Kaoru Blog

An Oxford Fling and 20,000 Words

2007-06-14T00:32:00.000Z

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!

---

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

No Hablo Español

2007-05-19T22:28:00.000Z

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!

IT Crowd!

2007-04-15T08:54:00.000Z

*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

There And Back Again

2007-04-12T09:35:00.000Z

(*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!

Busy! :(

2007-04-02T15:18:00.000Z

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! :)

Grammar, Bitch!

2007-01-16T23:51:00.000Z

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

Christmas and other adventures

2006-12-22T23:45:00.000Z

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

Waiting Sucks

2006-11-17T22:02:00.000Z

European Wii Launch Countdown

On the plus side it's my birthday tomorrow and I'm chugging cans of Mountain Dew (thanks J.P!) :D I'll post something about my birthday party sometime after it happens. :P

Later!

Busy Busy Busy....

2006-10-21T11:04:00.000Z

Yeah, I promised a post about Germany and you didn't get one, in my defence the Megatokyo.de guys haven't done a rant on Die Connichi yet either. :P If you wanna know about Germany just check out the photos on my Flickr account.

So yeah, busy busy... But with what?

WebService::Nestoria::Search

I released my first ever CPAN module! :D It connects to the Nestoria API and grabs information about property listings, so far only in the UK. If you wanna try it you can get it from my CPAN page! It's pretty exciting to have actually released code that other people are using... Except I haven't yet heard of anyone using it. :P While you're at it you can read the documentation I wrote, I'm pretty proud of that too. :P

Group Project

More coding in Perl... Working with Sibley and Ben (as usual) as well as Seb and Che, some people we randomly met by emailing saying 'we need people for our group!', but they're totally awesome and we all get on really well. Kinda surprised we hadn't met already since we all seem to be pretty like-minded, but then they sit on the left side of the lecture theatre so that would explain it, damn lefters. :P

Anime Soc

What little time I have left after the group project and my lectures is being sucked up nicely by Anime Soc. As you've probably already read in previous entries I'm on the committee this year which is loads of fun but the first week or two was pretty stressful. Things seem to be calming down now and we've got a good list of stuff to watch this term - Welcome To The NHK, Ichigo Mashimaro, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Fate/Stay Night, and the absolutely brilliant Ouran High School Host Club. :D Our freshers/new members are all great and hopefully we'll have some more socials soon so we can all hang out more. :)

--

So yeah, busy busy, but it's not without it's fun and good times. This is gonna be a good year. :)

Oh crap, November coming up, 5 21st birthdays of good friends... This is going to kill me, bankrupt me, and leave me wishing I could sleep through December. :P Oh well, it's not as bad as it sounds, one of the 21st birthdays is mine~ :D

Well that's that blog entry out of the way... Hopefully from now on I'll stick to my plan of 'short insane entries about nothing much and things that pop into my head', so if that goes ahead expect this blog to get a bit weirder. :P As a taster here's something that popped into my head a few weeks ago...

Japanese Scrabble. How does that work? All hiragana? How does the 'little tsu' work, is it a tile, is it ignored? How are each of the letters scored, do you get 10 for using a 'wo' correctly? Wtf...

Bye for now!

It's been a while...

2006-09-09T22:36:00.000Z

Finally the crowd (all 5 of them) shout, A blog post from Kaoru!

It certainly has been too long... At first I was tired from work, sitting at a computer typing all day can really have the effect that when you get home you don't really want to sit at the computer typing some more... Then after a couple of weeks of that I was put off writing a blog entry simply because there's too much to write about, and that's been a vicious circle between then and now when peer pressure (Carmen poking me) and reminders (Izumi setting up a new blog) have finally gotten to me. :P

So then, as usual with my 'OMG I haven't blogged in forever, so much to talk about!' entries I'll split this up into a few sections to make it easier to read...

