Scary Biscuits

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.