Super-Zero

Over my past few years as a student I have had the tolerance to put up with the network and computer services provided by my University. I’ll draw your attention to the word tolerance. The computers are severely out of date – I understand budgets don’t stretch to state of the art machines nor would I expect that, but Pentium 4′s with 512MB RAM? That coupled with the networking software which they run, plus windows XP and a suite of desktop adverts (Why this resource hog is necessary I have no idea) it doesn’t make for the most fun or even usable student computing experience.

Play.com sucked up my pre order. Didn’t arrive early or even on time. Please don’t preorder from them…go Woth Game. They fulfill their preorders really well.

Play can handle my return. I’m on my way to game where the special edition is £10 cheaper too.

I often find myself at a loss for things to do in work. To some people this might sound like an ideal situation but not for me. I tend to work in bursts and when I do work, I work hard. Thus I tend to finish up 2-3 hours of work in perhaps little over an hour. Then I have no work to do. However, admitting that I have no work to do is either inviting my hours to be cut (and thus pay) or alternatively inviting for more work than I can feasibly handle.

And so I come back to the question – what can I do with all the spare time. I browse the web, read interesting things, tweet etc, but oddly enough updating my blog or working on it is something which never really crosses my mind. And in fact its a great thing to do at work because I’m making all the right noises. After all typing continuously is a sign of working hard…right?

I mean I have development tools here and I have super fast web access – by rights I should be updating this way more often.

Anyway, I’m off to England for a week. Heading to see my girlfriend and go to Alton Towers! I’m having iPad urges and think I might end up returning with one, but well see how that turns out too. Additionally, since she will be at work a few days during the week, I really want to try and get some graphics started for this site. Hoping that I can finally make some progress!

Might try something cool with the free time I have…just an idea…

So as I sit in this well known coffee chain drinking one of their patented tea products (i assume) I am thinking about all the things I’d rather be doing today. Sure there are all the normal things such as sleeping late and playing games but I feel my life lacks adventure and fantasy.

‘But fantasy isn’t real’, I hear you scream. It should be.

Where is all this coming from? Well the E3 trailer for Final Fantasy XIV Online got me to thinking about how boring our lives really are. Sure there is cool tech to be had and interesting gossip in the office, but wheres the excitement and adventure? Where’s the risk, the epicness?

Chances are that its not really there for 95% of us. Times just aren’t as epic anymore. I’d like to believe in a time of dragons, magic and great evil to be overcome but like all things it probably is just a story passed down from generation to generation.

My tea’s gotten cold.

So, I have managed to inadvertently land myself with a lot of work to do over the summer…

Well I’ll be honest it’s my own doing really but it’s still going to take up quite a bit of my time. At least I get paid for it.

I guess that’s my way of saying the job is going well. They have taken my suggestions on board and decided that we should go on ahead with an overhaul of this, so you can see I have my work cut out for me.

I plan to turn it into this, but well see how it goes.

While I wouldn’t call myself a web developer I seem to be OK at designing things…however the problem arises when trying to code these ideas up, so I am going to be burying myself in books a fair bit this summer. On top of that I need to code up Super-Zero and one of my other projects too for a small independent group.

So yeah, fun summer ahead. However, if I do it right I should be able to do it all, and still have time to play Fallout 3 (which i have only now started playing and its awesome!) and some Red Dead Redemption, which I haven’t actually got yet but hoping to receive for my birthday which is on Wednesday. Plus the lots of gaming nights, movie making and other things we have in store for the summer (StarCraft II).

Which, speaking of, should be an awesome day. I have taken it off work. I have about 39 bottles of Coors Light in the Garage and have from now until Friday free…

Yes, It will be good.

During a recent gaming day I got into a heated debate about why my phone (HTC Desire) was better than my friends iPhone…Well it wasn’t much of a debate to be honest – he stated outright that the Desire was the better smartphone, however he admitted that one of the reasons he would still be holding onto his iPhone 3GS for ta while yet was an app called instapaper, which he used frequently on a daily basis.

Upon further discussion he explained to me that Instapaper allowed you to save a webpage quickly and easily for offline (or later online) viewing. This all works in conjunction with an Instapaper account – all your saved pages are synchronized to it allowing you to read your webpages offline on your phone while on the move, or online on your PC or Laptop. So it took me a while but I have finally found the answer for Android based phones.

InstaFetch Lite & PRO.

Although not officially developed by Instapaper, InstaFetch syncs with your Instapaper account and allows you quick and easy access to any pages you had saved already (handy when you upgrade or reset your phone) as well as a context menu item for the android browser that allows you to quickly and easily save your currently active website. A brilliant application for those of us that don’t want to listen in class, meetings or just can’t be bothered with squinting at small text while on the move.

The Lite version is free and comes with standard features including text size changes, auto-sync, notifications and the ability to create an Instapaper account quickly from within the App. The PRO version builds on this solid foundation by adding full-screen reading (without the top android bar), Night-mode (white text, black background) and other features such as folders for cataloging cool pages you come across.

One slight issue I have with the free version is that once you have read an article it is automatically deleted, but the PRO subscription is $5 for a year, which the developer has said will probably be free in a years time. $5 really isn’t that much and would buy that developer a well earned coffee, pint or other beverage of choice.

So there you have it. InstaFetch Lite and PRO! Making life on the move that little bit easier and on Android too!

NOTE TO SELF: Fix the post’s not liking right aligned pictures and text-wrapping.

So exam revision finally tried to start today. I have been snowed under with coursework for the past 2 weeks and as a reward to myself I took yesterday off to chill for one last time before the 4-week slog to the end of my exams. I have 1 1/2 weeks to revise 3 subjects, those being Solid State Devices (Microelectronics to the rest of the world), Computer Communications (Networking models + protocols) and Computer Architecture and Organisation (How processors work). This works out as about 3 days per subject. Which isn’t great considering this is course content from 22hours of classes per subject.

So, I have decided to really try and use the next 4 weeks to change my lifestyle – mainly my waking up time. Generally I tend to go to sleep late and wake early (as can be seen from the time of this blog post). But I am really going to try and invert this a bit. What I would ideally strive to do is change my waking time to about 6.30and my sleeping time to about 12. This would allow me to wake up, have breakfast and get all my affairs set in order before leaving for university or work, or just having some extra time before that days activity. This is especially useful with summer approaching as it stops me sleeping until midday.

I also plan to try and use some of this extra time to blog more. It’s sad looking down this website and thinking that I just paid £127 for a domain that was so barely used over the last two years. As I was (pretty much) forced to renew I am really determined to use the space. The extra time will let me think of some interesting things to talk about, and hopefully over the summer I will blog in the morning rather than late at night. Variety is the spice of life so I plan to try and use it.

I have decided to follow some pretty handy advice I found here and hope it works out. Some determination is required but I think that I will be able to do it. I really am trying to change my life a bit, and I feel that now, before my final year hits, is the time to do it. Attitudes, lifestyles and habits need changing and its time I got off my ass and sorted it.