The Job

Been working at Lokku coding for Nestoria for over a month or so now and still loving it so much, really great people to work with, I love working with Perl (in fact I'm dreading going back to university and C. :P), the hours (11am-6:30pm ish), the casual clothes, the location, the atmosphere, the lunch (burritos <3), everything is awesome. :D

I've learned sooo much Perl! Seriously before i joined I'd barely touched objects and references nor any regular expression modifiers except 'i' and 'g', now I just feel so confident and happy doing anything I want to. I love CPAN and all the modules, I love hashes and the Data::Dumper format, I don't even hate the CGI module that much anymore, I love here documents and grep and map and hashes ofhashrefs. Let's just say that KSN v5 will be coded in Perl. :P

The Laptop

I don't actually remember at what point of explaining the laptop situation I was at last time I posted something so I'll explain from the beginning... I knocked my laptop off my desk and onto the floor with its screen open and it turned on, something between the screen and the motherboard went terribly wrong, it was an old-ish Vaio model and they no longer made the motherboards so it was written off. Luckily I was able to claim on my parents' house insurance (accidental damages) and sometime in August I got a new Sony Vaio VGN-SZ2HP/B... It's basically the next model up from the next model up from my old laptop, and it's beautiful, dual coreIntel processor and magnesium alloy case, everything's lovely... Haven't really had the chance to get it working yet though. :P It came with a 'recovery partition' instead of discs and I very foolishly formatted it entirely... If I have time sometime I will make it work, I've downloaded all the SZ2 drivers from Vaio Link Europe and when I have time I'll fix things. Getting Gentoo working is another matter... For some reason whenever I play video on it the whole system freezes up... Again when I have time I will fix this. I just need to find the time.

My last laptop was called Rukia, after Kuchiki Rukia of Bleach, and since this is a higher model I've decided to call it 'Bankai Rukia' (just 'Rukia' for short most of the time.) - If you don't get this, 'Bankai' is basically the Bleach equivalent of Super Saiyan, and if you don't get that then well forget it. :)

London.pm

A few days into my job one of my coworkers Edmund invited me to a London.pm (London Perl Mongers) social at The Anchor pub in London Bridge. I had a great time discussing Japanese culture, various languages, computer games, food, operating systems, desktop environments, and even occasionally Perl. :) Went out with them again a couple of nights ago and had another great time chatting about various things. :) Shout outs to Edmund, Simon, Alex, Adam, Johan, and other people I spoke to whose names escape me . :P

They also have a fun active mailing list and IRC channel. :)

Die Connichi

This Thursday I'm heading off to Germany (National Express to Stanstead, Ryanair to Frankfurt Hahn) to meet up with the Megatokyo.de guys again (I went over there a few weeks before starting uni, so 2 years ago now) and hang out with them 'auf die Connichi', which is German for 'at a German anime convention in Kassel.' :P I'm sooo excited, I can't wait to see Anna and Moritz and everyone again and on top of that Fred and Sarah (Fred being the guy who draws and writes the non-German-version Megatokyo web comic, and Sarah being his wife) are gonna be there! And I'm not just gonna see them at the convention because we're picking them up at the airport and going out for dinner and stuff! *fanboy* :P I can't wait, it's gonna be an amazing 4 days, just as it was last time I was there. :D

I am slightly nervous about my German skills though... It's been about 2 years since I last spoke any German on more than a very very irregular basis and I have a feeling that while my self-confidence/assurance may have increased over those two years the level of my vocabulary will have dropped quite dramatically, leaving me exactly the same quiet mess I was last time, just for slightly different reasons. :P

Other bits and pieces

Happy Birthday to Carmen and John, whose birthdays passed by while I wasn't writing in here. :) My little brother's growing up, haha!

Check out this absolutely hilarious geeky webcomic. It was linked in the AnimeSoc forum shoutbox and I quickly read through the archives, it's absolutely hilarious in so many ways. I think Sandwich, Hyphen and Computational Linguists are probably my favourite. :)

The End

Well that's the end of this huuuuuuuge blog entry! Thanks for reading (if you did!) and look forward to another blog entry when I'm back from Germany! Hopefully after that I'll get into the habit of posting shorter and more regular/random blog entries about things I think about on the train home or whatever... It's been a plan of mine for a few weeks but I needed to get this monster out of the way first. :P

Until next time. :)

I have a job... o.o

2006-08-01T16:51:00.000Z

This August and September I will be mostly writing Perl scripts for the back end of this very nice website :)

I'm kinda in shock...

