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!

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

Now, the reason I haven’t had a chance to listen to the album too much is because on Tuesday, Grand Theft Auto IV was released. I’ve been a big fan of the GTA games since GTA 3 was released. I had played the original two GTA games casually, but GTA 3 was a really standout game. GTA IV is the next major iteration of the GTA series (Vice City and San Andreas were more like expansion packs for GTA 3), moving to the next-gen consoles (well, they are now current-gen, although the Wii and PS2 have a huge install base and following).

The game is fantastic. The storyline so far is great, with the acting being top notch. All the humour is still there and I constantly find myself laughing about comments here and there, both in the cinematic scenes and just by what people say on the streets or comments on the radio. The game has a huge amount of tiny details that make the game so good, and it looks stunning considering the size and detail found within Liberty City [a GTA version of New York].

Unfortunately, my exams are starting next week, so rather than play the game all day and just generally become a hermit only seeing the light of day for food and other necessities, I’m having to limit myself to playing in the evenings when I’m all revised out!

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 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!).

It all started when one of my fellow industrial placements sent an email around asking if anyone wanted to take part in an event called Hellrunner - a 10-12 mile trail run on an Army base. As the company we worked for were preparing to launch a drug helping people with Type-2 Diabetes (the company I worked for was a pharmaceutical company), those who were taking part in the event would be raising money for Diabetes UK.

Having not done much exercise since school (and even then, that was limited to playing football one afternoon a week) I was a wee bit apprehensive about taking part. I decided I would though, as it was a great motivation to get fit, it was a way to get to know more people within the company and it was for a good cause.

Hellrunner came and went, and was much fun (if not lots of pain!) and a few of us decided that we wanted to take part in a few more events. So following Hellrunner some of us signed up and tool part in the Reading and Watford Half Marathons. Some of us also took part in the UK Corporate Games, representing our company in the running events (other friends of ours competed in different events such as football and go karting).

Having finished my year in industry I’ll admit that I have struggled to keep up with my running. It was much easier training when I was working, as I would be in the office 8-4, come back home and go for a run. This gave me plenty of time to do whatever I wanted to in the evenings. At University, things are different. My schedule was quite scattered and I generally had work to do in the evenings along with general socializing.

A few of my housemates from last year went and bought the Nike+ running accessory for their iPod’s, and although I don’t like running with music (my headphones block out a lot of sound and as I run in the evenings, during the winter months this is quite dangerous), I decided to purchase the adapter. It only cost £20, and I don’t actually need to run with music to benefit from using it. (The adapter can change your music to encourage you to increase your pace etc.).

The Nike+ website tracks all your stats such as distance, time and calories burned. There is also a large community aspect of the website allowing you to enter challenges with friends or with other Nike+ runners that you may not know. I’m currently in two challenges, both of which are “Who can run the most miles in 2 months”. It really makes you push yourself and ensure you actually go for a run as you are competing against people.

After some fiddling around I managed to get a plug in working for my blog that displays some of my stats [look on the sidebar]. Ideally I’d like to get the stats that display recent runs as well as total mileage etc. but I haven’t figured out where I can access that. I stumbled across the plug in here and after a little trouble setting it up (it requires PHP 5, and I was running PHP 4) I got it working.

Next challenges for me? I’ve just signed up for the 2009 London Marathon, so fingers crossed I get a place. I’m also looking at doing the Great North and Great South runs, as well as this years Hellrunner (down South). If anyone has any suggestions for good events to take part in (or could get me a place on the New York Marathon!) then let me know!

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!