Stray Dog Strut

Bit overdue this one, seeing as I started the whole Uni thing a week ago. Anyways, here goes..

So, got a haircut on my last day (fri 14/9) in Edinburgh and bumped into some tourists who needed a bit of help finding the Castle. Needless to say I did my tourguide routine, explaining all about the volcano, the Royal Mile, drowning witches etc, and even posed for and took some pics for them – a fitting way to spend my last day in Edinburgh, i thought.

I’d packed all my stuff – a military-style exercise in packaging and planning, everything in it’s place – so after helping my dad with some gardening we loaded the van. We had lunch, my brother and sister etc turned up to wish me well, and we set off on our road trip down south.

We stopped overnight in a travelodge and arrived at the university the next day. It was a suprise as the AA directions stated we had another four turns or so, but suddenly there it was (unmistakeable due to the brightly coloured buildings). Upon arrival I spent a good hour queing for my flat keys etc while my parents watched a dvd in the van and went for a walk. Finally, we were able to unload my stuff and in two trips we had carried it all upstairs (it was alot of stuff, but packed into only a few boxes).

My flat is pretty big! I have my own room with en-suite and the kitchen is built for 4/5 people. Pic (more soon):

Falling arrived shortly after I’d moved in so while my parents went off to visit a relation, we unpacked my stuff. The flat is built for 4/5 people but no other residents turned up on the saturday so I stayed the night at Falling’s with my ‘rents. When we came back down on sunday (the distance is a variation of 3 trains and a bus!) another guy had moved in, Hakim, so we had a brief chat – I actually met his brother first as he was helping him move in.

This week was Fresher’s week so spent the week getting ID cards and trying to find my way around the uni. It’s quite a quiet campus – excepting the airport just across the water! -

- so this Fresher’s week has been a bit of a disappointment. I’ve been up to see Falling quite a few times, watched Heroes as my tv wasn’t setup – and done alot of shopping at the local Tesco’s.

Tomorrow is the first day of classes – I actually only have classes on monday/tuesday this semester. Tomorrow’s class is Creative Imagination which I’m looking forward to – it sounds like hard work though as I’ll need to start writing again! I’ve noted my interest in a Tai Kwan Do club – one of the few clubs i’ve actually been able to find information about! – so i’ll see how that goes. The Student Union has asked me to email them about anything i’m interested in and they’ll try to sort something out.

Being such a quiet week, i’ve had some time to mess about on my beloved Mac. I bought Guild Wars this week (for my Windows partition) – a non-subscription based mmorpg (massively-multiplayer-online-roleplaying-game). It’s been pretty good, a nice change to the more hands-off feel of Eve Online. I’ve never been interested in the World of Warcraft games, so this is a nice alternative. The ‘grinding’ has not been too bad – i’m at level 6 already (the main character Devona in the introductory story is level 5) but I’m not sure how far I have to go – some of the NPCs are level 15 at the moment.

I’ll leave it to you to Google re the plot, but it’s got all the usual character types – six in all: Warrior, Ranger, Elementalist, Monk, Mesmer, and Necromancer – and you can combine two professions as a major and minor. I’ve gone with my main profession of Ranger and secondary profession Elementalist. This allows me to attack with bows/swords/hammers/axes etc and also magical attacks like meteor showers and lightning strikes. Rangers can charm animals too so I have a pet cat, lol.

Your first profession determines your costume – hence the robin hood attire – but you get to choose colour, hair and face. Anyway, a few screenies -

I’ve also been further customising my Mac. I got a 250GB La Cie drive to use as a backup solution and additional storage for Windows/Mac OS X. Pic:

I’m trying out an application called Adium – it’s a chat program that allows you to use it with MSN, Yahoo etc. It’s alot nicer than the Mac version of MSN Messenger and who doesn’t want a duck on their dock?lol Also shown is Skype that i’ve set up for when mum wants to see how thin i’m getting=P

I installed Growl too – it’s basically a notification system that alot of programs use and allows you to customise how and which notifications you get. An example being GrowlTunes which displays a notification when a song starts in iTunes:

