I just started painting again as I like the feeling of being artistic without actually having to have any god-given skill; I reckon I can muddle my way through and get a decent result - learning along the way. Of course I'll never be up to the level of getting into a competition, but I can dream, right?
Speaking of miniatures I also recently indulged in a bit of miniature technology. I coughed up for a nice little mini-itx box from ZTech that's going to act as a media server for me. It's a pretty powerful bit of kit considering it's passively cooled (yay!) and is nice and small. I plumped for the Mini 1200lg-usb in case I want to add extra storage or wifi or TV cards or... well you know - anything :)
Actually as far as storage goes I've already upgraded it from a paltry 80GB hdd up to a 250GB, which isn't as much as I'd like but due to the constraints of the small form factor I'm limited to laptop hdds (2.5" instead of 3.5"). It's probably enough for the short term since I already have a linkstation with 250GB, but I had all these crazy ideas about terabytes I've had to quash :(
The next thing to consider is a new desktop PC since this one's ageing badly and is really annoying me with it's happy-go lucky attitude to revving the shit out of the fan. It needs a good formatting and some TLC too, and I'd like to get back to using it for PC games too - since I've still not completed anything James has given me in the past few years : If only they had Linux compatibility eh? A rant for another time.
In this pic you can see the crap job I've done on the leather. It needs to be a lot darker and better blended so I'll be repainting it ;)
The other arm is also visible and I think both the arms have pretty good shading/highlighting on them. I just learnt about that sort of thing from Games Workshop that's a really big help to a newbie like me :) I hope I don't look as gimpish as that guy on the cover when I'm doing it. Seriously. Do they want people to think we're all like that?
Here you can see a bit of the dragon instrument I painted last Christmas, and the arm I just painted. It's been a long time since I started on this guy, and he was the last miniature I painted.
I know it's a bit blurry; the camera obviously isn't built for that sort of close-up shot even in macro mode, or perhaps it's the lighting... Either way, it does the job in this case.
...than anything for you.
I've added Todos and got all that stuff working nicely, next I'll probably add in an image uploader so I can begin making a fool of myself with Warhammer model paintings :)
A retrospective update includes a back catalogue of blogs I wrote, some of which may have broken links and/or appallingly immature sentiments broadcast to the big wide world. Terrible stuff.
I'm sat here having finished watching Atlantis S04E03 (which was a bit predictable if you ask me...) thinking about what stupid thing to support on my website, since its architecture now lends itself to silly toys. Then it struck me; I don't actually have any originality of my own at the moment so instead I should be relying upon other people to give me some ideas.
So here's the idea I had; allow other people to give me Todos, which I can then either 'do' or 'reject' (most likely because they were supplied by James). So I'd better get to it, then.
I no longer need worry about future proofing my crappy blog software, and no longer need consider other people's crappy blog software. I can go about creating objects and let the system bear the stress of storing them for future publication, in the correct order too.
But enough of the allusions to technicality; perhaps this time content will win over.
I don't like what I'm being taught, I don't like the anal expectation that I turn up to lectures (despite there being no point what wth the 100% effective sleep induction taking place), and I don't like doing work that nobody uses.
I was thinking about how I'd feel if I'd done a year in industry as a break from uni; would I be able to stand it for longer? I reckon it'd just irritate me even further coming back.
My project is boring, my lectures inane. I've done literally 3 programming modules over 3 years of study (laughably easy modules I might add) and I'm extremely disillusioned about the degree I'll end up with. I suppose it's not a Programming degree; it's Software Engineering, so I have to learn how to engineer software - and to be fair I have learnt a lot of useful stuff from the degree. Unfortuntely not much of it was what I actually wanted to learn in the first place.
So there's this big craze these days for social networking - who knew that people actually wanted to keep track of eachother? I thought people lost contact on purpose :P
Anyway, I've tried all 3 of the networking sites I mention and have a few opinions about them;
Orkut
The first one I tried was Orkut which seems extremely chaotic... it's somehow connected to google and has just decided to integrate its login with google's (which suits me as I have a gmail account), unfortunately it's also become a nice place for weird spam to hit your mailbox so that's a bit annoying.As I said; it's a bit chaotic and not that many people are on there that I know, so there wasn't much reason for me to carry on using the site.
MySpace
Everyone's heard of MySpace and oh-my-god this piece of crap makes Orkut seem civilized. It's full of people wanting desperately to appear popular, and at the same time attempting to give me an epileptic fit any time I look at their profile page (as well as be bombarded by their crappy taste in music.)Anyway, as you can see I'm not at all impressed by MySpace; the idea of allowing people to decorate their profiles seems like a good one, but in practicality giving people that much freedom over things that other people have to see is really a terrible idea. I don't want to see incredibly clashing, browser incompatible crap all over my screen. Neither do I want awful music blaring from an annoying flash music player on every other page - try loading up a few random pages and hear the cacophony of shite.
It has image storage in photo albums and allows tagging of individual people in the pictures, that then links to their profiles. Actually most of the features of Facebook are really nice; it's fast, clean and effective - only the ability to 'poke' people and the adverts actually irritate me.
So, use Facebook - it's actually good :)
Thanks to ChrisGibson.com I have brand new hosting, so rather than running of my constantly-saturated home line, I'm running off his nice server (though my uptime 0wns his :P)
While there are still a few things I'd like to tweak with regards to moving from a Lighttpd server back to Apache, overall it's all working fine. The only major issue I can't work around just yet is that he doesn't have the `fortune' program available so I can's spout random crap at you effortlessly. Luckily Jen supplied me with some wisdom about religion so that's the quote for the site now.
That's all for now :)
It seems I've neglected this blog for a while now so this ought to be a large update;
Laptop
I got a brand new laptop since the insurance company wrote off the 2nd hand Thinkpad X31 I bought for £200 off ebay, they replaced it with a £900 Toshiba Satellite Pro U200 that has a Core2Duo chip in it - which, for anyone unfamiliar with all these specifications, is a massive upgrade!
Not only is this computer 64 bit as opposed to 32 bit, but it has 2 processors and plenty of L2 cache, meaning it's fairly nippy. I think the insurance company just looked at the GHz values of the processors without actually considering performance at all - which suits me fine ;)
Year
Well the new year hasn't brought much change, except that now I'm 24. I feel very tired right about now - birthdays always did that to me, well, for the past decade anyway.
Semester
More interesting to me than birthdays is the new modules I'm studying; Computer Vision and Understanding being one of the more interesting ones that deals with how computers can take a 2D image and work out what's going on with it - where are the objects, edges, overlaps, etc. Real Time Systems might also be interesting since it deals with embedded technology such as mobile phones.
The exams for my last semester went fairly well, so I'm now supposed to be concentrating on my Project and on job applications (boring). Needless to say I need something else to occupy my mind.
Website Design
Yes the design has changed, I just hacked an openly available template until I was moderately happy with it - the old design was beginning to irritate me - not that I looked at it very often ;)
Actually part of the reason I began looking at these templates is because I have a couple of hobby-projects in mind, one to do with James that's currently top secret (until someone asks I guess :P) and the other is a web page to allow me to control my music system in a similar way to iTunes' rather nice and simple interface. I'll talk more about them as and when I do anything on them.