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

Well, damn.  I totally forgot that I'd still got some things on order from HobbyLink Japan!  They have this crazy system ordering system, you see - you place an order for things, and when they have them in stop they will send them to you, but only then will they tell you the shipping costs.  On the plus side, I now have a Sanzenin Nagi pillowcase and a cushion to go with my Saber Lion cushion cover on the way.  On the minus side, this will set me back about £60, and I only have about £200 at the moment.  I should just about be able to make it to the end of term without going into debt, though, thanks to my weekly tutoring session with Derek.  Keep your fingers crossed for me!

In other news, Utawarerumono is, like, the best game ever.  It's highly addictive, damnit.  I don't need a gaming addiction right now!  If only the English patch had been released in 6 weeks time rather than now!  The story is both gripping and moving, and the gameplay is fun.  The music compliments the story perfectly.  It's a turn-based RPG combined with a visual novel.  It's also, to my surprise, an eroge.  Hmm, didn't see that one coming.  I think I must have been thinking of Gadget Trial as the not-an-eroge one.  I wish Gadget Trial (which I really need to play more of!) was an eroge, though :3

The number of Visual Novels I'm in the middle of just keeps on growing.  I'm now in the middle of One, Gadget Trial and Utawarerumono.  I've finished one route of both Fate/stay night and Wind.  I have several more that I just haven't started, or have only played a little of (Tsukihime, Bible Black).

Anyway, I'm very tired now, but I don't have time to sleep for the time being.  I need to get stuff done now, instead of messing around.  Gah :(

Gah!  Instead of treating myself to my yoghurt and anime, I went and implemented funky camera controls!  I can now point the camera at any of my spheres or point it at the origin at the press of a key.  I can also move it's position.
This is cool stuff.

That was possibly the most satisfying bit of coursework that I've ever done.

Computer Games Technology Coursework 2 (assessed).

Overview:  This is a programming exercise in computational physics: to simulate a 3 body system under gravity and display the results using XNA.

Watching those point-mass spheres orbit each other was just sooo relaxing :)  Maybe I'll share the program once I've graduated - I can hardly really put my assessed coursework on the 'net beforehand!

Anyway, I'm not done with it yet.  I need to change the scaling of the spheres so that it's proportional to the volume, I need to make the camera mobile and I need to implement the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RK4">RK4</a> intergrator.  Then I'll be done.

Not bad at all, considering how much I struggled with the last bit of XNA coursework!

I think it's time for a yoghurt and an episode of anime before bed.  I deserve this little reward, I think :)

Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun is made of win.  Mayu is the best kind of moe-blob, and her voice is just perfect.  Plus, she has pink hair.  I only wish that Megami Magazine would publish some posters of Mayu - I want her on my wall!

Speaking of Megami, I finally got time to cut the posters out of the January and February issues.  I've only had time to put a few of them up so far, but I'm going to have to find time to redecorate the rest of my room soon.  Down with Zero no Tsukaima, down with Moetan, down with Polyphonica, down with Nanoha StrikerS.  Up with Higurashi, up with Bamboo Blade, up with Kodomo no Jikan, up with Rosario to Vampire, up with Clannad.

Speaking of Clannad, I have the loveliest poster of Nagisa, Kyou and Tomoyo up on my wall now.  It's seriously beautiful.  Clannad is such a difficult series.  With Kanon, Shiori was a clear favourite ahead of the other girls.  With Clannad, I find it difficult to choose.  Nagisa is adorable.  Kyou is hillarious and shares a seiyuu with Izen from Gadget Trial.  Kotomi is voiced by Noto Mamiko.  Plus, Kotomi's "bonjour" was probably the best moment in anime ever.

