Busy times

I really should get round to writing here more often!

Spent quite a lot of last night writing up a summative essay for Intro. to Management, a lot of bullshit went into it though! I’m currently procrastinating instead of walking the 40 minute round trip to hand it in. Really can’t be bothered!

48 hour production in college this weekend – and all the PA Committee ‘freshers’ are involved, I’ve just had an email saying I’m doing all the mixing for the band – joy of joys! Should be a fun weekend anyway, can see me being drunk for the majority of it though!

Also been told I’m ringing in another quarter with DUSCR next week, I think I’ve scored more this term than I’d done in the 8 years before uni!

Peace out…

Half-Fire-Life-Drill

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7867861.stm

Found that on the BBC website this morning – looks like a fantastic use of my departments research team! Maybe just an excuse for them to play Source games all day?!!

Basically, the team (headed by Dr Shamus Smith) took the Half-Life engine, added a map representing the CompSci department, and then used it to run a simulation about escaping from a fire in the building. Sounds like a good idea, in theory!

Found this very interesting:

"If a door was on fire, they [gamers] would try and run through it, rather than look for a different exit," said Dr Smith

I’d like to think that I’d go for a different exit anyway… or are all gamers retarded in that way? Hope they wouldn’t try a similar strategy in real life!

Really didn’t like how the university covered this though (http://www.dur.ac.uk/news/newsitem/?itemno=7525). Sure Half-Life is violent, but simulations have been around for ages!

FSX gone?

http://www.flightsimx.co.uk/announcements/microsoft-flight-simulator-development-team-axed/

Sad day for the Flight Simulation world :-(

Gambling

http://tinyurl.com/89fhcb

If we’re honest – the one word Obama is guaranteed to say in his speech is ‘change’. Here’s my plan.

Betsson.com are offering odds of 1.03-to-1 on him saying it. Somehow, I manage to get a short term loan for a few thousand pounds. Bet this, pay off the loan straight away, walk away with the 3% (minus loan interest). Betting small amounts wouldn’t be worth it, but £1m equals £30k profit!

Anyone got a spare few million that I can borrow for a week?

Nuevasync update

Just been released! Provides support for multiple calendars on the phone (so they appear in different colours) and also for read-only ICAL files.

Well, that's just put gCalCloud out of business! I shall be shelving the project tomorrow, but will post the source code for people to have a look at just how crap it was! Hehe

Anyway, cheers Nuevasync, you just saved me a project!

iBlogger

As part of my resolution to get using this blog some more, thought I'd invest in iBlogger - a iPhone application that's actually quite professional! It's on sale at the moment, down from £4.99 to £0.59 - well worth it!

Anyway, think it's time I slept!

New website

You are probably viewing this having come from my brand new website – http://www.mattdyson.uni.cc – if not, go there now!

Some people may remember the site from times of old, many years ago when it had a crummy layout, crummy code and crummy content. The content is arguably still crummy, but I think I’ve improved on the other two!

I hope to integrate this blog into the site more (the wonders of XML and PHP :-P) in the near future, rather than running two separate sites, however I will continue to use Blogger as an extremely able blogging platform!