First day tomorrow... I'll write more after that.

Bye :)

Belgium, Laptop, Results, Birthdays, and other stuff...

2006-07-16T22:14:00.000Z

It's been way too long since I last blogged, sorry everyone... Plenty going on, not a whole lot of it good, but hey...

First off, I headed over to Belgium with people for a week and was all set to have a great time which I did for the first few days (so sunny, so much delicious food, great friends, fun times, barbeques, relaxing in the paddling pool~) but then we went to this water park for a day and I got way over-chlorined, headachey, ill, and just generally 'meh'... There were still some good times to be had (watching The IT Crowd with people, giving Ling the scrapbook that was made to commemorate her year in London (she's back to Australia today :'( We'll miss you Ling!!)) but to be honest the whole trip was less great than I was expecting. Sorry to people if I was a downer or whatever when I was there :(

Aaaanyway... More depressing times ahead... I knocked my laptop off my desk and it's broken :'( It's been in the local computer shop for about a week now and they've basically decided there's nothing they can do so we're now trying to claim on house insurance... I dunno what I'll do if I don't get the insurance money, not having a laptop now would SUCK :( I love my laptop and I want it back! *sulks* Oh and on top of that just before I came home from London with my brother I managed to blow up my monitor so I am actually now computerless in London... Gonna have to bring a crappy 12" flatscreen back with me and survive on 800x600 for a while :'( Grrrrrrrrrrr bad timing! :(

Ok ok the last month hasn't been that bad, there have been some good points... Mainly this one: My results came through and I passed! I'm back next year~ :D Got the letter right here so if you're curious here's my results...

C/F Part I 70%
Coursework 67%
Laboratory 82%
Project 82%

Computer Architecture 75% (NO WAI! XD)
Operating Systems 77%
Networks and Communications 65%
Software Engineering Design I 62%
Compilers 70%
Software Engineering Design II 72%
Concurrent Programming using Java 73%
Introduction To Artificial Intelligence 63%
Complexity and Computability 57%
Statistics 54% (They screwed us on the exam!)

Exam Total 66.8%
Year Total 69.5%
Overall Total 69.6%

Wooooooo~! Those should make me so happy right?? They don't... Want my laptop and a monitor for my PC... :( Meh.

Leave some comments to cheer me up XD

Oh and I'll be back in London sometime this week, probably Wednesday evening ish :) Hope to see people when I'm back!

Oh Oh, I almost forgot, lol... It's Aveleen (my housemate), Dave (my friend from home), and my Mum's birthdays today~! Yay for the 16th July :) Happy birthday to all of them and anyone else whose birthday it is today!

-- Alex

Belgium and other trips

2006-06-25T20:41:00.000Z

Wooohoo~~ Going to Belgium this Wednesday, for a week, with Anime Society friends ^____^ Getting the Eurostar down and staying at Greta's house (which is apparently really big :P) and should be having loads of fun~ ^_^ Check out my Flickr account when I get back ^_^

Getting back on the 5th July, and then going home to Devon between the 10th and sometime around a week later, depends on whether I have any job interviews and how long I want to stay home ^_^

Hmmm this has been a short entry... Oh well ^_^; If you want to get in touch with me between June 28th and July 5th drop me an email at my gmail account ^^

Byebye!

