Progress? - Tuesday

I found that using my first method of converting Therion to MP3 format didn't work, it left them in terrible quality, my second did but required me to be at the computer and do stuff every few minutes. On the plus side it didn't use so much processor power that it could stop me doing other stuff such as MSN or WoA. I should probably say that most of the WoA stuff I do is not the running, but re-writing and updating of the rules. On the plus side I've recently re-done just about every section and so by the time I start lectures I will not have any more to do, thus freeing up time for Database type stuff and possibly, the gathering of free stuff. In the evening Lorna and Brierley came over to our house and commented that it was very clean, Lorna saw the Ladies Man 2 picture and really likes it, she's a strange one that Lorna. Afterwards we all went to the beach and then back to the Ladies house, it's somewhat nicer than ours (and I don't mean purely in cleanliness) but we didn't have a vast number of choices anyway so that's our fault.

No Job - Monday

First interesting thing of the day involved myself, Pete and Gareth going around looking for part time jobs. We failed to find any, Pete is talking about making a template thing, we'll have to see where that goes. Not too long after getting back, myself and Pete bought the Therion albums and they're very nice. However, we can't burn the songs to a CD! I consider it stupid that we can't burn songs we bought to a CD, on the plus side I've found a way round it, though it's sucking up my processor power a lot and will take a little time to do, time I feel will be well spent. Those that were reading in the last few weeks of term might remember this. I happen to have a somewhat larger version still, Emma asked for it and promptly produced Ladies Man 2. I couldn't stop laughing and Lorna was saying just the other day she wanted a large version of with Siän and Jo cropped out of the picture... Now, free stuff competition. The aim of the game is to get as much free stuff as you can, it's a friendly competition and there's no prize. You must provide Photographic evidence or, if you're lucky enough to live near me, I have to see it (espcially Lorna, she's tried to cheat twice) 1) The Free Stuff cannot come from people you actually know 2) You have to get it yourself, no you cannot get the new CU relay worker to get stuff for you Lorna, no, I don't care how many times you ask. Lorna, it's your problem, not mine that you're stuck on the CU stall for Freshers Fayre and I'm not... In other news I'm running out of Hard Disk space and need to stash my AVI files on the iBook I brought down with me, now called "External Storage that's faster than USB 1"

Man Alive... - Sunday

No, it's nothing to do with life and death. It's just that John from Ammanford wanted me to ask our (Welsh) relay worker if She knew anything about the phrase, she's heard it, there, job done... Today I got up at umm, I can't recall and it's not important. The key thing is that I forgot Church was at 1030 rather than 1000 and got there 15 minutes early. After sitting outside for a while someone unlocked the door and I went in. The morning service was about getting the Balance of priorities correct. It was looking at Luke 8:16 and how Jesus says that you do not light a lamp only to put it out, then saying that his family were his followers. Jonathan pointed out that looking at other things Jesus does he's not saying family are pointless, just that they come second to God. The Hackers very kindly invited the students and Phil (he's technically not a student but I can't see that being a problem, I'm calling him a student from now on) to their house for lunch. Lorna, Brierley, Siän, Keryn (I think that's how it's spelt, She's the new relay worker for the CU), Graham, Phill and myself went over and it was delicious. After lunch we all sat in the Garden and chatted about random things, Lorna somehow managed to say that one of her school uniforms was rather revealing with the wording she used ("it [the uniform] was not a lot") and though I doubt it was quite like that, it'd explain a lot about Lorna if she went through that... In the evening there was a presentation from a Missionary from Iraq. She has been helping the Kurds in one of the cities and doing lots of really great stuff for them. It was very good to hear. In the evening service Jonathan "proved" as it were the saying that God works in mysterious ways. Peter (from the Bible) was travelling and wanted to take the message of the Gospel to Asia (though it's not what we consider Asia now) and was told by God to go a different place. Phillipi. The first person he witnessed to was from Asia, the point of it all was that if you're interested in following God's plan, follow all of it. I walked Lorna and Brierley back home, then came back myself. We've had internet problems. Speicifically the router keeps kicking almost everything off the network and we're not sure why. It's been most frustrating and I've not been able to talk to friends on MSN for more than 2 minutes in a row. If it continues I'll be looking into getting a very very long Ethernet cable... In other news Pete has some songs from a group called Therion, they're really good and I like them a lot. Therion are a mix of Clasical and Rock, they also sing in Swedish for most of the songs (might be something to do with them being Swedish, you never know). They even did O Fortuna and it sounds pretty cool. In other other news, Gareth has arrived down here and we're now just awaitng the last housemate. Now, for the free stuff contest? Hahaha, no, I will save that for tomorrow, today is quite long enough thank you.

