Home of the Dutch Gecko

The first term of my second first year is complete. Another ten week block of terrible stress and oodles of hard work. Ok, so maybe I was laying it on a little rich there.

It’s been good, I guess. The course makes more sense. There’s less of the “I don’t like this module I wish I was asleep” feeling. I’ve met a whole bunch of crazy new people. I’ve learned some crazy new stuff. I’ve moved house - again.

Quite a few changes. Yet it all seems so familiar - I guess it’s just the first year all over again.

I’m back in the nether-Netherlands, enjoying the whole family thing. My sister’s being nice so far, though this could be down to her revived counter-strike addiction. I’ve been tucking into revision like a good boy, but ICM is still worrying me. Nothing like sets and matrices to get the adrenaline rushing!

I’ve been trying to kick the insomnia habit, but my body seems to be keen on resisting any change. I’ve got a hell of a timetable next term so I’m going to have to fix things, but for some reason falling asleep is not an option until 2AM at the earliest. Of course, I’ve probably broken my previous progress by staying up this late now, but I theoretically have little to do tomorrow. And this is fun. Really. Blogging can be fun.

OK so I wrote all of that last week and never got round to sticking it on the site. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, and that your holidays are going well. I’m going to hit the “Publish” button and do something else.

I’ve been all the way through my old photo collection and picked out some stuff to adjust the colours, sharpen, line up, resize and upload. I’ve been pretty self-critical this time round, so some stuff that existed on the site isn’t present. It might be later, I don’t know.

It was pretty interesting to see the stuff I experimented with from the moment I started shooting to the stuff I did this summer. It’s only been a year and a half since I got my own camera, but it seems like longer. I currently have 2651 photos consuming 4.72GB on my hard drive, though some of them are duplicates, and some of them are just a blur or a black screen. I’m proud to say I’ve only ever deleted three photos, and that was because my memory card was full and I desperately wanted that last shot (no, it’s not on the site, it turned out rubbish). Why does this make me happy? Because it means I can remember things. We can’t yet take a photo of everything we see during our lifetime, but when I have my camera in my hand I stop for a lot of things. Often when I don’t have it I wish I did. I might see a funny situation (four hens sitting on a fence) or just something beautiful (the sun breaking through icicles hanging off a tree branch). Just now I can remember these situations as if they were a photo, but I cannot share them with you and I know I will forget them one day. So I keep those photos that I do have, even if they are only a blur.

You’ve probably found the link to the photo gallery already. It’s available on the right, or you can click here to go straight there. There’s also some funky preview things, but they might break on occasion as I tinker with them. Yes the layout on the gallery is still fairly basic (read: broken) but I needed some photos anyway to change the theming, so I thought I may as well upload them all at once so you could take a gander.

There are some new ones up there. Some of it is very old, but most of it is from the past summer (when I should have been building a website).

As a final, but serious note, I haven’t worked out a copyright system that works for me just yet, so at the moment all rights are reserved, spelled with a capital ©.

Also, principles of programming assignment next week, so this place will be dead Enjoy the pics!

I need to test to see if my advert blocks are appearing correctly, so here’s a post. With an advert.
Now that wasn’t so hard was it?

Well that works perfectly, so I guess I’ll stick a little text in here. Might as well include some real content eh?

I’m in York. It’s winter. The geese have left. Well, the dumb ones. The smart ones hang around and feed off the scraps they are given by the students.

A whole load of stuff has happened over the summer and I didn’t tell many people because I’m like that. Electronics is out - things were going badly, and the exams confirmed that. I’m now doing Computer Science (or Computer Systems and Software Engineering if you listen to the admissions department), and it’s going surprisingly well. If you want to learn esoteric programming languages, York is the place to be. Scheme will blow your mind, not to mention being thoroughly useless after the first year.

Life’s been good, course is easy (for now). The website switched to a new server, and I was a lazy shite but knew that it was about time to redesign the thing. So I didn’t, obviously. Instead, I made websites for other people:

• James College, where I lived last year
• Ennef, my mother’s own venture into language teaching and translation
• Question of Balance, for a friendly guy down the road. He’s made a few alterations to it though, and the code isn’t valid any more. Not my fault, I swear.

And now it’s time to do my own. I’m trying to make this theme as elegant as possible, and hopefully I’ll be able to package it up and make it available for download. It looks ugly just now, I know. That’s because it needs images, and images need photoshop, and installing photoshop requires me to get off my arse. One day, I promise.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what all the extra hints at galleries and photos around the site are for, it’s because I found one sweet photo management plugin. It’s gonna rock.

This is actually just a test for something that a friend wants to try out. If you’ve ever heard of Albino Blacksheep then you’ll know who he is - he runs it. If you haven’t seen the site before, check it out, it’s stuffed to the brim with talent.

Anyways, it’s some javascript thing that creates links to social networking stuff. I’m not sure exactly what it does, because he wasn’t that clear about it, so I guess I should find out.

ABS Share

Now, let’s see if that worked.

It did! Good! Now let’s see what it does! It didn’t, give me a few minutes.

I hacked it to make it work. What a waste of a test :\

Time to break everything of course! Here comes one theme without styling. And possibly horribly broken syntax. This is gonna get ugly.

Update: Yes! It parses!

Don’t fill my shoutbox with too much crap while I get a layout working. Thanks.

I need a second post to test out some stuff and observe behaviour. In other words, there’s nothing to see here. Sorry!

Tehee, the site is back.

It’s undergoing some X-treme rennovation, so expect to see all sorts of weird crap going on. Not to mention the gradual installation of *counts* 23 WordPress plugins. That’s a lot by the way.

So yeah, hang tight.