I am proud to announce the ‘official’ (hah) opening of…

Jeimusu-kun.com!

That’s right. I have my own personal .com website now, and if you head there, you will see that I finally got off my ass and finished my theme. So go check it out.

I won’t be deleting this for a month or so. Maybe I’ll start archiving these posts over there, who knows.

But I think it’s safe for you to assume that I won’t be posting here anymore, unless it’s a final notification of this address shutting down.

Hope to see you at the new pad.

Don’t worry, I’m not leaving here.

It’s time to go back up to Newcastle, for my third and final year of University. It’s scary, but I’m a lot less worried about it this year.

Basically, the past two years I’ve found stressful, and incredibly tough – not just the workload, but financially, making friends, and in terms of having a good time. But somehow I feel like I’ve matured more over these three months. The workload this year will be more manageable because I’ll MAKE it more manageable – I’m going to make my lecture and revision notes from day one, do assignments from the time they’re set and space the workload out. This should mean that by the time it gets close to the exam periods at the end of semesters one and two, I’ll already have most / all my revision notes done, and can then focus on actually learning the stuff.

Also, it helps that I only have two exams at the end of each semester, as opposed to the five or six I’ve had at the end of each previous semester for the past two years. That certainly helps the workload.

Also. Whilst I’d love to make new friends, I don’t need them. I’ve got a few great ones up there – Kat, Alan, Nell and Rob – and when I’m not seeing them I’ll either be working, reading, cycling, surfing, coding, writing, watching movies or playing videogames. I’d say my schedule doesn’t really leave that much time for new friends, looking at that.

I’m also going to try and steer clear of women this year – in the sense of dating and relationships. Whilst some dates would be lovely, and a relationship even better, I can honestly say that I’m happy being single. Plus, with the fact that my entire degree is riding on this year – over 80% of my degree’s marks come from third year exams, coursework and my research paper – I can’t see a relationship proving beneficial to my studies.

The other week, I got a letter through from the School of Marine Sciences about postgraduate study. It went on to list 10-or-so different MSc (Master of Science, for those outside the UK and outside the know) degrees that I could get direct entry onto, following obtaining my BSc (Bachelor of Science) in Marine Biology, at the University of Newcastle. Great, I thought. So I had a look online for more information…

…and it turns out that direct entry isn’t direct at all. The majority require at least 6 months of experience – something you can’t get without leaving University and going to work for – and funding. Now, funding for Undergraduate degrees is fairly simple – LEA, get a loan and any grants or bursaries or scholarships you can. And get a job if you need to. But for postgraduate work, it’s a lot harder to get. You either have to work to earn it yourself, or you can apply to different companies for funding.

These two factors put me off. Primarily, if I went on to do a postgraduate course, I’d really want to go somewhere else – whilst staying on means you’re already used to the campus, and you know all the lecturers and stuff, I’ve always wondered what life would have been like somewhere else. But, you know, if I could’ve just stayed straight on at Newcastle, then I would.

But I can’t. It’s too late to apply for funding, and even if I got it, I don’t have anywhere near as much experience as is required.

So. It got me thinking about the kind of work I’d want to do after getting my degree next summer. And, naturally, the Monterey Bay Aquarium came up. I was having a look at the roles some of the staff play, and one of them had mentioned a Science Communications course (or similar wording) at UCSC (University of California, Santa Cruz). A course which is designed to teach you how to be a scientific journalist, not only in science magazines but also how to convey information to the public when they generally don’t have as deep a knowledge of the goings-on of the world as scientists do.

It’s odd. As I read about this course, it occurred to me just how much this was something I wanted to do.

Naturally, there are drawbacks.

Once again, money I don’t have, and experience I don’t have. However, this actually plays more into my hands. If I could land a job doing academic research for a year or two, full time, this would give me a wealth of experience and also a ton of money – giving me more than enough to live on for the year I was out there. Of course, I’d have to get through the application process, and get a Visa for the year, and somewhere to live, etc. But I’d absolutely love it.

It’s given me determination to get there and apply when I’ve got the money and experience under my belt, at the very least.

