Well it seems that in my infinite forgetfulness I failed to write an entry yesterday. I almost forgot to write one today. I blame the fact that ad-hoc wifi has died again, leaving the laptop a little redundant.
Wednesday
Wednesday was shopping day. Around 2pm we (Gary, Nat, Jen, ... dude who's name I think is Dave... and myself) headed down to the train station and caught the train to Pontypridd. The train was totally packed but we were only on it for a minute or two so it didn't matter much. Once we got off the train we had to cross the bridge thing above the tracks, the steps of which were occupied by 3 chavs who insisted on sitting across the steps so that only one person could get by at one time. I was tempted to kick one of them as I probably would have had the support of a good 20+ people who'd just got off the train with us but we had more pressing matters at hand. We walked through Pontypridd for a while, and the town reminded me of Lewes for some reason. I think it was the way that it was made up entirely of side streets. It looked as if it hadn't had a structual upgrade since the middle ages - just like Lewes. We found somewhere to get some lunch, ate stuff, including drinking a bottle of Sprite with a lovely foreign (possibly Arabic) label, then went to Somerfield. I confirmed my theory that Somerfield sucks as a supermarket and it turns out that the one in Pontypridd is even smaller than the one in Uckfield, so my attempt at getting a reasonable quantity of food was thwarted by having to purchase that aforementioned food at a crappy store. After a bit of searching we found the bus station and waited for the bus that goes right up to Glamorgan Court. We had no intention of carrying loads of shopping up the Hill of Doom. That bus cost £1.45 and lasted no more than 10 minutes - Google Maps says that it's 1.9 miles between Pontypridd and Treforest - so it cost the five of us over £7 just to get back from Pontypridd. It doesn't take a genius here to realise that £7 is around about the maximum price that Tesco charge for home shopping delivery, so we are going to try and do our shopping online and have Tesco deliver to us in future. It'll be a hell of a lot cheaper, easier and we'll have a much nicer choice than crappy Somerfield.
Thursday
I was dreading today and rightly so. My longest day - 9 til 5 - consisting of five lectures and a tutorial. Those of you who know a reasonable amount about what I'm doing will realise that I have all but one of my lectures on Thursday. So presumably if I'm ill on a Thursday I'm totally screwed or something. That said today's lectures were pretty easy. It's just a case of sitting there while you get talked at for a while. Having done A-level Computing really helps, though. The Computer Systems & Internet Technology lecture was all stuff that I'd done at A-level, though in a way that made a bit more sense, which helped a bit. The maths lecture was just odd.. We were basically doing algorithms for division. Supposedly it's supposed to get us thinking in terms of how a computer does division - in a while loop doing a number of subtractions. From what I overheard others saying, though, it just confused everyone greatly. I was alright with everything because I could pretty much see what was going on, but at least one person wrote notes akin to "blah, blah, blah, blah, blah".
The Computer Programming lecture achieved very little, really. The guy just talked about general concepts of what a computer program is for the whole hour. Information Resource Engineering is apparently at least 11 weeks of what we did with databases in A-level, so that should prove fun... >.> And the last lecture was for Introduction to Multimedia & the Web. This could prove to be one of my favoured modules as its contents include HTML, XHTML, CSS, Flash, ActionScript (part of flash), etc. Also to paraphrase the lecturer slightly: "We don't condone piracy, but it is possible to obtain illegal copies of Dreamweaver and Flash or to download the evaluation copies and get cracks for them." She wasn't saying anything new for a good number of people in the room, though.
I have two one-hour breaks between my lectures on Thursdays so I think in future I'll need to take my laptop with me and see about getting online during those breaks. I found a nice coffee shop at the bottom of G block which sells some lovely sandwiches so I can at least get a decent lunch on Thursdays, but I can't keep myself occupied for 2 hours without a laptop, and there's no way I'm coming back to my room for about 45 minutes when I live on a mountain. I spend one hour getting my NUS card today, which the guy did really badly so the lamination was at about a 10° angle to the rest of the card. I had to trim that up with my knife when I got back. Bleh. At least I've got the thing now, though.
Haven't really got up to much this evening. Tested out setting all the surfaces on CTF-Face (Unreal Tournament GOTY ed.) to mirrored in UnrealEd. That still causes ultra lack of framerate and just looks silly. You really have no idea where you're going as everything is just a huge load of reflections. It's crazy.
And then I discovered that my lovely flat mates have in fact gone out to the union again tonight leaving a mess in the kitchen including half-finished washing up, food stains all over the work surfaces and a load of mess on the kitchen table. They got back from the union about half an hour ago - after I'd gone to bed - and it doesn't sound as if they've yet to go into the kitchen to do any tidying, so if the cleaners come in tomorrow and find it a total pig sty and end up billing us for them having to clean it, the others are paying for it. And "the others" doesn't include Jen or Nathan as I'm fairly sure they didn't cause the mess. I'm not bothered, though, as long as I don't have to pay for their mess.
Also it seems that ad-hoc wifi between desktop & laptop has totally given up now. It used to be a bit dodgy and take me a few minutes' worth of fiddling to get it to connect, but now it won't connect with over half an hour of work. Useless. Access point here I come ¬_¬