Ah, KyoAni...  <3  If only they'd do a Negima series, then the world would be complete.  So far, we haven't had a single decent anime adaptation.  'Mahou Sensei Negima!', the original.. XEBEC.  Ugly as hell, gave Chisame green hair, made up a lame ending.  No thanks.  'Negima!?' by SHAFT.  Again, no.  Sure, it was funny, but the sheer amount of character assasination that took place was unbelievable.  Sure, it was a good comedy, but it wasn't true to the manga, neither by way of characters or plot.  'Negima!!', the live action drama currently in production?  Hmm... I haven't watched it since episode 7.  It was quite horrendous, really.  What the world *needs* is a long-form Negima anime, preferably by Kyoto Animation.  I'm not talking about 26 episodes, I'm talking about a couple of hundred.  The manga just hit chapter 201.  The cast have come on so far since the early days, it's difficult to look back without cringing.  I can't wait to see how this arc is resolved.  And how will Negi explain all this to Ako?

Still on the subject of Negima, my favourite Negi/X pairing has changed since the early chapters.  Negi/Chisame is the best pairing, followed by Negi/Ako.  Konoka/Setsuna is practically a given, and Asuna/Eva would amuse me no end.  Asuna and Setsuna's bath scene in chapter 200 (?) was brilliant, though :)

And on that note, it's time for me to read the latest chapter of Hayate no Gotoku! and get back to my Games coursework.

Somehow, anime often leaves me with a strong urge to blog in block caps.  I shall resist this today.

Shakugan no Shana Second episode 15 was awesome.  Konoe Fumina was revealed to be a vessel for Hecate (no surprise there) and lots of stuff happened.  The Seeking Researcher made an appearance too, so there was much win.

Next week's episode looks even better - Pheles gave Yoshida Kazumi a hougu - does this mean that she can become a mystes as well?  Wouldn't that be awesome?  So much for the whole "I can never get together with Sakai-kun because he's immortal" thing!  Finally, Shana would have some serious competition!

In an endnote, I wish to loudly proclaim that someone should licence and translate the Shakugan no Shaka light novels.  Oh, and they should release them, as well.  Don't do what Seven Seas did with Kodomo no Jikan ¬_¬

I feel very silly for not having written an update on Saturday.

Most of you haven't known me long enough to remember it, but the 19th of January 2008 was the fifth birthday of something very important to me - My Diary. This website helped me make the transition from unknown and quiet to famous and popular. Well, I'm not sure about popular, but I was certainly famous. When you walk along a corridor and overhear people saying that their class had spent all of registration talking about your diary, you know you've made it. I ended up winning a 'Living Legend' award from comedy duo Chaz and Dave. Great days, indeed. The long term effect of my diary was simple - it helped me overcome my shyness. Growing my hair long, listening to prog, keeping an online diary and getting into anime - those were the four major steps that seperate 15 year old Brian and 21 year old Brian. The 16 year old Brian of my-diary.org had started on the path, but even 5 years down the line he hasn't reached the end.

To summarise the key points in my diary in the 10 minutes before I have to leave to be at my lecture on time (as if!), it was basically about my creepy, stalker-like obsession with Kirstie Smith. Yes, I fancied her, but no, it would never had worked. I hardly even knew her all that well, anyway. Just like my disasterous attempt to ask out Katy Steer a couple of years earlier (yes, I fancied her, yes, it was me who sent her that card, and yes, you all embarassed me beyond my limits. And yes, Rajan, that last point means you too.), my' romancing' of Kirstie was doomed to utter failure. So I made a mockery of it online.

Great idea, no?

The problem was, how was I to get people to read my diary without seeming too vain? ("Hey everyone, read my diary!!"?) Well, I tried telling Rajan. Hmm, what a mistake. Rajan didn't even look at it until a good week or two after it had become popular. A couple of days after I'd started writing, I gave the address to Katy. She gave it to Nic Biggs, and the next thing I knew everyone was reading it. Magic.

Five years ago I didn't write an update because I was ill and in bed, seemingly. Huh, looks like I picked the right day to write my flashback review.

I've got to get brush my hair, get dressed and go to my lecture now, really. This means that my grand plan of writing a retrospective look at my diary for its fifth anniversary has failed utterly, as I have to stop now. The point is that my diary was a lot of fun for everyone, really. Here's to five more years of blogging!