Lord d'Eath's Stuff

So... It's been ages since my last post, I know. I'm sorry

What's happened between then and now? We've (my flatmates and I, plus Dave - Yana's boyfriend) gone bowling twice. First time I lost (i.e. Came last), the second time I won and totally thrashed everyone else. The others now believe that I spent every waking hour at the bowling centre between the two sessions. It's a lie. I'm just good sometimes and bad others.

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Long time no post... I blame the fact that I really haven't been doing much. I ordered a nice wireless access point on Thursday evening for delivery next Thursday but it seems that Initial City Link already have it in their possession for delivery on Monday. A certain friend of mine says that they'll keep it in their warehouse until Thursday but I am hoping that they'll deliver it on Monday, since their website says that the scheduled delivery date is Monday. We shall see who is correct.

Also my room fridge arrived on Friday. It's pretty cool (pun not intented) and worryingly it's not much smaller than the one in our kitchen so I'm keeping the vast majority of my cold stuff in it now. It's even got a mini ice box thing where I can keep a couple of packs of rolls since they won't fit in our far-too-small freezer.

Front view of the fridge.

Inside view of it.

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Started actually learning Java today. It's not majorly hard, though I am still getting confused with the 'default' code that the IDE gives us when we start new classes. That said I managed to complete the work for the next three weeks in under an hour - half of our two-hour tutorial - so I just spent the rest of the lesson playing around to see what else I could make it do. I determined that for loops work in the same way I'd expect them to (I'd say the same as PHP, but it's  not quite the same since PHP is typless so PHP's for ($i=0; $i<10; $i++) becomes (int i=0; i<10; i++) in Java), switch statements worked just as I expected, too, though unfortunately they only accept integers (C-style) while PHP quite happily accepts strings for switch statements. I then started playing around with creating an interface (i.e. a GUI). I didn't really achieve much there, though, and was just able to create a 'frame' with a progress bar. I could happily change the value of that progress bar, but I couldn't get it to loop with a slight delay to give it a nice "Hello World"-for-progress-bars effect (instead I ended up creating an infinite loop that crashed the IDE). In retrospect I should have given the frame a text box and a button as well to allow the user (me) to enter a number between 1 and 100, press the button and then had the progress bar set itself to that length. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow or next week

Other lessons were boring... Completed this week's and next week's work for Computer Systems & Internet Technology in today's tutorial so it'll be back to entertaining myself next week, and Professional & Business Skills was dull, as predicted. I really have no intention of talking about CVs and Transferrable Personal Skills.

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I was given a new timetable today that moved my Professional & Business Skills tutorial to Tuesdays and added in a maths lecture on Friday mornings at 10, so I no longer have Fridays off.  Baaahh.

My Professional & Business Skills lecture was boring but needed.  I think it's going to become a module that I really hate but at the same time really need to do as I currently suck at interviews and similar businessy type things.  Got to write myself a CV over the next couple of weeks so that'll be great fun.  We've been given a sheet with a list of job vacancies and we have to write our CV as if we're applying for one of them and then make a 5-minute presentation explaining why we are good for the job.

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Sorry about the lack of post yesterday but I was totally knackered after getting back from Newport that I went to bed fairly soon. So yes, yesterday I caught the train to Newport to see Serenity. I left my room around 12:50 and managed to hold up everyone at the train station for about 10 minutes while the ticket dude sorted out my Young Person's Railcard, and then the train to Cardiff that was supposed to arrive at 1:10 (the one that goes down through Cardiff and then onto Barry) was delayed by 14 minutes so I ended up catching one that was going to Radyr. I was kind of hoping it would actually go to Cardiff as the sign thing just said "Calling at Taffs Well and Radyr", while the spoken announcement listed loads of places after Radyr including Cardiff Central. Stupid system. Anyway I eventually got to Cardiff Central at 1:40 and immediately had no idea where I was supposed to be going. After looking at the signs at the bottom of the flights of stairs I worked out that two platforms were for trains going West towards Swansea etc, two were for trains going North to Pontypridd & Merthyr Tydfil and South to Penarth and Barry and the remaining two platforms were for trains going East out of Wales - towards London and Bristol. Since Newport is one of the few places in Wales that is East of Cardiff I wandered up onto those platforms to look for a train. Both of the trains scheduled to arrive were set to depart around 2:25-2:30 - half an hour after I was supposed to meet Peter in Newport. I had no choice, though, so I waited around and caught the 2:30 train to Bristol Temple Meads. Newport is the first stop and it took a whole ten minutes to get there. Seems a bit crap after having waited on the platform for 45 minutes. So all in all my trip to Newport that should have taken 50 minutes ended up taking almost two hours.

But anyway Peter arrived and we went off to McDonald's and the cinema after almost turning right to start driving the wrong way up a dual-carriageway. Cool. We also popped off to Asda before we saw Serenity so Peter could buy a belt and I could buy the hair brush, hair bands and drawing pins I've been waiting to buy for weeks.

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