Finally, i’m been clearing up my Dock and discovered today that aswell as having folder I use often in the Dock, holding the mouse button down or ctrl-clicking will open a menu listing everything in that folder. The example below is my applications folder – very handy for quickly scrolling to an app I want to open. I also added a link to my spending budget and a folder for my uni work – I added an appropriate Mario icon;-)

Oh, on a final note – I had a funny thing happening with Mail telling me I had mail when I didn’t – and when you consider I have the classic “You’ve Got Mail” phrase announced every time, this got quite annoying! Turns out, I had mail in my dot mac account – the same dot mac I don’t want and haven’t even set up in Mail! I’m letting the trial run its course – as there doesn’t seem to be a way to disable it? (iDisk etc) but if you ever have Mail going barmy like this, check your dot mac mailbox!

Cheers

The problem with holidays is the amount of catching up you have to do when you get back.

I’ve just returned from the communication deadzone that was our cottage in Cornwall – no email, sms etc – and have to continue this mucky business of preparing for University life.

Seven days and counting and I feel like i’m running out of time, running out of life. My life is far from over of course, but it feels like this part of my life is coming to an end and i’m thinking of all the things I haven’t gotten around to yet. I’m also terrified that I won’t hack it at university – there are younger people than me with much more experience modding and coding etc.

That’s what concerns me, i’ve dabbled in so many things but seem to have run out of time to take them any further – remember my trials with UnrealEd? I worry that I won’t be able to innovate enough to keep up with this course. I know that these are just pre-uni jitters. I was exactly the same when I went to uni the first time: I had (and still have) very little experience of programming and started a degree in Software Engineering.

Ultimately, I left after the first semester for stupid reasons, but was coping fine with the actual course. I was introduced to the Java programming language and made a decent attempt at an assignment to create a calendar: simply a numerical representation in a DOS window. It was merely a test to see how much we’d learned so far. I still like programming for the logical methods involved but can’t see myself as a hardcore coder.

I fully intend to continue with my own projects in my spare time at uni (work allowing of course) and I suppose it would be impossible to be up-to-date with everything: I’ve yet to play many of the so called classic games such as GoldenEye and Chrono Trigger. I never had a SNES or N64 – instead I grew up with a Master System and Mega Drive II. I grew up with Sonic rather than Mario – incidentally, an excellent issue of Edge this month discussed Super Mario Galaxy which looks fantastic!

I’m sure once I start this course it will all fall into place – whilst I know that I will have to bring alot of my own ideas to the table, the tutors will teach us how to develop those ideas. On the train home from London today the landscape seemed to scream level designs at me – there were rolls of hay (what do you call them anyway? and what are they for? Yes..I really do live in a town) and complex pipeworks, old rusty graffiti-covered carriages, burnt out shells of factories, and roaming cows (I don’t think i’ve ever seen cows in a videogame!!). Oh if only they would invent retinal inserts to capture all these images as and when I please!=)

I’m really looking forward to just discussing games. I like all the little things that give a game character – Sonic taps his foot if you don’t move him for awhile, and I’ve heard Mario falls asleep. Spyro had the little dragonfly thing. Remember Spyro?lol Haven’t played Spyro for years – I only have the demo, and my dad (My dad – Mr non-gamer!) tried his best to find all the gems, only to have a couple to go when the demo timed out on him=S

I’ll definately be taking my favourite games to uni with me. I have a modest collection compared to some (85 PSX games, 49 PS2 games, 9 Master System games and 45 or so PC games – I don’t know what happened to my Mega Drive games, I want Flashback and Micro Machines V3 again!!) but its amazing how many I haven’t played for ages. Oh and a good twenty or so demo disks.

This week will be a week of packing and saying farewell to my city. I’ll be back of course – it’s not really the end – but alot can change while your away, holidays tend to highlight that. Old buildings have been pulled down here in the last week and further work is in progress. Just think what will change in three years? Cornwall has been a series of new experiences: My first sunset, swimming in the sea fully clothed (intentionally of course) and seeing a clear sky full of hundreds of stars. I’m sure uni will be the same and will provide plenty of food for thought in further posts.

Until then…