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