April 1st, 2005. First things first, read the Sin City books by Frank Miller. Appre­ciate the style of such a tale, the gritty black and white dra­wings, the high­lights and ima­ges in mono­tone. See how per­fect everything looks. Now com­pare this to sce­nes from the trai­ler and Comi­con trai­ler, see how per­fectly they com­pli­ment each other, see how per­fectly the comic por­tra­yals are brought to life. Now, look at who is pro­du­cing and direc­ting — firstly Frank Miller, the soul behind the whole thing is direc­ting along side Robert Rodri­guez and Quen­tin Taran­tino. At this point I am thin­king, “this will be awe­some”. NOW look at the cast list:

Jes­sica Alba .… Nancy Callahan
Rosa­rio Daw­son .… Gail
Eli­jah Wood .… Kevin
Bruce Willis .… John Har­ti­gan
Beni­cio Del Toro .… Jack Raf­ferty
Carla Gugino .… Luci­lle
Josh Hart­nett .… The Sales­man
Michael Mad­sen .… Bob
Jaime King .… Goldie/Wendy
Brit­tany Murphy .… She­llie
Clive Owen .… Dwight

Mic­key Rourke .… Marv

Nick Stahl .… Junior/Yellow Bas­tard
Now, on top of this each of these A-list actors looks exactly like the cha­rac­ter they play, it’s uncanny. If you’ve read the comics you’ll know that Eli­jah Wood as the psycho­tic Kevin is an abso­lu­tely PERFECT cas­ting. I need to see this film.

All this anti-feminine stuff I have thrown on here as joke is going to make me look like a total sexist pig. I don’t take any of this stuff seriously and if I were in fact sexist I would never be able to lead a life in my house in which I live with 5 other girls. In hind sight, here is my awe­some new pos­ter I found on cam­pus and did not pay for:

I get the fee­ling peo­ple always want to buy me stuff but simply don’t know what to get me. To solve this pro­blem and ensure I receive whor­des of pre­sents, here is my wish­list:
Ama­zon (co​.uk) Wishlist

I am currently very bored on cam­pus wai­ting for an email from
my tutor. You see, I have come in today for a Digi­tal Design lec­ture, but the
lec­tu­rer didn’t turn up. That lec­ture was at 1pm. I also have a tuto­rial
that will last about 10 minu­tes at 4pm. This ends up being a 3 hour wait for a
10 minute talk, being very bored, hot and hungry in a com­pu­ter room. Not really
my idea of fun or good time management.

So, while I am wai­ting I guess I will write another jour­nal
entry for my blog. You know,
my life at the moment and everything. Well, it’s the last week of term
and I shall soon be home­ward bound for Eas­ter and the holi­days. Hoo­rah! This
term has been a little infu­ria­ting, while the work loads have been mana­gea­ble
and the modu­les have kept me tic­king, the actual con­tent of them has bored me
beyond belief. Sys­tems and Con­trol and Sig­nal Pro­ces­sing, two modu­les run by
the com­pu­ter engi­nee­ring depart­ment are equi­va­lent to trying to sleep while
prop­ped up in an old uncom­for­ta­ble woo­den chair with a crazy old man ram­bling
in your ear about something you don’t unders­tand or care for. Howe­ver,
nothing com­pa­res to the atro­city that was “design of mea­su­re­ment sys­tems”
– not only was this boring and taught by a hard to unders­tand (but
lovely) foreig­ner, it was also utterly point­less. Luc­kily there is no exam,
just lots of Eas­ter cour­se­work. The other modu­les this term have been “Elec­tro­mecha­ni­cal
Power”, an optio­nal module con­cer­ning induc­tion motors and trans­for­mers –
it was dull and I drop­ped it seven weeks in; “Digi­tal design”, a
basic sur­mise of how to pro­gram mic­ro­con­tro­llers and mic­ro­pro­ces­sors,
back­ground know­ledge of VLSI and appli­ca­tions of C. It was fairly inte­res­ting to
begin with, but loo­king back, the course only taught the basics and really
could have been a 1^st year module. Most of the sub­ject areas could
have been expan­ded upon and the basics that we know will require further
lear­ning and teaching before we can even hope to suc­cess­fully apply them in
real life engi­nee­ring. Yes, the basics are nee­ded, but a little pro­ject let­ting
us use our skills wouldn’t go amiss; the extent of the course was the
abi­lity to pro­gram a func­tio­ning ven­ding machine or bur­glar alarm,
theo­re­ti­cally. Design ele­ments were mini­mal. If I want to go intro the world of
REAL elec­tro­nics; future tech­no­logy pro­ces­sors, etc…, I have to learn
about the ‘basics’ for such a sys­tem before I can start enjo­ying
how to rea­lise and improve con­cepts such as Hyper threa­ding. Com­pa­ring modern
com­pu­ter pro­ces­sors and a ven­ding machine is akin to black and white
pho­to­graphy ver­sus HDTV digi­tal film.

