Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap...

Today I maxed out my overdraft. Silly me, but thankfully my foresight to cancel my preorders (at least until I can get some money in to guarantee their safety) means that I'm not likely to be attacked by hired goons belonging to my bank anytime soon. This also means that I'm going to have to survive for the next 2 days on the food I have in my fridge. This, luckily, is particularly easy.

I also recieved an email today from a panicked member of my media project group. It says:

Mark U must text or email me concerning that fornt sheet for our conventions of videography project, my name must be on it and the tape handed in. my no: "

Which, I assume means that the guy is either thinking I'd be stupid enough not to submit the coursework, or to submit groupwork without listing other people's names in the group, or that because he hasn't turned up to either of the sessions since filming, I'll have somehow forgotten that he exists. Admittedly either of these are possible, but I'm suprisingly organised about this particular one, and not only can I locate both coursework tapes, but they're labelled (including being labelled as rushes and project), and sitting next to me on my desk. That's most likely a pass with flying colours then.

Talking of my course, today I was subjected to a three-hour lecture on the subject of the history of video tape. Odd.

Anger.

Missed parcel by 3 minutes, now I have to wait 4 hours to collect it.

Then add 3 hours initial charge time (estimated), and I don't get to use my DS until at least half 5.

Know why I wasn't in to collect my parcel?

Dentistry.

That's how my morning has been.

New year's resolutions.

1. Eat less
2. Excersise more
3. Read more books, listen to more music, watch more films, play more games
   
4. Avoid failing my uni course
5. Avoid insulting satanists' girlfriends
6. Get a PS2, thus ending any fanboyistic hatred of the machine I may still have
7. Spend less, earn more
8. Drink less at a time, but more often
   
9. Rent a house in Bradford with a group of friends
10. Leave my room on a daily basis
    

The true meaning of Christmas.

I've only been awake 3 hours, and already I'm proclaiming this to be the best christmas I've had in years, maybe ever. No, I didn't get a PSP/X360/GPx2/Whatever for christmas, in fact, as I've observed, that isn't even the meaning of christmas for me any more.
I'm 18, so this is my 18th Christmas, bad time for the traditional children's christmas values, because it's the age when absolutely everybody in the extended family decides you're no longer cute enough to qualify for presents, which is far enough because, lets face it, at about £20 a year for just under 20 years I've drained them all of about £400 each, not one penny they have seen back, and in some cases, I haven't actually spoken to them since the mid 90s. Even worse, I am, as you may have noticed, a male of the species, which means that my friends are always too broke/slovenly/apathetic/satanic* to even consider giving out presents. As a recent PvP comic points out, if christmas was left to the men it would die a very quick death.
So, logically, this year I had the least number of presents ever. Less than the dog. I ended up with 2 bottles of unusual looking beer, a bunch of homebrew stuff (evidently people take the fact that I have joined BURAS, the Bradford Union Real Ale Society, as a cue to buy beer-themed presents; A very good decision, really), a book I already own, some cheap white chocolate, and £30. While the more I mull over it, the better a haul it sounds, and one I am eternally grateful for, I long for the days in which I would be around £300 richer at this point, possibly reading a Beano annual.

Thankfully, this is not the true meaning of christmas. Neither is the episode of Doctor Who, which is the real reason I've been actually looking forward to christmas day. I have finally realised the importance of my family to me. At university I find I am depressed and lonely. This would probably be cured if I left my room more often, but that would require finding an exit underneath all the pizza boxes; a daunting task. Today I've spent much of the morning playing video games with dad. Keeping in mind that the last game he played for more than 5 minutes which wasn't 'Who wants to be a millionaire', was Worms, the sheer fact that he is willing to play a full 18-hole round of Tiger Woods PGA tour, whilst trying to decypher it's cryptic advice and seemingly random events, not to mention the sheer task of decoding the Xbox controller (which has 3 times as many movement controls, 4 times as many buttons, and a completely new 'trigger concept' to the last controller he used.
Thoroughly enjoyable, and It means I can claim that the Xbox saved christmas.

