Had a fairly good Christmas this year, loved the Christmas snow!

Below is a list of all the stuff I got!

Flying Fox	Dark Angels	Christmas #5	Rub-On Faces	Prep Bowls	Pinch Bowls
Spatula	Colander	Spatula	Modelling Kit	Wok
Cook Book	Measure Bowls	Kyphi Scrub	Kyphi Hands	Kyphi B Butter	Eyelets
Eyelets	Eyelets	Milka Daim	Milka Alpine	Mobile Hands

I also got some Hazelnut Cookies, Isabelle and a bottle of Prosecco from Hotel Chocolat. Gourmet Popping Corn in Midnight Blue, Autumn Haze and Fiery Amber. Some Hampton Art mini clear stamps for various occasions, and a box of mixed paper and cardstock from PaperMill

Un-shockingly I didn’t make it to 50k words this November for NaNoWriMo. I just had too many other things going on and after missing three day’s worth of writing due to going out and other commitments it felt more and more difficult to catch up. Eventually around the 20th I gave up. I got a little under 20k words written in the end though. Which was more than I thought possible. I’ll definitely have another bash next year

For some insane reason this year I signed up to do NaNoWriMo. For those who don’t know that is; National Novel Writing Month. The idea being you spend a month (30 days of November) writing a novel of at least 50,000 words. It’s not about having a polished, even readable novel on December 1st. It’s more about challenging yourself to write a lot in a short space of time to see what you end up with. There’s a big chance most of what you write will be utter rubbish, but there’s also the slight possibility that within the rubbish there may be a novel trying to escape. Once the big push is done you’ll be able to see if it’s worth pursuing. This approach means November is not the time for editing. It’s all about quantity, not quality!

I signed up a week ago and didn’t even think of a plot, characters, outline until 00:00 today. I was starting to worry it wasn’t the best approach, but I find planning this kind of thing extremely hard without starting to write so it was the only way for me. By 02:00 this morning I had 1,200 words written. I was amazed! Once I started it flowed pretty well. I’m not sure where my ideas are coming from, I really hope they’re not too influenced by a single film or book! One thing I really didn’t expect was to find myself writing Sci-Fi! I don’t even read Sci-Fi, what do I know about writing it?!

I’m on there as Hexy, I need people to bug me about it as I know it’ll be too easy to drift out of bothering otherwise!

Well the launch of Sky Player on XBL was a complete disaster! I logged in straight away on the day of launch and downloaded the app only to be greeted with various network errors whenever I tried to use it. I had a look on-line and there were hundreds of stories from people in the same situation. It turned out to be a problem at the Sky end, they massively underestimated how many people would be checking this out the minute it launched and as a result it took down all their servers!

The deal is this: If you’re already a Sky subscriber then whatever package you pay for you can stream for free as long as you have Multiroom or Broadband Unlimited. Current Sky subscribers can pay an additional £9.75 per month to stream for free if they don’t have either Multiroom or Broadband Unlimited. If you’re not a current Sky subscriber you can pay £15 per month to have access to the basic package. On top of this there are options to rent some programmes for £0.98 per programme. That seemed fairly reasonable to me, though I certainly wouldn’t want to pay for a series like that. It’s more suited to one off documentaries. Films would’ve been good, but maybe Microsoft thought it would be in direct competition with their revamped Zune HD Marketplace.

You don’t use MS points to buy any of the programmes either, you need to sign up for a SKY iD and create an on-line payment account. This links in to your 360 so you don’t have to sign in every time (although there is a security feature to enable that).

You can only use Sky Player on one console per account. It’s linked to the actual machine not your xbox account. I believe you can change this on the web-page for your Sky account if you need to (new console/replaced console, etc.) but I think that’s limited to one change per month.

Watching the sample channel now (Sky News) and even on High Quality I have to say it looks horrible Certainly nowhere near as crisp as Freeview. I’m also disappointed with the programmes I could purchase as PAYG. Hardly anything on Sky One at all. There were a couple of History documentaries that looked interesting, but they also looked quite old so would probably end up on freeview very soon if they hadn’t already. Not as impressed with this as I’d hoped, but in fairness it is the first time they’ve tried it and if they have the technical side working now maybe this will open the door for more. I would love to see a browser on the 360 (even Internet Explorer) just so more opportunities become available for us. iPlayer on the 360 would be great.

There are some voucher codes to make it a little cheaper to check out the features, these are the ones I know of:

One month free Sky Player Multiroom for Sky TV customers: XBOX1MONTHFREE

Three months Sky Player TV for the price of 2 for non-Sky TV customers: XBOX3FOR2

As above but from the Sky site: SKY3FOR2

I can’t believe it, I got on to another XBL Preview! Yay! This one is for the new Twitter/Facebook/LastFM apps and the new Zune HD Marketplace. I use Facebook, Twitter and LastFM quite a lot so this has been quite interesting for me to have a play around with.