Another year gone by

2006-06-12T12:39:00.000Z

Well I'm finally finished for the year, exams finished way back in May but I've had a month long project to be doing and that just finished on Friday! The project was to design a web-based space trading game, basically an exercise in using SQL databases and javascript/PHP/AJAX stuff... I think it went pretty well, our game looked pretty sexy (not least because we stole some graphics from Subspace ;)) and it all worked well. Here, check out a sexy screenshot:

Anyway so that's all over and done with... Just waiting for results now! Plus trying to write up a CV so I can send it to a bunch of companies and hopefully end up with a job over summer! (For those of you who don't know already I'll be staying in London over summer if I can find a job here! :))

A few other things to mention: Firstly, in no particular order, I bought an American copy of New Super Mario Bros and a Japanese copy of Sonic Rush, both for the Nintendo DS. No I don't own a DS, but I am borrowing Florencia's at the moment and I'll be buying my own one at the end of summer, so yeah :P New Super Mario Bros is perfect, it is exactly what a new version of Super Mario Bros should be, it takes the best aspects of Super Mario Bros (NES), Super Mario Bros 3 (NES) and Super Mario World (SNES) and puts them all together with some fun new ideas and loads of levels and it's just so much fun! And to continue with my nostalgia-fest I got Sonic Rush, which again is a great game that is exactly what it should be, Sonic Team have done a great job with it and it plays just like a real sonic game from the 90s (ie. it's hard as hell!), plus as if I weren't overwehlmed with nostalgia already, at the beginning of each level (when I'm playing as Sonic) Tails says "Ganbatte Sonic-kun!" (Japanese for "Do your best/Good luck Sonic!")... It's so cute and makes me happy to my core :P

Secondly, my no-coke no-bacon no-cheese no-snacks diet officially ends today! I can go back to eating whatever the hell I feel like, lol... But it is being replaced, not by a diet, but by an exercise scheme: The plan is to do at least 10 hours of DDR a week. That's just under 90 minutes of DDR a day. Wish me luck :P This heat will probably kill me but I've been making sure to drink plenty of water.

Thirdly: Some people (mostly the biologists/chemists/biochemists) have exams still! Good luck to all of you~~!!! That means you Nathalie, K-Li, Nick, Greta, Ling, Nanna, Vicky, anyone else I'm forgetting! Ganbatte!! :)

Uh, can't really think of much else to say... So yeah, leave some comments or something! Byeee

New Colours

2006-05-17T18:18:00.000Z

Well after my last blog entry, which revealed my new website design, 4 people (so like 200% of my average visitors XD) said they like the new design but don't like the grey... So here's your opportunity to help change the site! Please leave a comment and either say some colours in english, some colours in hex, or link to a website whose colours you particularly like :)

As for other stuff... Exams are over, got a group project to work on for the next few weeks and then gotta do a report on it and do a presentation... It's an online space trading game and it should be quite fun unless we're trying to do too much and end up getting nothing working :P

Not much else going on... Been watching Invader Zim and CSI, both great shows for completely different reasons XD Also finished Mai-Otome which I really enjoyed, look forward to seeing Mai-Hime soon!

And I think I'm out of stuff to say :P Bye everyone, don't forget to leave comments~ :)

KSNv4

2006-05-07T21:17:00.000Z

Check it out! My blog is finally integrated with my site! ^__^ As is my Memes Blog and some other fun pages.

When I've actually got time I'm planning to start a third Blogger blog (I love being able to have multiple blogs on one account ^^) and start ranting about things like Firefox and iPods (been mentally writing that iPods rant for half a year XD)

One week of exams left... *sigh* It's gonna be such a crappy week... Well a crappy 5 days, hopefully this time next week I'll be looking back with happiness on stuff, wanna finally see my friends again after a month of being home and then revising for exams T__T

Leave comments and stuff, let me know what you think of the new layout and content on KSNv4 ^__^

Under Construction

2006-05-05T21:39:00.000Z

Hey,

Working on Kaoru.Slackwise.Net version 4 at the moment, the blog section looks crap at the moment and there are a load of 404 File Not Found errors around and stuff, but bare with me :)

The exams are going ok, statistics was sucky for everyone including but the rest are ok so far... Next week got 4 in 5 days, it's gonna suck badly.

