Mixel's Magic Journal!

OW.. Goddamn teeth.

Thu, 08 May 2008 04:53:50 GMT

Yesterday they took out 3 of my wisdom teeth.

My mouth hurts. Everything tastes of blood. I'm all swollen up. :(

The two bottom ones were so sideways they couldnt pull them so they widened the sockets (drilled actual bone? Argh) and cut them up in situ.. Fortunately i was under general anesthetic.

Elizabeth is doing fine - ive got a lot of photos to put up soon but ive been a bit short on time.

My end of year presentation went unprecedentedly well. The whole group did their bits well and we all ended up with >70 in each of the 4 modules we were being graded on. Which is pretty crazy really. Going in to year three on the right footing at least.

Now I'll try sleep again. ow.

Guess?

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:49:28 GMT

Well, she likes fake heartbeats.. I guess you can trick her into thinking you've not even put her down. .. Tapping the basket that routinely makes my arm dead. This sounds like an opportunity for some sort of bop bop bop contraption, though I have no idea how I'd do that. Someone else probably has. Sounds like good instructables.com material. :)

Aaaannyway, after the last entry didn't really work because Jan's gallery is friends only I've pilfered the pics and stuck them up on mixelmagic.com too. Wooyay. I doubt she'll mind!

Janma, Kat & Ellie*2, Extreeeeme closeup, me, and me.. Looks like a goddamn fishing photo.

Now a shout out to www.awesomebooks.co.uk - who I ordered an art technique/reference book from, which was marked as second hand with visible use (i guess its been used by another artist).. I got an email saying it doesn't meet their quality control, so they've refunded the purchase..

.. But are sending it anyway for free..
..... And giving me a £2 voucher for the "inconvenience"

Awesome.

---

... What isn't awesome is me standing in cat sick wearing socks just now.

Eliza-what?

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:09:23 GMT

Ok, one of the reasons we like Elizabeth as a name so much is the millions of different things we can shorten it to, or she can shorten it to later..

Liz, Lizzie, Lisa, Libby, Ellie, Elle, Beth, Bet, etc. etc etc etc etc..

I like Libby a lot, Liz/lizzie doesn't seem like a child name for some reason, Lisa just reminds me of the Simpsons.. I've already found myself shortening her to Ellie, but I have a CMO character called Ellie, and she kind of got skewered a while ago.. Which isn't really a problem but it's an interesting naming issue. Many of the names I like most I've already used for characters.. It seems a little strange if they end up sharing them!

OK though, if anyone needs a baby photo fix, Jan posted a load on her Flickr page..

This one is pretty epic. I love that camera.

...

In other news: ARRRGGGGHHHH I just messed up massive chunks of my online stuff.

Baby stuff day 3..

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:21:42 GMT

Thanks for the baby posts, I will reply to those! First night was a bit hectic, first full day was mostly ok, and I can see how routines might work now. We all slept a bit!

Right now she also sleeps quite a lot in the day and feeds most of the night. Feels a bit weird that all I can do is carry her around and burp her etc. That'll distract her for 30 mins before she's all "BOOBS NOW!" Which I can't really help with..

So, I RTFM'd and apparently it's my job to make a lot of tea, carry things around, fend off too many visitors (lol) and use super geek powers to set up impromptu intercoms. (didn't say that in the book, but I should be able to set up a really good 2 way audio/video chat system using Kat's old ibook..)

The cats have been shut out of the attic completely.. We'd anticipated that, but it was confirmed a good idea after Mushroom had got into the baby basket before I'd even finished setting it up.. Which was less than a 2 minute window. Nice. Had to change the sheet after it had been on for 30 seconds.. Mushroom leaves footprints. Odd that; she only leaves them in the places you want most clean.. Kitchen cabinets, baby stuff etc.

There will be lots and lots more photos but not a constant stream (as in, hrs, minutes.. It'll be day-shifted), seems like living with her and enjoying it is more important than documenting everything. :) More pressing that we don't rush or miss anything than making sure nobody else misses stuff. Saying that I have kept my camera in my pocket the whole time since birth, and anticipate at least one batch of photos uploaded a week. I don't want to spam my main LJ so I'll work on separating her off into her own LJ or something (which both me and batkat could post to.