Anyway. That’s enough for now – I’ve got to swap some music around on my Zen V and then get a good night’s sleep. It’s up at quarter past six am for me. I’ll post again when I’m settled down – might have a surprise then as well.

“Do you want to run this ship?!?” [Capt. Malcolm Reynolds]
“Yes!” [Jayne Cobb]
“Well… you can’t…”[Capt. Malcolm Reynolds]
[Serenity]

Terrible is what I’ve been lately with this blog. But I have excuses. The past week’s been fairly busy doing nothing notable, so I’ve not really found anything interesting to blog about until now. I want to do one on mp3 players, seeing as I’ve far outgrown the capabilities of my 2gb Creative Zen and am looking to buy a new one – but I haven’t got the time right now as I’m off babysitting in about twenty minutes.

However, jsut wanted to give you a couple of bits of information.

I recently bought Watchmen, so I’m working my way through that. I’ve only finished Chapter II so far, but it’s fantastic. I wanted to read it before the film gets released, as book-to-film adaptations never seem to work very well and, sometimes, it gets altered far too much for my liking (I’m pointing an accusing finger at The Golden Compass here – a fun film, but they changed so much from the book to the film that I watched the thing with a hilarious expression of confusion on my face). This way, I won’t leave the cinema thinking that the film version is the actual version if it proves different, though Zach Snyder’s apparently staying very true to the novel, which is good.

Yes, that was a terribly structured paragraph, I am aware. I’ll work on it later.

Planning for the novel is progressing. I managed to find one of those famous inspiration spots where people just sit and write / paint / whatever. Mine happens to be on a nice secluded part of the bank of the nearby river, right on a meander with spectacular views and wildlife to watch. Consequently, I can sit there for hours and jot down ideas to structure and plan it more thoroughly at a later date. I even bought a notebook for the task! Haha.

I’ll post again soon, I promise.

“Help me Saul! He’s punching my bum!” [Dale Denton]
[Pineapple Express]

So. In the past week, I’ve watched and read a fair bit of awesome sci-fi stuff. And it’s really got me in the mood to attempt something unusual. I’m going to try and write a novel. I’ve actually come up with a concept that seems relatively unique to me (but then again, I haven’t read all the sci-fi stuff out there so who knows), and I think I’ll actually give this a shot.

So. I’ll likely be posting segments here for feedback. Whether I post them as entries here, or as entries on a separate page, who knows. You’ll find out soon enough.

Oh yeah. I also figured out who I’m going as at Halloween. I’m going to dress up as our favourite evil genius:

Oh yeah.

However, I have a feeling that no-one will recognise me. Let alone have heard of it.

Ah, screw it. You’re not awesome if you don’t know who that is.

Time to write.

“What happened to you? Do you EVER have a normal day?” [Dr. Calvin]
“Yeah, once… it was a Thursday.” [Del Spooner]
[i, Robot]

Sorry for the lack of posts over the past three/four days (forgive me, my brain’s not working properly right now). I’ve been surprisingly busy.

Anyway, in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s been a pretty big storm across the internet since Tuesday. About the new internet browser – Google Chrome.

Now, it’s scoring points in all the right places – it’s fast, it has a minimalistic design which still manages to be rather eye-pleasing, it’s innovative, and it’s easy to use.

However, Google screwed one up in the EULA. Originally, section 11 read like this (key segments in bold):

11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.

11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.

Naturally, this put a LOT of people off using Chrome. However, since the release, Google have announced that the EULA will be changed – they stated that they try to include the same terminology in all the EULAs for their services to make things clearer for the user. They said the language will be altered so it only shows that which is applicable to Chrome, and that this change in the EULA will apply to Chrome users who installed it before the change.

True to their words, when I went to download it today, section 11 now reads:

11. Content licence from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.

That’s it. The whole shebang. Hopefully this will bring users back to Chrome – as, I have to say, it is a very good browser. Does this mean I’m commiting adultery against Firefox? *shudders*.

I bought Eternal Sonata today. Very good jRPG – gorgeous visuals, innovative battle system, original story. I’m liking it a lot.

