Rory Franklin

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A friend of mine recently bought Rock Band for the Xbox 360. This game is absolutely fantastic. Fact.

It is a lot like Guitar Hero, except that it comes with a drum set and a microphone as well as a guitar. (I say comes with, you have to buy the intruments separately from the game) and the premise is that you start a band and go on tour, trying to get as many fans as possible (all the while making money from your gigs).

There is a reasonably robust character creation mode, although the one thing that annoys me about it is that (as far as I’m aware) you can’t use a character for more than one instrument (not at the same time, obviously, but between different band set ups). That is a minor inconvenience though, nothing major.

A while back, when I got my exam results, I went round to my friends house with a group of friends and we basically played Rock Band from about 10pm through till 3:30am. It was awesome! It was so much fun playing with everyone, and at one point we had 6 people playing at once. Two guitarists, a singer, and three people on the drums (one person using the left drumstick, another with the right drumstick and the third person using the foot pedal!).

My friend lent me the instruments and game while he was at Glastonbury festival so I’ve been trying to improve a little. I was absolutely terrible at the drums previously, and could play Bass on medium pretty confidently. I’m still absolutely terrible at the drums! But at least I can play through songs on Easy mode! I have trouble with the foot pedal and doing three things at once basically! I’ve become more confident playing Lead Guitar, but still struggle on some songs at Medium difficulty.

It’s safe to say that I’ve avoided the singing aspect of the game as I really can’t sing! It doesn’t help that I don’t know many of the words at all!

My degree classification was released on Friday 13th June (read into that as you will!), and I received a 2:2.

I was expecting to get this result as I needed to get a high mark this year to get a 2:1 (and a First would probably have been impossible) due to my poor second year at University. I had a really tough time during my second year and really disliked my course, leaving me with a very low average for the year. As the second year consists of 35% of my final classification (and my final year being worth 55% and my year in industry being worth 10%), I had caused myself a lot of problems to graduate with a higher classification.

The reason the title states that the exam results are sort of in is because my actual results (individual marks for modules) haven’t been released yet. They probably will be released on Friday, and then I’ll know how I did overall and how close I was to a 2:1.

I had my last exam on Friday just gone (23rd May) and am now a free man!

My exams were a bit of a mixed bag. The first one was ok apart from one question I messed up, the second one was really difficult. The third one went ok, but could have been better and the final one was difficult and I didn’t have enough time for it.

I also had to give a presentation (went really well) and do a Viva (was horrific!) during the exam period. So I’m glad it is all over now.

My housemates and myself are starting to leave University now. One of them left on Tuesday and another left today. I’m leaving tomorrow and the last two guys are leaving at some point next week. It’s strange because I’ve known these guys (and girl) for 4 years whilst at University, and one of the guys I have lived with for three years (and another I had lived with for 2 years).

So whats next for me? Well, I’m moving back home and beginning the job hunt. I’m going to try and find any job (if it is in IT then all the better) for the next year or so and apply for graduate schemes in the mean time. No more student loan for me! I’ll have to start paying that back soon I guess…

The weather has been absolutely stunning recently. It’s not often that the UK gets good weather, but that makes it extra special when we do!

Unfortunately, this recent bout of good weather has come smack in the middle of exam season. I’ve tried sitting outside revising in the sun, but there are too many distractions such as random noises (mostly 1st years having fun as their exams don’t start for a little while yet) and my notes being blown around (it’s not too windy, but there is a nice breeze).

Speaking of exams, so far I have had one exam. It was for Computer Security and Cryptography. The exam was probably the best exam we could have had (in terms of what topics came up), but I stupidly got myself confused between a transposition cipher and the Vigenere Cipher (Substitution) - meaning that I’ve lost about 10 marks out of 60. I was so annoyed with myself as I knew the answer completely, but just wrote about the wrong one!

I have a 15 minute presentation to give to some examiners on Monday that I have yet to prepare for. It should be alright though, and I’m planning on writing it tomorrow so I have most of tomorrow to prepare for it. After that I have an exam on Wednesday (Software Failure and Risk) that I am going to fail - it is a horrible module. I have two more exams on the 22nd and 23rd ("Human Computer Interaction" and "Concurrency Design and Practice" respectively) and then I am done… sort of. I have a Viva Voce as well, where I am interviewed about my final year project.

Now that my housemate Chole is back, I’ve been running again. I did a 5 1/2 mile run on Thursday and a 6 1/2 run this evening, so I’m back on track!

I also went and saw Be Kind Rewind on Friday. I thought it was quite good, and found lots of the sweded films to be very funny. Some of my friends were less than impressed, but some of that was due to the fact that they had not seen the original films that Jack Black and Mos Def recreated.

After 5 years I have decided to leave my role as Community Moderator at the InvisionFree and ZetaBoards service.

My reasons for doing so are simply that over the last year or so I have been committing less and less time and effort to my role and felt that I really no longer deserved to be in the position that I was. I had fallen out of touch with other staff members and more importantly I had fallen out of touch with the community itself.

I have many, many good memories of my time at InvisionFree and ZetaBoards and can honestly say that the staff there are a fantastic bunch of people who all put in a lot of time and effort to provide a fabulous free service.

I will still be hanging around the support boards, and will continue to take a keen interest in how the newest service, ZetaBoards, evolves. There is no way that after 5 years I could simply go cold turkey! Who knows, maybe I will become more active or maybe I will fade away.

The 10th studio album, Rising Down, by the Grammy-winning group The Roots was released on Monday (in the UK).

I’ve only had a chance to listen to it through a couple of times (I’ll explain further on in this post why), but I really like it and find the addition of many more guest appearances (from artists such as Malik B and Dice Raw [previously part of The Roots] as well as Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Common, Truck North, Wale and Chrisette Michele to name a few) to be quite refreshing as usually The Roots stray away from heavy use of guest appearances. Not that these appearances are carrying the record at all. They do in fact compliment the band rather well.

I’m a big fan of The Roots, and can’t wait for them to tour the UK again so I can see their new live show. I saw them twice last year (well, December 2006 and July 2007) and absolutely loved their live show. They are simply amazing live. Fact.
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I wasn’t entirely happy with my previous theme. It was alright, but felt a bit too rough and I really wanted to put something out that I was happier with.

So I have spent the last few evenings working on this theme and am much happier about it. There are still a few issues that need tweaking here and there, but on the whole I like it. I haven’t had a chance to test it in anything other than IE6 and Firefox though, so if anything looks broken please let me know!

I am having some issues with the side bar though. I want to change the "Recent Comments" section to have a » in front of each one, and the same for the "Nike+" section. The "Nike+" section seems quite tricky as the XML is causing a problem when putting in » as it is not a defined entity or something…

Any suggestions are welcomed!

I saw advertisements for the film Stardust last year and really wanted to go and see it, but unfortunately never had the opportunity. I even read Ben’s opinions of the film, which just made me want to see the film even more.

I finally got around to watching it the day before yesterday and absolutely loved it. So much, in fact, that I watched it again last night. I don’t remember the last time I did that with a film.

The film had humour, action, love, magic and I never found myself thinking that a particular scene was dragging on or unnecessary. I just thoroughly enjoyed it.

I would definitely recommend it, even if you aren’t a big fantasy fan. I found Robert De Niro’s character very good, and Ricky Gervais didn’t annoy me (which is a rarity!).

Last year, during my time working in industry (a year out as part of my University degree to work with a company doing something computing related - it was worth 10% of my final degree), I started running quite a lot.

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