Words can't describe..

No seriously, words just can't describe how happy I am right now. Just found out that our exam thats meant to be tomorrow morning has been cancelled and is getting rescheduled! I was so worried about it. Thank god. This also means I can get the hell on with the rest of my work tonight and have a day off with Tom tomorrow when he comes up. He was meant to be heading up as a 'awww, you've just had a horrible java exam, have a hug' kinda thing but now I just get to see him anyway. I'm sure you can actually tell how happy I am. Ahhh! :)


Anyway, this week as always has been jammed full of work. I kid, I kid. It's totally not been. I was really lazy last week and did absolutely no uni work and didn't care one bit about it until like Saturday. Was a nice wee break. But after that, I thought I was pretty screwed for this final exam because I was strruggling taking any information in. Instead of trying harder to revise, I did some work I'd find more interesting and cared more about. Terrible huh? But I'm getting on quite well with the Flash animation I've been making and had a little tutorial session today and my tutor was really chuffed with what I had so far and said I had already got a high pass and I've not even finished yet.

So the main reason why the exams been cancelled tomorrow is thanks to the lovely lovely snowy weather we've had. Thanks to it we had a snow day yesterday. Although, saying that, yesterday I thought I had an exam tomorrow so I was freaking out. Never thought I'd ever find myself disappointed to have a snow day.  Things have certainly changed. Regardless of disappointment we still managed to have some damn good fun! 

You guys might recognise Cassie, my flatmate. She's the one who got me into this whole blogging thing. I'm happy she did. Check her blog out if you haven't. There might be a bit of photo repetition though, we do do a lot of stuff together! 

Other than snow fun, I've not been doing much this week. I tell you one thing though, I've absolutely fallen in love with this song..

It's been used in the new John Lewis Christmas advert. I usually love their christmas adds but this year I was a bit disappointed, but it's definitely growing on me. I'm definitely a very loyal ex John Lewis worker, it's pathetic. But I love that bloody shop!


Now I've got my Student loan for the month, my aim is to get my christmas shopping done soon. One thing I need to do is find out about curlers. My mum's been wanting some for ages and I've got straighteners and curly hair so don't know a thing about curlers.. Anyone know about any that are about £30 and are perfect for fine hair?


Cass just came through to my room and showed me these guys, they are hilarious. Check them out.





SPAM day.


Over and out.
x

Bad start, good end..

So as the semester is coming to an end, that means exams and hand ins. Today we had a mock exam to prepare us for the actual one which is a week today. It went horribly badly as expected. It's on java and basically it's a multiple choice for half of it and the rest you need to correct coding errors and explain some theory behind things. Well I knew I'd done bad so that started my dar off with a bit of a downer, really wish it wasn't at 9am! I just got the results back and turns out I failed horrendously with a measly 29% but luckily it's not going towards anything and sort of gave me an idea of what to revise for next week..


So after that I decided some cheering up was in order! 


I went out shopping alone aiming on getting some things for my flat Secret Santa and failed miserably but just bought other stuff I'd been needing wanting for a while.. Was great fun. I also was going to treat myself to my first Gingerbread Latte of the season, so went up to Starbucks and saw my mate working behind the bar and he made me one for free! It made my day. To make it even better, I came home to find my Graze box sitting waiting for me! I LOVE graze. If you haven't heard of them before, they're a company that send you nibble boxes filled with small packets, perfect for shoving in your bag before uni or school, which all contain healthy snacks like nuts, dried fruit, olives and flapjacks! Got a great selection today, got some olives, some beautiful looking focaccia bread, some dried cranberried and raisins and some flapjacks! Can't wait to tuck into them. If you fancy getting into it, check out their website, it's http://www.graze.com/ and if you fancy signing up for a weekly delivery, which usually only costs £2.99, I've got a discount code you're very welcome to use! It's QDVW5FH3, and this code will get you a free box.

I bought a packet of these key covers coz we have 2 keys to get in our flat

and they are identical and it's so confusing, gave one to each

 of my flatmates (minus Finlay - he's too manly for that..) 

'Cause Finlay didn't take one, I got 2. The best ones too.

I feel the tache one is appropriate for this month after all!  

Nom nom. 

I used to work in John Lewis in Kitchenware and 

always wanted one of these while I worked there.. That

was 2 years ago, I finally got round to buying one today. 

