Journal: November 2007

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Reports suck.
Thu 29/11/07 (Link to this entry)

Lately I've been getting my teeth into writing my placement report for submitting to uni. The good news is that I'm not going to be short of things to write - the guideline is at least 10,000 words and I'm sure I'll handly beat that without breaking a sweat. There's so much to write about with this placement that it's more difficult working out what to leave out!

Of course, the bad news is that I have to actually write the bloody thing. I'm learning to use LaTeX, which will help with the formatting and typesetting, but I've unfortunately been unable to locate a handy open-source project that generates all your content for you too. I'm having to do that bit manually :-(

Ten bottles and three heads
Sat 24/11/07 (Link to this entry)

Apologies for the lack of updates recently - to be honest I haven't really had much to report. That has now changed, as I am now in proud possession of ten bottles of home-brewed ginger beer courtesy of the kindness of Tim Graves. With a bit of luck they'll be settled enough for drinking by Christmas, or failing that, New Year's. We've measured it as coming in at around 7.5% - not bad for something which most people think of as a kid's drink!

Lately I've been slugging around a lot ploughing through my collections of Heroes and Farscape. I'm particularly enjoying Heroes, which is one of these programs where you spend half the time going "damn, that is cool, I wish I could do that" (although I'm not too keen on the idea of going thermonuclear or having an evil alter-ego). Kim came up the other day to get a copy of the latest episodes and brought a nice present with her - a free monitor in exchange for my old speakers :-D

Ever since having had a three-headed setup at work for a while, I've coveted the idea of having three monitors on my home setup. The good news is that the new screen is just a wee LCD, so it doesn't take up too much room - just as well, as I'm running out of desk space!

Not long now
Thu 8/11/07 (Link to this entry)

The end of my placement has been slowly creeping up on me - it's now just a month and a bit to go, which means I need to get my skates on if I'm going to finish all my development work at Sun. I'm really looking forward to going back up north and being with my friends and family again, but it's a bit of a scary prospect too. Uni in particular is going to be wierd after 18 months of working 9-5 days. I'm also really not looking forward to being hundreds of miles away from the great friends I've made down here. I think I want one of those Portal guns...

In other news, I've finally gotten pissed off enough with Creative's buggy Audigy drivers that I've gone out and gotten a new soundcard. It's the somewhat embarrasingly-named Soundblaster X-Fi XtremeGamer, which is a decent modern gaming soundcard that actually has some up-to-date Vista drivers - though installing them was a right pain. Right enough, this is probably because I forgot to shut my PC down completely before swapping the card, so it tried to resume from hibernation with an entirely new sound card and promptly fell over in a big ugly heap.

And what's the point in having a fancy new soundcard without some decent speakers? To that end, I've invested in a nice set of Logitech X-450 surround speakers which are really rather good. The bass definition is great and it's nice to have proper surround sound after all these years of using my old quadraphonic speakers. The only problem I have now is trying to strike a balance between flexing the new subwoofer's muscles and keeping the volume just low enough that Craig doesn't go apeshit...

One last thing - if anyone out there wants my old Audigy 2 soundcard, it's yours for a fiver. First come, first served.

Fire and explosions
Tues 6/11/07 (Link to this entry)

Bonfire Night is a festival I can identify with. This is not because of any kind of particular fascination with the gunpowder plot or because it's an excuse to get slammed; it's because it is a night of great pleasure for pyromaniacs like myself. To that end, I spent a fair bit of time on Sunday cutting wood for the bonfire chez Matt, David and Mike the following night. I took the below pic before it got too dark; I actually collected quite a bit more than this.

Sadly, it transpired that we couldn't have a proper open fire at the guys' house in Fleet, as their landlord was understandably resistant to the idea of a crater of ash and scorched earth appearing in his lawn overnight. As such, we were forced to have the fire in an incinerator (which is a fancy term for a metal dustbin with some holes punched in the side). I am proud to report that the sides of said incinerator were glowing red by the end of the night. There were also fireworks:

I believe this is how Matt and Michael envisaged the whole display would turn out, after they spent a couple of hours wiring the whole garden with electric igniters for the array of fireworks which we'd collected. Sadly, the above is a recording of the fancy multi-shot firework which launched all those rockets without human intervention. The rain put paid to the idea of the other fireworks being able to go up so quickly. Denied.

All in all, a good night - particularly since I am assured that on close inspection in the morning light, dribbles of molten glass could be observed where they had poured out of the holes in the side of the incinerator. That's some proper fire right there.

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