More Than Just For Reading Week

Hey everyone! Another end-of-week Reading Week blog post. Got so much going on right now it's unreal, so I'm hoping to bring you all up to date on what's happening, and in fact this blog post will pretty much summarise my life at current (hence the title).

My University work has obviously slowed down a little this week, but pre-reading week we were quite busy. We get one-pagers every week which are designed to make us read the research papers given, which does take time. And we've also been working on a University project to build on top of something called Rime, based in the Contiki OS. We're building a reliable multi-hop communications stack; which basically means we're building something that can send messages across multiple devices and also guarantee that they get to the other side (see my previous blog post for what those devices are). So, for the past month or so, including reading week, I have been working with my classmates to produce first the RFC for this and now we're working on implementing it. The due date is Friday, so I've been quite busy coding that up.

Then of course on top of that I've also been working part-time, which has got to the stage where I'm now working three times a week; one full day and two half-days (so really two full day's a week rather then one and a half). We're working on a rather large project that we had to bring more people into, which is great because it's giving me a taster into how real teamwork works. This will give me great experience for when I do my masters group project that I do in the summer, and I've already got ideas as to how to organise that properly.

Another large area of my life that is growing rapidly, and one that I haven't mentioned on this blog much (if at all), is my participation in what's known as the Zeitgeist Movement, to the extent that I now have a separate blog in which I detail my reasons for joining the movement as well as post my thoughts and insights. If you want to find out more about what the movement does, and have the time to do so, I highly encourage you watch Zeitgeist Addendum, which is the film that refocused my views completely. Personally, I feel that the Zeitgeist Movement is something worth pushing forward and thus I am very active in the UK movement, being one of the administrators of the official UK site (and also part-creator of the site), and so this has been taken up quite a bit of my time keeping the site running and working on new things for the site. As well as that, the movement itself is currently pushing ZDay 2010, which is a worldwide event that will occur on the 13th March. There are quite a few events happening in the UK on ZDay, so feel free to check that out.

And now we come to my other stuff that's been going on; the lesser end of the stick, but oh so much sweeter. I am of course referring to my recent delightful relationship change. I now have a girlfriend, a wonderful beautiful girl called Ruth. Yeah, it came as a complete shock to me too! But she really is the embodiment of perfection. And I have to say I love her :)

So you want to know how we met? Well, OK then. When my flatmate and I moved in at the beginning of our masters, we started to go to our old university's student union for Pub Quiz, for two reasons. Firstly, my flatmate and I knew the place well while my flatmate knew the quiz-master even better. And secondly, it was within walking distance of the flat. Anyway, my flatmate knew someone who was attending Goldsmiths and was part of his pub-quiz team last year, and she brought along her flatmates, one of which was Ruth. And then we got talking, and I began to see the similarities between us (we both love Star Trek and anime, for instance!) About a month ago, I found out that she was interested in me, from various signs, and so I asked her out. And we've been going out since then! So yeah, there you have it! What a nice coincidence...

Anyway, think I've covered a lot of stuff in this blog post; in fact, this pretty much summarises my life at present. So for now, I'm signing off :)

The Rollercoaster Week

Friday 29th January at 11:34pm - What an evening! What a week! It's been a wild rollercoaster of a ride, and we've only just reached the peak!

The above extract is something I posted onto my Twitter feed regarding last week, and which I think holds true. I had quite an interestingly busy and unique week last week and it almost seemed as if this week and last week would merge together.

It started off normally. Monday I went and spent the day in the office, followed by an evening at home. That evening I looked over my plans for the remainder of the week and instantly saw an anomaly... I was fully booked every evening of the week for social events, and also on Saturday as well.

Tuesday I had my usual day at Uni followed by my usual day at my local Student Union's pub quiz. Wednesday was Uni, work and then a trip to Stamford Bridge. Thursday was a full day of Uni followed by a most enjoyable cinema trip to see Sherlock Holmes. And Friday was a morning at Uni, the rest of the day until late at work, and a wild night on the town with my programme class mates at Las Iguanas.

Saturday I went paintballing with a group of friends, which was once again extremely muddy! And my group came second due to bonus points the other side picked up for a kamikazee run. Sunday was a day spent in work, followed by a well deserved evening relaxing.