Oh, and I registered elizabethdawes.com - partly for "her" blog but otherwise just to camp until/in case she needs it later. .. Didn't say anything about that in the book either. I wonder if there are any tech-friendly parenting books.. There's an excellent net-savvy parenting blog & podcast in jumping monkeys at least. Going to have to look into that, I'm sure there are loads of useful sites.

It's a girl!

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:26:50 GMT

Elizabeth was born (after a long labour which I'll probably explain when less tired!) at 9:56am(ish) Tuesday 15th April.. She weighs 7lb 10oz, and is perfectly healthy. She's feeding well already, sleeping lots, and hasn't really cried at all yet.. Which freaked me out. She didn't seem in the slightest bit bothered by being born.

Anyway, here's some photos. :D (i'll tidy these up and post everywhere else asap)

batkat is doing well, there weren't any complications at all (just a long labour) .. Now I think I'm going to go sleep.. Just thought I should keep LJ posted!

Only a couple hrs old.
My brother Owen holding her. Not sure who looks more scared. :) Also, I find it funny that he's now "Uncle Owen" (.. ... ... Umm.. Star Wars.)
Tiny..

Blue Eyes..

Here's the gallery I'll be filling with Elizabeth photos as I take them..

Woo!

Macs, pipes, uni.. (still no baby)

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:44:41 GMT

Baby news first: There is no baby news.. batkat had a membrane sweep today though.. (well, at least I'm learning a lot about pregnancy!) That *might* kick-start birth within 48hrs, and if not it'll be induced next week.

Soo, within 1.5 weeks we *will* have a baby. :O

---

Uni stuff now.. Macs.. Are.. Everywhere. Seriously, its normal to see 3 student Macbooks in a room, and 2 of the 4 people (other than me) in my group, who'd previously been "ugh macs" seem to be getting Mac Minis or Macbooks.

... It's nice! We're planning on using a combination of the iPhone SDK and Unity3D to make an iPhone/iPod touch game next year, too.

For the work in progress (middle milestone) on our current brief we got 70.. 78 for the concept document, which is going to be used an example for later years as how to do it well. :D Now that made me very happy as it took ages to lay everything out, do pictures, etc.. I have a mitigating circumstances form to fill in "Re: Baby stuff" too, so I don't need to worry about impending fatherhood effecting my marks (in the short term!)

---

House stuff! Apparently our water supply goes under the house behind ours, and under her house it's lead piped, and we're sharing the same supply.. That seems a bit dumb. So we're probably going to share the cost to get the lead pipes removed, and are going to ask about getting the supplies split.. Which would be worth doing.. Probably.. Hmm. We wouldn't have known if she wasn't converting her basement either..

Stupid pipes.

RAM and HDs..

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:04:59 GMT

One of my external HDs goes.. CLUNK.. CLUNK..
- Other than that it shows no sign of breaking. Ah well, I'm backed up! I hope.

No baby yet..

My RAM just arrived.. 3GB should be enough. (Hurrah for dropping RAM prices!)

Today I should be doing a lot of coursework. Exciting.

Yay drawing pictures

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:50:15 GMT

First two pictures I've done since I got the new monitor..

The chickeny CMO thing is an easter pic.. The vampirey one's really just a collection of experiments. Trying to work out whether I need to get Autodesk Sketchbook pro or not. I'm on the beta - but that expires in a couple of days.

Basically, yeah, I think I do need it;- it massively speeds up the early part of picture making, I could churn stuff out pretty fast.

MONITOR!!!

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:50:43 GMT

...

I love this thing.

I was considering getting a 12" Wacom Cintiq after Dave Cheung bought one and seems to like it, triggering a research spree.. Which led me to the realisation that for £hundreds less I could get an obsceeeeenely nice display instead... (Cintiq was still tempting, but its un-portability lost it for me, I'd want to move it around, or what's the point? it'd be replacing one of my displays too, so that'd be a huge downgrade in screen space...)

Took me days to calibrate the Samsung, but its absolutely gorgeous.. Colour reproduction is spot on (lol, NOW it is), it displays more of the RGB gamut than any other display costing <£1k (that I can find on the internet anyway), it pivots, it's 24" 1920x1200, the colour doesn't change at all regardless of viewing angle.. It has enough inputs for me to plug every console I own (from within the last 10 years anyway) into it simultaneously.. It does Picture In Picture too. - That may seem like a daft feature, but I might have to move the consoles down into the basement when there's a 2 year old running around at console height knocking over PS3s etc, so it's all good.

