It would appear I have been conscripted for baby-sitting duty for my brother while he needs help while recovering from his op on his lung. But his house is a frikkin’ ice palace… I’m currently sat in his front room at 8am (already been here an hour) and freezing my nads off and hes upstairs still asleep in a toasty bed… sonova…

On another note, we’ve had 3 letters from Swalec saying that we haven’t been paying our bills, but we have been*, it’s just that Homelet have been in a dispute with Swalec recently and not paid them and we’re getting the repercussions. You see we pay Pinnacle, who pay Homelet, who pay Swalec. Anyways, most of this has been sorted out (I think). But the rest of the house want to split off from them and pay the bills directly… which I think is a bad idea, I don’t think they realise how much it will actually cost for our house to do this, especially with the 14-odd computers pretty much on all the time. I mean, this ice palace here hardly ever has it’s heating on and it’s currently paying more for its gas, electricity and water bills than us and we have 2 more house mates than them, plus a dish washer . So yea, I am kind of skeptical of moving away :S

Well this blog post has warmed my fingers up slightly… I think I will see if I can watch some House MD or something (I think I have it on my laptop)…

You stay classy Cardiff!

(*Some of us have not been paying pinnacle as of late, but since our landlord moved away from Pinnacle and only use them for our bills at the moment, they have no record of us. So with this and Homelet charging Pinnacle a lump sum for all bills from all Pinnacle houses with them together, they have no records of us and are paying it blindly on our behalf )

Yea, so I’ve developed this twitch in one of my eyes.

It’s probably related to all the programming I’ve been doing lately… late (say until 5am or so *looks at time*). I needed to play catch up on my final year project after not doing any during the first semester due to masses of coursework, and I’m making good progress. Unfortunately the project that I’ve chosen to do, is turning out to be rather large… at my current development speed, I should be able to complete it with ample time. However, I have to take into account: revision, exams and other coursework pieces I will be given out this coming semester… THEN I have to write up the project report, GAH!

So, looks like I’m going to have to cut down on the gaming and just go insane from the shear amount of coding ahead

Anyways, off the depressing stuff and onto the cool stuff! Ben and Toby have got round to sorting out the comscare.org domain now with a nice sexy splash page. Well done guys, looks awesome, but I still reckon it should be centred vertically (don’t care what you say Ben ).

Just finished coding on project for the night, might read a bit before I go to sleep :-/

Laters, Jargon

Wheeeee, tis 2006!

Christmas actually turned out quite well considering my bro being incapacitated. Actually he isn’t too bad, unlucky as he is… he seemed pretty good on christmas day and he liked presents, especially the cool thing was playing with it all day.

Anyways, as we are past all the festivities now, I am now getting myself back into a working attitude and have been working on my evolution simulation project, dubbed “Evolution Simulation” yay me for original names. I was thinking about calling it Darwinia but I like having money so I decided agains’t it. Anyway, I made a lot of progress on it today and now my little lifeforms move around their environment, some even managed to escape into Textpad. I shit you not! You can ask Grif, he can back me up… was weird.

Also been playing Warcraft 3 an unhealthy amount recently. Grif and I make a lethal Tower Defense map team. A TD map is basically a map with a number of strips (depending on players and teams) that are enclosed by a raised wall, going from one edge of the map to the other. There are a finite number of round, which monsters spawn at the ends and travel along the strip to the other, and you (and your partner, if it is a team TD map) have to build arrow towers and the like inside the strip to kill the monsters before they get to the other end (without blocking the entire strip wall to wall, otherwise they get stuck and start bashing the crap out of your towers). Anyway, as rounds go on, monsters have more life and you have to build better towers. But you only have a certain amount of gold to spend on them, you get more gold from bounty from killing the monsters (which slowly increases as monsters get harder). To win, you just have to kill all the monsters on every round.

Ok, so now you know what TD maps are. Me and Grif have been playing Morts Power TD map repeatedly, we are so good at it we never let a monster get past. However we have never got to the end of the map because you need at least 1 other team still surviving otherwise the map ends in victory for the last remaining team. Which is not cool when you want to get to level 99 (the last one). We have hosted this map on the battle.net so many times, and always the other teams are crap and die before the 20th level. So annoying. So we started hosting maps with “Pros Only” at the end of the game name, which is quite common place on battle.net. But nooooOOOOOo, every fucking noob in europe tries to join instead. So we upgraded our game name suffix to no retards… but alas they still come.

Was hilarious in one of our most recent games. Grif saw the green player building really weak towers at the beginning of the game, tons of them… absolutely pointless… so he started bitching at him saying something like “Look green, you’re useless. You might as well quit now you waste of space” (he might of been getting a bit impatient with all the noobs), and the next thing I know, green quits… awww bless, probably went to cry himself to sleep.

Whoa, been talking a lot about Warcraft 3 oh well

Anyways, to finish, the most recent game we played we actually got right to the end, level 99, with 1 other player (his teammate quit but he still fought on). Only to find that the level 99 monsters were pretty much immortal… didn’t do a scratch to them…. DAMNIT!!! It’s not fair, it shouldn’t end like that!!!