Short update for once :P
Bye :)

Redeemer

2006-04-29T13:51:00.000Z

Wheeee, I got the new Machinae Supremacy album Redeemer :D Been waiting for this album for so long, ever since getting their first album Deus Ex Machinae really. I love this band! Planning to do a track-by-track walk through of the album, but first, some reasons everyone (or at least everyone who reads this) should love Machinae Supremacy...

They give away 50+ songs FOR FREE on their website.
They've made their own online shop and therefore all profits go directly to them, no evil music industry involved
Their sound is completely unique, Metal/Rock/Computer Games Influences/Synth/SID
Their album art is awesome
They actually post on their website forum and keep in touch with fans
They ROCK

And now, for our feature presentation... Song by song analysis of Redeemer :)

01. Elite

Great "random quote at the beginning" really makes this a classic Machinae Supremacy track from the start, bringing a feeling of their old downloadable tracks like Attack Music and Earthbound :) The guitar, SID sounds, and lyrics equally sound like classic Machinae Supremacy, which makes this a great first track on the album.

Anyone with their ear to the ground
knows we will not be bound
You can push but you can't beat us down
we deliver the sound

Love it :)

02. Rise

Great nostalgic SID to start of, really sounds like something I should recognise but I'm not sure... Reminds me of Motoya's Cave from Final Fantasy... But yeah, not sure. Comment if you know :P

Anyway, been listening to this for a while now since they released it as a teaser for the new Album (did I mention this band give a lot of music away for free? ;P) and I love it, nice long intro and then onto the wonderful anti-reality MaSu lyrics :) My only problem with this song would be that it's 5:31 and has 15 lines... A lot of repetition which gets kinda annoying. Oh well :P

03. Fury

Another song I heard before getting the album, this time because they released a live version from one of their concerts :) Straight into lyrics this time, and what lyrics! Talk of "the immortal beast" and "the dragon roar" kinda reminding me of DragonForce (another band) too much, I like Machinae Supremacy because they sing about computer games... Maybe it's a computer game dragon :) I do love this song though, particularly for the "Now! Woaoaoah" bits... They're cool! XD Then you have the amazing middle 8, some great electric guitaring from Gibli the band's guitarist, I dunno what "setting" they have that guitar set to but some great SID-sounding sounds come out of it :D

04. Ronin

The first (but far from the only) song on the album with Japanese influences, which most people reading will know I love :D Their downloadable tracks have never really shown the band's love of Japan but Ninja on their first album made me so happy and this album really has not disappointed me for Japan-love either!

our disease, everywhere
I wander
I trail the song of
your despair, everywhere
don't you breathe, don't you dare

Mmm Ronin~ Again a bit of a long song with too few lyrics so quite a bit of repetition, but I don't really mind because they're good lyrics!

05. Kaori Stomp

Another Japanese-love song, and the first (but not only) song on the album to actually feature Japanese lyrics! I can't tell you how happy I was thumbing through the lyrics booklet that came with the CD and suddenly coming across hiragana and kanji amongst the lyrics! <3 Also the lyrics booklet is just beautiful, but that's another story.

Despite being 4:18 this song always seems to me one of the shortest tracks on the album, something about the beat of it just makes time fly by for me and this is one of my favourites on the album by far. My only complaint would be that the Japanese does actually seem out of place, much like when the Japanese randomly use English in their songs... I'd love to hear MaSu put out a song that's completely in Japanese, or even just have the whole of the chorus in Japanese instead of the odd sentence :P

06. Hate

I love the effects and the general sound of this song, it's unique on the album and a welcome break at track 6 from the first 5 which are more classically-MaSu-sounding. The synthy tune going through the whole song in the background is really cool and makes the song kinda calming despite the title "Hate".

