Hold Steady, Updates Ahoy!
It feels like forever since I updated, as is often the case, on the few occasions I have anything to blog about I’m too busy to actually write anything!
Sooo what have I been up to? Well I finished my OU course at last! It was an experience that’s for sure. I don’t think Arts & the Humanities are for me. I loved the chapters on Architecture but the OU doesn’t do any architecture specific courses. So from October I’ll be doing an Engineering degree instead. Annoyingly starting at Level 1 again, but it should be a lot easier and won’t be full of essays!
My PC went a bit screwy so I decided to rebuild it, but then decided it’s worth doing an upgrade so it’s actually still not in use. It does work, but I’ve not been using it because I don’t want to have to back up any new data from it again and also because I’ve been using… my sparkly new Samsung NC10.
Yeah, I finally bought myself a netbook. With the main PC playing up and my final OU course assessment looming it became more and more desirable. I mentioned to my Dad that I really wanted one and he ended up giving me half the cash! Then there was a code for 15% off as well
I love it, it’s lots nicer than most of the other netbooks around which are either built like fisher price toys or have terrible battery life. I do take issue with the weird keyboard layout though. I’d have preferred the right shift key to be the bigger of the two and the back-slash key to be before the Z not after the forward-slash which just confuses me.
Being nice and small I’ll probably be taking it out and about with me when I’m likely to be sat bored somewhere for any length of time and thanks to yet another code on-line I now have a PAYG 3G dongle from Three which I only had to pay postage for. looking forward to testing that out. It’s also easily un-lockable so I don’t have to end up stuck using Three forever.
On the baking side of things I finally bit the bullet and bought myself some food colouring gels and some food glitter. The stuff is amazing! A little goes a long, long way and makes even really simple cakes look that little bit better
To go with the Engineering degree I’m getting back into coding. Well I say coding… I never feel very confident with it because I know so many people who are capable of such great things and I feel very insignificant, but hell, I know more than some people out there making websites so sod it! I’ve given myself some projects as the basis of my learning. I’ve created a little page to grab my current location from Google Latitude (updates via my Blackberry Bold), find the nearest weather forecast to me and display an image and text for the weather (I’ve added it to my start page). I ended up using PHP as it’s something I already knew and worked well with JSON (which is awesome isn’t it?!). Once I get it working exactly how I want I shall play around at porting it. I’ve looked at the GeoRuby things out there and they look pretty good. Rails is set up on my host already and I wanted a reason to try it out. To get myself ready for all this I went through my website and made sure all the pages are valid XHTML (strict) and valid CSS (up to v3.0).
So apart from baking, coding, wishing the heatwave would leave me alone, getting pre-storm migraines and playing about on the netbook I’ve been watching the baby Buzzards out back. There’s three that fledged a month or so ago and an unknown number of newer babies who only just fledged. They’re really cute and strangely cat-like! If only I had a camera lens long enough to take pictures of them…
Originally published at Chaos-23. You can comment here or there.