Resurrection

Yep, I'm starting up my blog again with news from me at uni.

Warwick is pretty cool so far, work is pretty good and at a level where you can do pretty much as much or as little as you like, though naturally you need to do more for decent grades.

I've joined waaaay to many societies and sports clubs:

Juggling
Sci Fi
Climbing
Computing
Mountaineering
Video Game Design
Assassin's Guild
Snow Sports
Student Cinema
(in no particular order)

Juggling is really fun, despite my crappiness at juggling, I tend to do diabolo or poi there instead.
There was a society trip to Leeds yesterday to a juggling convention which was awesome, especially the shows at the end. Thoguh I did somehow manage to spend a ridiculous ammount of money on a new diabolo and poi, though they're pretty nice and should do me for a while.

Also heres a picture of me doing poi at 3 in the morning on top of a 12 foot sculpture wearing a toga.... don't ask.

(right click and view image to see full size)

Sci Fi club, however geeky it may be is pretty fun too, as the name suggests it is mainly to do with sci fi, but it isn't actually movies rather than board games and pen and paper role playing games.

Climbing is great fun especially since theres an awesome wall in our sports centre, which at £40 for the year is pretty good.

Computing, or compsoc as its known is another geeky one, also fun, though I haven't been along to many of their events, the exception being their 49 hour LAN party (note I didn't stay in there the entire 49 hours like some did).

Mountaineering is good in that it gets me out walking some more (since my last post I've done barely any walking and I was disgraced the other day to find that me feet were aching after a 15 mile walk), there was a trip to Snowdonia two weeks ago which was great fun, we did some nice walks and scrambles as well as a lot of table traversing (climbing over and under tables without touching the floor) in the evenings. There is another trip, this time to Ambleside (in the lake district), next weekend which I am looking foreward to imensely.

Video Game Design is just what it sounds like, and also gives me an excuse to pla my DS with otuer people from time to time.

Assassin's Guild is rather odd and apparently originated in Cambridge. Basically you sign up to a game over a few weeks, you get given a target who is someone else who has signed up, and you have to kill them in a novel way i.e. dropping a (polystyrene) fridge on their head, shooting them with a water pistol or setting up elaborate water traps. Unfortunatley I ahven;t managed to sign up for any games of this yet, but it should be fun.

Snow Sports is mostly a reason to go skiing, though they do a lot of socials too, I didn't make it into the Christmas trip to France, but I'm probalby going somewhere with Warwick Mountains instead anyhow.

Student Cinema is what it sounds like, they take over a huge lecture theatre and then project a film every night. So far I've been too busy with work and other societies to go and see anything but I'm hoping to go and see Brick (an awesome film) late tonight after our lamb roast.

Well, thats what I've been up to since I got to Uni, more details will probably follow.

Stay Alive
Zed0

...But I would walk five hundred miles...

...ok well maybe only one hundred...

Well I am glad to say that I managed it in a time of 33 hours and 59 minutes. I got to the last checkpoint at 7:20 (33 hours and 20 mins) with 3.2 miles to go over a hill and was wondering whether I would managed to finish in under 34 hours, I got in to the school at the end just as the church bell was chiming. =)

I was going to go for a Marvin like approach to this post (i.e. "The first twenty miles were the worst. The second twenty, they were the worst too. After that I went into a bit of a decline...") but I changed my mind at about 80 miles round the route when I got into a checkpoint where they happened to be playing "I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)" as I left and it stayed in my head for a while and I decided it would make a good title.
You can listen to the whole song on the Proclaimer's site here (Track 4 under "The Best Of...") although unfortunatley you have to have Real Player (or Windows Media Player Classic).

Anyway, onto the actual walk. I promise I will get photos up when they are developed (I wasn't the one taking the photos) and I will then scan my certificate too.
The start was fairly easy and pretty fast, I did 8.12 miles in an hour and 50 minutes, ariving at the first checkpoint 10 minutes before they were allowed to let people through. From then on it got a bit slower although until the fourth check point at thirty miles it was reasonably fast going. After that the route went over Windy Gile among other bumps along the Cheviot ridge which slowed things down a little bit, however props to the mountain rescue who were on checkpoint duty there between 6 in the evening and 6 in the morning (on a bloody windy and cold ridge). I got down off the hills and into the next checkpoint just as it got dark and I spent a good twenty minutes there equiping myself with a torch and easting cheese pastys. Then we went up over a marilyn which my dad was very annoyed he had not yet been over and the Marshals walk skirted around (however he took some time to go up it as he was sweeping the route). It got light eventually and I got to my preakfast point which was great. Just after breakfast I slowed to a crawl but eventually sped up about five miles later just in time to avoid getting lost where the route description was rather vauge.
The 10th last to the 3rd last miles weren't great as they were pretty much entirely on roads. =(
I did survive though and manage to do over 4 miles an hour at the end to get into the finish in a pretty good time.

My mum also drove around the route and walked along with me or some stretchs which was nice and gave me someone to talk to (though I talked to random other walkers that I happened to be walking by).
I was the only 18 year old to take part (the average entrant is about 50) although there were a couple of other guys below twenty (one of him had his 19th birthday two days beforehand).

Anyhow I'm glad its over and I've no idea how I got talked into doing something so stupid.

Its a long way to Tipperary

Yeah, well the title doesn't have a lot to do with the post but anyhow. This time tomorrow I should be starting on the stroll I'm going on. I'm hoping it won't take too long, I'm looking at around 36 hours (30 hours walking, 6 hours stopping at checkpoints etc). The weather isn't looking great, I suspect I'll be pretty wet by the end, not that I'll really notice it at that point.
My dad completed this walk in 28 hours a few weeks ago under tougher conditions but he has done 22 of them before...

I have now seen up to the end of season 2 of LOST, which as I predicted leaves a lot of questions, although you can answer a few of them by looking at the Hanso Foundation site. There are a few interesting sites and e-mail addresses connected to it (doing WHOIS etc) but so far they haven't yielde anything of interest.

In other news: finishing work on Wednesday, not seen X3 yet.

It Takes a Lot of Balls...

To make something like this:


From the first Animusic DVD. Pipe Dream has been voted one of the 50 greatest animation projects ever (by 3D World). A group of percussion instruments perform music by way of metal balls that fly out from pipes.
More details here.

In other news programing the DS is strange, lots of odd settings.

iDeaS

Having recieved my GBA Movie Player and got someone in Edinburgh to flash my DS I'm finally ready to start developing code for the Nintendo DS. I spent last night getting a development enviroment set up and doing a couple of demo programs, I'm happy now that I can take something a bit bigger so I'm hoping to do something a bit more complex than "Hello World" next, I'll probably mess about with some sprite based games before heading towards 3D stuff.
So, any ideas for games?
BTW iDeaS is an emulator for the DS.
Also I've got a Game Boy emulator on my DS no so I can play old school games such as one of my favourite games of all time:


In other news:
E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) looks interesting so far, Revolution (I refuse to use its new name) games look pretty neat, if, like the XBox 360, it has a VGA converter cable I may even have to get one for myself.
NWN2 trailer i out, just a pre-rendered cinematic though, looks rather different to the in-game graphics I've seen.