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…

Christmas Shopping is now complete! Looks like I’ve managed to spend almost identical amounts on people without even trying which is ace :oD

I also got all my BTO Bird Counts up to date. Been slacking for almost 2 months with that. :os

‘Now have a nasty sore throat, I think it was from all the rubbish I was burning today. I probably breathed in lots of toxic nasties *cough*

I wonder how many nights I’ll spend out this week… not sure I can cope with the same as last week, but having said that… I do have all of next week off work :oD

Well, not so much naughty as silly.

Bought myself a Canon EOS 300D last night. The one with the lens kit. Hopefully Canon will give me my £100 cashback. The EF lenses from my Canon EOS 600 should fit it too – yay! :oD

As soon as I get it I’m going back down the woods to find the Honey Buzzard and take decent pictures of him/her. I do love my Canon A70, but it’s total crap at long distance shots. Which is pretty much all I ever want to take (no, I’m not a stalker, I just have lots of cool wildlife near me… although not near enough).

I’m not sure I can really afford it, but figure I have a credit card… so… meh. :oD

Anyone know any good ways to befriend crows?

We have 2 pairs either side of our house and as we’ve been feeding them every day for years they’ll come get a slice of bread, but not until we’ve walked away.

I want them to eat bread from my lawn when I’m sat on the patio damnit!

I need to lure one closer to me too so I can get his picture. He has a few white feathers and looks really quite strange. He’s got a wifey & a nest right now so hopefully he’ll have a baby crow with his markings. :oD

I hate Christmas for one reason… food. I must’ve eaten more these past few of days than I do in a week. Mainly chocolates too. I swear Chocolate Oranges are addictive.

I’m more sniffly today and my throat hurts again. Hope I’m not going to get ill AGAIN. That would really suck. I only have a couple more days of my antibiotics left. My lungs sound like they’re full of liquid.

Oh well, tomorrow is the start of my last week off work for quite a while so I will start as I mean to go on. Eating some fruit and ending the Festive pigging out sessions.

These antibiotics have really cleared up my sinus infection so I’m not waking up with headaches before the rain anymore – yay!

Chris was dead chuffed with his Robot. He’s called him Dave and intends to scare the living crap out of his cat, Magic, when he gets home. Poor thing will pack his bags and leave!

Still no idea what’s happening for NYE, but I guess it’ll be the Rising again. I really should drink this year as the last few years of not drinking have been a nightmare.

The Hawk was in the garden earlier, eyeing up all the little finches and sparrows. Beautiful bird, but I don’t want it stalking in my garden! I must get a picture of it as it has no fear of humans whatsoever. I walked right outside past it before it flew away. If only the Crows would take a leaf out of the Hawk’s book. We only need to walk past the window and they’re off.

I’m off now to read all about Bonsai and make sure I can keep my little trees alive for as long as possible. The Lime should be OK cos it’s an outdoor tree… the Yew may need a bit more care and attention though.