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
