Last year on November the 23rd I had a job interview with the company I'll be working with next year.

It was only my second time in London, so fearing the worst I got trains and the London Underground so that I'd have an hour to spare for delays and getting lost. Thankfully I got there quicker than the train should have, I found the underground really easily and got to the building I was meant to be at about one and a quarter hours early!

With my spare time I thought I'd be a bit touristy and check out some of the sights that were within walking distance of my interview. I took photos on my lame camera phone of things like Big Ben, Palmer Street and a few mangled shots of Westminster Abbey.

Then on Flickr earlier this month I got a message asking if some company could use my (frankly pretty poor) photo of Westminster Abbey for use in some tourist map thing I'd never heard of. Being the kind fellow I am I agreed.

Today I've been told that if you go Here you can see my little photo and a credit to me! Apparently it also works on the iPhone and some other phones too, so you can tour round London and find out all the history, information and maps.

Thought I'd let you all know about them as they were nice enough to include my photo, and to ask permission too

When I joined uni over a year ago I knew it would take up lots of my free time with work and socialising, and last year it did just that. But this year is even more manic than before!

So far I seem to have more lectures this time round, or at least more 9am ones. Which drains my energy before I've even had lunch.
Then we have exams looming on the far side of the Christmas break which is starting to be in the back of my mind now with revision starting to make a mention in lectures too.
We have two group course works and both are pretty dull. One is using SPSS to do some analytics stuff and the other is a tiny bit of code and lots of write-up for a timetabling system. It's nice to have group courseworks to spread the load, but they're just so dull this semester! However the main reason I'm posting this at this time is because I just finished some code and editing the writeup at +3am >.<
Not to mention job hunting too. Next year I'll hopefully be taking a year out in industry to gain an extra diploma and another 3 letters after my name. But job hunting takes more time than I thought. On the up side I do have lots of cool freebies from the careers fairs.
Oh, and I'm a member of two societies again which though fun they do take up time

Anyway, this mostly boils down to my excuses for not posting for ages and when I have been posting lately, not having much to talk about.

So I'll do a short list of random things instead:
Shoutboxes
Not been working on them too much but whenever I open Notepad++ I have it set to open about 12 shoutbox files with the To-Do list at the front to remind me.
I do hope to take some time off over Christmas to revise for January exams, so I might use the shoutboxes to have a break and keep my mind sharp and hopefully have it ready for some sort of release around then.

MiniPolls
They went dead for a short while, so much so that I didn't even check my logs for a while.
Today though it says that this month has seen well over 100, 000 hits. Wow!
New Palmnet record!
As it seems fairly popular I might try and expand/open source it soon too.

Christmas Coding
This Christmas will be the first actual break from university / work for about 2 years. So I plan on actually enjoying it and having a bit of a break.
A break for me though means programming into the early hours on all sorts of silly things, so watch this space. I do have a few plans on little projects I'd like to just knock out for fun but feel free to add any suggestions. (The shoutboxes don't count as a suggestion, before Kevin asks :P )

As you may have noticed it's been a month and 11 days since my last post and not even I'm usually this negligent of my blog.

However, here at uni it's been exams and coursework galore! I had to finish an 11 week group project one week, the next I had to finish a server side programming project (swanky flight/hotel booking system) and then after that I had 8 hours worth of exams spread thankfully over 2 weeks.
The first exam, Computer Systems, went well but then I'm a computer geek. The others were business things like Human Resource management and Statistics and Modelling which aren't fun or interesting either

All done now though so I now have a whole two weeks before I'm meant to start a proper job.
In these two blissful weeks of no lectures, exams or work I'll hopefully be able to do some coding for myself for once!

Plans would be to tidy up PIntEd a bit and try and shove it out the doors, maybe take a look at FlashHacker too.
On the web side I could do with starting Palmnet v3 properly. I only have plans for now so I need to think them over some more and start laying out plans for the code. The end result should be that my site will be like a brand new site. I'll have to give up some Google ranking to do it as my site needs some important re-organising though. At the start Palmnet was just a fun little thing I had, then I slowly built on it more and more but I never planned for the future. Meaning I now have a tangled mess of links, cross links, scripts and folders. If people saw the directory structure without .htaccess redirects they'd cry! That and I have no easy way to link things. I plan on making it so I can just blog in a category and it show up on the software site and if I start naming things right I could add all sorts of wonders, like versioning control and documentation.

That'll all take some time however as I only have two weeks, and they'll be filled with more than sat round coding, and then after that I'll be working this summer. If all goes well though I should have most of it planned in a few days, and then refined over the next month or so. That'll mean I only have to code, and coding is easy when you have plans first.

