Well, my buddy Paul will be en-route today ready for when we head of to Wacken in Germany. Wacken for those who are unfamilier is an annual metal festival, and highlights this year include Slayer, Dismember, Meleavolent Creation, Testement, Nile, Stratovarious, Primal Fear, Sinner, Kataklysm. There is gonna be a lot of metal over the next few days.

We head off tomorrow at 4.30pm and embark on a 22 hour journey on a coach. It sounds horrible but is prett fun as you are with a stack of other metallers and have metl being played on the bus. 🙂 Oh, and this is REAL metal, not Kerrang TV rubbish.

I set up my webcam today also, and I will get the image on here when I get back. I have been doing a load of writing today and listened to Cannibal Corpse, Exhumed and now Entombed. 🙂

Just got back from Karate. It was my first session wearing my Gi, and it certainly helps. 🙂

Next week is our 6th week and we qualify to start the grading process if the sensei allows us to. We will also get out yellow tip soon. 🙂

Spend today doing a stack of writing, and bought a new monitor. 🙂 It is a 17″ flat screen monitor. I originally wanted a flat panel but I looked at them all and they looked awefull, even the ones priced at over 400 nicker. I saw a phillips flat screen that look pretty good for £150 and it went down to £120 as they had none in stock and I took the display model. I don’t care…so long as it works and I have my 1 year warrenty. 🙂

Only a few more days and I head off to Wacken for mucho metal. 🙂
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Well, we got back from Bedford on saturday after visiting Sooz’s family; hence no updates to the site. I took SOCOM to play with her sisters boyfriend Jon and much fun was had. Got back laste on saturday and on sunday had a band practice with the guys – good practice and sweated a lot. 🙂

Well, today I have quite a lot of stuff to do – need to post some things off, go get a flat screen monitor for my new office and start on some work. I have set up the studio to be an office as well as a studio, so I can sit in there and work as well as listening to metal through my studio setup. I need a new monitor though as my eyes have got used to my laptop and not the shitty screen that I have in there.

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Well last nights LUG went off with a blast as usual. In fact, I think last night was the all time record fo dirty jokes being told. It was to say the least hilarious. I got in at 1.30am after dropping Aq, BamBam and Helen off and was in great need to point percy at the porcelein after knocking back five pints of coke. It was one of those drinking nights in the sense of drinking as much as you can just for the sake of it, and as I was not driving this was 5 pints of coke.

We had a decent discussion about template systems last night also. What sparked the conversation was when I was trumpeting smarty tags for PHP. Aq revelled in shouting this down and we chewed the fat and the pro’s can con’s of these systems. I do like smarty, but I am still yet to learn how to use it fully – what I have seen though is pretty cool.
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Been doing some PHP again today. Like most languages, it surprises me when something fairly obvious is in the language. Today I needed to create a key/pair config file and although I can read a file of this type in easily with parse_ini_file(), there is no function to write to the file. So, I have needed to stick the file in an array, change the relevant line and output to a file. All seems a bit pointless really. This kind of stuff was a given when I coded KDE stuff and I used KConfig to deal with config files.

Anyway, tonight is a LUG and looks like it is going to be a good turnout. I also heard from Dom today who is coming round for some food at the weekend. We will be taking a trip to the Mexican. 🙂
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Well, went over to Craigs and ate curry. Was a good night and had some fun. 🙂

Tonight I did some work on a PHP project and it is now early and I need sleep. LUG meet tomorrow. 🙂
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Well, today I got up and spoke to my bro. I added a few modules to our CVS and merged some changes to the repository. I plan on hacking some of this tonight.

We are off out today to see Craig – it was his birthday and curry must be eaten. I also have a few things to work out with some new work coming up, but I may be able to reveal that soon.

Karate was cool last night. New instructor is different but good. I got my Gi (karate uniform) and some video’s of Kancho Sullivan doing first kata and basic moves. I will be practicing these. I am now officially a white belt, as I actually have the belt. 🙂 I want to turn this belt yellow though, and not through not washing it.

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Got up to today and I have some initial things to get sorted before I get on with some work. I am planning on doing some research today and some PHP coding. I have so much email to send…I swear I spend more and more time on email every day.

We are going to see a new Karate instructor tonight. This is because we will be missing the thursday session due to visiting family. Its gonna be fun to see what the other instructor is like. 🙂
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Today has been a nice lazy day. Spent some time laying on the sofa with Sooz, watching TV, playing SOCOM and generally taking it easy.

Tonight I decided to write a short HOWTO on setting up smoothwall to work with SOCOM. It is in the writing section.

I took a look at a bug report for the charities register and have fixed the problem the data there. We now have our first entry in the register. Fingers crossed it should being to build up more as I get more people aware of it.

Well, tomorrow is a band practice and then a relaxing evening. I have a busy week coming up. Well, a busy 5 months is about to come up. 😉

Well, I got my grades today and as expected I got a 2:1. 🙂 I had figured out my grades before and I was pretty much expecting this. Looks like most people on our course are happy with the grades also. good news all round. 🙂

I also have a few other nuggets of news coming up soon, but I cant say too much now as they are in the planning stage.

Oh, and by the way, there is a bug with the Charities Register. If you have trouble, mail me at [email protected] and I can help out.