Archive for January, 2011

Is the way this week ended for me R managed to get my headset working through my dodgey microphone port on my desktop so all is well in the house of Cipe, unluckily not so in the house of R and L. We’ll get to that shortly.

Sadly for the sake of news this week was also quite uneventful. Monday was once again the usual confusion of JSP, which makes perfect sense in the lecture then the tutorials make me feel like a complete idiot. The first Tutorial (from last week) consists of finding errors in the Java/HTML/CSS and where they’re failing to link to complete the server page. However this is much easier said that done as these are mistakes i’m struggling to see, kind of the stuff you wouldn’t make yourself and if you did you’d know how to fix them immediately.  So that’s proving mega annoying so far, however R has leant me his book so i’m sorted if I can get my head down in that. R and L have moved on to different modules which leaves me to tackle the beast alone should be quite the challenge.

Forensics this week consisted of another legendary lecture from Bob who seems to be the best person at improving my Mondays. It’s one of those modules that i’m doing purely for the interest in the subject and not really for job prospects. This was confirmed by a lecture on Wednesday from a Forensic Computing company who very nicely told us we’d be more than hard-pressed to get a job in the industry. Luckily I wasn’t using this as my fall-back on any accounts. It’s a cool subject though, learning about what the people do on the crime scene after the CSI people have been in their snazzy sunglasses and all.

Tuesday did however contain a very awesome silver lining. I registered my SubCard and had an amazing foot long meatball sub which was well worth it being as it was Sub of the Day. Managed to avoid another trip to Topman and another spending of £25 on a Mickey Mouse jumper. What can I say? I have womanly urges :p

Wednesday was a much nicer day than the dull Tuesday though. After the soul destroying lecture from forensic company, I had a short trip home to clean up and then headed back to Uni for the society photo shoot and Anime Taster Night. Despite arriving mega late and holding them up for quite a while, I arrived with N and D. Donning my extremely cute Tsukasa + Kagami t-shirt and holding my Miku plushie, I took a front row seat next to the head honchos (get me!) and tried to look cool while being oh so feminine. I hope to pull it off and you’ll be able to see when I get the photo myself as I paid for a nice copy of it to stick in my room . The society night itself was a bit weird as no one bought Anime to be tasted, so to speak. Luckily someone stepped up and I had no source to back him up with so we proceeded to watch Ore no Imouto which was one of my favourite animé from the last season. Fun to watch again but not exactly what you would call tasting new animé.

Thursday was spent besting Eclipse and it’s desire to stop me from doing Android programming. N and I managed to soldier on between us by my computer decided to keep deleting the auto-generated project files and preventing me from building and running the project. Ah well, can’t win them all, although i’d have liked to. The best things about Thursdays are the hour gap between Android tutorial and lecture which usually results in N and I eating a late breakfast at The Lounge. Really cheers you up in the morning to have a lovely sausage and bacon sandwich and a glass of juice . Hopefully i’ll start eating cereal a bit more again so may save me a fair amount of money in hindsight.

Friday wasn’t the usual night of pre-drinking then an amazing drunken night full of wacky memories and funny quotes. Instead it only contained one drink for me and I got bored very quickly. We ended up going to check out how our university was getting on at Game Jam. For those of you who don’t know, Game Jam is a global event over 48 hours where people assemble in teams and develop a game. It’s a really cool event and some crazy games get made. Unfortunately we didn’t get to go and check it out in the later stages but it looked like it was off to a good start and I got to wave at the live video feed a few times like an idiot.

The weekend was mostly spent catching up with sleep, animé and of course gaming. We now have a switch set up in the house to even out the network to all of us which so far is proving to work quite nicely. Alot of time was spent with R and D hitting up Team Fortress 2 and just enjoying not having to do much work. Over the week I heard back from a company I’d applied to for a working placement next year. They have offered me an interview which is of course amazing news but not something i’m entirely sure i’ll have a really good chance at getting. I guess all you can do is try your best in these situations and have no regrets when the time comes . Having done so well there, I have yet to apply for another placement but have a couple in mind so shall get round to doing those.

I picked up the animé Oniichan no Koto which is a hilarious piece on a girl who desires relations with her not-blood brother whom she seems to have an obsession with. While this sounds disturbing on the surface it’s actually quite hilarious as the guy struggles to stay alive as his sister and other pursuer fight tooth and nail over him. I’m more interested in how the first character from the ending song will come into the story as she looks quite cute and her seiyuu’s voice stands out quite a bit to me.