So, yes it was expensive but I spend over 60% of my time looking at my monitor/s I'd estimate, so I didn't want to compromise on a "good value" panel again. My other monitor's over as a secondary display now, which is great. It never was a good screen for art though, and was a daft purchase. :/ It's good to use as a giant EyeTV/IM/irc/iTunes screen though. :D

Fear it..

Umm, the polar icecaps are overrated anyway.

I.. can.. see.. forever... / Baby soon..

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:34:55 GMT

Stupid entry, but this is what happens when you "screen share" in Leopard then do the same thing back from the other machine, causing a loop.. When you move something the motion flies down the tunnel, like its all falling down. Woo. Talking about infinite loops...

Less than a week until the baby's due.

.. And we're prepared! We have more than enough of everything. Especially clothes. We have an obscene amount of clothes. Various relatives are making them.. We encourage that, and odd things from anyone who feels like giving stuff.. :)

We just have issues with being spammed with stuff we could have got ourselves. Generosity is good, but after a point it decreases our ability to choose things ourselves, and do things ourselves. Both me and Kat really enjoy shopping too, both individually and together. So, not only does it add a lot of clutter, it removes an experience *we* could have. Decisions we could make. We have very different tastes to most of the people we know. No amount of generosity can override that - something we've both taken too long to learn.

We don't really want every possible situation thought through by anyone else first either. The journey is more important than the destination, we don't want, or need to be prepared for everything. We want to be able to learn things for ourselves, and, yes.. Dress the kid ourselves, nobody else needs to be keeping tabs on what we do/don't have. That's creepy.

At various times in our lives - others' influence has overridden our own preferences when it should have been much more about us and what we'd prefer than anyone else. Various experiences we basically feel "robbed" of. This upsets (and angers) both me and Kat, and grr. It's very hard to argue against generosity - and Kat's so meek she basically does anything to avoid rocking boats on any occasion - even when she's really sure of something. (which is an admirable trait btw, I'm not complaining about that, its just not conducive to positive change)

Meh.. So yes, we need to do the whole peacekeeping bit, but I don't want the child to be a walking case of the same weird guilt issues that have occurred before for both Kat & myself, about sometimes different, sometimes the same things/events. It was just about us before, now there's a whole extra person we're responsible for.

The baby stuff is exciting though, I'm not stressed about that at all. The little guy/girl is obviously fine in there, wriggling around - i think it'll be a lot less weird once it's outside anyway. :D

Obviously there'll be a load of photos soon.

Expensiive

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:03:19 GMT

On Thursday we had a presentation.. We had to present the 30+ page concept document for our game..

Of course, my printer broke. (completely).. So I've ordered a new one.. I hate printers. I've never really bought a nice one new though so hopefully this will be better. (I've had hand-me-downs or council freebies)

Then, when I got to uni it turns out I somehow sync'd my files wrong so didnt actually *have* the presentation, so left Sam & James printing the document while I came home to get the files. Doh!

The presentation went ok, I still get nervous and a bit rubbish though, but hmm, so did the Team17 guy who came in to guest lecture a couple of weeks ago. XD Oh, and we sort of presented some of the wrong things, so it could have gone better..

I've ordered a really nice monitor. I was being tempted by a Cintiq (Chugworth Dave just got one so I've been looking them up) but I think it's really just a bit of a seductive gimmick - For £150 less I can get a 24" monitor with an 8bit panel and really great colour gamut. My current display is only 6bit, and it really makes a difference when painting. Oops. So my original LG may have been a semi-bad purchase, as lovely as it is. :/ I shouldn't have tried to compromise between *needed* screen real-estate and *needed* colour reproduction, so I went overboard and bought a complete beast.. I'm going to have to saw part of my desk off for it to fit.

OH.. And it pivots to portrait, supports HDCP, 1080p, 1920x1200.. 24" Photos later in the week hopefully.

Easter break, have some odd jobs to do for various people.. I think someone came and fixed the roof for us too (it was leaking..)

Exciting. Right now I'm about to go and break half of my online stuff, probably.

CMOs Bday - Uni marks & Placements

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:21:31 GMT

Anyone visiting Creeping Me Out will notice..
I updated it again! Also, I'm running the CMO's 4th birthday Art Competition.. With DeviantArt Subscriptions for the best entries. (not uber great prizes I know, but I have no CMO merch atm, and this gives me something to work up to later on... "4 years" is hardly the most significant bday ever...)