Back in Portsmouth - Week 12 and a bit

Saturday was good, WoA has paused for now, yet I spent several hours dealing with an Admin problem on it anyway. Sunday involved me having a short interview infront of the Church where I compressed this into the space of 3 or 4 minutes. To quote Emma, it was shorter than usual. I'm assuming She means I'm normally prepared, have planned and speak to the point of completion on a subject, not taking longer than needed but not cutting it unessessarily short. I thought that was very nice of Emma. Monday and Tuesday were a blur of Packing and some Warcraft 3 games. Wednessday invovled going down to Portsmouth, finding the house was in okay condition and also that Lauren had "commandeered" the room I was going to have. So as to avoid causing arguments right now I've moved into the smallest room, on the plus side I've got a nice chair here, it's not nice enough to completely make up for the other room but I'm sure I'll manage and cause annoyances of my own. I'll be honest, it's one of the scariest nights I've ever had, I don't know that I actually slept until about 0400 the next day, and lightly at that. I was alone in the House until Friday when Peter turned up, every creak and groan, no matter how faint was unnerving for the first 24 hours of being alone, after that I got somewhat better. Pete is in the largest room and has somewhat more stuff than me, we got Internet today (Saturday) and it's not bad at all. If you've seen the deal of free iTunes songs with bottles of Coke, don't buy more than 5 of the things, the smallprint says you get 5 free songs, no more. On the subject of Coke, someone who will remain nameless (it wasn't me and it wasn't Pete) decided that the best way to remove the Coke label and get the free iTunes song was with a sharp knife, stabbing the edge of the label and pulling the knife through the label this person cut slightly too far into the plastic and promptly blew the coke bottle up. There was coke on the walls and ceiling, my ears were ringing for a while. Having had to cook all my meals for myself has made me think of how nice it is to be at home where I not only get free meals, cooked by other people, they're also balanced. I've got very few doubts that I'll promptly stop being so pessemistic as soon as I see my friends. Family are great, but sometimes the simple fact that all 20 people around you are your friends is nice too. On a side note, I should say thank you to my Mum, Dad and Sister for driving me down here and getting me a load of food, it was most appriciated. One last thing while on the subject of food. Pete's Mum brought him down and I went to Tesco with them, it's probably a good thing I did because we had real problems with the unloading. We parked in a carpark, then when we had a trolley that weighed more than me (okay, slight overstatment) found that the lift was not working. Best of all I was the only one with a sense of direction and when we drove the car to pick up pete, we found that the auto-wheel lock on the trolley had engaged and it took both of us to drag it 30m and load the car up. Tomorrow I'll elaborate on my Free Stuff competition seeing as Lorna has already missed the point completely...

Competition? - Weeks 11/12

Simply put, blogs should start to get more regular soon, I'll be in Portsmouth soon! On other news World of Arl is still in-between worlds so there's nothing amazing happening there. With Luke and Rosie, it was the last time I would see them before before going to Portsmouth, sadly they've not actually got an answer to the Collosians question though did raise that in Hebrews 10 it mentions about Jesus being at the right hand of God while in heaven, I currently don't have an answer to it but I'm going to look for one. You're probably wondering what on earth this has to do with the title? Well, after losing to me at pool and realising that I am just that cool, Emma has created a blog and is laughing at me. The joke is on her as she's not going to be speaking to me in person after Sunday. Either way, I promised I'd link to her blog, I never promised I'd say nice stuff about her. The reason I'm giving that she lost at pool was that she was gawping at me. Emma was winning 5-0 and then potted the black early, either she's uneducated or, like I thought, Gawping at me. Ever the scientist I did a test. I told Emma I'd wipe the floor with her a second time (and incidently managed to get her to pay for the second game). I spent the entire game posing and flexing my "muscular" body. Sadly she fell for it and couldn't hit a thing, by the end I was winning 5-1 and that 1 is because I knocked one of her's in. Then I fluffed up and hit the black in early (kinda ironic really). I could say that it was because I was being a gentleman or I could say I'm just rubbish at pool, I'll let you decide for yourself ;) I'm looking forwards to going back to Uni, it'll be a shame not having food (nice food) cooked for me any more but I'm sure there's an upside. I've also got a new plan this year, it's two words long. Free Stuff The plan is to get as much free-stuff as possible, cooked meals don't count if they're from friends, infact, it's all got to come from strangers. Anybody in a similar situation is welcome to have a friendly competition, I reckon it can be quite fun. Now, I just need to figure out how I'm going to get a load of free stuff... As a side note, myself and Coel just played a lovely joke on AJ pretending to be from Nigeria, he fell for it for a good 5 minutes (and he was saying that Emma was gullible when he said he was gay)