I've heard so much about this brand of nail varnish so went

out and bought some, got a lovely colour called Purple Grey. I was 

silly and didn't take a photo of it with the polish on. Ignore the stuff 

I'm wearing in the photo.

Check out their stuff here.

I saw this in next and instantly fell in love. I've 

been wanting an alpine style cardi for a while but 

needed a new casual dress so was chuffed when I saw this. 

You can get it here.

Hopefully the final exam next week isn't as bad as todays.. Otherwise I'll be skint. 

I'm going to leave you with a video, I've had this song flying around my head all week! 

Over and out.

x

What A Cutie!

So during the week I sort of settled with the fact that I wouldn't see Tom for like 3 weeks till I have finished my hand ins and exams and all that. Then yesterday, he turned up on my doorstep unexpected with roses in hand! Was so cute.

Basically Tom is the worst person at keeping secrets and he kind of let it slip that that he had a surprise for me, he'd been mentioning buying me dinner and getting it sent over to my flat and I just assumed it was that and got all my work done so I could enjoy it.

Also, he's never bought me flowers before.. well not really anyway. He never had till a couple of months back and it was brought up and I started teasing him for it, so next time he was at the shop he came back with some flowers with a big reduced sticker on them! Was so funny. So thats what was so cute about it. Now they've got prime positon on my desk. They're lovely.

Been Pretty busy the rest of the week though. It's the final couple of weeks of the semester so the works hotting up. But this weekend I 'accidentally' went out instead of staying in to make sure I got work done on Saturday.. Whoops! I had great fun though and ended up doing absolutely NO work on Saturday and instead I bought Christmas presents and watched The Sopranos and the X Factor. How Productive. Sunday on the other hand was extremely productive. I got a lot of Photoshop work done, to be precise, I was on there from 12 till 8! I had square eyes by the end of the evening but it was worth it! If you're interested in seeing what I'm up to at uni check out this link to my uni Wordpress, it's only for one of my modules but I'm fair enjoying it. 

I can't wait till I've got passed the prospect of my Java exam. It's horrible. Tomorrow is the start of my final Java assignment for the semester, we need to code BattleShips. Fabulous. 

All I'm looking forward to right now is heading home for Christmas and earn myself some money! But the bummer is that I'm working on New Years Eve and 1st January, which sucks but as I will be working at Tom's work again, we've been put on the same shifts so we can spend it together and then party afterwards! We can have our own Hogmanay! God, it seems so early to be thinking about New Years, it's not even December.. needs to be done though. 

Anyone got any plans for Hogmanay and Christmas yet? I'm getting quite sneaky with my Christmas shopping, on Saturday I managed to buy 5 presents all in one go, can't wait till it's all done!!

Over and out.

x

Awesome stuff.

So today we had a lecture about visual communication and how posters and advertising puts forward different stories and meanings to different people. The whole lecture was pretty interesting and was mainly focussing on old advertising, mainly stuff used like a hundred years ago to get people to enroll in the army for war but he side tracked a bit and looked at different styles too and the whole subject really reminded me of an article I read a couple of months back and I re-looked it up and theres loads more information about it than there was a few months back.

The article I'm talking about is one about builders working in a London tube station, Notting Hill Gate station to be exact, who were working on modernising the station and stumbled across on a blocked off lift passageway which was full of vintage posters from the late 1950's. The passageway was closed off around 1959 and had been essentially forgotten about until this year. The discovery found loads of intact posters posters for various things, including a couple for old films like 'Around the World in 80 Days' and 'The Horse's Mouth', and even one for the 'Ideal Home Exhibition' which ran from 1908 all the way up to 2009, and I actually got to go to one of the last exhibitions in Glasgow, it was great fun. Theres also one that advertises 'Persodent toothpaste' too, it's ace, probably my favourite one, it's so colourful.

Obviously as no one has access to the posters I couldn't have taken these photo so the credit for any photos goes to Mikey Ashworth and London Underground, found on his Flickr where you can find the rest of the photos. Although, saying that, I really wish I could see them in person as I bet they are amazing.

Here is a link to the original article I read back in June.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286535/Notting-Hill-posters-1950s-artwork-Tube-station.html

Pretty cool huh?

Over and out.
x

Pfffttt!

