Kaoru.Slackwise.Net v4 blog

Thursday, June 14, 2007

An Oxford Fling and 20,000 Words

Wow, what a month! The title characters (Miss Oxford Fling and Mr 20,000 Words XD) were kinda all happening at the same time, but I'm gonna talk about them separately so here goes...

Oxford Fling

Last Saturday was Izumi-chan's end of year fling, and I just so happened to tag along :) Actually, I've been wanting to visit Izumi and hang out for ages, and this was the perfect opportunity! I went up fairly early (too early according to someone XD) and met up with Izumi at around 11, dropped my bags (one for laptop + stuff, one for clothes for the fling) off in her room, and then we headed out for lunch :)

We went for lunch in a place called the NoodleBar, which was basically a Chinese Wagamama XD I had some really nice charsiu pork noodle soup, and Izumi had the same but with duck and thicker noodles :) It was pretty yummy but unfortunately suffered from the same problem as Wagamama does, which is that it's noisy!

After that we went for a wander around Oxford, in particular visiting St Mary's church and the Deer Park at Magdalen. St Mary's is really tall and they let you climb up the stairs to the top and walk around on this granite balcony thing... It's really cool because you can see all the pretty Oxford buildings below you :) Some of you might know that I'm a little (a lot XD) afraid of heights... But I got used to being up there fairly quickly and definitely enjoyed it :) Oxford is so pretty!

On the way back from "doing Oxford" we bought some snacks at Saisnbury's and then sat down on Izumi's floor in front of a movie :) The movie genre of choice was "horror", and the movie was The Hills Have Eyes. The movie started out pretty slowly, and Izumi and I were having a fair amount of difficulty figuring out how the characters (who are a family on vacation) were all actually related to one another... I think there were three generations, but the middle generation had quite an age gap between its oldest and youngest members :P Anyway once the movie actually got going it was really awesome! I don't wanna spoil to much but basically one of the characters owned a load of mutants using a variety of cool weapons including a baseball bat, a screwdriver and a shotgun :D Much fun!

Once the movie was over with, Izumi headed to the shower while I "got ready for the fling"... Well, first I completed Ouendan 2, since I'd been stuck on the last level on the coach up, but then I got ready for the fling :) Soon enough I was dressed up all smart and ready, and after a bit Izumi came out of her room looking amazing in her dress :)

The fling started out with a champagne reception, lots of chatting and properly meeting Izumi's Oxford friends, and then an absolutely delicious dinner. The dinner had a few options for each course, and mine were: Chicken Noodle Soup, Thai Green Curry, and Mousse, whereas Izumi chose: Chicken Noodle Soup, Belly Pork, and Fruit Salad. The Belly Pork was absolutely amazing and kinda made me wish that I'd decided on that myself, but the Thai curry was also delicious and my Mousse kicked her Fruit Salad's ass so we were even really XD Mmm the mousse was peach with a cherry sauce, soo yummy!

After the dinner the Gargoyles (Regent's Park singing society?) were singing out in one of the two marquees and we watched them for a while. They were really good! I particularly liked their rendition of Fly Me To The Moon, since that has Evangelion-y memories for me :P Once the singing was done, we wandered around seeing what other fun things were happening :) Naturally Izumi was snapping photos the whole evening so if you take a look on at her Facebook albums there's plenty more photos to see!

It was an incredible night with tons going on, so I'm just gonna recap some of the events quickly... Apologies if the order is wrong or anything :P There was a team of Chinese acrobats who were great - One did cool dances with flowing fabric and stuff, another did acrobatic moves/balancing acts which culminated in her balancing 5 candlestick holders (with candles lit) over her body while she somehow managed to balance on one foot, and lastly a magician who did some pretty funky tricks :) Some were quite obvious I think, but others were like "huh?" :P The Doughnut Kings (Jazz Band... Regent's Park or Oxford? dunno...) played in the main hall and some people were doing ballroom dancing and stuff to it which was pretty cool to watch but kinda made me wish I knew how to dance XD Uhh what else happened? Well all evening out between the marquees there were sumo suits and a ring for people to play with which was highly entertaining XD And in the other marquee there was shisha pipes/bongs/whatever (????) for people to try... I didn't try it, but it was still a rather relaxed atmosphere with cushions all over the floor so we did spend some time in there :P

At the end of the night the "bop" started in the main hall, which meant that pop/rock/rap/chart music was played and people who were drunk danced... Also, I danced... or attempted to at least XD Song highlights were Spinning Around (Kylie?), Summer of '69 (Bryan Adams) (Although Izumi missed it T_T I love that song <3), and Parklife (Blur) when absolutely everybody started dancing together in a massive ring :) It was so awesome!