Enough about my site though, what about things to keep you occupied in the mean time? Well, have some news:

• Mini Polls are still popular as ever, which is cool.
• Remember the new shout boxes, codenamed MNAH? Well I do still work on them. They have a working RSS feed now and the image based stuff is started but not done yet. I plan on doing a bit of restructuring however, which will delay them even more!
• Raycasting ring any bells? If so you'll be glad to hear I used the university library here the other day and now have a couple of books full of all sorts of interesting stuff, so expect some more graphics stuff soon.
• It's my birthday on the 21^st, hope you all buy me nice stuffs, yeah?

It's just gone 3am here but I realised I've not posted to my blog for ages!
Almost half a month since my last post >.< I've just been so busy with uni-preparations and such I kinda forgot.

Anyway, I do have something of mild interest I'll probably post sometime tomorrow if I can, needs to be tidied up a whole heap, but trust me, it rules :3

Just to re-confirm: I AM NOT DEAD...YET!

Results

Thursday the 16th of August was the day of reckoning for me. 10am I logged into UCAS to find "Congratulations! Your place at Loughborough University (L79) to study Computing and Management (4 year SW) (GN42) has been confirmed."

Anyhoo, about 10:45 me and Phil set off for college as Ben was running late, got my results:

• Computing: C
• Electronics: C
• Physics: E
• General Studies: E

All in all I did pretty crap.

In total I only got 200 (L'boro doesn't count general studies) of the 300 points I needed to get in to Loughborough, and I got beaten by Ben in computing! Shameful! But then I did put about 10% effort into the whole revision thing so I guess I deserved to get rubbish grades >.<

Anyway, as I got 100 points lower than needed I gave them a call. Without thinking anything awry the woman on the phone said I was indeed in to L'boro and that she'd see me in September! Crazy lady :P

Uni

As stated above I'm off to Loughborough university on September the 27th.

If anyone reads this and is also going to the same uni, gimmie a shout! I know nobody else who even applied really :S

Still, got my registration pack and the freshers week seems awesome. Everything from a BBQ to a foam party so should all be good fun. Best of all though is the fact the halls they put me in has it's own bar! Don't even have to stagger to and from the student union XD

On a more depressing point, I have no idea what might become of Palmnet. It might be paid for and keep going throughout the 4-5 years of uni, it might just die a sad and lonely death as I become entrenched in university work, who knows.

Hopefully it'll keep going though and be filled with all the latest geekery, only from uni instead of home. They might even have some sweet tach for me to play with and blog about too ^^

Nothing new for Palmnet really. I've almost done all the updates for the new system and plan to roll them out sometime in the coming weeks.

On a lighter note, I was 18 on Thursday, June the 21st, also the day of my last ever exam, woo!
Thus I have some interesting* news for you. (*May not be interesting at all)



I got a new MP3 player, which is like pr0n for all the gadget geeks who might read this.
A 30GB Creative Zen Vision:M is now what fills my pocket since the demise of the Sansa. I was going to buy another Sansa but Phil got himself one and I could hardly have a matching MP3 player, so the creative was the other choice for me.
And I'm glad I took it!
This MP3 player kicks some serious ass. It's screen is better than most full size HD monitors I've seen, the sound is awesome and the controls and general usage aspects are great. So far only crashed it once, and that was just after a firmware update, so not half as bad as the Sansa!



For my new Creative Zen I needed some swanky ear buds as my old ones were beginning to show their age (About 3 years old now).
I've always wanted some Skullcandy ones because the name sounds so cool, so I went to the only shop that sells them in my town, the Orange shop, and got me a pair of the "Smokin' Buds", they don't sound quite so good as the £50 Sony ones I had, but they're still mighty good.



On a less techy note, now I'm 18 I can legally buy fireworks.
Unfortunately the firework shop in town went out of business, shockingly nobody wants lots of fireworks in mid June.
So instead we got some sparklers. Not quite as manly but still needed to be 18, no footage of the sparkling action though, but there's the lighter we used to try and make up for it.



I also got reminded of yo-yo'ing back in the 90's, and how I hadn't done it for so long, so I went out and got myself a yo-yo.
Unfortunately I couldn't find the cheap tacky ones I used to have as a little kid so I ended up spending £7 on a pro yo-yo. Hardly the most expensive, but still a bit advanced for me.
Got it to sleep now, and rocking the cradle is easy, must learn some new tricks over the summer though and end up a yo-yo pro!