Lord d'Eath's Stuff

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.

Read more... (1650 more characters...)

How to start... I was supposed to wash all my dirty clothes today but never got round to it. I blame the constant hoard of people around the laundry room. Gonna have to do it tomorrow, though. Also tomorrow Peter & I will be going to see Serenity which should be fun.

Flat mates are out at the union again, and they've left the kitchen in a total tip. Again. I have photographic evidence today, though:

View as I enter the kitchen..

Read more... (1890 more characters...)

Well it seems that in my infinite forgetfulness I failed to write an entry yesterday. I almost forgot to write one today. I blame the fact that ad-hoc wifi has died again, leaving the laptop a little redundant.

Wednesday
Wednesday was shopping day. Around 2pm we (Gary, Nat, Jen, ... dude who's name I think is Dave... and myself) headed down to the train station and caught the train to Pontypridd. The train was totally packed but we were only on it for a minute or two so it didn't matter much. Once we got off the train we had to cross the bridge thing above the tracks, the steps of which were occupied by 3 chavs who insisted on sitting across the steps so that only one person could get by at one time. I was tempted to kick one of them as I probably would have had the support of a good 20+ people who'd just got off the train with us but we had more pressing matters at hand. We walked through Pontypridd for a while, and the town reminded me of Lewes for some reason. I think it was the way that it was made up entirely of side streets. It looked as if it hadn't had a structual upgrade since the middle ages - just like Lewes. We found somewhere to get some lunch, ate stuff, including drinking a bottle of Sprite with a lovely foreign (possibly Arabic) label, then went to Somerfield. I confirmed my theory that Somerfield sucks as a supermarket and it turns out that the one in Pontypridd is even smaller than the one in Uckfield, so my attempt at getting a reasonable quantity of food was thwarted by having to purchase that aforementioned food at a crappy store. After a bit of searching we found the bus station and waited for the bus that goes right up to Glamorgan Court. We had no intention of carrying loads of shopping up the Hill of Doom. That bus cost £1.45 and lasted no more than 10 minutes - Google Maps says that it's 1.9 miles between Pontypridd and Treforest - so it cost the five of us over £7 just to get back from Pontypridd. It doesn't take a genius here to realise that £7 is around about the maximum price that Tesco charge for home shopping delivery, so we are going to try and do our shopping online and have Tesco deliver to us in future. It'll be a hell of a lot cheaper, easier and we'll have a much nicer choice than crappy Somerfield.

Read more... (3907 more characters...)

Had a couple of ever-so-interesting tutorials today. The Computer Systems & Internet Technology module looks like it's going to at least start out to be a repeat of the A-level units that we did with Greaves and that none of us really understood very much. Stuff about processor architecture... We almost did some work in it, too! But only almost. We basically looked through the Powerpoint presentation that will be used in Thursday's lecture. I managed to arrive an hour early for that tutorial, too. I thought it was at 12 but it was actually at 1. Lovely. I had to re-download Portable Firefox, onto my personal network drive as the machines in that room didn't have USB ports on the front..

Then I had a Computer Programming tutorial where we really did nothing. We loaded the program that we'll be using to code our wonderful Java programs in, got shown where we could get at its installer on the School's network and then left, basically. The installer for that IDE is about 250MB so it won't very easily fit on my 128MB flash drive so I'm going to have to bring the USB cable for my NW-HD5H in and copy it to that instead.

Read more... (2504 more characters...)

While today was technically my first day of lessons and stuff I still haven't got much done. I had a tutorial for my "Introduction to Multimedia and the Web" module, the work for which I completed in about 15 minutes. It was basically "open a new document. find the University logo. find some urls to some stuff. find a book online and in the library. save the document", so easy stuff, really. Then I just had a look around the system to see what was installed and so on. Firefox wasn't installed - only Internet Explorer - so I just downloaded Portable Firefox (Google it) to my flash drive. No way am I going to use IE

Then I had a lecture for Professional & Business Skills in which they were basically saying "omfg we screwed up timetables!" so nothing's really happening for that this week. I had a tutorial for it at 3pm and it lasted a whole ten minutes because we had nothing to do. Got to print off a couple of things for next week though.

Read more... (586 more characters...)