Well, here come the obligatory end of year post where I review all that has occurred…..

January
- Yay. 2008. Not much happened this month.

February
-got my aquarium set-up. Fish!
-got my geek glasses.
-low: witnessing a guy have a heart attack on the train.

March
-rush off my feet with work.
-new Bryan Adams album.
-low: having a total meltdown over work.

April
-low: having a total meltdown over work.

May
-my beloved iPod breaking.
-exams and stress.
-walks on the beach.
-finishing 3rd year of uni.
-local music festival.
-ears swelling shut.

June
-officially learn I have my degree. Yay.
-new Indiana Jones film.

July
-scary storm.
-return to work.
-ears swell shut (again).

August
-Inverness.
-Edinburgh.
-all the places inbetween.
-new X-Files film.
-completing FF1.

September
-quitting work.
-doing the Student Ambassador thang again.
-getting turned away from a church (funny story).
-finding the street which “leads to God”. Seriously. Ward Road, Dundee.
-my sister breaking her toe.
-the world not ending.
-returning for 4th year of uni.

October
-the month that contains my “highest highs and my lowest lows”.
-seeing Bryan Adams on 2 consecutive nights.
-being 2nd row at the Dundee gig.
-highest high: meeting Bryan Adams, Keith Scott and Gary Breit afterwards.
-Bryan now owns my sharpie marker.
-meeting quite a few friends and having a blast.
-having a fab time at the Glasgow gig. Rock on!
-lowest low: family member being diagnosed with a serious illness. Was touch and go for a while.

November
-turning 21. Not sure if this is a good/bad thing.
-ill relative getting home.
-ton of coursework.

December
-exam stress.
-exam stress.
-exam stress.
-exam stress.
-meltdown.
-exam stress.
-coursework.
-getting my ears pierced again.

Yeah so that’s been my year. As you’ve probably guessed, the best moment for me was meeting 3 of my heroes. A moment which I will never forget. What can I say other than roll on 2009. Hope it’s full of fun, rock and good times.

Have a groovy New Year folks! See ya then!

Mood : blah   Music : Light In Your Eyes  by  Sheryl Crow

I got a pair of Dog Speakers as a Christmas present from my sister yesterday. Groovy, huh? They sound fantastic (plenty of bass) and are quite loud (being a music lover, this pleases me). I’ve had music blaring all day, but that probably doesn’t surprise you.

Tonight I was sitting watching Series 3, episode 6 of the IT Crowd this evening when my sister bursts in and starts pointing at the TV (much like Douglas does with the dead fly in the last episode of Series 2). Yes, it would appear that Jen has the same speakers sitting on her desk.

Now, I’m off to do some coding…

Mood : nerdy   Music : Crash & Burn  by  Savage Garden

First and foremost, I’d like to wish everybody a big Merry Christmas. Hope you’ve all had a fantastic day, wherever you are.

I got a lot of lovely gifts including a Nikon D80 SLR!!! I’ve only just charged the battery and have been experimenting with the shutter speed and a torch, to make pretty swirls (might upload some to my Flickr account very soon). The other present which has occupied a lot of my time is Guitar Hero: World Tour. I mean, I’ve played for hours, to the point where I thought I was going to be late for Christmas dinner. In fact, I did end up arriving late but that’s a whole different story…..

I was walking up to my grandparents house with my dog, on my way to have Christmas dinner when this black cocker spaniel came running across to me. I kept walking in the hope that it would turn around and go back to wherever it came from. I met one of my relatives at the top of the road and realised the spaniel was still with me but was standing in the middle of the road. In the time I was talking to my relative, the poor wee dog almost got hit by 2 cars. We figured out that it belonged to the people who lived opposite me. I couldn’t leave it by itself because I would have felt responsible if it was killed/injured so I got it to follow me home and was in the process of trying to entice it in my front gate when the owners *finally* noticed it was missing and took it in.

Following that, I set off up the road and arrived as everyone was in the middle of the first course….woops. To make matters worse, I discovered that my sister had been trying to call me and everyone was getting frustrated that I wasn’t answering- I’d left my mobile in the house because I thought I was just going for a 5 minute walk. Wrong.

I realised my story sounded a bit silly when I was in the middle of telling it to my mum (and apologising for the lateness!). C’mon I couldn’t leave a puppy out on the street at Christmas!

Mood : awake   Music : Shut Your Eyes  by  Snow Patrol

I’ve just reached 40,000 songs played on lastfm! The 40,000th song? “To The Moon And Back” by Savage Garden.

Seeing as I’m on “holiday”, I’ll be listening to a lot more music so the next milestone may not be far away!

Mood : tired

Finally, I’m on “holiday”.  The past week has been utter hell so apologies if I have appeared overly stressed/snappy/moody.

I had my first exam on Monday and it didn’t go well.  I could do the second part of all the questions but the first parts were difficult.  We seemed to have spent a great deal of time on Neural Nets in that particular module however, there was no mention of those or A.I. in the exam, which I found odd.

I promised myself that if an exam went badly that I’d try and keep my head.  I was ok ’til I got home where I pretty much lost it and seriously considered quitting uni.  Spending hours in tears is not a productive use of time and it doesn’t feel good either.  I have no idea why I reacted as badly as I did?  I’ve never had a reaction after an exam like this before.

Tuesday’s exam seemed to go better.  I felt really weepy in the morning but after getting into the exam room, I was ok.  Not sure how well I did in that one but it went better than the one on Monday which gave me a well-needed confidence boost.