Well I should make at least 1 chrimbo blog before its too late

Just got back from christmas shopping with Grif, I was looking for something for my brother, didn’t get anything though, but I have scouted out 2 possible good presents for him. Diablo 2 + Expansion (If I can bloody find the original, looked in every game store, they only have the expansion… fucking idiotic if you ask me) or the “Cool Thing” I spotted in random gadget like shop… I’m hoping the game shops might restock tomorrow or at least bring some copies of D2 out of storage, if not I’ll have to request it and if they don’t have it looks like “Cool Thing” it is. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Anyways, going home tomorrow (thursday) for xmas but hopefully I will be back before new year. So if I don’t see any of you before I leave… Have a merry chrimbo, and if I can’t get back into Cardiff, an awesome new year

Jargon

Ok, Obviously it isn’t gonna be 2005 for much longer, but I’m still desperate for a decent LAN party.

WOPR has had quite a bit of work done on her, lots of dedicated server apps ready to run and I’m still developing a simple web based launcher for them. I propose somewhere in the last week of January, for Winter-een-mas!

Directly after exams before we settle down into the new semester is when we should make our move, and this time it’s going to be a proper LAN party lasting overnight at least (no leaving early ). Who’s up for a slaughterfest for the suggested date range?

Let me know and this time it will happen
Jargon

Oooooohhh, I’m so funny

So I’m back from fun factory, last one before christmas, was lots of fun. They played queen at end of night, the leg-ends! Plus this irish christmas song that everyone appeared to know but me, heh. Oh well.

Charlie went over Steph’s, and me and Grif took a trip to spar for food (would of gone for chips and cheese but both needed toilet desperately bad). Anyways, all in all an excellent night saw lots of people there we knew (Charlie & Grif’s hockey friends, Toby’s Mike as I like to call him since we already have a Mike in our household, etc). Was very crowded, lots of pushing and shoving going on… which I contributed a lot too

Damn I love my new site and I have big plans for it yet, heh.

Jargon

Woooo!

After a few days intensive coding, new site is in a state in which it can fully replace the old site (due to the fact I didn’t really do much work on the old site). I am loving this site more and more as I work on it, next step would be to get the gallery up then maybe a files area, then start working on a portfolio or something.

Anyways, I’d appreciate any feedback anyone has to offer… if you find any problems please don’t hesitate to post to inform me.

Now I must rest and play some DoD Source.
Ciao, Jargon

Argh, I swear I’m going to go nuts any second now!

For the past 5 or 6 hours (I’ve lost track of time) I have been tweaking the .htaccess files on my new site… and damn is it getting on my nerves… I have made 0 progress, I hate apache. The concept is simple, I want it so that if a visitor comes to the site’s root directory, it will be redirected to /blog/ and yes I know I could simply do this in php with a header(“Location: …”) command, but I know .htaccess files are designed to do this kind of thing and I want to use new stuffs for my new site and make it as efficient and well made as possible. However the only thing I’ve managed to achieve so far are about 1000 “redirect limit reached” alerts *sighs*

I’ve tried every possible combination (or so it feels), it basically works on a regex principle. If the address matches a regex pattern you specify then do something useful. But alas, I can’t get it right… I’ve got the .htaccess file working and doing some other cool things for my new site, simple things mind you, but at least I didn’t use WordPress to automatically generate it for me

Well I suppose I better keep trying, think I’m gonna look for more tutorials/examples on t3h interw3bz0rs…

Ok, so I have just managed to crawl from beneath the overwhelming tower of coursework that I have been set lately. All coursework, all deadlines met, yay me and I was thinking about the way I completed these courseworks. I think every piece of coursework this semester has been a night before, and in all but 1 of the courseworks (think there were 5 or 6 in total), I had to pull an all-nighter to finish. The thing is it isn’t because I ran out of time, I genuinely work better at night and if you can do it in 1 night then why not the one you HAVE to do it. In secondary school you were always under the advice that you shouldn’t leave it to the last minute. But it works fine for me

Anyway, I’m so used to skipping sleep for a night that I’m beginning to wonder why we let our sleep patterns be controlled by a spinning planet. I sleep when I’m tired and when it is conveniant. I guess it all boils down to conveniance, its easier to see in day light and thus easier to go about everyday things. At the moment its 4:42am and its not because I am playing an addictive computer game or finishing off some coursework, its cause I want to go ice skating at 7am at Winter Wonderland. I would never be able to get up at 7am (you probably saying cause I go to sleep at stupid hours, which is a fair accusation) unless it is urgent. Even staying up this late and getting used to a late sleep/wake cycle doesn’t prevent me from getting to my 9am lectures. I move my sleep time all over the place I guess my body is beginning to get used to the lack of routine hehe. So, ice skating at the crack of dawn outside is gonna be cool. Charlie is still awake as well… but he DOES have coursework hehe, I thought I would stay up and sleep later after I got back.

Well thats enough about lack of sleep. I am also working on a new design for my site (AGAIN, yes i know ), this time it is Quake orientated (I just hope i don’t get sued for copyright infringement). If you want to take a gander while it is still in development its currently running at http://new.jargonia.co.uk (replies dont work there yet) but I would be grateful for the feedback on this side of the site.

Jargon

Been back in Cardiff for about a week now, yay. Bought a proper copy of NWN so I could play online (I have now completed both expansions, my god it took a long time) and now playing on a cool persistant world with Charlie and Grif. Although, I do have to complete the NWN original storyline that I am playing co-op with Grif.

Also, we’ve agreed (me and Charlie) that the LAN should take place in the middle of the month, so we’re aiming for the 15th, as that is when people will start be coming back to Cardiff and hopefully there will be more people around. So tell me if you can make it (obviously we could shift it a few days in either direction but let me know asap).

Lastly, Charlie has been writing a campaign for Stars Wars RPG game, Wooo! Can’t wait to play