After I got that 95 for 3D animation (yaaay!) I followed it up with a 66 for video post production (booo!!) .. Mostly by being too subtle with the "effects", which is pretty stupid of me. Don't know of anyone else doing better though so, meh.

Year 2 marks sofar..

Video Post Prod:	66
Graphic Comms:	68
Games Design 1:	75
3D Animation:	95
= 76 average

Half way through the year now, trying to keep the average up. I'm not even going to try getting a placement next year for a couple of reasons. I've seen (and want to do) next year's brief, and none of the guys I've been working with are doing placements, so when I come back to do year 3 it'd be a gamble as to who I end up with. I'd also just like to have all this academic stuff finally behind me, point proven, etc..

Baby day approaching fast..

And I drew a robot..

Tentacles!

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 11:43:51 GMT

Del Toro doing "At The Mountains Of Madness" - Now THAT is great. None of the Lovecraft films have been quite on the money, but I can imagine him doing a very good job.

AND he's directing The Hobbit! :) (as two movies)

This is such great news! Watched Cronos again recently (first time I saw it I was obviously too young or distracted to get it), and loved it.. Pan's Labyrinth was great. Even Hellboy was good, and had serious Cthulhu-isms anyway.

Lost Series 4 premiere was amazing, as expected!

I got 95/100 on my 3D animation brief.. Best mark I've ever got for anything - considering there are no right/wrong answers and it's soully a creative thing to a set of requirements.. VERY happy about that as it'll make keeping my second year >70 average significantly easier! Waiting for my video-post-production marks now.

Five things!

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 20:37:18 GMT

1) I went to the dentist, they drilled and filled one of my front(ish) teeth. It hurts a bit two days later suddenly, but I'm sure it's fine. Some time in the new year I'll have to have my wisdom teeth taken out. Because one of them collapsed. That was annoying, so it has a temporary filling in now.

2) I got the marks for my more technical first brief of Yr 2.. I was a bit annoyed at myself after the first marks I got back this year were 68, but for the techy assignment I got 75, so my average is good! Year two marks account for 25% of my final grade, so if I can do well for this year I could have 20ish points to begin "next" year with, giving me a little more leeway in what's going to be a pretty heavy year..

3) I drew a crazy CMO Oekaki (might still do little mods here and there, like fixing her wonky eyes) which took about 20 hrs of draw-time. It doesn't necessarily look like it should have taken that long, mind.. The wood, shinies etc.. Mostly just experimenting, but it looks okay!

- Click to full view please -
Or click here to watch the animation.
You may want want to click the M/H/Mx bottom left button to increase the replay speed.

4) I'm working on a 30 second film/editing project and a 10 second animation project. I'm making them both about Zombie Holiday, which is a godsend many different ways. So right now I'm making and rigging 3D models of characters, building scenery and doing mock-up rendering at the moment. Here's a very dirty preview of one of the scene setups. It's a series of tubes in reality, spinning.. We're getting marks for technique, so if I can do things efficiently and make them look nice whilst technically being not that complex that'll be good. Here's a few seconds in the graveyard.

5) Sofar.. Blender is my friend. 3DStudio Max is mostly doing my head in.

22 days of Leopard - with lots of pics!

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 09:17:13 GMT

So, on Saturday 3rd Nov. my shiny copy of Leopard arrived and I promptly installed it on my Macbook.. No problems there, perfect first time.

Then I proceeded to install it on our other two Macs...

I know, i know, my setup is hardly sleek and minimalist.. This is only one of two(or three?) screens too..

Next I went for my G5, which took about a days worth of faffing around. My dodgy USB setup and flashed, technically unsupported "Windows" video card were worrying me.. My 500GB USB HD was making the whole setup Kernel Panic frequently. Os X Kernel Panics are essentially the same as a windows Blue Screen Of Death, apart from they're grey. Checked the logs and sorted that out by swapping around all my USB stuff.

Before my G5 was done we also did a problem free upgrade on Kat's Macbook Pro..

Well, the wow starts now..? :P Leopard is nice! Everything runs faster, even on my "antiquated" G5.. Seriously, that blew me away - I was expecting old hardware to choke on the new effects, but (as everything is multi CPU/core aware?) it flies now. I can't even make my unsupported ATI card crash anymore (touch wood)..