Also, I seem to have moved out of the “I Want” phase. I still want the new computer – that’s obvious, you can’t do that much with a 20GB HDD, an AMD Athlon XP 2200+, an nVidia GeForce 2 64mb and 512mb of RAM anymore. I think I might be getting some components for christmas. Which will, naturally, be very VERY useful.

New spec (for those of you who understand it) will include an ATi Radeon X1800XT 256mb GDDR3, 2GB DDR2 RAM at the highest speed (I can’t remember what it is) to start with, a 250GB SATAII Seagate Barracuda HDD, and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor – from 5000+ to 6000+, depending on how far I can stretch it.

Decided on a bike, too. Getting a GT Palomar 2008. For a penny under £200, it’s a good spec bike, and a respected brand. Hopefully picking it up on Sunday, or placing a deposit on it at least.

Life… still nice and relaxing, though I need to start coding that bloody template already, as well as start doing some research for the write-up of my project – got a ton of useful information from my trip, but obviously the more I can find, the better my paper can be.

I will get on it soon, I promise.

Oh, and… this post is brought to you from Google Chrome.

“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” [Richard B. Riddick]
[Pitch Black]

I know everyone does, but it’s especially notable when you have a particular kind of day, don’t you think?

I’m talking, of course, about the “I want” day.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I just made that up. But everyone’s had one – that day when you think “Oh, I’d quite like such-and-such,” or “you know, I really fancy that thingamajig.”

I’ve been having them for the past week now, annoyingly. And the list is extensive.

First up, a mountain bike. Now, this is kinda necessary anyway – and it’s something I’ll definitely be buying after I move back to Newcastle for third year. I have one here, but it’s rather broken and for a little more than the price of repairing it and servicing it, I could buy a new, higher-spec one. Which is also lighter – my current one weighs a ton. It’ll definitely get a lot of use – I’ll be using it to cycle in and out of the city centre instead of paying a fortune for bus fares. And I’ll be using it at least every other weekend too, as training for the 24-hour charity endurance race I’ll be entering next summer.

Secondly – and I blogged about this briefly yesterday – the brilliant Tokyoflash Rogue.

Now, I have a watch. It’s a nice Timex Reef Gear Indiglo. But, I only wear it when I go diving – when I’m being a landlubber, I tend to just use my LG Viewty phone to tell the time.

However, with something like this, the insanely-cool factor alone would make me wear it every day.
You tell the time in a way that’s destined to make newcomers go “huh?!?”, but is actually really intuitive. The outer ring of smaller blocks denotes the number of minutes – every fifth block is smaller to make reading easier. The ring of larger blocks displays “rough” minutes – the gap in the ring being the approximate minutes. And the inner ring displays the hour by the location of the gap, just like on a clock. There. Simple and awesome. It’s £83.42, so I’ve got some saving to do. At least it’s free shipping.

Third up is a bunch of videogame stuff. I won’t bore you with details – here’s the list: Fable 2 (X360), Fallout 3 (X360), Resident Evil 5 (X360), Aliens: Colonial Marines (X360), Dead Space (X360), The Sims 2 Apartment Life (PC), a Gamecube, all the Zelda games that have been released on the Gamecube, and a PS2 with pretty much all the Final Fantasy Games. I’m hoping that some of those are just temporary wants – though I’m pretty hyped about the Xbox 360 games – three of which (Fable 2, Fallout 3 and Dead Space) get released within a 10-day period. Thanks, guys.

Fourth – a new computer. Or rather, components to do a complete overhaul of my current system, including a 19″ LG HD Monitor a a dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor at 2.4-2.6GHz – depending on how far I’ll eventually stretch my budget.

Fifth – a new camera. I love my Cybershot, don’t get me wrong – but it showed it’s limitations whilst I was out in California early this summer. It takes great photos, but the 3x optical zoom is a bit of a bitch when you want good pictures of wildlife without disturbing it. I don’t particularly want to go the route of a Digital SLR, as lens-changing will be a huge issue when you’re out on a boat trying to get snaps of whales and dolphins, I imagine. Apparantly there’s a good Olympus All-in-one with something like a 12x optical zoom. That’d do nicely, I’ll have to chase Dave up on that one. Fortunately, my parents said something about getting me a nice camera as a graduation present, so hopefully I won’t have to buy that one.