All in all, it really was a non-stop week; although I can't say I didn't enjoy myself thoroughly, because the week was a lot of fun!

Dragon Age Origins

Having played Dragon Age Origins for a good amount of time now, I actually think I am beginning to like it a lot. The game presents itself well, and the storyline definitely draws you in. The animation is superb, the sound effects excellent, and the gameplay well structured and enjoyable. That said, it is quite a gory game to play, so much so I actually turned off the persistent gore in the options menu, which made the game a lot more enjoyable, so I'm glad they kept that in the options.

The game itself has you play as a Grey Warden, a Jedi Knight of olden times if you will, peacekeepers and defenders against this horde of evil creatures called the Blight. After the initial intro section, you end up travelling the lands to try and gather everyone together in order to stave off this Blight while being seen as an outlaw and outcast by those ruling.

Before I go on, the intro section is most interesting. Depending on the race, class and sex you pick to play as, your storyline changes to reflect that, so much so that it gives you a unique entrance into the game compared to other characters people might pick. There are six locations, with a possiblity of twelve different intros, compared to what race and class you choose, and with minor changes depending on sex. And as I said, the choices you pick at the beginning influence how people react and see you along your quest.

So, you travel the land with your companions to gather people together to stave off evil. And along the way you pick up companions to join you and help you complete your quest. You can have a total of three companions travelling with you at any time, so you need to swap your party in and out to get the best out of them. The decisions you make during gameplay also influence the game heavily, and influence your characters. The game provides a way for characters to indicate their approval of your actions, and of course different characters will approve and disapprove of different things. I've had situations where one character highly approves, and another highly disapproves. There is also the option of romance along the way for some companions, if they approve high enough...

The game's camera angle is also quite fun, as it supports both top-down and behind-the-character views. Top-down gives you a very much Neverwinter Nights feel, eerily so, so much that when in that mode you could have someone look over your shoulder and say 'you playing Neverwinter?' The behind-the-character view allows you to play similar to Star Wars KotOR, and really shows off the superb graphics and feel of the game, and is where I play personally. But it supports both, with very quick transition between them.

Overall, Dragon Age Origins is an awesome game, and if you are an RPG fan over the age of 18, a must get...

UCL Second Term

Woo! I've managed to get more then one blog post posted in a single month, and in the space of just under three days too! Amazing!

Anyway, onto the topic. As you may have guessed by the new ticker on the right-hand side of the blog, my second term at UCL University is well under way. So I thought I might give you an update on what is going on...

As you may know, I'm currently studying an MSc in Networked Computer Systems since September last year. The first term was definitely a lot of fun and was very interesting, but was extremely hard work to complete. The courses involved learning about the underlying structure of networks and, in particular, the Internet; learning about distributed systems used in the world and the procedures involved in keeping them secure; a look into operating systems and how they influence networking; and a final course in Network Performance.

Network Performance was probably the hardest course I have ever taken anywhere, even over Physics, due to it's high use of extremely difficult mathematics. I am so not a mathematician, so I really struggled with this course.

Another thing that really brought me down last term was 9am lectures, every single day. For those of you for which this is the norm, do understand that this was coming from an extra-long four month summer vacation with late mornings and equally late evenings, so I was completely unprepared for what was involved.

This term, it's a little different. While 9am lectures happen 2/3 times a week, I do get slightly longer lay-ins. I also get a completely free day on Monday, which I am using for work. But my afternoons that I used to have are now turning into evenings, so it's a trade-off from the previous term.

Of greatest interest this term, for me personally, is Network and Applications Programming, which is a purely programming course in C in which we program on TMote Sky's, shown on the right hand side. These small devices contain various sensors, buttons and LEDs, and a small radio chipset; and use an OS called Contiki that is specifically designed to work on memory-constrained devices such as these. We will be working to program a multi-hop routing algorithm between the devices which will eventually allow for a button to be pressed on one side of the room and an LED to flash on the other side, with each of the devices routing between each other to get things to the other side. This is what I came to Uni to do!

So yeah, all in all my course is definitely coming along nicely, I'm enjoying my time and learning a lot at the same time.