The strangest part; all of the things I thought were hardware/incompatibility glitches on my G5 (the inability to wake from sleep caused by dodgy USB stuff, annoying ATI card freezes) seem to be *fixed* now. So it's faster and more stable using random hacked together PC components.. Excellent, and unexpected.

Positive

Time Machine not only works well but looks ridiculously over the top whilst doing it. I've disabled all of my cobbled together backup scripts - this keeps an up to date image of any changes i make transparently. Very happy about how easy it makes the process. Anyone who hasn't seen this, it means you can rewind the system, or any file, in hourly increments.

The OS interface is much more consistent now. No brushed metal ugliness.

Everything I've tried still seems to work!

Quicklook is instantanious on both my machines, and works flawlessly - very.. VERY nice. This is beyond useful and quickly becomes indispensable. (loads any previewable doc, psd, pdf, jpg, etc. in a popup window without loading any apps.

Finally the ability to change the icon grid size in the Finder.. I don't understand how that took them so long to sort out.

Virtual Desktops work about as well as I can imagine they could. I have my second screen set up with IM, IRC, EyeTV etc and they hover there happily while sliding between the main monitor's spaces. Clears up lots of space for Photoshop. On the Macbook running parallels I can easily have one "Space" for XP so i can Alt-tab and it slides between the two OS..

Network prefs consolidated into one much nicer prefpane, yay!

Coverflow is actually really.. REALLY nice, especially in folders full of images. Runs smoothly on both machines.

Dictionary and Calculator are now rigged up to the spotlight search function.. type a word or sum into the corner box and get the answer instantly without any other apps loaded..

Spotlight is *much* faster now, making it a viable app launcher. It supports Boolean terms now too, usefully.

Normal file dialogues now have a "media" section - with all your itunes music library, iphoto library/albums and movies folders for browsing. Seems like a little thing, but again it's a good time saver as it saves loading any of the library apps. The iPhoto stuff in particular is very well done.

All the machines on the network magically appear in the Finder sidebar. It works!

There are a huge number of other improvements in all the component apps.. iChat, Addressbook, iCal, etc etc.

Negative

A large number of people have had installation issues - I was among them, but that was due to dodgy software and hardware hacks.. Oops. Only outstanding issue is with that external drive.. I think.

"Stacks" aren't configurable enough and remove a useful "pop up folder menu" feature of the dock. :( But they're pretty and they do have some added functionality (you can drag things out of them for a start)

inexplicably reflective dock.. Cute though - I'm undecided.

The menubar is unconfigurably transparent for no good reason. There have been a lot of UNIX commands uncovered to fix that though. Funny to see Leopard machines at uni with these hacks applied so you can *see the menubar when they're doing presentations etc*.. Bad move Apple.

They removed the ability to send SMS messages using Bluetooth in the address book!??! That feature was great and saved me ages! In the US you can send SMS with iChat, but that's no use here. :( (I guess you're supposed to get an iPhone instead? Great.)

Summary

I think Leopard is the first OS I've used which instantly and easily illustrates *why* I prefer using it over other systems in a functional way that people could actually understand.. Both AmigaOS and MacOS 10.2 through Tiger acted "much like windows" but with a couple of nice features (exposé, spotlight in osX, screen management etc on the Amiga) and everything being in different places.. People are put off by the differentness and see no functional difference (and are scared of losing software, heh). Now the number of obvious, demonstrable useful features has increased massively. At uni where there's the usual windows people (Games Design!), they've only said positive things.. Coverflow and Quickview aren't gimmicks - I wish I'd always had this functionality - it saves a lot of time. Leopard on the whole seems like Apple doing everything they can to streamline things and make them better organised, including the desktop and user workflow.. And they've largely been successful. Considering one of the Mac's main selling points has always been how it keeps out of your way and lets you get on with things that's probably quite an achievement.

They might've rushed Leopard near launch to get it out on time - I wouldn't have recommended the upgrade for everyone at first due to the teething problems on certain configurations, but now things seem more ironed out (10.5.1), It's definitely worth it!

Unfortunately titled ship..

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 09:44:39 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7110550.stm

.. MS Explorer.. Crashed?

