Well after nearly giving up, as our ideas were either already in existence or just didn't really hold water, we actually made it to the UK Final! By we I mean the team I'm in, we are a team from the University of Hull! After not expecting to get through to the final at all, I am now really looking forward to going to Reading next Thursday/Friday! :)

We still have a lot to work to do, poster and presentation, so there goes my relaxing weekend! lol

Well back to work...

Well after we spent this weekend trying to think up some more ideas, our team came together today and discussed them!

The problem is that we systematically destroyed most of the ideas, well not quiet but we bounced ideas off of each other which mostly resulted in the idea being put in the 'maybe' pile (with no intention of taking it any further!). That is apart from one idea. we all generally saw potential in this idea and we each suggested ideas to extend it with new features. All was good, we took the idea to Rob Miles (our lecturer) who helped develop the idea and then suggested we google around abit to make sure our idea was original!

That's where the day went wrong. After googling for a while we found our idea and all its features already implemented and available for $25...
It was near identical to our idea and included the type of connectivity we had considered and everything, it also included some extra things we hadn't thought of!

So now we are back to square one, again, and have very little time remaining.

The setting up of THUPS (see title) has finally been completed, and this week we were ratified by the Union Council!!!

I began to think about setting up a Poker Society when I arrived at Hull University, around last September, since then I got together a group of friends who were also interested in the idea and set up a committee for the society! That all went well and was done in about October, we then started to recruit members to fill the 15 member minimum we needed in order to officially start the society, since then things just kinda didn't get done...

That was until last week when we heard that another group of people were planning on setting up a Poker Society, this made us realise that we should have really done this by now and so decided to go and do it the next day! Well that was last week and since then the proposal for The Hull University Poker Society (THUPS) has been considered and accepted by the Hull University Union Council. This now means that, subject to conditions, we can now function as a proper society (organise events etc).

Its amazing how the thought of someone beating you to doing something can really motivate you! It turns out the other 'group' was just a couple of people who had mentioned it in another block and who mentioned it to someone in our block, who in turn told us.

Well as I said a few posts ago my Xbox360 broke down on me just before its 2-month birthday (from when I bought it)!

Last Friday I finally sorted it out, packed it up and waited for it to be picked up by DHL and then today (about 4 days later) I got a nice new Xbox360!

Well I'm off to fire it up and see if all is well...

Today the MSP's at Hull university organised a programming competition which involved participants programming (in C#) Bots for Unreal Tournament!

The event was great and I believe fun was had by all, even those who didn't enter (as there was FREE pizza)!

As the title of this post says, my Bot (Roybott) came second by just 1 frag in the final! - The Winner's Bot was called Void, programmed by another first year on the same course as me.

I didn't personally take any photos of the event, but Rob Miles have posted some good coverage!
( http://thespoke.net/blogs/robmiles/archive/2006/02/08/937032.aspx )

I am now looking forward to other such events in the future, as I believe many other people now are!

Last night I turned my Xbox 360 on and got the dreaded 3 Red Lights (around the Ring of Light)!

This means that there is a hardware failure/fault, I tried all the advised steps from the Xbox.com website but had no luck! So this morning I phoned up customer service (who were actually very nice and helpful) to arrange a repair! My 360's coffin (courier box) will arrive within 72 hours and I should have a replacement or repaired console 5-7 days after that!

I am very disappointed that it never made it to its 2 month birthday which is on Thursday (Yeah I got a launch console!!!) but I guess its better than it breaking just after its 1 year birthday when I would have to have paid for a repair!

I may be in my first year, but already I have seen an opportunity for after I have my degree which I'm very interested in taking.
That is the JET scheme, a Japanese government program in which people from all over the world (who have degrees) get the opportunity to travel to Japan and become a teaching assistant in a Japanese school teaching English. You would live in Japan and work in, possibly, a couple of local schools helping with conversational English and other aspects of teaching English. While you are doing this you get paid a £20,000 salary, and have your flight out there and back paid for.

The reason this interested me so much was the fact that I have wanted to at least travel to (and hopefully live for a while in) Japan since I can remember. My fascination with the country is for a number of different reasons, one of the main is that fact that they are technologically advance and have the best selection of gadgets in the world! As well as this Japan is the heart of the games industry (well to a degree) and the birth place of (Japanese) Anime! This goes with my general interest in the Japanese culture and makes it one of my goals in life.

If you want to read more on the JET scheme then visit: http://www.jet-uk.org

For now I will need to concentrate on my degree but I will be keeping this in mind.

Well as you can tell its been 2 1/2 months since my last post, the reason?
Well to start with I just kept putting it off, not having a lot to write about and so forth, until eventually I kinda forgot about it. Not entirely, just to the point where I wasn't thinking of it anymore!

That was until today, when I got reminded about it 3 times. Firstly for some strange reason I remembered about Rob Miles' blog (a lecturer of mine) and so caught up on reading some of that. Later on in the day I had a lecture with Rob in which he mentioned the 'Imagine Cup' and then thirdly I received an email from MS saying about the 'Imagine Cup'! So after 3 subtle hints in one day I decided to bring my blog back to life and will now begin blogging for real (no, honestly this time I mean it)!

Right so to bring this up to date here's the last 2-3 months in a few summaries!