Into 2010: The Next Decade

Heya all! It's been some time, yet again, since I posted. In fact, here's a fact for you; last year I posted just 5 blog posts. That's abysmal!

This year, I intend to do better. A lot better. In fact, I intend to once again get into regular posting of blog articles, but this time, I'm taking a slightly different approach to my blog writing. Instead of posting regular fortnightly posts, I'm going to keep 'running drafts' going. With this approach, I might have various different drafts around different topics running alongside each other, side by side. As I develop each blog post, others might get posted and/or created, until eventually I deem the post ready and it gets sent out.

This way, I will always have something I'm working on. It might be a weekly update, or perhaps it's information on a particular interest, or perhaps I'm reviewing a particular TV show/movie/software/website/etc.

I'm also planning on organising my labels better, although I'm not entirely sure the way to do that. Do you think I should be general about my labels (ie type of post, general area of where I'm posting) or specific (like I have now, individual topics)? I'm more leaning towards the former, but it means going through all my existing posts and updating their labels. Which I guess I need to do anyway...

To show my interest in blogging full-time again, I've gone and got myself a copy of Blogo for Mac, which I will be using to organise my blog posts without even having to be online. Which is awesome!

Right! That's all for now. Hopefully you'll see another new blog post in a future near you!

Moving Forward

So. I've come back to that which is blogging. I'm starting to lean towards making a little free time to update you all on what's been going on. But it's been so long since I last posted a blog I'm just going to be brief on what has happened over the last few months.

So, last time I posted I was during my exams, right? Well, let me bring you up to date on that. I completed my exams and spent a wonderful few months waiting for the results. Then they came in... First Class Honours! So yeah, I was very chuffed. Getting a first was no easy task, and I had a fantastic time at Goldsmiths. The graduation ceremony in September was very good too; the robes, the speeches, the photos and saying goodbye to friends. It was awesome; photos available on Facebook.

Jumping back to July, and my birthday and summer party happened on the same day. I will be posting up pictures of that event onto Facebook in the near future, so if you're looking for them then keep an eye on that. The day went really well; I know a few friends who turned up and had a great time. The weather was perfect, and the food really nice (cooked by friends of my Dad's girlfriend Dana from Romania). Overall, the day went really well.

Speaking of Romania, in August I took a small trip out there with my Dad, Dana and my younger brother Andy. It was a most interesting trip. I got to meet loads of new people, as well as have the experience of seeing how people live on farms and the like, it was like going back in time! But the cities were all well developed and had some interesting differences to most cities, such as having cars going round a roundabout three times hooting their horn to show off a married couple. The reason I went to Romania was for a wedding of a friend of Dana's, and that itself was great fun, but the entire trip really was a lot of fun and very inspirational at the same time, and it was well worth going.

So, what's new now? Well, I've now moved! That's right! I now live in central London, which is awesome. Having a lot of fun in my new flat. I'm also attending UCL to do my masters in Networked Computer Systems. Again, it's a lot of fun and although it's challenging, I'm definitely learning some pretty awesome stuff. Had to learn calculus!

And the future? Well, that's still to come. But this has been a quick wrap up. I haven't covered everything, but I thought if I was to get back into blogging there has got to be sometime. As for sorting out my labels; not really sure what to do with those... lol

Exam Season

Hey ho! So I have been extremely busy lately, no doubt as many of you have noticed. I've stopped playing EVE Online and many other games to focus on my Uni and Business work. And luckily, I've got both of these out the way, the Uni because I'm finished, and my Business because I've taken a leave of absence.

The reason being? Exams!! My Univeristy Third year exams start on Wednesday, and go on for three weeks (two per week). I have my last exam on the 29th May, and from that date I am completely finished with University (I think, I might still get my Viva sometime in early June, we'll have to see...)

Anyhow, I'm only a month away from finishing my three year degree at Goldsmiths! So obviously, I have taken a break to pour every ounce of available energy into gaining this degree. Still, I have managed to find a little bit in my breaks to post this blog entry informing you all that I still live, and that I haven't forgotten my blog.

I've just been too busy to do anything else but work, and am now too busy to do anything else but revise!!

P.S. I will be organising my labels for the posts soon into various categories. Hopefully :)