Scary Biscuits

It occurred to me today that if I don’t put up some Christmas decorations this weekend, then I would not get around to it until the next. I would then have all of 6 days to appreciate them before I head back to my parents home for a week of Christmas festivities. 

This would not do, so I headed out to find somewhere to buy a nice artificial fake Christmas tree; I would have bought real, but I realised I have no idea what I would do with the bloody thing after Christmas. After a spot of googling and asking around I found what I was looking for on the John Lewis website, for the princely sum of £25.

So the expedition was set, and I headed out to Oxford Street where the nearest store was to be found. After a bit of umming and aaaahhring over what type of decorations to go for on the tree, I finally picked some stuff out. The result can be seen above. 

Not bad for my first solo tree decoration attempt I think, if a little wonky.

Soooooo, I have not blogged for a while. Turns out I got lasy, graduated and started my new job already. In any case this weekend I’ve been mixing it up between:

• Playing Fable II that was released on Friday.
• Helping out with an attempt to beat a world record attempt for the number of people playing the Nintendo DS simultaneously. 
• Doing some stuff for a work training task.

I find myself sitting the University Library listening to the EVE Online soundtrack and wonder why everytime I listen to it I have a massive urge to play EVE. I mean its not like I have the sounds turned on when I play, I guess I am just twisted.

Incidently I am in the library because it seems the only place I can actually “get stuff done” is when I am locked in here. Although at this point I am rapidly loosing the will to live, particularly as my laptop seems to have given its last wimper in this world. It now no longer gets past the boot screen, and makes “interesting” noises.

Anyway, I guess I should go and write a couple thousand more words. Suckage.

In case you are one of the few people I have yet to tell my quest in search of a job is at an end. It turns out after a phone interview, face to face interview, assessment centre, and a battery of psychometric tests RBS GBM have decided to give me an offer. I have to say I was quite surprised at the time, if only because the phone call containing the offer took slightly longer to arrive than I expected. In fact I was already preparing my no-problem, doors close, and windows open speech for the poor recruitment person who has to make calls to those unlucky people. 
 
I have to say that moving to London was not something I had specifically considered when looking for a job. I had long accepted that to find a place at a good company, where I can stretch myself, and get a good wage, I would need to move pretty much wherever it happened to be. After visiting London a bunch of times in the last year for various reasons I have really come around to the idea, and actually really look forward to it now. Even to the point where I have been looking at sites figuring out where the hell to live…..any suggestions of nice places to live within 30 minutes travel of Liverpool Street Station PLEASE leave a comment.
 
In any case suffice it to say I am very pleased now that I actually have something to do after my degree, and more to the point will have a surprisingly nice income to fritter away on various gadgets, games, and computers.

I thought I would point this out to anyone who was interested. The BBC has been working on a new slightly more up to date homepage, and you can take a peek at it here:
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/
 
Oh and also the iPlayer has been updated to let people stream as well as download which is cool.

Well, what a combo. You might well be thinking what the hell am I talking about.
 
I of course dropped Sheffield in as I had gone on a little road trip their with a friend so I could take an aptitude test. A test in included 4 parts no less:

• Number Series
• Verbal Reasoning
• Syntax Checking
• Diagramatic Reasoning

It was quite interesting, despite it taking nearly 3 hours odd. In any case I won’t find out the results for a week at least, then I can find out if I can explain all.
 
More interestingly while I was in Sheffield with Gareth we did a little shopping to pass time before the test. I was checking all the normal places for how much they were selling Mass Effect for, and a quite bizzare situation emerged.
 
I discovered quite strangly that W. H. Smiths has the cheapest price at a lowly £32.99. This was quite odd, in that I would not consider this to be an important place to check games prices as they are often not cheaper, but more often more expensive. 
 
In any case we also checked HMV (£35 with student discount) and Game (£39.99) which were both more expensive to my surprise. Well I could not resist in fear of it being a miss price by them, so I have snapped it up. Once I got home I managed to sneak in an hours play (got back around 9-10pm) before falling asleep and it seems like an excellent game, and has an interesting story so far.
 
Anyway for today I need to go make some food, I’m starving.

I have decided to grab a lovefilm subscription, if only so I can more cheapy play all of the games that I want to without having to actually buy them. I figure I can still purchase all the really good ones, like Mass Effect or Assasins Creed, but this way I can play all of the ones that are not AAA without emptying my bank account.
 
It also has the added benefit of having the DVD’s also, so I think I will probably work through a load of those too. I now have a games queue including:

• Half-Life 2 - The Orange Box
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
• Star Trek: Legacy
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - Made by the same people as Mass Effect and is supposed to be really good.
• Command And Conquer 3 - Tiberium Wars
• Psychonauts - They keep banging on about it on the 1up yours podcast so want to see what the fuss is all about.

Since I am on the 2 disks at a time package I have two lists one for games then the other disk is just for DVD’s and I have way way way to many on that queue to list. 
 
Anyway, should be good hopefully.

What seems like years of only doing maybe a presentation once every 2-3 years I seem to arrived at what can only be called the “year of the presenation”.
 
One of the modules that I have selected this year is “Semenars and Readings” which basically amounts to various people taking it doing rolling presenations every couple of weeks on a topic that is randomly picked. This combined with the presenation required as part of my business modules this year, I think already this term that I will have easily trippled the number of presentations that I have had to do in my entire life.
 
This does have a cunning benefit thought, I never particularly liked doing presentations but now that I have been doing so many (mainly in small groups) they ain’t seeming so bad any more. 
 
Oh and if you want something interesting to read about interaction design, then I would highly recommend “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman. We (Gareth, Dafydd) have done a presentation on the guy, and some of his thoughts on the topic are particularly insightful. The book spawned a particularly humorous section of slides about why my washing machines design sucks.
 
So coming to a presentation near you soon, possibly me.

Think I need to change the name of this thing to the food blog, but oh well. I tried making apple crumble, with some success. It looked like a crumble and the apple filling was nice.
 
Only problem was that the cumble was way to buttery, may have to tone down the amount of butter next time.

Ok, so I tried again, and this time the rice was perfect. Well at least much better than before.
 
It still has a different texture/flavour to the rice that I am used to but I think that is because I normally have basmati rice at home. I will probably just pick some up when I next go shopping to see if that makes a difference.