Guess What! - Saturday

That's right! Today was REALLY dull. Now, I know how annyoing it is to see a title like that so I've got a cunning plan. I'll say what I wish had happened today. In my mind this would have been a great day if... I woke up this morning at 0730 as planned (that's acutally what I did). It was very cold (hang on, this is rather real so far), getting washed was only plesent when hot water was involved. Still I was very much awake very fast. I grabbed a mug of tea, a sandwich and began working on WoA. Due to the multiple Database Systems I'd created it ran all the caclulations for me, I spent a whole hour and it'd done everything I needed it to for 40 different teams (we currently have 24 teams, 12 teams to a Custodian). Well, it was now very early in the morning, perfect time for a little Bible study. An hour later I understood more about what I'd been reading today and I'm really glad I spent the time to look at it and think about it. After that I decided to have a short nap. I was awoken from my nap by my phone, on the other end of the phone was this really nice Lady I've not told you about. She invted me over to her house to watch the Rugby (okay I admit, I have no clue what time it was meant to be on TV). I went over there and she cooked me food. Awesome. After the Rugby Match (do I look like I care who won?) I went back to my house and worked on my latest Database Idea for WoA. It works really well, we're going to call it Ermantrude, the last one was called Smythe. In the evening that Lady I watched Rugby with earlier came over because she was bored, we played computer games and it was really good fun. We then went for a walk on the beach, I found a crab and caught it (yeah, it doesn't take a lot to please me), I promptly ran after the lady while holding the crab. I found it really funny. After walking said Lady home I went back onto WoA to find everything ticking over smoothly, the automatic systems working like a charm. Someone had also emailed me asking if they could buy a copy of some of the stuff I'd written. W00t. As you can see, there are some slight differences between what actually happens and what really happens, yet, they're not all that different are they! I hope that made visiting my blog worthwhile for you, maybe next Saturday will be somewhat more realistic yet just as interesting.

Cold - Thursday

Yes, it was a bit of a chilly day today. That is, until I walked more than 100m, at that point my circulation kicked in and by the time I was almost at Uni I had taken off my coat and was walking around in shorts and t-shirt. I saw two ladies walking along in coats, scarves and trousers, shivering and there was me carrying my coat and actually feeling very warm. One of them spotted me and gave me a look that plainly said "you must be joking". I of course grinned back. The lab went well, afterwards I saw the people about placements, filled in some form I was apparently meant to fill in a while ago and sorted out a few details. I then walked back and continued work on Phil the Database for WoA. In fact, I did that for most of the day, over dinner we watched V for Vendetta, I think it might be my new favourite film. Sure, it's not one that's worth watching all the time but I like it a lot and rate it very highly. In the evening I carried on with Phil the Database. In total today I quite possibly spent 7 hours programming, maybe only 6. I think that any placement involving programming will suit me nicely. Now for the title, I sit here at 2315 and my toes are cold. I think my window isn't overly heat retentive, is this a problem? No, I am very very good at living in low tempreatures, I just need to make sure that I move around a little more than at present.

Time to shine! - Wednesday

First of all, I laughed at Gareth because he had an 0900 start, my meeting thing was at 0930. I left at 0845 to get there for 0915, I somehow got there at 0900, odd, I somehow shaved 10 minutes off an already tight 25 minute walk. Ah well, I sat in the boardroom for half an hour alone but with an internet connection. I even WoAed. When everybody arrived I noticed I was the only student, I think there were meant to be other students but they were not there. Did that bother me? No. Overall most of the meeting didn't concern me, we had a big talk about the website which was re-done and by majority agreement, is rubbish. It was re-written to meet web-standards, unsurprisingly it failed validation so I'm unimpressed. I've emailed the lady incharge but have had no response yet. After the meeting I sat in the Anglesea building and did some programming of "Phil" (yes, that's the name that won). I plan to give similar names to other parts of the database as they're created. I then attended Salem's lecture, he said he'd updated the slides from last week, never actually mentioning that he'd made a mistake. Anyhoo, I then went to the Prayer Lunch. I brought some Toffee Squares as created by my Mum, they went down well. In fact, everybody wants my Mum to make some more in time for my Baptism (19th), my parents are going to come down for it (it was postponed because they were on Holiday last time). Should be fun. After the Prayer Lunch I walked home and did more database stuff, I also did some more of the PHP 2nd Example and thought about what I'd need to do for the Tutorial on it. All in all it was time well spent. At 1915 I met Justin and Ceryn for Christianity Explored training. We went around to Matt's house (he's a member of Solent Church) and we watched the Alpha Course training video (it told us how to deal with small group discussions) and was not only informative but funny. It has been quite cold today but that didn't stop me wearing shorts in the evening, (trousers in the morning because I thought I should look "normal" for the board meeting) apparently I should have been cold. After the video I walked Ceryn home, we had an interesting talk about the muggers and how to deal with them. I got back, found some nice Emails in my inbox (nothing from the person incharge of the Uni website), chatted to some people over MSN, carried on work on Phil the Database. It's not working as well as I'd like (specifically there's one part of one page that just doesn't seem to work). It's most odd but it's also 0042 which may be impeding my ability to program, you never know.