The lovely 3 ladies of Oniichan

I’m really enjoying gaming on the PC platform so far which I was unable to do much of on my pathetic laptop. Team Fortress 2 is by far one of the most entertaining games i’ve ever played and simply feels natural to me as I parade around the map causing havoc. I like the Sniper a lot for offensive play as my headshots seem to just keep on coming to me without a giant amount of effort. However, I seem to be finding most success as a Heavy with R or D backing me up as a Medic. It’s so simple to just walk out like a one man army and kill everything in sight while your health barely decreases at all.

So the week’s already over and it’s deep into Monday morning as I finish this. I’m so excited to spend a couple of days with my beautiful girlfriend on Friday so I can’t wait for this week to be over already but I’ll just have to soldier on through.

Cipe out~

Apologies to anyone who waits for the blog (the whole none of you) but last week was busy in a few ways. I’ll refer to last week as this week to avoid much confusion.

The week began in a pretty ordinary fashion. Lectures and such are in their first week so very introductory stuff that doesn’t really grab your attention a large amount of the time. As far as the modules i’m taking they are:

• Cybercrime and Forensic Analysis
• Web Media Programming
• Software Development for Mobile Computing Applications
• Web Programming with servlets and JSP

Any of you already know me (which is most of you at this point) will know i’m not much of a programmer and would go as far as changing award title to avoid certain modules. However so far, for the most part, they seem like they will be pretty decent pickups. JSP isn’t exactly interesting but I guess it’d be useful and the rest of the options available look about as appealing as dog poop so i’ll give them a pass. So hopefully by the end of this semester I shall be experienced in throwing stuff with Java and making magic happen…maybe. Not much else to document on yet so I shall let you know more during the next blog and hopefully i’ll make heads or tails of JSP.

Wednesday night was quite a worry for a few of us and a very bad night for a certain someone . My friends and I took a train to our university’s other campus for a night out. As the usual fashion, everyone ended up quite drunk and a good night was had in general with some awesome music and some lol-worthy moments. These included D pretending to be a former-History current-English student to try and pull a girl (Computing/Games students seem to ward away women), random girl hitting on L and getting rejected, asking if I was single and getting rejected, then ignoring our suggestion of D. Poor lad, another night another lady

Much more interesting was the story that followed. L, being very drunk as this part, got into a taxi with N and co. instead of D, R and I and completely disappearing. Not much was known about this until about 4 in the morning when D bursts into my room saying that he’s had a call from L who is the other side of the town lost and has phone battery is dead. In short, he ended up miles and miles away by an A road and had to hitch-hike his way back. Scary for him and us all, but all ended well apart from the early wake up the few hours after finally managing to get some sleep. Be this a lesson folks, always know where you’re going when drunk!

Moving swiftly on, I finally assembled my desktop completely this week. Main specs for anyone who cares:

• AMD Phenom II X4 925 Socket AM3 2.8 GHz 6MB L3 Cache
• 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz Memory Kit 1.5V CL9
• PowerColor HD 5770 1GB GDDR5 DVI HDMI Out PCI-E Graphics Card
• Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache

The innards of Haruhi!

Also invested in a new 21.5″ HD monitor to replace my TV which was being used as my main monitor (19″) and a Cyborg V5 keyboard for those beastly gaming sessions I can hopefully do now with some decent hardware at my disposal. It was quite a fun Thursday spent building it with the guys and learnt a fair bit about the inside of a computer. Defining moments were definitely all the “that’s what she said” moments after someone talking about inserting drives and things into sockets, the incredibly annoying hard drive that didn’t want to go in for about 20 minutes and the insanely awesome looking fan in the middle of blue LEDs that makes it look like moving water. Decided to call it Haruhi keeping with the “that’s what she said” theme and I already gave Mio away to my router so it seemed an appropriate choice.

A very blurry picture of the "water effect"

Our friend R from university last year who dropped out to pursue a career in the army also paid us a visit for a few days. Was really nice to see him and quickly fall back into old habits of late night sandwiches and very silly conversation. Nice to see the people you like never seem to change much .

Also another reason it gained that name was that I watched The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya on Tuesday at our otaku society. While i’m not prepared to write an entire blog to it as i’m still getting my opinion straight, it was possibly one of the most beautiful Animé films I have ever seen. Story was awesome, art was amazing and Haruhi was just beautiful :3. Also used this as a giant excuse to take my plushie out to cuddle while I watched it, was awesome. Yes, i’m a girl . The rest of the society enjoyed it too so I guess it was a successful night, not something we have every week so it’s nice to hear tons of good feedback after the night is over and that everyone has had a good time. As for how next week will go, we’ll see when it happens. Have a society photo shoot on Wednesday with the other societies there as well so shall hopefully be quite fun.