Finally, the night was over and it was time to say goodbye... I got changed back into my regular clothes, hugged Izumi goodnight, and set off home on the 3:10am Oxford Tube :)

As you can tell, the whole day was absolutely amazing and I will always look back on it and smile :) Thank you so much for inviting me Izumi-chan~! <3 *huuugs*

20,000 Words

What on earth could this be a reference to I wonder? Well I assume most of my reader's can guess even if they don't know already... Today I handed in my project report! At 81 pages and 20,859 words I'm really quite happy with it, although I'm sure my supervisor will continue to believe that my sentences are too long and my paragraphs are too short :P Perhaps he's right, it's true that I do use commas a lot, but that's just me XD

For the overly curious my report can be downloaded (in PDF or PostScript format) from my DoC website, on the Individual Project page.

So glad that it's finally over! :D I've been up late every night for the past week working on it, usually being kicked out of the DoC labs by security at 11pm :P Today I had a feeling that the printers would all break (and I wasn't wrong!) and that the binding room would be ridiculously busy, so I got up at 6:30 and caught the 7:28 train to London Victoria. When I arrived the DoC labs weren't even open yet and I was absolutely exhausted. I printed my project off nice and quickly, and headed up to the binding room which was going to open at around 9... Flicking through my project outside I naturally noticed a mistake, so headed back down to the labs to fix it and reprint it. Printing it that time naturally caused a paper jam, which of course coincided with the other printers all going offline for one reason or another and me having to wait for another hour. Aaanyway~ I got my project bound and handed in by around 11:30, so that wasn't too bad at all :D

Got my presentation on Monday morning, and once that's done I've officially finished my degree!! But don't worry, it's not all over, next Wednesday I have my interview to do a Masters in Advanced Computing :) It's a one year course that will land me with an MSc if all goes well! Awesomeness!

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Well, thanks for reading to anybody who read all the way through this essay of a blog entry! Hopefully I'll write again soon! Our end of year ball is this Saturday, and with my presentation and interview next week too, I should have plenty to write about!

Oh, I nearly forgot... Ed (my awesome employer :P) asked me to plug Yahoo! Hack Day, which is this Saturday. Nestoria are having a competition wherein the best use of the Nestoria API will win you a GPS receiver thingy! Read more on the Nestoria blog: http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/2007/06/11/nestoria-prize-at-yahoo-hack-day/.

As always, leave comments! :D Byeeee

Saturday, May 19, 2007

No Hablo Español

Just a quick update to plug my favourite UK-based property search engine, Nestoria :) They just recently went live with their Spanish site which can quite naturally be found at http://www.nestoria.es, so if you want to buy a house in Spain or Tenerife, or you just like funky google maps mashups, go check it out! (Also they're giving me a job again this summer so show them some love <3)

Also a little plug for myself :P I just uploaded version 0.07 of WebService::Nestoria::Search to The Perl Authors Upload Server (aka PAUSE) and it should appear on my CPAN page sometime soon :) It feels so awesome to have some of my code out there in the world where people actually download it and use it! My email address is up on CPAN so feel free to prod me with bug reports and such and I'll do what I can!

Tomorrow a bunch of us are heading to Oxford to visit Izumi-chan so I'll post something about that soon probably :) Later everyone!

Sunday, April 15, 2007

IT Crowd!

*Yawns* For those who don't read the "time posted" (or of course if it's an hour out as it might well be now we've switched to BST) it's 9:55... Faaar too early to be awake on a Sunday! The reason I'm awake is because John just grabbed his stuff and headed back to Birmingham, which is because the reason he was staying happened last night, which is in turn the title of this blog entry... :)

Last night J.P., Florencia, John and I drove up to Uxbridge/Slough to Pinewood Studios and saw two episodes of The IT Crowd season II! It was so great, the warm up act was muuch better than last time (J.P., Ant, Pedro, Dustin and I went a couple of weeks ago), the crowd seemed to be made up of fans rather than people who showed up for the hell of it, and I won a signed copy of Pussey by Daniel Clowes!! Sooo coool!

