It’s been a while since I updated my blog, I’ve been busy with university - coming to the end of the first semester. I’m studying Computing Science: Web Development, a four year course (including a years work placement in the third year). I’m living in halls at Staffordshire University, the Stafford campus. I have a small room, restricted internet usage, but apart from that its a nice place!
I’ve been keeping busy, during freshers week I met the most amazing girl in the world, Tasha. We met at one of the union organised events, Tony Lee’s XXX hypnotist comedy night.
We’ve been ice-skating, the first time since going with my secondary school!
Spent a weekend in Portsmouth with Tasha’s best friend, Shona. Went out on the Saturday night to a comedy night/club. The next morning we took a day trip to London, traveling on the train.
A few weeks back we went to see Pendulum performing live in Birmingham, a totally different experience to when I saw them with Nick in May. Definitely worth it.
I checked the UCAS Track site after being tipped off by Nick, so I knew before collecting my results that Staffordshire University had accepted me. Wolverhampton, my insurance university also gave me an unconditional offer.
Collected the results from SSFC just before midday, in no particular order:
- Business Studies: C
- ICT: C
- Sociology: C
I’m pretty happy with my results! 
I spent four days at Staffordshire University on their Step Ahead summer school pilot, it laid to rest some of my fears about going off to university, but it also made me realise how much I really do want to go, getting the results today has taken a weight off my mind!
Finished my last exam this morning, we get the results on Thursday 16th of August 
I need two Ds and a C (or the equivalent combinations) to get into Staffordshire Universities Internet Technology course I’ve applied for. Hopefully, regardless of my total lack of revision in some subjects I will be able to achieve this!
On another note, It didn’t really deserve a post of its own, I bought an MP3 player a couple of weeks ago, originally I chose a Philips, but Amazon’s estimated delivery time put me off, so I cancelled and ordered the SanDisk Sansa instead.
It’s only the 2 GB model but I’ve bumped it up to 3 using the microSD slot and the card I bought for my phone a while back… but never used as it only worked intermittently. The Sansa is much smaller than my PDA so hopefully I’ll use it more often.
This is the second time Microsoft’s advertising has impressed me recently, a few weeks ago I had fun with their “Certified for Windows Vista” campaign site. In particular the staring competition against “the coach” which uses your webcam to detect when you blink (or basically any movement!). Nick dugg the site, it’s well worth a look if you’ve got a webcam.
I wouldn’t have ordinarily noticed this, but earlier today I opened Internet Explorer (*shudders*) and waited for the MSN homepage to load, I thought they’d done a fancy redesign at first; however it’s just an interactive (in a way) advertisement for Office 2007 – for today only.
They’ve placed the standard MSN page inside a Word document, and by using the Ribbon and Office’s live preview feature you can make a few changes to the styling of the page.
cPanel was updated to version 11 last night, there are a number of new features, so go check it out!
I used to run RvSkin on top of cPanel as I believed it improved the user experience, however I’m impressed with the new x3 interface, so for the foreseeable future I’ve set all PWnet hosting accounts to the default cPanel theme.