Friday was another quite drunken night at the Students Union for our university. Didn’t have too much to drink but ended up in a bit of a funny state and danced the night away as usual with 2 Disaronno and lemonade’s in hand. L decided to take the designated driver role after his state on Wednesday which was quite beneficial for me as I really didn’t fancy a stumble home in the cold. Also was wearing my dressing gown due to the night’s theme of PJs so that was quite a weird experience too. Especially washing your hands with your sleeves hanging all over the place and soaking them in water. Mine seems to have massive sleeves and a pretty Jedi looking hood which both can get in the way of random things.

The weekend was mostly spent on Team Fortress 2 which I can now play stable on my desktop and Plants vs. Zombies both on Steam. Both are amazing games, PvZ more for a casual play and TF2 for a really fun filled blasting session. My favourite classes seem to correlate to my Halo 3/Reach playing style which is a supportive player and occasional sniper. This of course means I play Medic and Sniper mainly. I prefer the Medic concept of being a giant support for your team and then pulling out the primary weapon when poop hits the fan. Always thought it was important to have a player role like this in every game and that’s why the recent Call of Duty games have had the feeling like something was missing for me. The Sniper class perfectly fits the massive amount of time I spent on Halo 3 brute forcing myself to get better with the sniper rifle for the sake of my team mates when we were competing in Gamebattles matches. Absolutely in love with the charged shots and the SMG while being a bit weak is a pretty awesome desperation weapon.

So that was my week. Hopefully I’ll have some cool stuff to talk about next week or it could all go horribly wrong, we shall see when the time comes.

Until then my friends~

Having planned the occasion over a month in advance, it was a really nice surprise to realise the K-ON! and K-ON!! marathon my friends and I had been planning landed on the birthday (completely fictional of course) of a certain favourite character of mine, Miss Akiyama Mio.

For those of you who aren’t aware, as far as Animé characters go, Mio is a minor obsession of mine. Unless you understand the Otaku-like culture or are deeply into Animé yourself, it’s hard to understand how a character in an Animé can be something to get that excited over. However if you do, you’ll know exactly what it’s like. I’m not really a merchandise whore but I do have a cute little Nendoroid of her sitting in front of me as we speak and a t-shirt some Phillipino (if I remember correctly) fan made and is way awesome with the “Don’t Say Lazy” lyrics on it.

Anyway back to the marathon, beforehand was delayed due to me waking up late but all went off to a good start as BD, J and I sped off to Asda and indulged in a crate of Emerge, Coke, stuff to make food for later, lots of snacks and of course, the necessary box of Cherry Bakewells. With a certain BD staff discount it was a little less horrible to look at as we made haste towards the destination.

After a small amount of setup time for an amp and speakers we were under way. As far as Animé watching environments go this was close to perfection. Good screen size, 1080P blu-ray rips and good volume all added up to a good overall experience. Not to mention the company

Before getting into my exciting return into the Animé itself, I must comment on the epic meal cooked between J and I. The meeting of 2 cultures, vegetable fried rice and chicken tikka masala. Personally found it to be the best combination ever since the McGangBang (see Urban Dictionary if confused) and was surprisingly filling as I barely ate much more all night. Oh, other than J’s perfectionist cheese on lightly toasted toast .

Anyway back to K-ON! itself. If anything, Season 1 was way better than I remembered. Yui seemed even more epic than ever, and her comedy duo act with Ritsu killed me several times. Mio was as cute and lovely as ever, including the infamous “pantsu” scene and her general yummyness (it’s a word!). The music definitely stayed with me from the first time as “Don’t Say Lazy” was probably my most played song on iTunes last year and Fuwa Fuwa Time was equally as amazing. We also hit a bump or 2 with a couple of episodes, in one case where one wouldn’t play at all and we had to resort to some 720P airing quality episode, which was a giant step down but completely bearable.

Season 2 was only really 75% watched because we started to fall into a sleep deprived, laugh-at-anything state and the latter episodes were a bit too familiar for me having only aired not too long ago. Due to the popularity of Season 1 and the Manga, you could really see where they dragged it out in parts but the character development was a lot better. Music, while not as good with the OPs and EDs as Season 1, were perfectly on par. My personal favourite is U&I and the story of it’s creation. It’s such a cute episode and really portrays how different yet close 2 siblings can really be.

Also considered the scary concept of the Mio fan-club actually existing. As Newtype’s #1 female for pretty much most of the last year, many obsessive fans have the usual shrines dedicated to her and little Mio fan-club cards. Yup, she’s probably the luckiest thing ever not to be real or she’d probably have been sexually assaulted on the way home from school.

