A desk is definitely required for productivity.

Since I’ve been back for Easter I’ve been working by sitting on the sofa, with the laptop in front of me. It was cool to start with; all comfortable and what not, but now it’s getting annoying not to mention painful. I think that’s mostly the reason my concentration has massively been waining more than usual.

There’s definitely a few things that a programmer needs, despite my thinking anyone could do it when I first started. A desk is one of them, with lots of space for my laptop, and a second monitor (lots and lots of screen space), and a notebook (I’m always doodling things that make no sense to most people, but really helps me program).

I can’t even call it “taking a break”, but I’ve given up on trying to work and decided to download Wrath of the Lich King. I’m not even sure if it’ll run on my 8MB shared memory for graphics, but we’ll see I suppose. I plan on deleting and uninstalling it after this month’s subscription dies out, which should be sometime soon.

Downloading it shouldn’t be a problem whilst at my mum’s either. She recently got her connection speed bumped up… I’ve never seen anything this fast before…

I wonder if this'll be constant...

Bored…

Looks like I won’t be going out tonight because the guys don’t wanna go to cocktail society :( I really wanted to! Never mind though, I really couldn’t afford it anyway. So, I’ve really nothing to do now.

I’ve been playing Warcraft, which I guess I can play s’more in a bit. And Starcraft, but I’m on a stupidly hard level (just ran out of gas).

I’m self learning Visual Basic too, but I’m stuck and have no one to ask for help. For instance, how do I dynamically create a label? I tried Diming a new one, but it just doesn’t appear… Also, I wanna make it connect to my database.

Update: turns out I needed to do Me.Controls.Add (myNewObject).

Still no WoW? :(

I’ve connected to the university library wireless and it’s incredibly fast. Down side is that they’ve either blocked WoW from being about to send information, or WoW’s down… I’m hoping it’s not the first option.

In other news, I’m thinking of getting an Eee PC. They’re tiny, and good enough for me to type during classes.

Isohunt and IRC don’t work either. Damn censorship.

WoW PTR servers are slow

I don't think it could get slower than this...

Ugh. They really need to put some money into upgrading their PTR servers. Even when playing there’s huge amounts of lag.

Never dressed for the occasion

The biggest problem stopping me finding full time employment at the moment isn’t finding work, that’s actually easy. There are stupid amounts of people hiring full time programmers, so I’m not too worried about that. Unfortunately, I can’t go for any of those positions, since I don’t have a suit to be interviewed in… So, when I get paid from by my previous client, I’ll spend that money on a suit.

Well, I’m excited.

I’m also excited about getting to 70. Shamess is currently 53, and I’ve gotten to that “ugh, do I really have to keep leveling you?” part of the game. I guess I’m a little bit bored of WoW for the moment. I’m sure if I have a break, I’ll be up for it again.

Great unexpectations

The exam today didn’t go as well as I expected… I didn’t do horribly, but not as well as I hoped when walking in. They decided to abandon the judicial creativity quest completely, which messed up our revision. We were told, and understandably so, that judicial creativity was a topic that always came up, 100% of the time. And it did since the beginning of this subject. Today though, they decided to miss it out… Instead, I had to do justice, and just make up a tonne of stuff. I’m more curious than worried about if I’ll have the grades to get into university now… I hope I will. If not, I have next year to reapply and maybe retake an A2 unit or something, part time.

In Warcraft news, I really wanted to do Deadmines tonight, with Ratio, but my connection is being so stupid.

I went to the job center today! I felt crappy going in, like I failed at life or something… I know there’s nothing wrong with using the service, but I don’t feel like it fills its purpose since both my dad and mum have been going since… well, ever. I was pleasently surprised though; there are tonnes of jobs all listed on a touch screen computer and you can print off the details and stuff. I even though programming, PHP and HTML jobs. I printed a bunch off and I’ll start working on those Monday. I’ll probably start this weekend, but I doubt I can do anything (like phoning them up and stuff) till Monday.

Apparently, I’m entitled to job seeker’s allowance, but I really don’t feel like I’m entitled to it. I mean, I am seeking, but I’ve not given the government any money at the moment, so I feel like I’d just be 100% selfishly using other people’s tax money to fund my non-productive lifestyle…

Underestimating exams again

It’s hours before an exam and I’m reading World of Warcraft pages… Thank goodness it’s an easy exam. Well, I think so anyway. It’s Law 6, where I just need to ramble about statutory interpretation and precedent, which I did awesome at last year, and I still know fairly well. The second and last question is on the Hart-Devlin debate, which I sort of know already. I just have to remember some cases; I’ll be shocked if I get less than a B on this.

Today has been productive

Don’t be fooled into believe that I love to tell you all what I’m doing every second of the day, I’m actually only here because World Of Warcraft is doing for maintenance. Why do they take off every realm at the same time? I thought I’d play my dwarf (PVP server) whilst my main is down, but that goes down too. Sucks. So now I’m here.

I still have the problems with graphics on both WoW and GW, with no idea what the problem is. I’ve updated drivers and everything. WoW support have told me to do a memory test, which could take hours so I might do it for when I got to bed. A small part of me wants the memory test to find an error, so I can get it fixed. But at the same time, I don’t want Toshiba to take him again…

I’ve actually done a lot of revision today. That makes me even less nervous. I was shocked to see that my first exam is Friday though… it’s a computing resit. I haven’t actually looked at it at all, to be honest… Tomorrow I shall though, and make sure that I understand all the terms in the specification. As all exams, you only need to learn what they want you to learn, even if it’s not relavant.

What else have I done today… Oh, I’ve started reading a C++ book, which my computing teacher lent me. It’s… huge. I got bored at first, where it’s teaching about variable types and stuff, which I already know. I’m reading it though, since I may miss something C++ specific that’ll confuse me later on in the book.

I suppose I’ll go to sleep now. Wake me up at 1100, when the server is back up.

Guild Wars is broken…

What. The. Frack.

Update: Apparently, my .dat file must have gotten corrupt, so I have to download all the images again… Got help from some unnofficial GW forum.

Update: That didn’t fix it. I just downloaded all the images again only to realise that the game works perfectly when not maximised in widescreen… I guess I file a ticket.

Here’s another image, from in game. Lion’s Arch.

Guild Wars not quiet working...

Here’re my options. These worked before Toshiba took niimo in.

Guild Wars options menu

Update: WoW is fucked too.

Pfft.

Surrounded by idiots

I’m currently on one of the computers at mum’s which is only slightly better than the ones at college; right click works!

Anyway, DHL came to drop off my laptop Friday, but no one was in the house. Then my sister forgot to bring the form they posted to my mum’s so I have to wait till Monday to even ask them to bring him again. I hope they don’t charge for that, or decide to get rid of him…

On an unrelated note: Ober got me playing World Of Warcraft. That wasn’t a very smart idea. I’ve played it for hours, and miss it already… Ober forbid me to buy it till I finish with my exams.