I’ll leave you with some photos I took in Elkhorn Slough and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I feel a bit silly posting these at the bottom – I’ve been praised for the quality of them a fair few times so I feel I should at least put them near the top – but I’ll repost them in a few days, hopefully getting a Photos page sorted out.

Catch you on the flip. Word. And other cool hip phrases meaning goodbye.

“You know, somehow, ‘I told you so’… just doesn’t quite say it.” [Del Spooner]
[i, Robot]

^Because, let’s face it, I’m not always listening to music.

So, courtesy of the internet, I found some rather cool things.

The first is the Tokyoflash Rogue:

Now, this caught my eye in a split second. How cool is that? They ship for between £80 and £85 worldwide, so I’ve got a bit of saving to do before I can grab one. But it’s seriously awesome, and I’m not normally interested in watches. I have to have one of these.

Number two: Samurai Girl.
You’ve probably heard of it already, but in case you haven’t, here’s a brief run-down.
Asian-American girl is adopted by Japanese billionaire. Goes to wedding. Wedding gets crashed… by ninjas. Ninjas kill girl’s brother. Girl goes on run. Girl goes to late brother’s Yakuza-trained best-friend in order to learn martial arts.
I have to see this. If not just for the inevitable comedy factor.

Number three is not a discovery on my part, but the link was sent to me by Kate:
Photobombers Of The Day. I swear one of my friends is in one of these, haha. Brilliant post, it definitely made me laugh.

This weekend I’ll be making my official start on designing and coding my own template. Hopefully I won’t cock it up completely.

“When I get sad, I stop being sad, and be awesome instead. True story.” [Barney Stinson]
[How I Met Your Mother, Season 02, Episode 01: 'Where Were We?']

So. Guild Wars. If you don’t know what it is, read this.

The concept of MMORPGs has always been one which makes me sit on the fence. You connect to the internet, create a character by choosing it’s name, class, race, and other physical characteristics, and then you take that character and throw it into a server full of other peoples’ characters, where you party up, trade items, go questing, loot dungeons, chat, fight other players, and hopefully make a shedload of . Great.

Except, hang on a second. You have to pay. And not just pay a one-time fee for the physical game, like you would for, say, a copy of Call of Duty or Age of Empires. No. Whilst you have to pay that fee if you want a physical copy of the game (game clients have been readily accessible for legal download since the introduction of high-speed internet) – you also have to pay a monthly fee.

Why? The game cost me £30*, why should I then have to pay another £20 every two months** to be allowed to play it? At those rates, playing for a year would cost me £120, plus the £30 to buy the damn thing in the first place. And then, if you want to stay up-to-date, you have to spend another £20*** on each expansion that gets released.

At those costs, I feel you need to play the game a lot to say it’s worth it. Please don’t think I’m calling everyone who plays these pay-monthly MMORPGs a loser who’s got a lot of free time. I’m not. My best friend plays WoW, and has done for a few years now. And whilst he spends a lot of time on it, he also spends a lot of time out of his house.

Myself, I can’t justify spending that much on it. Not when I don’t play that much.

Enter Guild Wars. Sure, it cost me £20 for prophecies. But that’s all it cost me. No online subscriptions, and no downtime (well, not when I’ve wanted to play anyway). It has fantastic visuals, and the storyline is great – from what I’ve worked out, at least – whilst I’ve played for a total of 148 hours and 5 minutes, this has been over the last 23 months, during which I’ve always ended up deleting my characters due to periods of inactivity and forgetting where I was.

In fact, I liked Guild Wars so much, that I bought the expansion, Factions, for £10. Then, I bought Nightfall, for another £15. So, for £45, I’ve got 2 years of play of a fantastic MMORPG, which would cost me £270-£290**** elsewhere.

Another great thing about Guild Wars is the ability to party up with AI-controlled henchmen. Now, I’ve been on the internet a fairly long time, and I know the ratio of arseholes to decent people is something like 214809273598723:1. So the ability to use henchmen means I can just ignore everyone else and complete quests the way I want to do them, but with backup so I don’t get nuked in an instant.

