The second probably being more recognisable than the first, so I’ll just start with that.

So my major gripe with it so far is getting it to connect to Imperial’s wireless, otherwise I’ve got a laptop I can only ever use when it’s tethered to a network cable. Somehow, this feels slightly like missing the point to my mind. The problem is that the EEE only supports the kind of wireless security used by home connections, WEP (which is dreadful, and nobody should ever use ever. It is less security, and more like a deterrent. Think of it as a waist-high fence) and WPA-Personal (or WPA-PSK, for the TLA minded) and the Imperial network uses WPA-Enterprise.

There were two real solutions before me, blow away the default Xandros install and go with Xubuntu (which would work) or try and hack WPA-Enterprise support into Xandros through the agency of bizarre text commands (none of which, sadly, were sudo make me a sandwich, although I did a lot of sudo nano) and a bucket-load of patience.

The first option I discarded because Xubuntu looked even harder to use than Xandros, and I was getting quite attached to the cute default tabs interface. And the second required more patience than even I possess.

As luck would have it, Imperial have an insecure network, through which one can use something called VPN (or Virtual Private Networking) to create a tunnel through to the real network. To start with, I though this would have been even more horrific than getting WPA to work so I didn’t even consider it, but as it turns out, it actually works out of the box using the default installed software. So it works! Hooray!

PLRW is Professor Lord Robert Winston, who today did a talk at Imperial to help launch the annual RCSU Science Challenge. The top prize is £2500, a MacBook (which I would immediately sell or install Windows on. Probably both.) and A TRIP TO CERN. Honestly, there was an actual audible gasp at that one. The guy organising the event is a physicist, so he took the opportunity to ask any medics to let him have the tickets if they happened to win. It’s one hell of a prize, never mind the free trip to the French-Swiss border, the chance to have a look around CERN is pretty much once in a lifetime for anyone who isn’t a high-energy physicist by trade.

My thoughts about the lecture itself will probably have to wait until sometime tomorrow.

Until we meet again.

So today I had a tutorial, in which I kinda had to admit that I didn’t actually know anything because I hadn’t done the problem sheet. So the tutor kept asking me if I understood what was going on. Rather luckily I did, he asked me to do a question up on the board and it actually went alright, all in all.

Then I took a bus up to Piccadilly Circus (because walking to South Ken tube is extremely tedious), somehow managing smack my little finger on something I was getting on, causing the tip of my nail to kinda crack in the middle and start bleeding. Which was kinda icky.

Anyways, got there and had a bit of a stroll. A purposeful stroll. I wandered over Leicester Square, up to the Seven Dials in Covent Garden. On a side note, the Seven Dials is rapidly becoming my favorite area of Central London. It’s just cool.

Got to Forbidden Planet and bought the new Buffy comic, then headed up past the Intrepid Fox (heavy metal pub. Interesting clientele) to  Tottenham Court Road, with the intention of buying a white Asus EEE 4g. First place said they hadn’t had stock in about two weeks, and that he wasn’t expecting any again ever.

Next place I tried was Micro Anvika, a sign outside said they were in stock, which is usually a good sign. I wandered over to the guy standing by the display model, pointed, and said “I want one of those, please”. Really. He then proceeded to sell me one. The weirdest part was the whole paying by card part. You do start to realise how easy it is to blow vast amounts of cash really, really fast.

Anyways, I took it home, and it’s now what I’m using to type this blog post. The keyboard takes some getting used to, but it’s really not that bad at all!

On other matters, on Tuesday, me, Sarah^2, Niro, Daisy, Rowan & Craig gathered at Sarah & Daisy’s place and made pancakes, which was awesome, and then went to the Temperance pub, which was really nice, and all in all it was a good night.

So I played through Bioshock the other day and I was going to post up my thoughts, but heck, like most things I plan to do, it didn’t really happen. In fact so little has happened this holiday that I haven’t written a blog entry for over a month, which frankly just Isn’t Good Enough.

In summary of what I can remember, I lazed about a worryingly large amount, did no work, earned no money, went out a few times, but otherwise wasted weeks of my precious youth. Urgh, sounds worse when I say it like that.

Anyways, I played through Bioshock, and some of my thoughts are vaguely congruent with this here video, which is just too funny for words to quite capture:

He is quite right. Bioshock is probably going to be one of the best games of the year, a few other ones not withstanding. This isn’t a reflection so much on the quality of Bioshock per se, and more on the fact that practically nothing good has come out for ages. Seriously, can you remember the last really awesome game that came out? I sure as hell can’t.

