Those of you who are so inclined may "follow" me on Twitter.
http://twitter.com/cosmicflame

Don't expect anything interesting, though.

Today Holly has proved repeatedly that she is the best girlfriend in the world. Ever.

Firstly she bought me a Lego Star Wars X-Wing, which I'm building at the moment.

Secondly she put out this massive spider who made me scream and menaced me.

She is the best and I love her so much.

Last night's sharing dessert was so nice that we went again tonight. My treat, this time.

Holly then majorly impressed me by helping me put the chain back on my bike. I love practical girls :)

And now it's back to hers to watch Dude, Where's My Car?!

I just had a Hot Cookie Dough Dessert to share with Holly <3 We've been planning to do this for ages but always end up full before we get a chance.
It was delicious.
Also, we were so sickening that we cleared the shop (again)!

Well, I'm now 23.

I've had an awesome birthday. More of a birthweek, really. My beloved couldn't be with me today, so we had an extended weekend during which I received a present every day :) She also made me a cake!

I then spent yesterday and today at home with my family. Another cake!

I have received some lovely presents, too. Holly and my parents bought me some Star Wars Lego - Echo Base from Holly and the Midi-size Millennium Falcon and a pack of Assassin Droids from my parents. I also received games (Beautiful Katamari and Blue Dragon from Holly) and a DVD (Disney's Robin Hood from my parents). The other thing that particularly springs to mind was a copy of The Snow Goose from my parents :)

Finally, Claire bought me a set of metal (possible not metal?) shelves for my flat. Storage space! I will soon have more of it!

All in all a very good day. Shame my flat is so damn cold now :S
...Autumn...

I've been wanting to write this post for a while. Before I could, though, my girlfriend wanted to tell one of her closest friends about us herself.

My girlfriend is Holly Lindon.

The Holly who I lived with and loved two years ago.

The Holly who I love now.

It's been a long road for both of us, but we're finally at a place where we can be happy together.

(Yes, we were both awful to each other in the past, but that is well and truly behind us now. We've both changed an awful lot. The past doesn't matter - only the present and the future)

Time to have breakfast and go to work, I think!

So, things have changed in my life recently. Big things. For one, I now have a girlfriend.

Actually, that's the only big change.

The only other thing is that I'm on somewhat of a massive Star Wars kick at the moment :)

So, yeah, things are good. I'm happy with the one I love. Work is going well. Life is good.

I love her so much

Ok, so Rick Wakeman was AWESOME. Nothing much else to say, really, other than that the show was amazing, the lights gorgeous and the music beautiful. Hampton Court Palace was the perfect venue for the show.

I saw a few friendly faces around Egham and one distinctly unfriendly one - said person has already written a startlingly mature post about me on her LiveJournal. Well, I don't care about her opinion anyway. The girls at work love my hair, and Tak, who I dropped in on, reckoned that I looked straight out of a rock concert "as usual". So, that being the case, I'm not going to trade more blows with such a lowly person. I have an awesome life and a great group of friends, plus I love my job. Her and her friend's insecurities are none of my business anymore, thank goodness.

It's amazing just how drama-free my life has been since I graduated. The worst it's got has been whether a problem was with the application that I've inherited or the network/firewall - my problem or the sysadmins' problem. Intellectual back-and-forthing, followed by deep analysis and resolution. It wasn't my problem, for the record.

Egham was beautiful as always. I'm probably going to spend a long weekend down there after the exams to catch up with all my old friends before they graduate or go home for the summer. Since it's exam time, I didn't feel that it was fair to contact anyone and ask for a couple of hours of their time when they could be revising. I didn't want to be the distraction that damaged their chances. As it was, I got to see Tak. I wasn't planning on disturbing his revision, but it turned out that he was having the day off. He texted me just before I got on the train back to London, and in the resulting discussion revealed that he was extremely free. Opportunity only knocks once, so I went over to his for a couple of hours. He gave me a Lucky Star pocket watch, too, quite randomly. It is a thing of beauty and I am going to wear it for formal occasions, quite subversively.