Yes, I know the point of a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game is to play with other people, but most of the time I can’t be bothered to deal with sexually frustrated 13 year old boys who think that names like “Ima Pump You” and “Ivana Killu K” (for real – these guys just ran past my AFK Ele/Me) who think that the ability to “act tough” over the internet means they can ruin it for me by deliberately letting me get my arse handed to me by Charr.

I’m not sure if any other MMORPGs feature henchmen, just to clarify. I’m just stating this is advantageous to me.

I tried the 14-day free trial of WoW; that didn’t strike my fancy too much. I tried to play the trial of Star Wars Galaxies, but a ton of server issues meant my free trial was up before I’d even gotten to create a character. Guild wars gives me absolutely zero problems whatsoever. In fact, I need to buy the Eye of the North expansion at some point…

In other news…

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go cast an Auro of Restoration on me whilst casting Flares and Fire Storms at some Ice Elementals.

“They’re coming out of the walls! They’re coming outta the goddamn walls!” [Hudson]
[Aliens]

*RRP of WoW when it was first released (I think).
**Current RRP of a 60-day Game Card for WoW.
***Current RRP of the Burning Crusade Expansion for WoW.
****Estimated total if the second WoW Expansion’s been released.
Note: I have nothing against WoW. It was just the first other MMORPG that sprang to mind.

See, I resolved to post on this thing daily – at least whilst I had things to write about. And yesterday, I wanted to talk to you about Guild Wars. But I never got around to doing it. So, later tonight, I will.

Updates:

See, I have ideas for this place. I guess that’s what keeps me wanting to post here as well, for once I’m motivated to do stuff.

PC Inspector File Recovery is currently slaving away on my desktop PC, saving JPEGs it’s recovered from my hard drive. Hopefully, they’ll be all my missing photos, in which case I’ll be backing them up onto CD/DVD as soon as I can. Then, I think I’ll get around to adding a Photos section, to show off my favourites.

“Oh my god! I’ve got some fucking Jaffa Cakes in my coat pocket!” [Tim Bisley]
[Spaced, Season 01, Episode 05: 'Chaos']

I’ve taken to quoting How I Met Your Mother at people. Now, if you know me then you’ll know – this is something I do anyway. Well, I’m doing it much more than usual. This is clearly a sign that Season Four should air very soon.

I love this show. The actors casted were chosen perfectly for their roles. It’s a show that, from the first minute of the Pilot, has kept me hooked, and I don’t think there’s a single episode that I don’t love. In fact, the Pilot episode itself is one of the few I’ve seen which manages to set up everything you need to know about the show, within a 25-odd minute time period, but in a way which is perfectly clear and isn’t in the least bit overwhelming. Plus, the soundtrack to it features some absolutely fantastic songs.

In fact, the only bad thing about it show is that over here, in the UK, it receives very little airtime. I was lucky enough to catch it when BBC 2 aired Season 1 before Top Gear on a Sunday Evening (back when TG was on at 6:30 or 7:30pm, I can’t remember which), but I’m not sure whether they showed the whole series or not. And since then, it’s been on Trouble (I think, don’t hold me to that as I don’t have Sky), and is currently on BBC 2 at some obscure hour in the morning.

And what’s more – whilst Season 1 has been aired in it’s entirety, and released on DVD – I’ve heard not a whisper about Season 2. Which is a shame. No season 2 episodes anywhere on TV, and no Season 2 DVD set (considering Season 3 finished airing in the US a while ago I felt this would definitely be due a few months back). The only way to keep up is to watch bad quality versions streamed over the internet.

But I guess for a downside, that’s an upside. If that makes sense.

In other news…

Downloaded a handy free utility called PC Inspector File Recovery. From what I’ve seen, it’s had good reviews, so I’m hoping it’ll do the trick and drag back my photos. That’d be nice.

“It was like something from an old movie, where the sailor sees the girl across the crowded dance floor, turns to his buddy and says, ‘See that girl? I’m gonna marry her someday.’” [Future Ted]
“Hey Barney, see that girl?” [Ted]
“Oh yeeeahh, you just KNOW she likes it dirty.” [Barney]
[How I Met Your Mother, Season 01, Episode 01: 'Pilot']