Beyond that not much to say... I'll be getting back to solid constant revision now :( Next time I blog will probably be next weekend after the Future Sight prerelease which I'm still going to despite my exams :P

Here: Have an adorable picture :)

Byebyes everyone! <3

Thursday, April 12, 2007

There And Back Again

(*gasp* Another blog entry, blah blah... Maybe if nobody makes a big deal out of it I won't get back into bad habits... Or of course blogging when I have exams coming up is a bad habit... You decide :P)

Soo~ Last Friday John (my brother) drove down from where he's living in Birmingham, dropped Carmen (his girlfriend who's at uni in Brum) off at her house and then came here, then on Saturday the two of us drove off via Carmen's house and then the three of us went off down to sunny Devon: home. :)

It's difficult to explain how I feel about my trip home... On the surface it was really lovely, the sun was always shining, I got to see Sean and Dave and hang out with John and Carmen and see my parents and eat waay too much food every day. Ok it kicked ass, the food was delicious, the barbecue with friends was loads of fun (Sean's new girlfriend is really cool :)), seeing Hot Fuzz again was seeing Hot Fuzz again, and I didn't feel out of touch with London like I usually do (A certain someone had free txts all weekend~ :P) so it was all great! However the whole time I was there there was this nasty "I'm not doing any revision, why aren't I doing any revision, I should be revising!!" thought at the back of my head that kinda stopped me from having the great time I should have been having... This especially sucks since the next time I'm going home is mid-June and only for 2 weeks or maybe less :/ Meh :P

Anyway we (John, Carmen and I) came back to London on Tuesday, we (John and I) literally dumped our bags and got the train into central London to meet Anime Soc people for "The Ling Dinner", a dinner to celebrate Ling visiting from Australia which was really nice :) Great to see her again of course and a good time was had by all, although I think it was the fastest meal Anime Soc have ever had :P Might just have been because I was tired from being in a car for 4+ hours but the whole meal just sped passed for me which was weird :/

Not much to say since then... Yesterday John and I hung out watching Scrubs, Family Guy and a few movies, and today I'm back to revision and John's gone to visit Carmen again :)

Love to everyone who actually reads this crap~ <3 :P Byee!

Monday, April 02, 2007

Busy! :(

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the lack of posts lately (ie since January), I suck I know XD The way things are this year I've either been so busy that I've had no time to write or so bored that I've had nothing to write about! But after the repeated pokings of Izumi-chan and Ke-kun I've decided to post something :D And just so you know those weren't metaphorical pokings, they literally spent a good few hours poking me yesterday... While I was full of Dim Sum... Poor me~ :( :P

So~ Hmm what's happened since my last post waaaay back in January? A fair bit I imagine... Izumi-chan turned 21, a big load more crap happened in my house which resulted in Nathalie and Sibley (two of my best friends) moving out and having to find emergency accommodation for the rest of the year, I've been working fairly constantly on my final year individual project, I completed Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and a big bunch of Virtual Console games, some crazy Germans came to visit... All important things I should have blogged about, but I didn't, and I'm not gonna - If you wanna hear about them ask me on MSN :P

Things I am gonna blog about are things which are still going on :) I'm fed up with my usual "last few weeks/months recap" blogs and I think they've given me bad blogging habits so they're gone! Bwahaha :P So then... Things... :P

Exams!

My exams are coming up in a few weeks! My final exams! I should be revising more :)

Magic: The Gathering

This wonderful mix of spending all my money and shuffling 60 card decks has re-entered my life :) Dustin and I were bored of playing DS during the How To Draw Manga lessons so we started playing Magic... Then his friend Andrei, and Ant, and Kenny, and J.P., and Nick, and Joe, and Kai joined us... Then I started going to the SciFi Society MTG nights on Thursdays too... And we had our own booster draft with Time Spiral and Planar Chaos boosters. It's really good to be playing again but it is frightfully addictive :P

Reading

I read The Runes of the Earth, I read the translation of the Battle Royale novel, I read the Earthsea Quartet, and I'm now I'm re-reading Cryptonomicon. I highly recommend every last one of them.