* although in his defence, he hosted a couple of awesome parties for which he spent about £70 on booze and food. Rock on!

Alien Technology

I spent my first time on a Mac today.
Well, that is to say my first time on a mac other than the pre-'we're cool and stylish' apple era or the horrendous experience of the mac that was at my middle school that took an entire hour to rip a single track from a CD (which my IBM compatible laptop achieved in 20 seconds.
Also, it's my first time on TWO macs, as the first one was the thing that Macintosh apologists claim doesn't exist; a mac that's more buggy and intolerable to use than an old windows computer. It greeted me by telling me that I didn't exist, that I couldn't access my saved files, and that half of the programs installed on the computer didn't actually own icons. It then proceded to crash promptly every three seconds. Not that this slowed me down at all, however. I was too busy trying to find the CD drive (The button's on the keyboard, dumbkopf!) Eventually I decided to try another mac (after about 10 minutes of trying to find the logoff button; on the windows computers it's a bug button on the 'start' menu, on the macs it's in a big list of other very similar looking commands.), and tried another system, which thankfully worked.

Oh, and one-button mouse system? useless for stuff like photoshop. I don't see what people see in the format.

The man who eBayed

There's not many things that I look up to my father for. His taste in music is varied, but annoying, his grasp of technology is nonexistant, and his cookery seems to extend only to macarconi cheese with mashed potatoes and broad beans or indescribably tasteless Chilli. However, if there's anything that I truly admire my father over, it's his eBaying skills. Somehow this usually mildly technophobic man is suddenly in his element when put in front of an ebay search page. Want cheap ink cartridges? He'll find three for the price of half. Need an item that's about to go? He snipes his items with a marksman-like precision. Want the teddy bear you gave away as a child? ...He's working on that. That's my mother's mid life crisis coming through, so you can't expect that to be a reasonable task. There's one going in 14 hours for over £50...
And yet in five years of guerilla ebaying, he's never got one negative comment. Every single person who has dealt with my father seems to have found him to be communicative, friendly, quick to pay, and/or fast to post. It's just not something I can seemingly live up to. Hell, stuff I want tends to get sniped from me left, right and center! I tried to buy a GameBoy (original 1991, looked in good condit, takes 4xAA batteries) today, only to see it flutter away from my eyes right at the last minute.

So here's to you, Dad, you who showed me that the 'Buy it now' button means 'Pay loads more than neccessary (actually, I've found a couple of cases where this isn't true, but that's only because I know my videogames), the man who can send a cheque faster than most people can send a paypal payment, the man who sniped goods before sniping became popular and eBay introduced the 'maximum bid' feature in an attempt to cull it. The man who eBayed.

One of the Flock

This message is pretty much just a test to make sure that I can update my blog through 'Flock', some new browser based on the firefox source code, but with a load of blogging and sharing tools of some sort. It's an intruiging concept, but I don't yet see how it affects me... Other than making updating my blog a one-click job. Actually, seeing as my job is made considerably easier, it's probably neccessary for me to use this. As I've mentioned before, I'm lazy.

A shape not entirely unlike a fruit of some sort.

I'm sitting on the floor of my room, typing this on my trusty laptop. In front of me are the gutted remains of my computer, which, due to my own negligence, seems to have a burnt-out motherboard. Meanwhile I'm groping around the room looking somewhat in vain for my missing keycard so that I have a chance of leaving the building tomorrow to go on a brewery tour. These two problems alone will cost me in the region of £100, leaving me on the verge of bankruptcy. So much for the N64 per week theory.
I haven't had much time to write my blog lately due to the sheer amount of work I've ended up doing, and I'll still be busy well into reading week. Hence the shortness of this blog. Ah well, I tried.

Just someone give me Fable: The lost chapters (i.e, play.com make my goddamn delivery) or my snes, and I'll be happy again.