The one redee­ming module I have had this term, a module that
has kept me going and pre­ven­ted me from losing all faith in the degree I am
rea­ding, was “ULSI”. This stands for, ‘ultra large scale
inte­gra­tion’ and was a module on the science and engi­nee­ring behind micro
fabri­ca­tion and nano­tech­no­logy. It gave insight into busi­ness rela­tions bet­ween
research groups, Intel, IBM and the other large chip manu­fac­tu­rers, it told us
how they make such small devi­ces (tran­sis­tors), how much it costs to make them,
how they are sca­ling them and making them sma­ller, how they are con­sis­tently impro­ving
upon pre­vious designs and all the pro­blems they face in the pro­cess. It is
without a doubt the most inte­res­ting module so far and it is one run by the
PHYSICS depart­ment. The whole module was cut­ting edge, the lec­tu­rer was head of
a research team fron­ting deve­lop­ment for the tech­no­lo­gies of 2018 and the
intri­ca­cies, subt­le­ties and inge­nuity behind the whole pro­cess was astoun­ding. Some
of the areas cove­red inc­lude Short Chan­nel Effects (tran­sis­tor chan­nel lengths
sub mic­ro­me­ter), Source/Drain exten­sions and pro­blems in fabri­ca­tion, Quan­tum
Mecha­ni­cal Tun­ne­ling, oxide thick­nes­ses, mate­rial
alter­na­ti­ves and research, rai­sed source drains, sili­con futu­res, sili­con
lasers, inter­con­nects, epi­taxy, high k die­lec­trics,
che­mi­cal vapour depo­si­tion, che­mi­cal mecha­ni­cal polishing and more. I
posi­ti­vely loved it, des­pite the impos­sibly hard assign­ment ques­tions. The
level of know­ledge was far grea­ter than any of the engi­nee­ring modu­les and
rather than just being told things, we were told why things hap­pe­ned. Although
I guess that is the dif­fe­rence bet­ween engi­nee­ring and science, one tries to
unders­tand the other tries to apply.

In other, non course rela­ted news: My mum is get­ting married
soon and the date is approaching. I have been and bought my suit for the
occa­sion and I have desig­ned and prin­ted all the invi­tes (after much
deli­be­ra­tion and cons­tant edi­ting due to dis­sa­tis­fac­tion of the cus­to­mer, I
jest). I am also going to France soon, a nice little medie­val town north of w:st=“on”>Can­nes called class=SpellE>Mougins. I am tra­ve­lling with my girl­friend Sam and we took
fore­ver purcha­sing our flight tic­kets simply because the chea­pest were from class=GramE>an air­port miles away and we had to arrange trans­port to and
from. In the end we just went via Bri­tish Air­ways from Heath­row as, although it
was slightly more expen­sive than Easy­jet, it gave us
good departure/arrival times and was less hassle. I’ve got some other
news con­cer­ning back­yard police antics but that can form another post.

Im still sit­ting here bored in the
com­pu­ter room, I for­got to charge my iPod so I can’t
even lis­ten to music. ARGH! I might just skip the tuto­rial and go home. Maybe I’ll
buy a can of lilt. This room is unna­tu­rally hot, when
I did a tem­pe­ra­ture sen­sor expe­ri­ment in here it said it was 30C. Not really the
opti­mum wor­king temperature.