I really should go to bed now, I guess.

Good night.

For the first time since I graduated, I am in Egham.
For the first time ever, I will be staying on campus.

Me and Claire are going to see Rick Wakeman at Hampton Court Palace, and the obvious choice of guest accomodation was RHUL. We're staying in what used to be Athlone hall, right above what used to be Times Square. So many memories... Times Square was where I first met the bulk of the anime society. I'm glad it's still there. So many memories, so many memories.

Good afternoon

So what's going on in my life these days? Well, my life in Cambridge is going pretty well. The flat and I are getting on well, I've started wearing my hair down again, to the shock of everyone at work and I have time to play guitar again.

Ah yes, guitar... My careful plans to obtain new technology have been slaughtered by a sudden reawakening of my lust for guitars. I have a *need* for a Telecaster, a Les Paul, a classical and/or acoustic and the Epiphone ES 175. Hell, that's going to cost a lot. I also need a/some better amp(s)...

I'm on my way into town at the moment to pick up my bike. Not my Brompton, but my other bike. It's at Station Road Cycles having been serviced and kitted out with a basket and panniers. It's going to be my shopping bike :)

Back to guitars for a moment. I wrote what could be a new song last night, but I haven't got a decent way of recording it at the moment. Claire's agreed to let me have the 16-track in Cambridge, but that means going to Lynn to get it... I'll get around to it eventually, I guess.

Right, that's all for now. I have no idea where the bus is any more and I don't want to miss town!

Good afternoon.

I just finished reading Watchmen. Wow. That really was an awesome read. I started it late last night and couldn't put it down until 3 am. I spent all of this afternoon finishing it. Words fail me.

I guess I should go and see the film, now. I sincerely doubt that it can be as good, though.

In other news, living in my flat is going well and my washing machine works just fine.

This has to be the geekiest, most beautiful expression of love ever. Unless you don't know maths :)

http://www.floodgap.com/hdnr/?10

It occurs to me that the last public update I made here had me going to a job interview in St. Albans.

A lot has happened in the last 7 months. Here are the highlights:

I now have a job as a software developer. I work in Cambridge and am moving there next Saturday, after 7 months as a commuter. I have a Brompton folding bike which I use for getting from Cambridge railway station to where my company is based. My company is rather well-off and I am steadily rising up through the ranks ;)

I'm single at the moment. Spending three to four hours a day traveling hasn't exactly helped to get me out of the situation, but I'll soon have a lot more free time, so... Also, my department at work, Development, has three girls in it. One of them is married with a baby, one is probably single and the other is definitely single. There are also a lot of single men in dev. It doesn't seem to be a particularly good environment for meeting people ;)

I've been on two business trips in the last 7 months, both to my company's office in Southern California. It's very beautiful out there. I'd never flown before, but now I have and I love it.

I'm thinking of taking up archery in the next few months.

My current project at work is making me work a lot of late nights, which is a shame :( It's not that I don't enjoy it on some level, but it makes me get home so late...

I have an Xbox 360 but don't get much time to play on it at the moment.

I have quite a lot of friends at work, which is good.

That's about everything that I can think of right now.

I have a telephone interview with a company in St. Albans tomorrow.
I'm going to have a face-to-face interview with a company in Cambridge over the next few days, possibly even tomorrow afternoon.
What the hell.
I really am going to have to write that guide as to how to get a job.

Well, I passed all of my exams.  I didn't want to check the lists, but in the end I couldn't resist. 

Amusing facts:
-Nobody failed the Fundamentals of Digital Sound and Music course, which was an odd one to say the least.
-Nobody failed the Full Unit Project.  That's quite a relief!

Overall, there were very few fails.  There were a couple of incompletes across the courses, but I think my entire year is going to graduate.  Yay!