I do like it so far, although there are some niggly bits. The social networking apps seem to be removed from the 360 experience itself which I think detracts from the point of them a little.

I did enjoy logging in to LastFM and listening to my music library there, although I have upnp media servers installed so could listen to my own music anyway. Nice that it scrobbles though.

Facebook looks like it’s had the most time spent on it. I think it works pretty well. As I’ve got my XBL account linked to my Facebook account now I’d have expected it to update when I got an achievement or at least have the option to do this. It doesn’t, although this is no big deal as I already have a Facebook app which does this.

Twitter isn’t all that useful for me at the moment, not because I don’t use it, I do. A lot. The 360 isn’t the best place to use it though as it has no browser so every time I saw a tweet with a link I had to use my netbook to look at it instead. It also doesn’t tie in with your XBL account so it won’t update when you get achievements (there are some services around which do this though).

I was really excited about the Zune HD marketplace as I’ve read that they’ve really improved streaming for people with less than great internet connections (that’d be me). Sadly there’s nothing there I want to watch. I’ve either seen them, got them, or I have no interest in the films available. Might’ve been nice to add a short free HD clip we could test with.

I couldn’t check out the Inside News feature as it’s US only.

The Facebook and LastFM apps benefit from being things you can just sign into and forget until you’re feeling lazy and want to use them (seeing Facebook photos on my big TV was pretty nice). The Twitter one falls down here because even if I decide to use it just to check tweets rather than post them, I can’t with about 80% of them because they contain links and photos. I also don’t like the way Twitter doesn’t automatically log you in. It remembers your details but sits waiting for you to press the login button. MS needs to add a browser. It’ll make all this stuff so much better. Twitter without a browser is so neutered.

After last year’s disaster with the Arts & Humanities course at the Open University, I decided to go back to what I know. This year I started my first Engineering course (T175). It’s much better suited to me. Computers and technology are what I know, already this course is a lot easier for me to get my head around. Some of it is a little too simple, I’m having to force myself to do the really basic work, but I’m hoping it will soon become a lot more interesting. Even if this particular course doesn’t, the Engineering degree as a whole will.

I had the first tutorial yesterday. I was dreading it as usual, but the fact that it was on a Saturday afternoon and at TVU was great. So much easier to to and from than the last ones! The people on my course seem nice and I was pleased everyone was as quiet as me when I arrived. Our tutor tried to get us to chat amongst ourselves quite a few times as she set up her computer and we all just sat there. Silent That’s the only tutorial we have on this course which made me quite happy! There is a day school in April but that’s only in Basingstoke so nothing drastic. This 30 point course is a lot less work than last year’s 60 pointer. I’m very confident this one won’t have me panicking too much about meeting deadlines.

My birthday was a pretty quiet affair this year. No-one could really afford to do much and I was still a bit ill with a cold I couldn’t shake. I met up with Claire and Tony at Zero Degrees (I know, not very original but they were meant to have a new menu!). When Nick and Rob arrived we headed for FOODS! It wasn’t until I got home I realised my weird pizza that was meant to have noodles on it was noodle-less. Hmmm that’s not fair! I think next time I’ll go back to the Goat’s Cheese one, I swear it’s the best pizza EVER!

C&T got me some more vinyl figures, I swear I need a display cabinet for all these cool little plastic beasts and N&R got me some chopsticks from their trip to Paris. They turned out to be the same kind I’d bought Claire a few years ago which wasn’t a problem for me as I’d very nearly not given Claire hers as I fell in love with their little faces Good timing too as I eat loads of stir fries and my chopsticks are getting old.

Paul & Chris joined us later at the Purtle and as if to prove how old I am, I went home early! I knew if I left before 22:00 I could get a train and then a lift home. After that and I’d have to pay out almost £30 for a taxi. Sod that! It was a good night spent discussing Venture Bros and films that make us cry. I do miss going out and having mad rants with people, it’s so unfair that no-one seems to be out any more. I can’t afford to go out on the off-chance I might bump into people now. Argh, I need a job! I need money! I want to have a social life again!