So this weeks been a pretty bog standard week as always. One thing I do know - it's nearly Christmas! It's snuck up on me this year but the thing that broke it to me this year was seeing the Christmas Coca Cola van in Edinburgh covered in lights and people singing the christmas coke song and handing out wee cans of coke. Was pretty damn cool! 

Went home again this weekend, got back tonight at like half 10, and I'm pretty drained from it all. Don't get me wrong it was a good weekend at home but there was a lot of unnecessary stress from many different folk, mainly my mum! Went home on Friday and once again met my dad for an after work pint with tom and he whipped out a bunch of Tesco restaurant vouchers and handed them to me. So as a result, me and Tom had £60 free vouchers at either Pizza Express or Cafe Rouge. Obviously, we chose Cafe Rouge and just went straight along and had a lovely, and very yummy, dinner together and managed to spend no money. Winner! Then the next day, went shopping with my mum during the day to scope out a coat round town. It was a shockingly successful day and we found a dress within an hour but they didn't have my size, so ended up on a mad goose chase round town in all the Oasis stores round Edinburgh and Leith. But in the end it was in the last store and I got it. I'm SO happy with it. Also, Tom's mum knitted me a purple headband with a bow on it, it's so cute, and it actually fits my massive head! Doesn't exactly go with the khaki jacket but sod it! This ain't no fashion blog! 

Please excuse the bad hair and face, it's been a long day. 

Coat from Oasis (with additional 20% discount off at the mo!)

So after a lovely day with my mum shopping, I went to meet Tom and a couple of mates and the 4 of us went out and watched the 3D Boxing! Such a random thing to do, 2 couples after dinner and drinks, go to the pub and watch boxing together. Don't get me wrong, the 3D was cool, the best bit was seeing the crowd and seeing the depth between each row in the crowd.. but Boxing really ain't my cuppa tea! Or so I found out on Saturday. But that was a nice night, felt so grown up having an unintentional 'couples night'. Although the others spent a lot of the night telling me how young I was compared to them. (Which I was!) The downer on the weekend came today, we had plans to go see Tom's parents new house and catch up with them and the family but that never happened, I ended up having to babysit my gran round Costcos, (don't get me wrong, I love her, but Costcos is not a place for her to be!) and then went home to be bitched at by my mum because she is worried about Snail flu when she heads on holiday to Argentina on Tuesday! Yes, you read that correct, Snail Flu! Also, she was saying she just didn't want to go because she was too worried about other things. She wasn't too up for me taking her place though! Other than that, today wasn't too bad, just a bit silly. 

Also, earlier this week I had a complete fail of a day. In a lot of aspects too! It started by sleeping in, then by getting caught in the rain and then going to a stupid 5 hour class to then get dumped by our clients for our project while everyone else got to speak to folk. So as a group we were pretty redundant and got set a shit task of being 'the fly on the wall' and taking pervy photos of folk in our class talking to people with Aphasia and speaking about a, generally, very personal thing! So that was a bummer. As a result we don't have any research to use for the hand in for this week, but I'll leave the stress for when I come to it. So after this awful day in uni, we all left class as a flat and jumped in the lift up to the flat and then we got stuck and it started to drop! It was pretty traumatising or at least, it seemed so for Cassie who started panicing her little head off. But we got out, and had to fill some weird incident report form in. Worst thing was, we called the alarm folk in the lift and no one answered! Luckily the lift just dropped a bit further and let us out.

On the upside, I got to take away an iPad from that module to do 'research' with (..play games). Get to keep it for at least a couple of days too! Had it over the weekend at home, it was a welcome change to lugging my mac back and forth from trains. One thing I'd like to say about them though, is that no matter what a lot of people think, it's in no way a real replacement for a laptop! It wouldn't be able to do anything actually productive on it other than checking emails and maybe a bit of typing up. Or at least I don't think so anyway. But it's a bloody good thing to keep you amused on the train. I did get a lot of looks on the train, looking distinctly like a student but with an iPad. Can't be something you see very often. 

Anyway, I'm off to bed, class in 8 hours.. Sorry about the recent rants.

Over and out. 

x

Cameras ready, prepare the flash.