The latter part of the marathon resulted in me playing Plants vs. Zombies for the first time and general browsing through random sites, aren’t I nice?

Favourite parts of the series:

• Buying Yui’s guitar
• First performance and Mio’s infamous “pantsu” scene (stripey!)
• All other performances
• Mugi’s love of lesbian moments
• Azusa doing her cat impression with ears on
• Mio’s role of Juliet in the play
• Yui as a tree in the play
• Mio’s flashback story and her confidence training from Ritsu
• Mio’s fan-club meeting (her Poem is so sweet but awkward)
• Yui’s general hilarious ditsy moments
• Skull (need I say anymore)
• “We all came” (real subtitle, WTF)
• YuiAzu

Things learned:

• If you don’t have forms, Nodoka will seriously f you up
• Sawako does everything “like a boss”
• Azusa changes race while on the beach (from Japanese to Caribbean!)
• 40 episode marathons are not wise

Overall an awesome night. Much props to J for hosting and cooking and BD for essentially funding the night. Next on the marathon agenda will be the completion the “Slice of life trinity”, an Anime I haven’t seen since my first viewing around 7 years ago, the amazing Azumanga Daioh.

Until next time folks, ciao

Isn't she cute?

Before anything is said I think I should probably address the name and whole rainbow thing this blog has going on. The name of the blog was suggested by a friend as we sat down brainstorming and it sounded stupid enough to fit. Note: I am  not extremely camp or in love with rainbows, I just think they are very pretty .

Right so here we are. I’d, for a long time, talked about blogging but never actually got around to it. This was especially true last semester at university where the workload really hit me hard and I was struggling to keep sane, let alone do something that wasn’t work. Anyway, that’s been resolved shortly until it happens again this semester .

So i’m not really sure if I ever have much to write about but going with the flow seems to work. My return trip back after seeing my family for Christmas has resulted in, so far, a really good week. Had a lot of fun hanging with the guys, reminiscing old times and trying to get to bed at a decent time and failing miserably . Any form of keeping fit and healthy coming into a new year will hopefully take form when the semester actually starts and I can start hitting the gym again. Not a giant “pumping weights” guy but it’s definitely a better way for me to be focused on getting fit than making myself go for a run, which always seems to leave me near a takeaway.

The other trait of a university student, lacking food, also seems to be a case yet again. It’s hard to shop living with 4 other guys and sharing a really tiny freezer so i’m trying to postpone a really big shop until they have eaten their way down a bit. A staple diet of Super Noodles, sausage sandwiches and bowls of cereal seems to do the trick. Hopefully I cut down a bit further on fizzy drinks because it got quite excessive last year and occasionally, I do worry for my health (only sometimes). Cereal was at least somewhat of a start for me but thanks to the help of a very nice bowl with onomatopoeias (just had to Google the spelling of that) of fruits being used in breakfast like ways. I’m sure it suggests I actually eat some fruit but that might be pushing it.

A nice return to my university student house has reunited me with my very loud sound system which consists of a pretty big sub woofer, 2 large floor standing speakers and an amp to power them. Amazingly good for dropping anything dubstep, UK Garage tracks and Bassline House so the bass really quakes through the floor. Though at the moment there’s only one band I can manage to listen to continually and it’s now becoming a twice a day thing.

The Pretty Reckless is a band from New York founded and fronted by Taylor Momsen (Gossip Girl’s Jenny Humphrey). After finally getting round to downloading the album I can quite safely say I love it. I first heard “Make Me Wanna Die” in the 2010 movie “Kick Ass” which is a comic book adaption. I suggest you check out all of these things if you haven’t but here’s a few tracks you should DEFINITELY hear by The Pretty Reckless:

Make Me Wanna Die - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYeGw-bo430&ob=av3el

Just Tonight – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7VGOnV2QhU&ob=av2em

Miss Nothing – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFlHsKExcYg&feature=channel

Anyway while i’m forcing my interests on you, i’m a big fan of Anime and Manga and there’s a strong possibility future blogs may be on the topic of my weekly Anime watching. To see all the Anime i’ve watched or are currently watching check out my About page (my Twitter is there too!). The new Anime I picked up this season is Beelzebub, Gosick and Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Seems to be a good mix of everything and compliments what I already have really well. I’ll be discussing them quite a bit in weeks to come so hope you enjoy/endure it.

Right so I reckon that’s me done for now. Dunno if the next entry is due for next week or in the next few days, but yeah hope this was a semi decent read and ciao.