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I love listening to music, so a decent mp3 player is needed for my 1 hour commute to work, so I decided to get myself a 80gb ipod classic. Beforehand I was pretty against to iPods since their battery life and fault rate was horrific. However these days the battery life is awesome and for the price you’re getting a pretty awesome deal (come on, 80gb for £160). I however opted to get myself some warranty to ensure that if this thing DOES break, I can get it repaired or replaced. So yeah with an extra £30 on 3 year warranty at Argos I got myself an ipod. It’s pretty cool, cover flow rocks (glad I have album art sorted) and it was nice and slim. Travelling is now a godsend. I will still use my iriver when I need to do some recordings hehe.
OK I’ve been on a pretty crazy spending spree but I’ve managed to get myself a PS3 AND a PSP Lite and Slim. Reason for getting the ps3 was to simply buy it before they stop doing the 60gb PS3s which had backward compatibility as well as 4 usb ports. Psp well, I dont know, I wanted to play Loco Roco and a few MGS games. I’ve managed to get the PSP modded too so I can get into the whole homebrew scene (I still buy the UMDS :)) but yeah, guilty pleasure and all, I really enjoy the PS3, it’s nice having a machine that can do HD quality films as well play games, I was going to get one anyway when MGS4 is out. I have guitar hero 3 for it too for some rocking action as well as a few bits and bobs downloaded on the PSN store. Tekken 5 dark resurrection is epic! I’m going to give the xbox 360 a miss for the time being until they fully fix their heating problems as well as make the Elite features feature on the normal white coloured 360. So yeah, loads of games to play with now haha :$.
I’m really starting to appreciate the use of RSS feeds and a feed reader. I used to use the live bookmark feature in firefox to check out for news but now it seems to be tedious to use since you need to click on it in order to check if anything is new. Now that I’m using Google Reader all I need to do is load that baby up and bam! All my feeds are there! Anything new can instantly be noticed (rather than occasionally slipping the odd news when I’m not clicking them live bookmarks). I’ve been pimping the thing up with loads of feeds including Muse news, NME news, some random comics, geek news (LOADS of it), blog entries from friends, social networking updates (mainly facebook tbh) and photography news. I hardly check the sites anymore, just read it on google reader 
I would recommend people to get Google Reader going. I would recommend a software based RSS reader like RSSOwl or even Outlook but it’s just a lot nicer and easier to manage when you do it all online (seems like the way forward these days, what with web office etc). So yeah! Get yourself a gmail account if you haven’t already and go nuts on Google Reader 
Been doing alot of blog pimping lately, on my blog and also on Alice’s newly acquired blog that can be found at www.aliced.co.uk. Its fun when you get into a mode where you just tweak your blog like silly haha. Some changes now include:
- New image borders and hovers
- Random images for To do list and about me section
- Slightly cooler looking comment box
- Removed Links from the blog
- Added a flickr badge at the bottom
- Changes the calender date thingy to a nicer looking green and white thingy
- Meddled with the header thingy a bit
- Added loads more subtitles
That’s about it really. Going to see Jason and Rachel today for some wii action
Yes, you’ve heard it, last ever exam. And strangely things get biblical.
Anyway lets set the scene, wake up per usual. I actually haven’t revised much, I did print stuff out but nothing really went in. But instead of moping around I just started attempting the past papers and sample questions. It gave me an idea of how the questions were going to be and all. Initially I was a bit overwhelmed with the stuff I dont know how to answer, but gradually with alot of googling I managed to find all the answers I needed. I slowly did this from 8-9. I also had my last bowl of lucky charms (don’t worry, one more bag left haha), saved it for today for good luck. Not to mention my lucky duck hehe.
Anyway enough of the revision. I start heading off to uni at the same time I left for Advanced Databases, weird thing was how the buses arrived bang on when I was at the bus stop so I got to uni pretty swiftly. I was a bit early so I decided to do some shopping and bought Jason his birthday present in advance. I then went to uni and revised a bit more in the staff canteen. Thing were starting to make sense (just a tad to be honest) most of the questions were answered at home so I was just reading stuff at the canteen, like always nothing really got in haha.
Decided to just head to the venue and do the exam… and yeah.. guess where I’m doing the exam? HERE!
Thats right, the exam gets biblical, a really nice end to uni haha. The final judgement! (I actually could go on!) But yeah, it was pretty weird doing the exam there, there was a different woman leading the exam, she was just as evil as the other one (whats with the evil old ladies haha), she actually reported a kid for leaving their revision notes on the floor (regardless of reading it). Hope he doesnt get a fail for that. But yeah, the exam itself was REALLY easy, the lecturer was lazy and simply pasted the old exam questions in the paper! Just slightly tweaked in some areas, it was godly to answer, all I had to do was write the stuff I only just answered this morning. It still involved 2 hours worth of pen scribbling but nonetheless, its a good thing when you can use up 2 hours and just constantly write.
One of the best moments is when a light started to shine on my desk, oh yeah, was quite surreal, most people experienced the light shining onto their desk, it almost felt like god going “you are the chosen one! now start coding your xhtml semantics and make sure its web accessible” haha. But yeah, I even starting assuming the praying position just to sort of thank the lord for such an easy exam haha.
Afterwards I went out with Alex to buy a Krispy Kreme to celebrate, it was all a bit of an anticlimax to be honest, didn’t feel like it ended right, but nonetheless we ate our Krispy Kremes, had a game of DS Lite and went our ways. Quite alot of silly girls kept trying to talk to us, chances are if we had replied we would have got some, what with their “easy virtue” haha. Kingston was filled with chavs, the emo kids hanged around the basement of the shopping centre (typical) and sat near the Krispy Kremes store (trying to get nice and fat?)