DS

Ouendan Ouendan Ouendan~ <3 If you don't know it it's the Japanese version of Elite Beat Agents... And if you don't know Elite Beat Agents then you need to stop buying your DS games in England where they come out about 6 months late :P Ouendan/EBA are rhythm games where music plays and you have to tap the DS touch screen in time with the music... Think DDR but for DS :P Ouendan has such great music too, Asian Kung-Fu Generation, B'z, Orange Range, nobodyknows+, L'Arc~en~Ciel :D I'm now very very stuck on the last level of Insane mode though (there are 4 difficulties: easy, normal, hard and insane) which is annoying :P

I also got Wario: Master of Disguise which is pretty fun although the levels tend to take me about an hour to get through o.o; Not your usual 2D platformer lol.

Pokemon: Pearl should be coming through the post in April! *excited*

Phone

I got a new phone! :O It's a Nokia n73, and it's on contract... It's fun :)

IT Crowd

I'm in the audience for IT Crowd season 2! :D Been to one filming already last Friday, it was really great :) If you're at all geeky or just like good comedy shows no matter what the setting go buy The IT Crowd season 1 on DVD :P

Conclusions

The weather has such a huge effect on my emotions, the onset of spring makes me very happy :) Lately whenever I go to the supermarket or anywhere I can smell the spring whenever I go out of the front door, it's awesome! <3

Shout Outs

K-li, Kenny, Ant, J.P., Florencia, Greta, Nathalie, Sibley, Anyone else with exams: Good luck for your exams in April/May!!!

Izumi: Whee a blog entry! XD Hope to see you soon *ハッグ* <3

Everyone: Who are you~? XD Leave a comment! :)

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Grammar, Bitch!

Random thoughts I had on the way home...

You're an idiot because your grammar is terrible.

Look over there, their grammar is good because they're more intelligent than you.

Its rules are simple, so it's not hard to learn

Friday, December 22, 2006

Christmas and other adventures

Well it's about time for another blog entry isn't it... Four or five things have happened which means it's time for a nice long entry detailing them, or something. :P

So then, I suppose we'll go in chronological order...

Birthday!

My birthday was awesome, many thanks to everyone who came and everyone who wished me a happy birthday and everyone who's awesome (just, thanks for being awesome k?) - We hung out at my house, watched some of the best movies of all time (Mean Girls, Pirates of the Carribean, and the Family Guy Movie) and I got some sweet gifts including a katana from my brother and various other things from other people :D

DragonForce!!!

On the 14th Izumi, Nick and I went to see DragonForce at the London Astoria, they're a power metal band that formed in London in '99 and they are amazing! It was also my first gig evar (shocking since I'm a massive music fan I know) and I absolutely loved it, the band were absolutely amazing both while singing and between songs! They even opened with my favourite song of theirs "Revolution Deathsquad." :D It was just one of the best nights of my life and I'll never forget it~

Lunch with Nestoria

On the 15th (yes I was a little deaf after DragonForce :P) I headed over to the office and met up with the guys I worked with over summer from Nestoria, I was treated to a delicious Christmas lunch (turkey all the trimmings: stuffing, vegetables, roast potatoes and gravy <3) and had a good time chatting and catching up on all the great changes they've made to the site since I left. :) They wanted me to mention that they're still looking for great engineering interns who can do wonderful things in Perl under Unix/Linux and if anyone reading this is interested I can only say go for it, I had a great time over summer and the working environment is the best I've ever experienced - Casual clothes, not-too-early starts, always friendly and willing to help. :) If you don't think your Perl is up-to-scratch I'd recommend reading the first few chapters of The Perl Cookbook to prepare yourself for the interview. :P

Home + Wii

Home in sunny (lol) Devon once again~ It's great to be home, spent a fun day with James on Tuesday and my brother came home today and will hopefully see more people down the pub tomorrow night. :) Got my Wii on Wednesday afternoon (at last!) so I've been playing lots and lots of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess... It's awesome! Everyone who ever liked Ocarina of Time go out and buy a Wii right now (if you can find a shop with any in stock :P)

Can't wait for Christmas~ Christmas Eve we're having roast lamb and Christmas Day we're having duck... Everyone be jealous! :P

Other Stuff

If you're not already reading it go read xkcd. Seriously.

Facebook has stolen my soul.

I started playing the New Super Mario Bros minigame Wanted on the coach home... My DS has been on for 5 days and I'm on level 4576... It's not a challenge anymore, I just can't bring myself to stop. :P

I've been +fav'ing a lot more on dA lately. :)

Leave comments! Merry Christmas and happy holidays and a happy new year!! :D

Kaoru [dot] Slackwise [dot] Net v4