--

In other news, the CSSification of my website continues at a good pace.  The style is beautiful (naturally).  I've also started using some PHP - I didn't want to have to paste the HTML for my sidebar into every page, and the easiest way to dynamically link the page in appears to be with the PHP `include' command.  Useful indeed.  I might also change the site so the page to be displayed is in the URL - example.com/?page=frontpage, etc.  That might save me some time, and it would also make page creation easier.  Instead of having to write each page from scratch and remember the php includes and stuff, I could just put the main body of the page in a file on it's own.  However, I have no idea how to set the title of the page like this - maybe with some Javascript?
I also need to figure out what I'm doing with the sidebar - should the categories expand to show the subpages?  Is that easy to do?  Once I've done all that (and fixed a couple of CSS issues), the new site will go live.  Maybe then I'll finally link to it ;)

I doubt I'm going to be posting on LiveJournal much from now on. Maybe a few dull posts about buses doing amusing things or stuff going on in my life, but nothing very important.

Why is that? Because I have my own website now, with a self-admin'd blog. With that, I have no need for sites like LJ and Photobucket anymore.

The site is only half-live at the moment - the photo gallery and blog are up and going and the secret forum has reached nearly 500 posts. The 'Code' section only has one game on it so far, but hopefully I'll get some more code up there this morning. I'm also planning to write a 'Guides' section explaining how to do various simple things which people tend not to know - working with Java packages, setting Windows environmental variables, using the Windows command line....maybe write a basic guide to LaTeX. Stuff which might help my friends in the first year.

I hardly have any active contacts on LJ anymore, anyway. The people who want to find me will be able to, those who don't won't bother. It's as simple as that.

Can you say "Best magical girl show ever?"  No, because it wasn't as good as Nanoha/Nanoha A's.

But otherwise, it was absolutely brilliant.  I've been waiting for this OVA for months, ever since it was announced.  IT DELIVERED!  There was even a "Nice boat" reference at the end! xD

I watched it in raw, so I didn't understand all of it, but it was enough.

Taisuke for once was actually amusing, rather than annoying.  He also spent half of the episode naked, having torn off his clothes while being an ero-zombie.  Yes, there were ero-zombies, and a nice boat.  What more could you really ask from?  Long live the School Days franchise!

Other news:  stuff.  Not important stuff.  We caught a mouse earlier and I let him out on the other side of the road.  He was rather cute.  XNA sucks, and Hooke's Law will never leave my brain.  My room here is a lot tidier now.  Clannad was awesome, Shakugan no Shana Second is still awesome, H2O had a weird, yet happy, ending, true tears is actually very good.  I'm reading a book on Design Patterns.  See?  Nothing of any importance.  I should have been in bed an hour ago.

It is over.  7 months, 13000 words and over 7000 line of code.  One celibratory pizza.

This project has seen my learn LaTeX, the YourKit Java Profiler and a heck of a lot about Luby Transform.

Like most of my friends, I have not slept properly for a long time.  I will be going to bed shortly, and I don't plan on waking up until it's time to go to my lectures tomorrow.

Copies of my project will be available on request, but not necessarily just yet.  Feel free to register your interest with a comment.

In other news, drunk Tak is hilarious.  Apparently he lives on a diet of toast and strawberry jam.  He made me promise to record him the next time he phoned me when drunk...

Ichigo jamu!

Colchester Grandma just phoned.  For the first minute or two of the conversation, until I mentioned that Mum and Dad were in town, she thought I was Mum.  I get this quite a lot from that side of the family, and I don't quite know why...  One day I'm going to have to wrest the Shure microphone back from Claire and record both mine and Mum's voices for comparison...

MAKE IT STOP.

Parcelforce's help line is the worst thing I have ever come across.    I'm used to being put on hold and having tinny music played to me, but the non-stop adverts for their services are quite unbearable.

Thankfully I'm talking to a human now.  At last.

There.  And I now have the code I need so I can pay the customs charges.

Customs charges paid, Hina-chan is free.  Major credit to Tak for paying her ransom xD