll have a go at the problem sheets, at which point I'll feel stupid again because I won't be able to do them, ahhh well. A cheer for Emma for blogging, and a cheer for Dero for getting in a wired article! (Scarily I met another Emma today, so that's four I know now :S).