This song is also one of the few that has enough lyrics for the whole song, a simple verse chorus verse chorus verse layout that works well :)

07. I Know the Reaper

This song sounds great, brilliant guitar work and drumming, the tune is good. I don't really like the lyrics though... The line "I tell you, I know the Reaper" is repeated twice per chorus and it bugs me. :P Actually that's probably the only problem I have with it, the verses are nice and well written, it's just an annoying chorus... *shrugs* Just me, I'm sure loads of other people love the song :P

08. Seventeen

The second of two songs on the album to have the classic MaSu "quote at the beginning", and again this one sounds like one of their original songs from before their first album, it's great.

We are the ones who are setting you free
now you can share our beliefs and be just like we
We bring you out from under tyranny
and into our economy

Nothing quite like taking the piss out of America ;P

09. The Cavern of Lost Time

At 0:34 this is definitely the shortest song on the album, but that doesn't stop it from being really really pretty :) I'm not even sure what it's on, it sounds a bit like a violin or something but my guess is it's Gordon on his keyboard :)

10. Rogue World Asylum

I loooove this song! Again it sounds like classic MaSu, or maybe like something from their first album, it's just a great song with a catchy drum beat and some good lyrics:

In a rogue world we are free
we have found the colored keys
but I know that we are still here waiting

Coloured Keys, Doom/Quake references... Love it :)

11. Through The Looking Glass

Mmm piano to start off and then into guitar and drums with the piano, great :) Great lyrics in this song, away from the geeky computer game references and the political stuff this one goes straight for the MaSu philosophy about time and such. The piano remains prominent throughout the song giving this a really unique sound in comparison with the other songs MaSu have done :)

12 Oki Kumas Adventure

Quite a calm and synthy track with some good lyrics about an old Japanese warrior (not sure whether he's real or they made him up ^^;;), one of the great Japan-inspired Machinae Supremacy songs with a really catchy tune. Nice piece of Japanese speaking near the end too, and then some female vocals! :) (The lyrics booklet thanks Chika Kawahira and Erica Oeberg, I'd guess Erica did the singing and Chika did the Japanese speaking, but I could be wrong.)

13. Reanimator (March of the Undead III)

Whatever happened to March of the Undead I huh? Ah well... This is a really nice song, starts off slow and then kicks off about 2 minutes through and really kicks a lot of ass, a great sequel to March of the Undead II (one of their freely downloadable songs.)

Another bit of Japanese speaking at the end of this one too. It's good to hear MaSu using their own Japanese words rather than simply sampling from an anime, I do love it when they use quotes from various things but translating your own stuff into Japanese has got to be cool too :) I want a whole song by MaSu in Japanese!

14. Prelude To Empire

A little (1 minute 37 second) track which rips clips from a few of Machinae Supremacy's oldest tracks, it's really cool to hear them in the background because over the top of them is this really eerie sound... It's great! My only real complaint is as a "Prelude to Empire" it doesn't blend flawless into the beginning of Empire, but oh well, I guess with this being a CD release there's that 2 second gap for people who don't rip their tracks anyway right?

15. Empire

I LOOOOOOOVE THIS SONG!! Amazing drumming, female vocals (which could actually be synth'd) and guitaring at the beginning, and then the synth comes in in time with the drums on each beat, it's just AMAZING :D This is basically the Machinae Prime (an instrumental track from their first album) of this album, and it fits perfectly and ends the album wonderfully. Empire isn't entirely instrumental, but at 6 minutes 53 and only 8 lines of lyrics it might as well be, the instrumentals of this song are really at the front and it just shows off all that Machinae Supremacy are capable of. I really can't describe how much I love this song, it has parts which sound completely new and parts which are classic MaSu and parts which just plain make me happy... Go buy the album I guess!

