I have to admit that he was right, thus far. I’m listening to Rumours, an album by Fleetwood Mac. And it’s brilliant, to be frank. I’m really, really looking forward to the rest of the stuff he picked out if it’s all going to be of this calibre. My only complaint is that all of the songs have a fade-out at the end and as such the album feels a little disjointed.

In other news, it’s my last day at work tomorrow (will be today by the time I’ve finished typing out this post) and I can’t believe how quickly the past four weeks have flown past. It seems like no time until I’ll be back in the grind that is A-level education, although I’m looking forward to seeing everybody again.

Between now and then, I have some Computing coursework to do, some Maths (lots of Maths) that I want to learn and the bulk of my EPQ assignment to do. I still haven’t started that: Score one for procrastination. It really does bug me how much of my time gets wasted, but at least I have actually done something useful recently.

Tomorrow should bring ratings for a lot of my music, and hopefully also some progress on the Computing/Maths/EPQ front. Currently listening to The Chain – Fleetwood Mac. It’s a good song.

~ Godders.

Since breaking up for the summer, I’ve hardly been active on the social front. This weekend was spent coding and playing Halo 3, and I went to Matty B’s BBQ last week which has been my only contact with anybody I know outside work. Apart from bumping into a couple of friends who go to a different college and I’d not spoken to in ages on the bus home.

Unfortunately, buses aren’t the best place to have a catch-up session, especially when you’re only on said bus for 20 minutes. Alas. Anyways, you’ll be wondering what the purpose of this post is if it’s not web design.

Well, one of my closer friends has been ignoring me lately. And being ignored is a lot like passive whitespace on a web page for the following reasons:

• You can’t do jack to stop it being there, even the best designs will only minimise it.
• You don’t really want it to be there at all, you’d rather everything just fits.
• It’s main component is nothing. Just emptiness. And that sucks.
• It’s not useful like active whitespace – those points in conversations where the silence is useful, whether you’re just mulling things over or just happy in one another’s presence.

But hey, life goes on. Work is pretty good, though lack of a bass pedal for the Rock Band drum kit means everyone’s just been playing Fifa at lunch. I take the opportunity to check Facebook/forums and just generally chill out, because I suck at Fifa multiplayer haha.

So: the 50 Things update.
5. Start to learn Java.
This was fairly easy. I’ve only done the basics thus far but to be honest, picking up a new language once you know a couple isn’t too difficult. It’s mostly just about learning the syntax, and your IDE does a lot of that for you.

Am on track for 11, as long as I don’t miss one in the next week and a half.

16. Get my main PC connected to the internet.
And it is glorious. Oh how I missed having a quality computer to use.

22. Cook a meal without being asked.
I should have specified that this is for my family, not for myself. At any rate, I’ve done both: lots of crappy dinners for myself and a Vegetable Risotto for the family, which was yummy.

31 remains out of reach for the moment: am 920/1000 GS in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. 60 of the remaining points are easy to get but take a little tedium. The other 20 points could be gained in as quickly as a minute, but are for a damn-near-impossible level (Mile High Club, on Veteran difficuly. Ouch)

A tweet tomorrow and Wednesday will complete 38, thanks to the fact that they let me tweet while at work.

41. Forgive somebody.
While the injustice of what a certain someone did a while ago is evident, it’s in the past and it changed nothing. So who cares?

That makes 9/50, with a further 3 close to being done. Progress, if a tad slow for my liking. Oh, and I have ActionScript planned for this weekend. Fun times.

~ Godders.

1. I can’t code right now. This is quite a geeky thing to be annoyed at, but when I’m in a bad mood I find that coding lets me turn off the part of my brain that’s focusing on why life sucks and apply it to something useful. As it is, XNA’s website is down. Which means that my only current coding project is unusable – I’ve not got enough knowledge of using XNA’s tools to continue without the tutorials. At all.
2. A grand total of one person has actually initiated a conversation with me today outside of work. At the moment, there is only one person actually speaking to me and the conversation started less than thirty seconds ago – I can count the number of my friends that I’ve spoken to today on one hand. I’ve been sat here for ages with nobody to talk to and nothing to do. Never a good situation to be in.
3. My parents are trying to mess around with my sleep schedule. Again. I still wonder what part it is of them that refuses to face up to the fact that I have insomnia and it’s certainly not just going to go away overnight. I refuse to take sleeping pills, though nothing else seems to work.
4. I can’t play on the Xbox 360. Because it’s in my brother’s room, and he “needs to go to bed early”. He’s in there playing it now, he’s at home all day and when I get back at about quarter to six I can’t even get a go because he’s ‘hardly been on today’ (Bullshit, I say.)
5. One of my ‘best friends’ is in his house by himself, throwing parties every other day, and I’ve been invited to not one. Not even one on a weekend, after all he does know that I’ve got work. Well that’s just fine. After the way people seemed to have been too pissed to look after themselves, I’m not sure I’d want to be there anyway.

Those are the sources of my bad mood. A little vain, maybe, being annoyed because people aren’t paying much attention to me. But yes, this is a cry for conversation and social interaction. Because I feel so damn lonely, sat here with only my headphones talking to me.

~ Godders.

So yeah, I started a job today. Full-time temporary, for four weeks. Making websites / updating websites / styling websites… you get the idea. It’s quite good, I like the environment muchly – mostly because everyone that I’m directly working with is really geeky. It’s fantastic.

While I’m on the topic of work: I’m using a Mac (The dual-core G5, a tad outdated but still nice) and the more I use OS X, the more I come to realise that I really, really want a Mac. I’m thinking either 18th birthday or leaving for University present, and probably a MacBook(or MacBook Pro). The only thing is, I detest the Mighty Mouse and their shitty small keyboard with half the useful buttons missing.

Also, while at work today, I’ve been listening to lots of Prog Metal and remembering just why I love Progressive Music. Opeth, Porcupine Tree and Ayreon were the bands I listened to today: Opeth’s soft album, Damnation, is absolutely brilliant – Windowpane is one of the best songs I’ve heard in ages. More of the same tomorrow, I reckon. Maybe some Dream Theater thrown in there too.

Had a fantastic sandwich for lunch, from a café called Breads (in Huddersfield) – Roast Vegetables and Feta Cheese, with Sweet Chilli Sauce. I’m not normally a fan of Feta, but the combination of the veg and the sweet chilli with the sour cheese was just fantastic. The pricetag, however, wasn’t quite so great – £4.73 for a sandwich and a bottle of coke is a bit excessive. Payday’s not going to be until next Wednesday either, so I think that’ll have to be my culinary indulgence for the week haha. Still, it was good.

Downloading Visual Studio is pissing me off – the download (which is 3.3GB) has died on me twice thus far, at 56% and 77% respectively. Am about to set it going again, cross your fingers for me! And I may or may not have played a little of a certain online game this evening. Still, I’m not playing it now so we can safely say that I’m not addicted again… yet.

Also, England won the second test of the Ashes thanks to some inspired bowling by one Freddie Flintoff. He can’t claim anything like all of the credit – it is, after all, a team game – but he certainly contributed his share to the victory. I played some cricket yesterday, too, but I don’t have that much time to play a lot of it.

That’ll do for the moment, and I doubt I’ll have anything interesting to say tomorrow unless someone spontaneously combusts at work or something.

~ Godders.