Rhymes with rabies

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 22:03:13 GMT

Firstly, thanks to everyone who posted the nice comments on the last entry, I did mean to reply to everything.. Then I got distracted by n-million things (mostly uni work).. I might reply to them at some point in the future! Who knows. :) They're all appreciated though, by both of us..

Anyway, this was a few days back, sofar it has everything it's supposed to have organ-wise, definitely has a face etc (useful).. And is growing super fast!

It kicks batkat a lot, and has kicked me a few times. Funny that the first interaction with new humans involves kicking. How cute! It's kicking you in the ribs! Yay!

Anyway.. It was a fun scan and it looks a lot like a baby now. :)

----

I have 2 big ol' blog entries half written just sat on my desktop, need to finish those. Especially the "zombie makeup test" one!

Things at uni are going fine.. I got the marks for my first group brief and narrowly missed 70. Uugh. Still waiting for the marks for the (non group based) programming assignment, which I hopefully did better on!

Oh yeah...

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:44:47 GMT

15 weeks. Weird huh?

Spine, teeth, head.. heart.. Almost.. human! We could see it kicking around a lot too - ultrasound is really good now, we got very good views of it from lots of angles. It's feet are freakily just like tiny feet with toes already.. He/she was curling them and waving them about.

We don't know if it's a boy or a girl and we've asked not to know. There's really no need to know either way. It's a person either way, and I'd prefer the surprise.

Oh yeah, I realise this is the first time I've mentioned this.. Keeping you on your toes. We were making sure it got along far enough so as to not get people's hopes up early on.

Yes, it's pretty freaky.. Looks like baby Skeletor in this grab, he/she looked much more human during the scan..

Oh, and batkat is doing fine, importantly..

---

Uni stuff is going ok, though it's pretty heavy.. I'm taking on loads of work. I'll post examples sometime soon anyway.

Uni & Sprites

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 05:29:34 GMT

Recent improvements in Zombie Holiday sprites..

Hmm. :)

I start uni properly next week.. Confusingly they've moved me to another group. That'd make sense if they'd moved more than just me, but I seem to be the only person who's been shuffled.. Maybe its based on our marks.. Maybe they have a plan..

Or maybe it's just random and annoying.

On Monday I'll be going to my old group's sessions and I'll try working out why they've done it. I work well with a couple of people in my old group.. Having a completely new one is a bit of a gamble. Meergh. I don't know..

Oh Rats!

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:29:07 GMT

I'm going to do a few quick entries - I start uni again today and have been putting off blog stuff, so I'll have to catch back up with myself..

After getting the all-clear from the vets I got 2 new rats a few weeks back. I thought long and hard about getting chinchillas instead, but they don't click so well with me.. Maybe next time though.

More here

Then it took me a week to work out what to call them.. The bigger, lighter one is Rasputin, the Smaller skittier almost black & white one is Romero.. I picked one name for unkillability and the other for zombie association. (makes sense when you see his markings)

Best thing about these two though is I can actually tell which one is which! - They have very different personalities, and play fight a lot.. Rasputin is definitely the alpha, but Romero seems braver (wel, prepared to leap off things without much thought) and maybe more intelligent.. Yesterday he worked out how to use the Wodent wheel - which had been there for about 3 weeks before they plucked up courage to do anything with it..

I don't think he was impressed.. Why run when you can sleep I suppose.

Friday Flock.. Yay! + Uuuuugh..

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 08:41:42 GMT

Went to the last Flock, which was a lot of fun.. Spoke to a load of people I haven't in ages.. Seriously long time since i'd been out at all, not to mention alone, so twas good, if strange..

So yeah, it was an excellent night until the end where i started feeling pretty iffy.

Feel really stupid for getting/being sick at the end.. Apparently I can handle drink even less than i used to be able to.. I only had 3 Newcastle Browns.. :( Sorry if anyone either had to witness that, or walk around it, or whatever.. (it was outside and around the corner anyway, so at least i missed everyone!)..

Gavin did the whole sober helping me out thing, which i find pretty funny.. Still feel dumb/waaay to old to have that happen. Embarrassing. When I'm not having any symptoms i guess its easier to overdo it as i feel so okay... until I don't feel okay... :/

Danced a bit.. Got a Woolstock II t-shirt, (thankye Paul and door guy whos name escapes me, but who was super helpful after me being sick and not allowed back in, hehe) got home and passed out.

Rat update..