Looking forwards to Uni - Week 9/10

Monday or Tuesday I went to see Superman Returns (despite assuming I'd never see it). It's a bit long but the first half is excellent and helps make up for the not-so-good second half. I went with a Lady called Emma and a Guy called Nathaniel, it took them a little while to find my house but they made it in the end. After the film we went and had some food then drove back. Friday was again a meeting with the Jehova Witnesses. We discussed Colossians and Genesis, specifically how Colossians says Jesus created everything yet Genesis says that God did (thus saying they are the same or that Jesus is a God). Youth group was film night not amazingly cool. This last week has been mostly dull too, WoA is on a new world and all that that'll bring with it. This Friday Luke and Rosie couldn't stay long, next Friday they're in Liverpool so I won't see them then either. I'm looking forwards to returning to Uni!

Given up - Week 8

Yeah, I've given up on the river idea, I just keep forgetting and have other stuff to do, well, I've not completely given up on the idea. I've given up on managing the Neural Net Othello program, I've got a load of other stuff to do such as websites and a database I can stick in WoA. Speaking of WoA, we're about to finnish the current World and move onto the next, it's really doing very well. Nothing big happened during the week here, though, Luke and Rosie came back. Here are the two key parts of the conversation. Me: When was Jesus created? JW: At the beginning of time Me: Ummm, were people not created on the 6th day? JW: Jesus is an Angel It gets better. Me: Why is He an Angel? JW: *flicks to Revelations about how Michael has an army of Angels* Me: That's Michael, not Jesus JW: The Bible mentions Micheal's army and Jesus' army, nowhere does it say there are two armies Me: I'll be honest, that makes no sense, but rather than just say you're wrong, how about this. Satan, along with his buddies such as PrinceB are stupid. He has 1/3rd of the Angels, God has 2/3rds. This means that even without factoring in the All Powerful God, Satan is at a 2-1 disadvantage. When you have an army twice the size of your opponents, isn't it quite possible you would split it in two? JW: Hmmmm I intend to ask them again about Jesus being Micheal. It gets better yet. Pete (he's been helping me loads with this) and myself looked at some stuff and they believe that God created Jesus and that Jesus then created everything else. This to me says two things (if it were true, I'll be asking them to prove it this Friday). 1) God is very lazy, He creates Jesus and takes the rest of eternity off 2) If Jesus created everything bar God, why not worship Jesus? And that's not even mentioning the part that their Bible refers to Jesus as a "god" (i.e. a lie or falsehood of a deity) or the lack of free will on the part of the 144,000. Youth Group was very good fun, mostly because I carried the stuff back to the building before the shaving cream fight, so was sadly absent for it and remained free of shaving cream. Today Wyn (Johnathan is on holiday) talked on seeing things the way that God wants us to, I felt it was a good thing to keep in mind and one I should keep in mind more. After the service I talked to the Gentleman I am making some websites for, we spent a good 15 seconds talking about websites. Me: Anything I need to know? John: There are no Sacred Cows Me: Awesome And spent the rest of the time talking about the internet and the military. The couple that gave me a lift home told me some stories of their own encounters with Jehova Witnesses, sadly they all ended with the "high up" JW's telling the "lower down" JW's to not talk to them, almost as if their faith were not real. So I end on this note, it applies mostly to those of a religion, though if you've not got a religion and are starting to think about it, it might be worth keeping in mind. "If you have a Faith you cannot question, is it really true enough that it's worth having?"