But yeah… feels weird and all but its allllll over.. now I can official start lounging about! Leeds tomorrow woo!
Slowly completing my other projects now, been doing the crazy sudoku one now It wasn’t too hard to implement I must say, though I did use the dirtiest coding ever to build it, nonetheless I completed the juice of the system and all I need is to finish bits and bobs off, write the report and bam, another project out of the way. I’m suppose to be making posters right now so its pretty awesome that I’m way ahead of time. Got lots of presentations and demonstrations to do this week. Including some crazy poster presentation and a database presentation. Will most likely need to look representable so ties all the way (leather one to make it slightly rock and roll haha). Watching loads of Studio Ghibli films lately, felt really inspired to watch them again Still wanna goto Studio Ghibli in Japan 
At a disturbing word count of 38, 836 words, a disturbingly awesome poster presentation waiting to be printed off and a nights and nights of staying up late coding, report writing, and head scratching the report is FINALLLLLLLLLLLLY done! Woo!
Theres still other bits and bobs to finish, like database reports, web technology reports as well as prototype demonstrations but they are all small projects that can be done in a desperate night of struggle (like all the great projects men had set off to do in the last minute), but yeah. This was the hardest project I’ve ever done and I’m so glad to just hand it over to the uni people for it to be marked. Bit of an anti climax to be honest. I was expecting this rush after handing it in but nowt. Ah well.
I better do some relaxing now, my head is all tensed up, ready to explode so I’m definitely calling this a day, a of relaxing, a day of kings shall we say haha. A day where I can toss my shoes in the air and just set myself free (is a more toned down non hippy free love kind of way).
Ooh waiting for an awesome parcel arrive now Thank god I handed my project in early otherwise I would have went to a crazy Royal Mail car chase (with my imaginary car). Anyway… WOOO!!!!!
Deary me, I have a lot of phrases for this one, including “Geeks will always be geeks”, “They’ll never learn” and perhaps “Whats your logical intervention for all of this?”
Anyway, after a lovely lecture at Mobile Business today (as well as a nice talk about my project report with my supervisor). I had the urge to do something immediately when I got back home..
No not that (filthy minds you), and no not finish my report! Rather then following the crowd and continuing to juice out 60 pages worth of project banter, (I’m on 57 now anyway so I can take a break haha), I decide to.. FLASH MY PHONE!……….AGAIN!
Now I dont think I blogged about the time I flashed my phone (actually I just found it haha). But the first time I received my phone, I was instantly appalled by Orange’s stupid Homescreen crap they’ve put on the phone. These days, mobile operators would like meddle with a perfectly functional and cool phone firmware and shove alot of their operator specific crap in it to restrict users when using their phones. Usually its to protect themselves from people using other features etc. Anyway, the first time I flashed it I got it done professionally (though the location I got it flashed from wasn’t too professional looking, in fact it was their house and they just do it with their laptop haha (they have the gear before you ask!)). Anyway, that was fine, my phone was flashed then (I also suffered a nasty fall that day but lets not talk about it haha)… the second time was when Nokia announced that you can flash your own phone. Being someone who enjoys having their stuff up to date I jumped on the software upgrades etc and downloaded the nokia software, it was nice and official so it was alot more chilled and relaxed to do it etc.
Anyway, the thing I didnt know was the fact that it recognised my product code and that it required an operator specific firmware. So BAM! I’m stuck with the operator specific crap… AGAIN! I wasn’t having none of that, I didnt really want to spend more money to get it debranded again so I opted in looking at ways of doing it myself. Now there are, but they are DODGY and usually carry a risk in bricking your phone. But I did it anyway, and guess what? Bricked phone. Had to go back to that professional place and get it reflashed in order to get my phone working again.
So yeah… after that traumatic experience, here comes part 2. My supervisor / lecturer talked about his new swanky N95 phone and talked about how Orange were sly enough to disable voip calling. He was then googling for solutions to get past this and in the end he was contacted by someone who gave him the solution.. which was.. ladies and gentleman, flashing your phone. The whole phone debranding thing sent shivers down my spine. Though for my lecturers case he managed to get it done successfully, using the same dodgy software that I once used. So what does that leave me? I’m stuck here googling for new firmware updates and whether or not there are new safer methods out to do the job, and strangely..there was! Which was out in 2007 (where have I been). The method is alot safer and requires changing the phone id to a generic code. Reading more into it I found out that you can also turn N70 phones into an N70 music edition phone (firmware wise). So yeah, it got me all excited and this is where the crowd all shakes their heads, tut and go “geeks will always be geeks” haha.
So yeah.. I’m waiting for my phone battery to charge. I have my phone all setup and ready to go. Once again I’m going to panic over it but it does seem like a reasonably easy task this time, not to mention the fact that I’ve tried the official route before and it seemed to have worked :). So yeah, another crazy day of phone flashing and all.
So yeah, if you cant reach me on the phone after this.. chances are I’ll be heading back to that damn place to get my phone professionally reflashed because I bricked it again haha. Also, if you play me on Tetris DS around this time and notice that I’m beating you mercilessly, that means I bricked it again, if you find me very agitated or antisocial, that means I bricked it again. Haha. But yeah, if I feel happy after this ordeal, that means I’ve successfully flashed my mobile phone and managed to add in a TINY bit of functionality to my phone which I’ll probably won’t use anyway haha. So yeah, this is where you go “geeks will be geeks” again with their constant need for updating stuff even though it adds no real benefit.
Update: Haha, well, just managed to get my phone RE RE Flashed. It worked the first time and I had the new music edition thingy but I felt it was kinda rubbish so I reflashed it to a standard generic one. So yeah, it worked 
Just funny how I felt the need to reflash it because something was bothering me haha. So yeah, everything is fine and dandy