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:50:47 GMT

Well, they found a tumor in Tofu's brain, and an abscess in his inner ear. They haven't worked out what the bacteria causing the abscesses were, but they've basically said I should be ok if i'm careful to disinfect the cages thoroughly.

Whatever it was they've found no evidence of a virus or anything to take out their immune systems. I'm guessing the bacteria/infection thing only happened once they were old and increasingly susceptible anyway. I'm not sure I could've done anything about it.. They were a well looked after set of rats but their personal hygiene *was* pretty shoddy - largely in ways i couldn't do anything about. They don't exactly do as they're told. :)

So.. Cleaning cages soon.

Not likely to blog for a week or two..! Might do anyway, but yep, busy busy.

Oh, got back in contact with a good friend of yore, which I'm really happy about. Making an effort to sort out at least one "nagging little thing I've been meaning to do for ages" every day. Hopefully that'll go better than the "draw something every day" plan, which resulted in a sudden drop in amount of drawings I do. Oops. It's the thought that counts?

No more rats..

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 01:27:09 GMT

My last rat was put down yesterday after a couple of days having fits and becoming a vegetable. I took him for a post-mortem (to Wetherby.. By taxi) . I chose to do this on the off-chance that there was something more sinister behind the recent rat deaths - if there's any chance there was something contagious I need to know in case i want to keep rats later on..

Having pets die is depressing.. Having a day of vet stuff costing over £200 when they're already dead even more-so.

---

On a much more positive note.. i got my marks for 1st Yr of uni, and my average is 72.. Which I'm very happy with. The first year's marks don't really count for anything other than progressing to the next level, but.. Still nice.. I got 90 for the end of year assignment.

Andy and Jamie were round and played a load of multiplayer stuff which was fun, and good to distract me from other stuff. Today Danny, Lucy and Owen should be coming round to play random stuff too.

Apple launched a load of new stuff (iMac, software, no portables though).. Which is good, but rats > Macs.. I'm really dreading the call from the pathologists.. Lets hope it's nothing too scary or anything I could have avoided.

(un)Freezing Mac..

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 14:15:26 GMT

Okay, so, a few months ago I flashed an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to work in the Mac.. It seemed to work fine, until recently..

Anything using Core Graphics (iphoto mostly) froze up the system completely.. Everything stops, mouse pointer doesn't even move any more type freeze where you have to hold down the off button for a few seconds to get out. So I switched to my old graphics card for a week, which was unbeaaaarably slow now I'm used to the 9800.

So I switch back to the 9800 and look in the console/error log and see the scanner driver is polling the buttons on the front of the scanner about 30 times a second.. "are you pressing a button on the scanner?" "are you pressing a button on the scanner?" "are you pressing a button on the scanner?" "are you pressing a button on the scanner?" .. So I stop the scanner monitor from loading at boot time, and now I can't make the Mac crash anymore..

So, either a weird coincidence or weird behaviour. Secondary Mac graphics library which crashes when USB devices are spammed by their own drivers whilst using one particular graphics card. Whaa.. I'm not complaining, but I don't trust it not to crash again.

... On Tuesday Owen and I went to Danny's taking a load of games, controllers and the PS3. That was tiring.. PS3s aren't exactly super portable. A lot of fun though, and I kicked butt. Go team Mixel!

Wales!

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:56:08 GMT

Firstly.. Happy Bday batkat

I said I'd post about Wales.. I'm finally getting around to it now, weeks later.

The drive down was.. Wet. As was much of the week.

A bit of a church near the house.

On one of the beaches near the house.

Kat & her grandma looking at rocks.

Stone henge magic stones!! Actually these were pretty impressive, and there wasnt anyone else around apart from sheep which was nice. Didn't look like it should have stayed up at all.

Kat looking unimpressed.

Waves.

Another much less impressive stone thingy in Newport. It was tiny, and was crammed between people's gardens. It needed gnomes - that would've been excellent.

Woodland walk.

This calf came over and moo-d at me a bit before it's mum came and scared me away.

This hill almost killed Martin.

Chicken.

Crazy looking cow on way back from walk in the woods.

The house we stayed at.

Sunset from just outside the house.

Bats flying around the house.

Where the boat set out from to go see dolphins etc.

Birds on "whale and dolphin" trip.

And here's a video of dolphins. Youtube + The sea = horrible mess, oh well.

Lots more photos in my Wales 07 online album.