Jesus: 1 - Hallow's Eve: 0 - Tuesday

Up early, got to Java lecture, sat through Java lecture listening to something I learnt when I was about 16 (if you want to think more of me, I taught myself this part from books, not taught by a person). Overall not at good as normal but it's gotta be covered. Surprisingly enough, most of the class don't care. I've managed to identify at least 12 people that do care, they're all in the same lab as me which is rather handy. After the lecture I sat down in the Anglesea buidling for an hour before going to see my tutor. After seeing him (he said I can use him as a reference which is kinda neat) I carried on sitting down. While sitting down I did of course peruse WoA and spent my time very well making an extended Timetable. There's a slightly higherquality version here for those with a nicer connection (might not display as nicely in IE either, it's a .png). As there's currently no key for it, the yellow going to red gradients represent when I anticipate travelling, the yellow to green is also travel. One is to Uni, the other is from, you can work out which direction is which. Also note that the Tutor session is every other week (I missed it last week so went this one to catch up). Also, I have this semester 2 or 3 labs sometime in Thursday afternoon, they're one off but quite long. For those that think this is really snazzy and want a version for their timetable, I'll happily make one for free. There's one problem. I will know your timetable and can ambush you as you walk around Portsmouth (assuming you live here). After the Tutorial/WoA session I went to Software Systems, we're learning about UML and it's not making a vast ammount of sense. By that I don't mean that I can't understand the language, no, I just find it hard to see where I will use it. I somehow come to a conlcusion without using it and it all works nicely. Still, if I'm going to get a placement next year it might be worth putting in the extra effort here. As clearly labeled on the timetable I walked home and umm, did a lot. By "a lot" I mean that I had a nap. Walking back in I attended Digital Electronics. Last year this was a subject that I struggled with a fair bit, it's not my strong point. Today we were doing diagrams on the board, seeing as I use a text editor you'd think this was a problem. Not so! I found a solution (based off of my experiance of programming languages) that allowed me to represent the diagram in text. After Digital I attended more Software Systems but by the end was too tired to to go to the Data Coms tutorial so instead walked home. I walked home with a gentleman called Mathew whom I met last year at Langstone, it was quite nice (he's still living in Langstone so was happy to have company for the first half of the walk). Getting home I had a delicious and nutritious pot noodle dinner (nutritious for a programmer anyway) and spent the evening working on my PHP tutorials for the denezins of WoAm, though, the tutorials are open to all and apparently easy to understand. If you're interested, go to here to see them, you don't have to register to read them, though if you want to post replies to a topic you will, we've had problems with spam bots and this was the only way to solve it (combined with a custom Spambot blocker I wrote). Now for why the title says that Jesus is beating Hallow's Eve. Very simply, my housemates said that I could deal with Trick or Treaters. A sum total of one group turned up but I enjoyed it. The two girls (yes, girls not ladies) were dressed as something meant to be scary, the parents stood at the edge of the path to our door keeping a watchful eye on them. Out of the house came something that actually was scary (me in shorts, t-shirt and no shoes or socks). Rather than give them sweets I asked them about why they were supporting Evil and started to talk to them about Jesus. Sadly the children were too high on sugar to understand any of it but the parents both heard it all. They felt they'd met a weirdo and took their children away. Strange that, I didn't realise they wanted sweets until they told me, I just assumed they wanted to hear the good news. Well, maybe that's just me being optimistic. I didn't give them any sweets (they walked off before I could think of anything, that and I wasn't finnished talking about the Gospel). Tomorrow will hopefully be a fun day, I've got a special Faculty of Technology meeting, the one that I'm the rep for that I got voted for. Better yet, I get to miss a lecture for it (and they'll have free food there!!!).