I have managed uber fail on both New Year’s resolutions I made (and wrote about on my only other blog post for this year). I said I would update my blog more often but haven’t written any since my 1st post of the year. After having a Phd application rejected after an interview in February and then doing nothing but looking for jobs + internships, I felt I had not much to write about apart from a huge whinge-fest.
On the ‘finishing games I have bought’ promise, I have done slightly better (which I could have written about earlier but I failed). I have finished Dragon Age:Origins, but still haven’t finished Batman or Torchlight. At least the latest Steam Sale didn’t result in the mass purchasing of the christmas sale (as I’d already bought all the games I wanted then). Dragon:Age I found to be addictive in the sense that I’ve finished it with a dwarf commoner character and yet I still have gone back and started over with a second character to see what the effect of different choices makes on the story line. I also found Claudia Black another reason to play through again as her character (Morrigan) makes me laugh at her comebacks and taunts.
Though I’ve now got less time to get on with working through my games list as I’m doing an internship in Cambridge. Last week was my first week and so far it seems to be good. I spend it doing a lot of reading and cataloging chemicals. Today I turned into a tourist and spend a few hours wandering around Cambridge photoing various buildings. Time to for a geeky activity to restore the balance……
Two weeks in the New Year and I’ve finally made the effort to make a blog post.
New Year’s resolutions for me this year are:
- Try to update my blog more often
- Work through the pile of games I have not completed yet
I have managed to accumulate rather a long list of games which I have to complete Thanks Steam for having both a pre-holiday sale and then a christmas sale, as a result I bought 25 games in a 5 week period. Of these, I have only played a Batman and Torchlight, along with a side-order of Burnout Paradise for good measure.
Torchlight has proved to be the most addictive of these, though I’ve enjoyed playing all three.
Batman has great voice acting (imo) – the guy who voices the Joker is really good and I love the setting of Arkham.
I wasn’t quite sure what I expected from Torchlight, but I’m definitely addicted to dungeon wandering and killing demons. Having never played any of the Diablo series, Torchlight has made me want to try it (after all the comparisons of Torchlight to the Diablo series).
Burnout = general mayhem in cars. I haven’t tried the bikes in the game yet, I’m having way too much fun cruising round Paradise City in cars at the moment. Definitely fun when I’m frustrated and feel like driving around and crashing a few cars
I finally got the results for my M.Res just over a week ago. I managed to pass, so I clearly didn’t play too much Plants vs Zombies. Graduation ceremony is next week and involves trying to work out whether to buy a DVD of the ceremony and which photograph pack is required.
I decided I want to carry on the work I was doing during my first M.Res project and so I’ve applied for a Phd at Birmingham, but despite my references being written at the beginning of November, they still hadn’t reached the admissions office by the end of the month.
While I’m waiting to hear about my Phd application and looking for jobs. I have the time to play the games I bought on Steam during the pre-holiday sale. Let’s say in involved rather a high sum of money and 8 games
Well, I’m all finished with the lab work for my second project in my Masters. Now I just need to write up the project report for it. But I’ve taken up the usual student activity of procrastination and doing things other than writing my report are far more fun, like playing Plants vs Zombies, writing the first blog post in about 3 months or helping out with The Secret of Monkey Island – Special Edition. I loved Monkey Island as a kid, I think it’s at least 10 years since I first played The Secret of Monkey Island, but somehow I can still remember the sword fighting insults (“I’ve fought apes more polite than you” “I’m glad to hear you attended your family reunion”). Clearly I played that game far too much 
Some cool news from the first project of my Masters is that I have my name on a journal article 
. I was asked to help collect some of the data for the article and was lucky enough to be included as an author. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja810046q = a linky for anyone interested in the article.
As I’m doing an M.Res, this means my year is split into 2 18 week lab based projects, with a couple of taught modules thrown in.
Some how my first 18 week project is almost over (my last day is tomorrow). Seeing as I’ve not had any lab stuff to do for the last week, I’ve have an extra week for writing up my project report. Which means I get to stay at home and use my desktop rather than wrestle with the olde computer (which is why nobody uses it) in the research office.
The other advantage of being at home means I can use Spotify to catch up on bands I’ve been meaning to listen to for ages.
A Google Street Car?
On my way home from Brum today I happened to see this car parked in the centre of Coventry (near the Litten Tree, if you want to know exactly where).
To me it looks very much like one of the Google Street View Cars -> right make and colour of car, big ass camera. The only thing missing is the Google logo on the front door.
If it is a Google Street Car, it will be the 2nd time I’ve seen one. The 1st time was about this time last year while i was driving through Coventry.
I’m sure I’m developing a talent to break computers just by looking at them wrong. Two computers breaking on me in a day is pretty good going, surely?
Tuesday of this week was sooo not a good day for me as far as computers go. First one computer breaks on me at uni and then my desktop at home decides it wanted to go play dead as well.
The uni computer that decided to go meet its maker is one used to run a piece of equipment called a Differential Scanning Calorimeter in one of the bioscience labs at Brum Uni. It decided to post a nice little error message of “There is not enough memory to load the registry or the registry is corrupt” on every restart. This machine is still running Windows 95 (what it is about me needing to use computers that have to run Windows 95 is another rant), so there some lulz there. So far o-one can decide if it’s just the registry that is corrupt or if there is actually a problem with the hardware.
The outcome of that little (:P) problem is unresolved at the moment, the reasoning is that “they’re worried about it being a serious problem with the computer being so old”.
So as I couldn’t get any work done at uni, I decided that going home to do some work on my desktop would be more productive than staying at uni. Heh, so much for that one. My desktop decided that it would keep crashing as soon as it had loaded into windows. At least with my desktop, I am allowed to fiddle with it (unlike uni computers which need IT technicians to play with them). Seems that my problem there was a loose CPU fan, which I’m happy to say is now fixed (fingers crossed).
So yeah, I’m glad this week is over. 
Seeing as I’m nearly half-way through my Masters, I guess it’s time I figure out what I want to after I’ve finished. At the moment I’m trying to decide between staying at Birmingham to do a PhD (as my current project supervisor has offered a PhD to me) or going to Warwick to do a PGCE.
So to help me choose I’ve been writing a pro and con list for both courses in the hope that it will help me choose
PhD pros
- funding that will pay my fees and give a stipend for the length of the PhD
- being able to continue on the project I’m currently working on
- getting to stay with my current project supervior
- being a student for another 3 years
PhD cons
- having to commute to Birmingham for another 3 years which won’t be fun if the West Coast main line breaks every January
- the potential that I may hate the project I’m working on by the time I reach my 3rd year
PGCE pros
- I’d get funding (about £6000) as I’d be a science teacher
- the course is only a year
- Warwick is closer to where I live
- the chance to get kids interested in scince
PGCE cons
- I’ve never had any experience of working in a school
- dealing with kids that aren’t interested in learning
- standing up in front of a classroom and teaching
Ugh, equal number of pros but PhD has fewer cons.
Is a coin flip an acceptable method of choosing?
Well at least mine is. :p
So far in a year it’s managed to kill 2 cd drives, 1gb of RAM and now potentially taken my hdd down too. Strangely enough this all usually seems to happen after LANs ¬_¬.
At least there is some good to having to buy new RAM, it means I’m finally trying Windows 7 64bit. (First time for me on a 64 bit OS)