I’m still spen­ding my time pla­ying Halo 2 on Xbox
live, des­pite all the assho­les that swear and curse when they win or lose at
the end of a match. I’m get­ting a little bored with all the maps now and
fresh down­loa­da­ble con­tent is requi­red soon! That and the patch to stop all the
chea­ting, it’s a little ridi­cu­lous. Ame­ri­can mid terms and exams have
made it less fun as no one in my Something Awful clan is ever online, espe­cially
at the Bri­tish times that I play. So ins­tead I leave it on and wait for peo­ple
while sur­fing the net in my ever so lethar­gic man­ner. It was in doing this that
I noti­ced my fire­fox had stop­ped wor­king correctly; seve­ral
pages inc­lu­ding the BBC foot­ball page and the Bun​gie​.net stats page were
loa­ding wrong. I narro­wed the pro­blem down to a faulty grea­se­mon­key
exten­sion script but the only way of remo­ving such an error was to reins­tall
and rebuild my pro­file from scratch. Luc­kily I had bac­ked up all my book­marks,
saved data, form data and the like. Howe­ver it did take me into the early hours
of the mor­ning to have things back up and run­ning so smoothly (i.e. exten­sion
ins­talls, log­ging into everything again, etc… ).
I still love fire­fox though!

Not much more I can think of to tell you. Samantha has
finally finished her crazy bio­lo­gi­cal essays that I had to proof read. She’s
been worr­ying about them all term and been get­ting very
stres­sed over their com­ple­tion. So now she has a short gap before she can start
worr­ying about her exams.

One final thing to note, goo­gle
news has added the abi­lity to make the front page cus­to­mi­sa­ble – i.e. I
can inc­lude news alerts on xbox and class=SpellE>playstation, or local news. Lovely.
I love goo­gle too.

I recently read an inte­res­ting SH/SC topic over at Something Awful con­cer­ning help­ful pro­grams and neat win­dows hacks, etc… . Inci­den­tally, I now have some lovely and cus­to­mi­za­ble pro­grams on my desk­top that I am now going to share.

1. Rain­len­der — A pro­gram pro­vi­ding a fully func­tio­nal, skin-able calen­dar on your desk­top
2. Rain­me­ter — Made by “Rain” again, this pro­gram moni­tors your sys­tem and dis­plays out­puts on your desk­top. E.g. HDD space, memory, cpu tem­pe­ra­ture, weather, net stats
3. CClea­ner — “Crap Clea­ner”, cleans up mru lists, temp files and lots of unu­sed lef­to­vers from other pro­grams. Lots of peo­ple were repor­ting dele­tion upwards of 4Gb, per­so­nally it only dele­ted 250mb on my sys­tem, mainly fire­fox temp files.

Addi­tio­nally, something I have had for a long time and gra­dually added to:
I have some very cool quick search fire­fox book­marks I made myself, i.e. I type “what giraffe” and it will load the page corres­pon­ding to Giraf­fes on www​.ans​wers​.com. Simi­larly, “define giraffe” gives the goo­gle defi­ni­tion, “goo­gle giraffe” searches goo­gle, img — ima­ges, wiki — wiki­pe­dia, play — play​.com pro­duct search, amg — all­mu­sic guide, word — dic­tio­nary loo­kup, thes — the­sau­rus loo­kup. There are lots more but these are the ones I use most. Com­bine these fea­tu­res with my exten­sions: Gmail Email noti­fier, Adblock and exten­sive fil­ter list of all major ad pro­vi­ders, BlogThis right click exten­sion, Down­load Sort that auto­ma­ti­cally puts filety­pes in spe­ci­fied fol­ders without the anno­ying browse dia­lo­gue appea­ring all the time, Add Book­mark Here lets me quickly and easily orga­nise favou­ri­tes and finally Grea­se­mon­key that lets me edit any site howe­ver I choose using javasc­ript – i.e. all​mu​sic​.com no lon­ger has anno­ying javasc­ript links and ain​tit​cool​.com doesn’t have a shitty design. Oh I also have live RSS feed book­marks from the BBC and other news sources.