--------------------

So there you have it, my review of Machinae Supremacy's new album Redeemer :D Go to the Machinae Supremacy site right now and download some of their free tracks, see what you think! :)

As for me, well I'm gonna leave Redeemer on my playlist, take my laptop over to my bed, and read some notes on Statistics, Software Engineering, and Operating Systems... This was enough procrastination I think XD

Leave comments and stuff :)
-- Kaoru

New Environment

2006-04-22T20:29:00.000Z

So I got back to London on Sunday, K-Li came over and we were hanging out in my room on IRC, she on my PC and me on my laptop, and she was having trouble with my user interface. I've used Fluxbox for the last 3 years, and I've always loved it, Gnome and KDE just seemed slow and nasty in comparrison, with their big nasty menus, it was too windows-like (I know a lot of Gnome fans will scream at me for saying that, but the big centralised menu is windows-like) and I liked my comand-line stuff. That said, I try to promote linux whenever I can, and if people coming to my house are getting fluxbox as their first linux experience maybe that wasn't great... Besides, I could do with a change.

Enter: Xfce, sort of like Gnome but stripped down with a right-click-on-the-desktop-style-menu (the way I like it), but with a much frendlier task bar and a little panel thing and everything. I played around with it a lot, making the menu have /only/ what I want in it (I hate big menus full of useless crap :P) and moving the task bar to the bottom and the panel to the right (on autohide) to make it as fluxbox-like as possible really... But it does seem much nicer and user friendly. The rounded windows for everything are really cool :)

Here, have a screenshot of my current setup while i write this :)

Other new things you may notice from the screen shot... SCIM is a much better input method for writing Japanese, my old one sucked so badly, in GTK programs (Gaim, X-Chat, Firefox etc) it would automatically start in Japanese >.< This new one is great, perfect in almost every way, except it makes Opera crash. I have no idea why. Hopefully it'll be fixed in a newer version of either Opera or SCIM. And yeah, that's the "other" new thing, Firefox is in my icons on my panel, which is unusual for me because usually I'm an Opera zealot :P

Uh, not much else to rant about... Exams start Monday (April 24th) and continue until May 12th... Wish me luck, I'm gonna need it! XD

-- Kaoru

Back for good...

2006-04-15T21:52:00.000Z

Whooooooooooooooooo~!! Slackwise.net is back for good! (Ok that's jinxing it but whatever...)

We now have lovely amazing beautiful hosting with Dream Host, who it seems as their name would suggest are a complete dream... I just published all my old blog entries in about 3 seconds O_O Loving this!

Anyway not much else to say... Going back to London tomorrow! Yay, can't wait ^_^ Unfortunately then got my exams between the 24th April and 12th May... Eugh >.<; If you want more detail about my exams check out my Google Calendar! Although it's not shared fully so if you want to be added to my "people who can see my calendar" list leave me a comment or send me an email or something ^^

Bye people! Leave comments ^_^
-- Kaoru

kaoru dot homelinux dot net...

2006-03-25T17:52:00.000Z

Well now what's going on? Slackwise is down again (well actually slackwise is fine, but the DNS is all screwy so when you try to connect to slackwise.net it doesn't know where to look :P) so I'm hosting stuff on my own computer. Hooray for linux and apache, the software that runs most of the Internet :D

Anyway so yeah... John (my brother) and Sean (a friend from home) are driving up as I type and tomorrow we're all driving down to Bournemouth where I'm staying at a friend's with a bunch of Anime Society people, it's gonna be sooo fun :D Then going home on Wednesday for a few weeks, will probably be revsing a lot of the time so I dunno how often I'll be online -_-

Oh also I'm leaving my computer here and off while I'm away so you won't be able to read this anyway! XD haha how pointless...

Leave comments and stuff, bye people ^_^

Haha... Never Fails XD

2006-03-18T14:14:00.000Z

What never fails you ask? Well every time I move my blog back onto blogspot because Slackwise.Net is down, a couple of days later Slackwise comes back XD

Anyway this blog will now be back at http://kaoru.slackwise.net/kblog/! Unfortunately because of the way blogspot works the blog will stay there too, but none of the updates will go to it, so this will appear to be the last post... If you're reading this please go to the place where the updates are - http://kaoru.slackwise.net/kblog/

Also this means that I can start work on my new website! Yay~ I can't really because I have exams in 5 weeks and I have a lot of revision to do, and then I have my exams, and then another project... But yeah, I'll start work on it after that, in June or so :P

Bye~

That time of the year again...

