Last Ray of Hope

My browser at work seemed to keep the background image, so for now I’ve removed the image from the website so it won’t be able to find it.

At the weekend I’ll see if I can find out whats causing it to appear.

Also at the moment I’m working on trying out some types of pagination for multi-page posts.

Just updated the site theme to v3.0.0, seems Wordpress doesn’t notify me when it goes out of date since I was using v1.0.8.

Text seems a lot more crisp in this one.

Today while browsing around the interwebs, I came by an archive of my old website, which was originally a Final Fantasy website.

But in my news posts from around that time, I was talking about a newer version of the battle system I had built into the custom made forums I had created since I couldn’t afford vBulletin. I named them dejaBoards, after a friend who had the alias Dejaina Rhea.

I had completely forgot I had wrote them, and the fact they made a lot of other forums hate LastRay since also being Final Fantasy forums, they couldn’t do it.

Though funny story about that, Final Fantasy Republic actually purchased the ability to look at the sourcecode for them back in the day they were making theirs. I think they also stole the idea of shops from me.

Hopefully at some point get around to re-uploading them to this site and reverse engineer the database I had setup for them. Then maybe even update them use java to get a better graphical version. They certainly need their queries cleaned up though.

Updated my Wordpress blog with the old entries from the archive.

A great end to 2009 and start to 2010, SNOW!

To think a short time ago, having a white Christmas was extremely unlikely, nowadays it seems to be every year. Thanks Global Warming :).

It started on the same night as the office Christmas party, and on my way home I literally got covered in snow to the point of becoming a walking snowman.

In January it snowed some more, creating a layer of ice which turned everywhere into what looked like a glacier. Apparently, they run out of grit too, which was unfortunate, because when they finally got some more to put down, it began to snow again.

Lots of great snowmen this year :).

Whilst home for Christmas, I found my LEGO model that I made years ago, though it was in a broken.

Strangely enough despite being years since I last worked on it, I was able to fix most of it.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough room in my bag to bring it back home with me, but hopefully I’ll be able to bring it back up in a few month.

Then I can take it apart and come up with instructions to make it, and maybe buy some new LEGO bricks to replace some of the flats I combined to make a brick when I ran out of pieces.

And the ultimate goal, is to maybe even build it in the LEGO MMO.

Having just upgraded my XBox 360 monitor to HD, I was now lacking a descent sound system to back it up with.

When watching films at a friends house, we have 5.1 surround sound, and I’m often noticing the sounds coming from different directions, which is something I’m not use to with only having 2.1.

So my requirements for speakers would be first to be 5.1, have a remote control for turning down at night, and to support optical for the better sound quality.

After a bit of searching, and dismissing a lot of speakers that come with DVD players, I came by the Logitech Z-5500 5.1 THX 500W Speakers.

And with luck, they were also available on Misco, which was surprising since I couldn’t find a speaker section on the website. Ordering them for Saturday delivery, they didn’t arrive, so on Monday I was going to book some holiday for Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, but they early and my neighbour signed them for me.

Opening the huge box, I found where most of my money went, the subwoofer. It has a hilarious notice with it, telling me to keep it two feet away from any other electronics, which after rearranging my room I was able to achieve.

The only downside was that I couldn’t use them til Tuesday, since despite paying £230, they didn’t give me an optical cable with it. Speaking of which, Maplin sells a gold plated optical cable… how does that even make sense?

Playing Borderlands later that night was a lot easier to know where enemies were shooting me from.

Two week ago I decided to finally get a new gaming monitor to replace the one I currently use.

Since I have the XBox 360 Elite, I decided to go with HD, and it eventually came down to two choices.

- 28″ HannsG HG281DJ
- 26″ Iiyama E2607WS-B1

The HannsG was £40 cheaper, but 2″  bigger, which made me suspicious about the quality of the image, but had a good review that also told me about Misco

But in the end I decided to go with it since Scan was out of stock on the Iiyama. The first order was screwed up, so I had to wait a few days for it to be sorted.

It finally arrived today, and I use it as my monitor at work for the rest of the day :D. Its amazing.

Tonight I managed to finish a so-called impossible jigsaw. I finally noticed the pattern with the pieces of the same shape.

Once the edge was finally formed, I began to put it together, only to discover one piece missing.

Well I suppose thats one way to guarantee no one can finished it.

Today, well more like last night, my hermit crab finally changed shells. Its been in the default one I bought it in for about 2 years, which is quite a long time now that I think about it.

I had a picture of it in its old shell but I can’t seem to find it.

I’ll post some code that I have been doing the past month. I’ve played around the evil uses for pointers again.

I’ve also upgraded my XCode to the new version, which caused some problems when moving from Mac OS X 10.5 libraries to Mac OS X 10.6, most of them just being deprecated functions.

I started this month out with a bit of baking.

It initially started out as a craving for some Australian Crunch and despite the fact I don’t like it, I used coconut in the base mixture.

The coconut actually seems to give Australian Crunch that bizarre taste that makes me find it addictive, and while my version has not reached the standard of the one I use to get in Sixth Form, it is one step closer.

My previous attempt had the base of the cake stuck to the tray despite greasing it first, so this time I tried baking paper, which helped a lot.

Before I used cornflakes as well, this time however I decided to use Crunchy Nut cornflakes, which didn’t seem to make that much of a difference, I think the other flavors probably masked the taste, though you could occasionally taste honey.

Ingredients

3oz Sugar
3oz Coconut
2oz Cornflakes
5oz Plain flour
2tbsp drinking chocolate
6oz Margarine
For the topping:
8oz Icing sugar
2tbsp Drinking chocolate

Directions

- Melt the margarine in a saucepan.
- Mix all dry ingredients together in a bowl (it’s better if you slightly crush the cornflakes first)
- Add melted margarine and mix well
- Grease a 7.5 inch square baking tin
- Turn mixture into tin and press down firmly
- Bake in the center of a pre-heated oven (Gas Mark 5, 190C) for 20-25 minutes, then leave to cool.
- Mix the icing sugar and drinking chocolate with a few drops of water to make a thick iced topping
- When completely cold spread the topping evenly over the top and place in the fridge to set.
- When set cut into even squares.

I used a recipe I found on the Jamie Oliver forums this time. Since links on forums are unreliable, the recipe displayed above is the same one.

The cake was an overall success with friends at work, went through two jars of it in half a day.

On the next page is the Millionaires Shortbread.