The exams on Wednesday and Thursday were ok but again, not great.  By this point I was beginning to feel knackered (well exams take a lot out of you, don’t they?) and had the beginnings of a migraine (I was aware that my right eye kept twitching).  There wasn’t a lot of time to relax after the exam on Thursday- I had to put the finishing touches to a report that was due for the next day.

I handed in the report yesterday lunchtime and now, I have officially finished the semester.

Time for a break me thinks?

Mood : exhausted   Music : Kashmir  by  Led Zeppelin

I promised earlier that I’d explain the lack of updates on my blog.

Reason number one- I was switching hosting companies (but you knew that, yeah).  Reason number two- uni work.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing 9-5 days at uni but sometimes I don’t feel like I’m actually getting anywhere.  I have a week left of this semester and in that time I have a 3000 essay to hand in (nearly done) and 4 exams in one week.  Yes, you read that right, 4 exams in one week.

My uni has decided to give us all our taught modules before Christmas.  We’ve had 10 teaching weeks and 2 revision weeks.  We have 2 pieces of coursework to hand in this semester and 2 first day back in January.  Then there’s the exams.  I have all 4 of my final year exams next week, all on consecutive days.  It’s friggin’ insane- as you can probably tell, I’m freaking out.

Now there’s supposed to be an upside to all of this.  Next semester, we’re supposed to concentrate on our honours project only.  For the past 12 weeks, we’ve been told we weren’t getting any info on it until we came back in January, as not to distract us from the exams next week.  Well guess what arrived in my inbox this afternoon?  A whole bunch of info about the projects and how we basically have 5 days to choose them when we come back and then have to write a 20 page document due a few weeks after that, detailing our proposal.  Basically, we have to look into this over the supposed Christmas holidays.  To top it off, I looked at the project list and nothing jumped out at me.  In my opinion, that email shouldn’t have been sent out today- that was wrong.  It should have been sent next friday, when the exams were over.

I was thinking about what coursework I have to do over Christmas anyway (write a compiler and a mobile internet site) plus the family stuff I need to do (need to make Christmas as special as I can for some people this year- they’ve had a tough time) and basically, I’ve worked out that I won’t be having a holiday at all.  Won’t be having one at Easter either- write up time.  Perhaps it’s because I’m stressed about the exams or maybe it’s because I’m completely knackered but when I got off the train this evening and sat down in the car, I started crying.  I appreciate that no one said it would be easy and if something is too easy, it’s probably not worth doing but, it feels like it’s all a little too much.I just want to sleep.  I feel like a zombie right now.

There’s a very appropriate song playing on itunes right now- Countin’ On A Miracle by Bruce Springsteen.  I think that says it all.

Mood : pissed off   Music : Countin' On A Miracle  by  Bruce Springsteen

Just in case you were wondering what the hell was going on with my site over the past week, I will explain…..

Basically, my hosting contract ran out with eUK Host and I switched to Design Market Host because I got a much better deal.

The blog was broken because I hadn’t had the time to upload it onto the server.  I’ve now done that (duh) and upgraded to wordpress 2.7 (shiny).  I’m currently trying to get my old theme back withthe various plugins.  After that, all should be groovy.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why I haven’t blogged much lately, I have more to say on that later.

Perhaps it’s about time that I update my blog, considering I’ve not done so in the past couple of week (not like me, is it?).

To be honest, I’ve not really been upto much the past couple of weeks, aside from knuckling down at uni and trying to get all my work done.  I’ve come to realise that I’m not a happy bunny at the moment however, it’s not just the uni work dragging me down- I’m still finding it difficult dealing with an illness that a family member is facing.

Right now, I’m pretty much panicking about everything and I don’t really know what to do.  I have coursework due soon and although I’m a bit stressed about that, I know that’s going to be done on time- it’s almost complete.  The downside is that I have 4 exams in 2 weeks and I feel like I haven’t had enough time to revise.  It’s my final year and there’s a lot riding on them- I don’t want a fail or a third.  Then there’s the issue of the coursework that’s due after Christmas.  Personally, I don’t like Christmas and if it was up to me, I wouldn’t celebrate it at all (I don’t subscribe to a particular religion) but I know it means a lot to my family.  Given the rough time my family is going through at the moment, Christmas needs to be as special as possible this year.  I’m concerned that the coursework will limit the time I can spend with them

Yeah, I know, I’m in 4th year and yeah, I’m aware it’s supposed to be harder.  C’mon if something is easy then it’s not worth doing.  The workload at the moment is just insane

There are black patches under my eyes at the moment- watch them grow as the days wear on…..

Mood : stressed   Music : How Do Ya Feel Tonight?  by  Bryan Adams

Around a week and a half ago, I logged into Hotmail, to find that my account had been switched over to Windows Live Mail.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client and I soon discovered that I could no longer access my hotmail email address using it. So, for the past few days, I’ve begrudgingly logged into the hotmail site to access my mail. After a little bit of searching, I found a solution….

1. Make sure you have Thunderbird version 2.0.0.17.

2. Download the webmail plug-in version 1.3.2 and install it.

3. Download the hotmail plug-in from this website. Choose the hotmail-1-2-19b49.zip file and install it.

If you’re having a problem, this should solve it for you. That said, I was reading a thread on a forum and it didn’t seem to fix it for everyone. For those that are interested, the forum thread can be found here.

Mood : blah   Music : Just Older  by  Bon Jovi

Yes, I caved. I bought another iPod.

Why? Well, I think iPod Mini’s look cool, my old nano just isn’t big enough and this was only £30 off of eBay, including postage. Plus, look at the condition it’s in- it’s immaculate!

I still want to try and fix my kind of broken 20GB 4th Gen iPod though because it’s the first one I ever owned.

Mood : blah   Music : Taxman  by  Stevie Ray Vaughan