2006-03-17T10:13:00.000Z

Yep, it's that time of the year again... Of course it's not always the same time of the year, I think it was august-october in 2004... Of course what I'm referring to is Slackwise.Net being down -_-; Once again Lance and I's greediness for free hosting where we can slack has lead to us being left with no hosting at all *sigh* Which of course means you're now reading this on http://kaokun.blogspot.com/, unless of course you're reading this in the archives and slackwise.net is back up :P Another little note, I've put kmemes on blogspot hosting at http://kmemes.blogspot.com/ so yeah, go check that out too ^^

Wowww it's been a while since I posted XD Sooo much to talk about... Well, begin at the beginning...

Thing to talk about 1 XD I'm currently writing this in my Compilers lecture! How? I finally got a laptop :D It's a very sexy Sony Vaio VGN-S2HP (1.6Ghz, 1GB Ram, 40GB hard drive, ATI graphics (-_-), built-in wifi, and an average running temperature of about 70°C (I've seen it hit 88... It didn't travel through time XD))... I'm running Gentoo Linux on it which is working great, wireless was shockingly easy to get working and I haven't even had too much trouble with the ATI drivers... Too much ^^;; There's one thing I have left to get working, but I have easter and maybe even summer before that has to actually work, so yeah ^^

Thing to talk about 2! Anime Society had its nominations and voting for next years committee, we needed a President, a Technical Secretary, a Treasurer, an Ambassador, and a Web Admin... We had five people run, one for each position XD So next years committee will be: K-Li, Me, Ant, Greta, and JP! Omg it's gonna be so fun and mad, we're soo not the people you want in charge of something XD (Well I'm not anyway :P) My job, Technical Secretary, involves sorting out the Manga Library and also running the showings every week... Generally involves hooking my laptop up to the projector and putting the anime on... Unfortunately that's the thing I don't have working 100% yet XD Well I'm not committee 'til next year... ^^;

Thing to talk about 3... OMG what a horrible term, nearly over though... I swear forget GCSEs, forget A Levels, forget first year at uni, before this term I did not know what the word "busy" meant >_< Anyway today's my last day of lectures, and our last coursework is in for Tuesday, yaaay~ Then John (my brother) is coming up to drive me back next weekend, yaaaaay~ ^__^ Unfortunately less yay is the fact that my exams start on the 24th of April, just over a month away, and I have a lot of revision to do... *sigh* Just want this year to be over -_-;

Well I'm pretty much out of things to say, so I'll talk to you all soon and please leave comments etc as always! ^_^ Byeeee

Neko!!

2006-02-09T00:27:00.000Z

Long Cat

Speedy Cat

Cats are fun ^_______^

Valentine's Day Plans

2006-02-02T20:59:00.000Z

Not traditional date/girlfriend/romance Valentine's Day plans of course, owing to my lack of the middle one, but I do in fact have some plans for February 14th 2006... Namely, I figured what better day than Singles Awareness Day to start my healthy-kaoru-plan :P

So, the plan...

Foodwise

No more sugar/soda drinks... (Yes this includes coke *cry*)
No more snacks (chocolate bars, saf cookies, somerfield cookies etc)
No more bacon (No I really don't know what I'm going to eat)
No more cheese (ditto)

Exercisewise

DDR at least an hour a week
Just stop being so damn lazy >_<

Obviously as there are some addictive substances on that list (namely coke and saf cookies XD) I'm gonna need some help... So yeah, anyone reading this and seeing me be tempted by something I shouldn't eat tell me off or something 'kay? But not until the 14th, between now and then I can eat whatever I want and drink all the coke I can (which is a lot believe me.)

Thanks everyone... Oh and if anyone has an idea of something to add to the list of things to give up or something I can eat instead of bacon and cheese that's healthier let me know!

-- Kaoru

PS. For people reading who don't go to IC 'saf cookies' are cookies from 'the saf', the Sir Alexander Fleming building which is actually the bioligists place but it has the best food on campus :P