On the Friday afternoon I met up with Janine and saw Tim Minchin. Well I say ‘saw’, unless we jumped up and down we couldn’t actually see anything as they’d draped black fabric over the metal fencing. He was great as usual. Caught some of Streetlight Manifesto and then The Horrors, saw a little of the Deftones. Saw Florence and the Machine and she was brilliant, I was really impressed. Soulsavers were really good too. But the highlight of Friday was definitely Faith No More. For all the people who said having them play inside a tent was a stupid idea because it would be rammed… nuh-uh! I went to the loos in plenty of time before they were on stage (which were awesome, clean and I didn’t have to queue for them at all over the WHOLE weekend, a festival first!). The loos were right near the tent so when I came out I could see the tent was really empty with spaces at the front so I made the most of it! Stood at the barrier at the front left and waited for them to come on. WOW! They were amazing! Absolutely loved it, although it wasn’t right seeing a guitarist who wasn’t Big Jim. Maybe I should’ve stood on the right and blocked my view of him with a post so I could pretend it was him! It took ages to get out of the festival site that night, but at first I really didn’t care because I’d finally seen FnM! I was meant to go to their infamous Brixton Academy show in 1990 but for some reason didn’t go. I don’t think I could afford it at the time. A lot of my friends went and are visible on the You Fat Bastards video. I am still jealous!The queue for the taxis was immense. I’ve never seen it that huge. Ever. I’d got blisters on my feet on the way to the festival site from the station at 12:00 so by 00:30 they were killing me. I knew I had 2 large blisters on each heel that rubbed with every step. I’d had plasters on them but they’d rubbed off over the course of the day. It was the first time I hadn’t taken my chair to a festival either, thinking I’d just buy one in the arena. Except this year they decided not to sell ANY chairs in the arena. Madness! Not sitting down all day coupled with blisters made walking a slow nightmare. Queueing for a taxi for two and a half hours was bad enough… but spending that time with idiots shouting “Haha! You don’t know how to get to the station! It’s only 10 minutes walk you fucking morons!” made me get really, really angry. I KNOW HOW TO GET TO THE STATION! It would have taken me about three hours to get there considering I could only shuffle in agony and even if I got to the station, what then? No more trains that night. They really didn’t consider that not everyone was getting a cab into the town centre, I was getting a cab in the opposite direction! Eugh… RETARDS!

Saturday I got to sleep in a bit, first band I wanted to see was Eagles of Death Metal at 14:35. they rocked as usual. Always makes me feel good seeing them live, they seem so happy! Jesse dedicated a song to his little girl who was sat at the back of the stage in ear defenders on Dave Grohl’s knee. She went really shy and hid from the cameras. Bless! There was an hour of rushing around, bumping into people and getting food before the band of the day, Them Crooked Vultures! Although I’d heard of the collaboration, I didn’t know that was their name until Claire & Tony told me on the Thursday, along with the rumour that they would be playing. Sure enough a big X appeared in the field on google maps on the Friday \m/ They were in the same tent as FnM the previous night but it was a whole different story. We got there fairly early and already it was pretty rammed. We got in a little way so we could just about see the stage and the screens, then it got ridiculous. As the band came on stage huge waves of people forced into the tent. I got annoyed that there was hardly a sound for each member of the band until Dave Grohl walked on stage and they went insane. We even heard people express their confusion that he was drumming and not singing, “who the hell was the ginger bloke with the mic” *sigh* Then another wave of people barged in sending me flying and pushing Claire over into Tony. I had enough. I just shoulder barged my way out. I no longer cared if I annoyed anyone. I set up my chair outside and watched on the screen, it was a better view and I could sit down and eat at the same time. Claire & Tone joined me soon afterwards. They were the last band I need to see that day really so I spent the rest of the night walking about looking at stalls and checking out smaller bands in the little tents.

Got in on the Sunday late again, which was silly really as I knew I was going home really early that night and getting a lift home from outside the Orange campsite entrance. No traffic made it bliss and made me feel smug Got into the Dance tent for deadmau5 and he was amazing. Unfortunately I couldn’t see the stage or screen at first for the evilmau5 entrance, the tent was rammed. I’ve never known such a polite crowd though! I was at the edge of the tent and everyone who walked past me said excuse me and thank you. I was really impressed. After that I spent the day wandering about catching bits of bands and bumping into people again. I couldn’t believe I was leaving while Bloc Party were playing. It was about the earliest I’d left a festival since my ex started hassling me after I saw Butthole Surfers one year. I only saw that one band that year but as the day ticket was about £20 back then it wasn’t much a big deal! Oh how times have changed! I wandered around the camp-sites for a bit, bought some ear-rings (I always have to buy at least one thing from every festival as a souvenir) and wandered out for my lift.

