Rory Franklin

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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Best. Game. Ever.

I was recently introduced to the game Audio Surf (well, I actually found a link to it somewhere and read an article about it, forgot about it and then remembered it when being shown it the day before yesterday), that is kind of similar to Guitar Hero etc. in that you have to hit notes according to a songs tempo etc.

The difference with this is that it’s kind of like a racing game in that you have to avoid the gray blocks and hit the coloured blocks.

It also lets you play the game using any song on your computer (as long as it isn’t protected by DRM), as it analyzes the song to generate the track (kind of like a rollercoaster).

It is lots and lots of fun, especially with any dance, drum n bass, rock song!

So yesterday was the due date for my final year project (the BlueJ Java IDE GUI Builder extension). It was a stressful day to say the least with us handing it in right as the office was closing. I wasn’t particularly happy with that, as I was hoping to get it in a few hours before. But oh well, it’s in and now I just have to write an Individual Report and have an interview with some examiners regarding it.

On another note, I just want to point out how incredibly annoying it is that Grand Theft Auto IV comes out on April 29th, just a few days before my final exams start!

I guess I’ll have have to wait until May 23rd to buy it (that is the day after my last exam). Very annoying.

The title of this entry is somewhat misleading, but it does hold true in some respects. More and more services are appearing on the internet that allow you to publish information about yourself in some for or another. Whether it is information about what you are currently doing (Twitter) or photos you’ve taken (Flickr), user generated content is booming. Just look at how popular websites like YouTube are.

There are various other sites that allow you to publish information about yourself however, and they are slightly more interesting to me. It’s all well and good letting someone know that you are currently eating last nights leftover meal (Ok, so I may have told Nicola that I was eating reheated Dominos pizza earlier), but that doesn’t really tell me all that much. Seeing what people have been listening to recently and having music recommended to you based on your own personal music habits is something that is quite exciting.
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http://www.hypebeast.com/2008/03/carnegie-mellon-university-sneakerology-101

Why is this course not available over here?!???!?? I’m a bit of a sneaker freak… I own 6 different colourways of the same trainer style (Nike Dunk), one of which are a pair of Nike iD’s (you get to choose what colour each section is and add a personalised tag), and a pair of special edition Dunk SB’s (the Stussy Team Manager editions), along with another 5 or so pairs of trainers that I wear regularly. I’ll get some pictures up eventually.

I don’t know what it is about trainers, I just like being able to wear different colours and styles depending on the clothes that I am wearing. I tend to colour co-ordinate my trainers and t-shirts, bags, jackets - basically whatever I’m wearing!

Don’t judge me!