It’s overly heavy on exposition, the AI isn’t that good, the ghost sequences make no kind of logical sense, the Vitachambers (think instant respawn) make whupping the hell out of everything too easy. It picks up towards the end though, where you start to get a bit more variety into your powers. I’m not full of hate - the art direction is stunning, and some of the individual set-pieces are breathtaking. The concept of the Little Sister / Big Daddy is wonderful, and something I would love to see more of in games.

Little Sisters are little girls who have been turned into monsters; they prowl Rapture extracting Adam (the resource needed to hop yourself up on genetic goodies like fireballs) from the bodies of dead enemies. This makes them somewhat of a target, as they carry lots and lots of Adam, so they’re protected by the huge Big Daddies. Anyways, as long as you don’t attack them, they are neutral to you, and you get lots of interesting behaviours, like the Little Sister pointing at you in fear if you get too close, that kind of thing.

In those details, it’s a good game, but the number of niggling complaints just stacks up. Each weapon has a stupid number of additional ammo types, and couple this with all your plasmid (basically magical powers) types it gets really hard to manage. The slavish devotion to the System Shock 2 archetype is justifiably mocked, it’s harmed what this game could have been.

Anyways, Bioshock is a game that’s worth getting, assuming that its monstrous system requirements don’t melt your PC into a foul smelling pool of ruined electronics.

In other news… (as promised)

• Went for a trip up to Liverpool way to see Niro for his B’day BBQ and met up with the Uni people. It was awesometastic, and therefore deserves its own entry. All in good time, my pretties.
• And next week I’m going on holiday to Majorca with Uni people. Again, probably going to rock.
• The Orange Box has been released for purchase on Steam. It’s about

I’m bored, so I’m going to do the long-awaited (sort of) Barcelona-write-up before I forget too much about the experience! If you were there and have a better memory than me, please chip in so I can fill this out a bit. I’m too lazy to set up a wiki for one page.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m at a party at Josh’s and he asked why I haven’t written anything since my post about the ball, and that was on Sunday, I think. So I’m sitting at his laptop typing this out whilst watching South Park.

I’ve pretty much been busy is my excuse. Had a couple of friends down and that kept me kinda busy; well, a friend and an acquaintance, at any rate. Tom and Meg, as it happened. Although Tom had to disappear back to Lancaster because he had an exam in the middle of his visit so me and Meg watched a stupid amount of Buffy, Spaced, and Shaun of the Dead.

Anyways, that’s why I haven’t been writing all of the much. But right now I’m at Josh’s, which is (sorta…) near Spalding. Much as I can tell it’s a good 50 minutes by car from Peterborough, which is about 50 minutes by train from King’s Cross, so it’s a bit of a way away. There was a BBQ, and we went to the pub where we were accosted by a kinda drunk woman (or at least it seemed) called Donna, who challenged us to a game of pool and then kinda failed miserably at playing it. Anyways, back at Josh’s there was a fairly abortive attempt to play Drink Monopoly instead of Ring of Fire, I still can’t quite fathom why.

Anyways, it’s a party at which there’s exclusively guys, so going to sleep is a hazardous experience. Once guy already has permanent marker on his face, nearly got his eyebrow shaved off, and got shocked in the face with a joke electric pen. I was actually feeling kinda sleepy, and Nightmare on Elm Street was on; the parallels were kinda frightening.

In other news, I hope to actually be interesting again in a week or so, when I have time to read newspapers and philosophy and novels and stuff like that.

Oh, I was reading Scoble the other day and he was rating social networking services and amongst other things wondering why Facebook was so popular, almost like he thought Facebook had appeared overnight and become insanely popular because of some feature it had. Social networking sites are useful because they have all your friends on them. Facebook is big because everyone at your university has it. All your friends from back home have it. It’s an exponential phenomenon! MySpace isn’t big because it’s good. Anyone with half a brain can tell that.

Ah well. Time to post this now and do something else!

P.S. Most people agree that Sally Sparrow is hawt.

The Imperial College Centenary Ball. Wow, that was an event and a half. First there was the dinner, then the fun fair, dodgems, drinking at the union, wandering about wondering why nobody was playing good music, eventually ended up in the marquee where Alex Zane was, at last, playing something halfway decent, got some dancing in, then rolled up for the Survivors photo at 4 am. Then we hung around at the union for a few more hours.

It’s 8:20 am and I just got back into halls. I’m completely knackered.

The most annoying thing about living by yourself is that if you’re sick/in pain, you have to actually go get the stuff to make you feel better yourself, when all your instincts are telling you to stay put in bed. Right now my sinuses are absolutely killing me and it’s really getting on my nerves.