It was an awesome festival this year and even though I didn’t see many full sets I caught performances by countless bands,  wandered an awful lot, met some great people and had a fantastic time. The new layout of the arena was really impressive. There was a HUGE space set aside for toilets, I’ve never seen so many! No queuing and there was always loo roll and soap! Amazing! They also had some tents a little closer together this year but had big metal fences between them which did a really good job of stopping the sound merging. Great work. I’d been dreading this festival as I had a real sense of foreboding but it turned out to be unfounded. Roll on next year!

It feels like forever since I updated, as is often the case, on the few occasions I have anything to blog about I’m too busy to actually write anything!

Sooo what have I been up to? Well I finished my OU course at last! It was an experience that’s for sure. I don’t think Arts & the Humanities are for me. I loved the chapters on Architecture but the OU doesn’t do any architecture specific courses. So from October I’ll be doing an Engineering degree instead. Annoyingly starting at Level 1 again, but it should be a lot easier and won’t be full of essays!

My PC went a bit screwy so I decided to rebuild it, but then decided it’s worth doing an upgrade so it’s actually still not in use. It does work, but I’ve not been using it because I don’t want to have to back up any new data from it again and also because I’ve been using… my sparkly new Samsung NC10.

Yeah, I finally bought myself a netbook. With the main PC playing up and my final OU course assessment looming it became more and more desirable. I mentioned to my Dad that I really wanted one and he ended up giving me half the cash! Then there was a code for 15% off as well I love it, it’s lots nicer than most of the other netbooks around which are either built like fisher price toys or have terrible battery life. I do take issue with the weird keyboard layout though. I’d have preferred the right shift key to be the bigger of the two and the back-slash key to be before the Z not after the forward-slash which just confuses me.

Being nice and small I’ll probably be taking it out and about with me when I’m likely to be sat bored somewhere for any length of time and thanks to yet another code on-line I now have a PAYG 3G dongle from Three which I only had to pay postage for. looking forward to testing that out. It’s also easily un-lockable so I don’t have to end up stuck using Three forever.

On the baking side of things I finally bit the bullet and bought myself some food colouring gels and some food glitter. The stuff is amazing! A little goes a long, long way and makes even really simple cakes look that little bit better

To go with the Engineering degree I’m getting back into coding. Well I say coding… I never feel very confident with it because I know so many people who are capable of such great things and I feel very insignificant, but hell, I know more than some people out there making websites so sod it! I’ve given myself some projects as the basis of my learning. I’ve created a little page to grab my current location from Google Latitude (updates via my Blackberry Bold), find the nearest weather forecast to me and display an image and text for the weather (I’ve added it to my start page). I ended up using PHP as it’s something I already knew and worked well with JSON (which is awesome isn’t it?!). Once I get it working exactly how I want I shall play around at porting it. I’ve looked at the GeoRuby things out there and they look pretty good. Rails is set up on my host already and I wanted a reason to try it out. To get myself ready for all this I went through my website and made sure all the pages are valid XHTML (strict) and valid CSS (up to v3.0).

So apart from baking, coding, wishing the heatwave would leave me alone, getting pre-storm migraines and playing about on the netbook I’ve been watching the baby Buzzards out back. There’s three that fledged a month or so ago and an unknown number of newer babies who only just fledged. They’re really cute and strangely cat-like! If only I had a camera lens long enough to take pictures of them…

A while ago I kept seeing codes popping up on Twitter. Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I clicked the link and found myself on the Graze website. Graze supply little (and they are quite small in all fairness) boxes of healthy snacks. You’re provided with information on how many of your 5-a-day the box counts towards and they choose what to send you with a rating system. You’re asked to go through everything they supply and rate it from ‘Never send me this’ through ‘Try’ to ‘Love it!’, so while it’s a bit of a lottery as long as you’ve rated everything you should only get munch that you like. The boxes themselves are eco friendly, being made from recycled materials and being fully recyclable too for good measure.

They cost £2.99 (inc. postage) so while that does seem a little pricey at first; if you had a box for lunch every day it wouldn’t be much different to buying a sandwich and a drink. It gets better though, on sign-up you get a code to share with your friends that will get you £1 off a box and that will get your friends 1 free box and another ½ price.

If you want to give Graze a go, try out a free box using my code when you sign up:

N1N4HB6A

You’ll get a free box of yummy, healthy foods and I’ll get £1 off my next one. Everyone’s happy!

As I am currently at home I’ve only asked for 1 box a week. Wednesdays are my “days of graze“. They’ve just e-mailed me to say tomorrow I’ll be getting a box with white grapes, Japanese rice crackers and dried raspberries. Yum!

If you’re going on holiday or don’t have the cash it’s easy to push back the next delivery too. So far the food has been excellent, I’m quite picky about grapes and pineapple but the ones from Graze have been very tasty and clearly very fresh. I highly recommend trying them out