November, not a lot happened just general uni life and coursework!

December, on the 2nd my Xbox360 arrived... at home.... I'm at uni! This was because I had pre-ordered it before coming to uni and wasn't sure about changing it and getting it delivered here, plus the fact that I had exams starting on the 5th. So I left it and didn't get to play it until the week after (9th) when I returned home for Christmas!
Without a job over the Christmas holidays a lot of it just consisted of enjoying my free time and playing my Xbox360 (I have PDZ, COD2 and PGR3). Apart from that I finally got Half-Life 2 and started my coursework for one of my modules (the coursework is to create a multiplayer map in Half-Life 2, which is pretty cool!) All in all I had a good Christmas and a nice break from uni.

January, had a great new year and then returned to uni around the 8th!
On the 14th I signed for a house for next year from ClubEasy.com, I'm getting a 4 bedroomed house with Craig (from my course) and 2 friends from back home who will be first years at Hull Uni next year!

There we go this blog is now sort of up to date, well pretty much!

Last night (saturday night) was the Ghostbusters themed Halloween party at the Asylum (Hull's student night club), so for the last week or so me and a few friends had dedicated way too much time (and probably money) to making Ghostbusters costumes! However we were actually pretty pleased with the result:

I should explain that I (second from the left) went as Louis Tully (the geeky one who was a ghostbuster near the end of the second film), and thats why my hair is plastered to one side. You can probably guess the reason why I went as him when there was 4 of us.

This is another shot of us which shows our quality guns (which only cost 50p each, excluding the spray paint):

Although is was supposed to be a Ghostbusters themed halloween night, there was a distinct lack of any thing ghostbusters there (they didnt even play the Ghostbusters theme) and it seemed strange that only about 3-4 other people dressed as ghostbusters which made us think that everyone else knew somethign we didnt!

Over the last couple of week, since I started Uni here, Ive been considering setting up a Poker Society as there isn't currently one here!

I read somewhere that I first need 15 names before I could go forward with this idea, So this week I started asking around a few people mainly from my block. So far I have a list of 12 names and email address of people who would be interested in the society, which isnt a bad start! Tommorrow I intend to go into the union on one of my breaks and arrange a meeting with the society organiser (or who ever it is I need to talk to) to ask exactly what I need to do next.

I had a quick google around and found this site www.ukstudentpoker.com , which helps students setup and organise Poker Societies at different Uni's. Yesturday I emailed them and recieved a reply today with some useful info on the equipment I need and also on the legal side of the poker playing.

I will keep this posted with how the society is progressing, or not depending how things go, but for now I just need to find out what steps I need to do to get this thing moving!

This weekend has gone by pretty quick, I spent about all of saturday at the Hull ComSoc (computer society) FragFest! This was pretty much a LAN party incase you wasn't sure.

This was the first LAN party ive been to and mainly being a console (xbox but soon to be Xbox 360) gamer it was also the first time Ive really played an FPS on the PC. I took my laptop along as I didnt want to have to cart my PC and monitor down there, however after seeing this I realised that carrying my pc wouldnt have been that hard...

I really enjoyed the day as I got to play the much praised Counter Strike for the first time, which was really fun even if i did keep dying! I was told that the turn out of about 30 something people was an improvement on previous events, so that was good news as they now intend to do the event more often!

As for sunday, today I just caught up with typing some of my notes up. which was pretty much it!

Well so far my attempt to post in here at least once a week isnt going as well as it could do, but I aint going to give up yet!

Also I havent been able to put the image I uploaded into my gallery actually into my last blog post. (Hmm while just typing this I had an idea, so if you see the picture below then it worked and that is the picture of the GLC I took the other day at the Hull Uni Freshers Fest!)

So far Uni is going well we have actually started to do stuff, after the first few lectures were just introductory ones telling us what we will be doing!

As for C# we have only covered the basic so far and have yet to use the actual programming enviroment, we have been doing coding in notepad and compiling it via the VS .NET command prompt, but I think im picking it up well! Before this the only bit of programming I have done was using Visual Basic for my A-level course work, the language C# has some basic similarities (as in the iteration, selection statements etc) but all in all its alot more of a complex language which I think im going to enjoy learning!

I will say what I said before and hopefully stick to it a bit better this time, I will hopefully post in here at least once a week and I should have alittle more to write about soon as my course has really just started to get going!

I think a good place to start this is at the start of my Uni life...Well not exactly the very start as that was freshers week, which by the way was great!

I don't exactly have a lot to write at the moment as I have only just had my first day of lectures. These Lectures were an introduction to what we can expect to be doing in the coming semester, we also did a small exercise on writing instructions to perform a task. This task was to simply make a cup of tea, however after not going into too much detail we still somehow managed to get a page and a half of bullet points! This could have been a lot more had we gone into more detail about some of the steps. This made me realise that something like this will never be complete as each step could be broken down into more detail and made into 4 more steps.

That's all I have to write for now, I intend to write in this blog at least once a week and hopefully more (but we'll see how it goes!). Ill leave you now with a photo of the GLC (Goldie Lookin Chain) which I took on my Sony Ericsson K750i last night at the 'Freshers Fest', which was a music festival to end freshers week!

(Edit: I will put the pic on as soon as I figure out how...Im new to this blogging lark!)