So as many of you guys know it's Movember this month, it's a campaign to raise awareness about cancers that affect me, all it involves is not shaving their top lip for the whole month! You can trim them, shape them and enjoy them and see how they can raise money for a great cause. To raise money, guys can make profiles on the Movember website to collect the money on, the profile could be a personal one or a group one. This cause is very close to my heart as couple of years back my dad was diagnosed with cancer, but he's all good now, so all's fine! But yeah, I'm all for Movember, if I could I'd grow one myself. A bunch of the guys on our course are taking part and they'd love your support if possible! It's great coming into class and seeing how they're getting on. Here's their Mo Group page! 

I was jealous of all the guys taking part so thought I'd grow a quick one myself! 

On another note, this weeks been pretty good. Sorry for the lacking in posting, been preoccupied by Java and heading home for a bit of a family booze up for my brother, Andy's, birthday. 

Boring uni chat will not last as long as it has been for the last few posts. It's getting ridiculous, whoever is reading this must be bored of java chat and bitching. Anyway, I'm getting a lot more used to the Java work, not saying I'm good at it but I can do it. I do have the blessing that my dad is a Java coder, so I got some lovely help with this weeks work, but then learnt it all twice 'cause I had to help Cass with some of it. So got it back today and got 78%, which is good enough. Good thing is that these weekly submissions of work add up to about 70% of my final grade for that module. Winner! 

Was back in Edinburgh over the weekend and didn't get back till this morning, it was great fun! Got to see a lot of folk I'd not seen in a while and also got to spend basically the whole weekend with Tom! Having not seen him for 2 whole weeks, I was so excited to see him. So accidentally got drunk with my dad on Friday. Was intending on just going for one drink with him! Hadn't really eaten before heading to Edinburgh, so it was inevitable. It was a nice old father daughter chat. Saturday was Andy's actual birthday but I ended up actually going back to my parents house to see him and he didn't even arrive till like 7 and then expected me to arrange his birthday drinks. But as I'm a sucker for a mission I did it. Was quite successful to our surprise, seeing as all his mates have finished their degrees and buggered off to all the corners of the globe. Was another ace night and I reckon I can say for him that he saw his 24th year in nicely. I must seem like a right alcoholic right now but I've not drank properly in ages, well before Halloween anyway. But on Sunday the family all got together for a fancy dinner along with Andy's new girlfriend, Anneka, and Tom so it was full of laughs. Andy was still in some nick from the night before so he was the brunt of all the jokes. 

About 2 weeks ago I managed to break both my necklace and my ring with in a day of each other. My necklace has broke before and it was a mission to get fixed but it's one I got for my 18th and I love it, so I had to get it fixed. So I luckily got that fixed but in Edinburgh so I couldn't have it for 2 weeks. My ring was my most prised possession ever, it was my mum's engagement ring and she never wore it as she got another one similar so she gave it to me a couple of years back. It's 30 years old, so we weren't too surprised when it broke but still, always rubbish. The diamond fell right out and I didn't even notice until the claws ripped my tights, luckily it broke while I was inside Tom's dad's car, and I found it before his dog managed to eat it. After a panic, I told my mum and she investigated about getting it fixed. After getting it looked at, we found out that 30 years of use means a lot of wear and tear, and they said that the diamond was being held in by only 2 claws. But it got fixed and I have them both back as you can see in the photo. The moral of the story is don't break beautiful things! 

Home again next weekend because my cousin, Claire, is coming back from Australia after a year, can't wait to hear her tales. Can't wait to travel more after uni, it's going to be amazing. Me and Tom are hoping to head on a big travel after I finish my degree, It's going to be ace. Getting jealous of everyone going away at the mo, but It'll happen soon enough!

Let the Mo be with you.

Over and out.

x

Happy November, time to sleep.

It's been a pretty busy week this week with prep for halloween, work for my computing module, avoiding said work and some other design work. I don't know where the weeks gone to be honest. But what I do know is that it ended in style! 

Halloween was such a riot. Pretty much everyone in the flat dressed up, minus Finlay coz he was hungover and had to get work done which was a shame, but everyone else was really up for it and put quite a lot of effort in. We looked like a weird wee troop. We had a mouse, a sailor, Dastan from Prince of Persia, a Twister board and a zombie. I've never dressed as anything scary for halloween before, never really put that much effort into halloween before, lazy bugger. This year was the year to buck the trend. I went as a scary ass looking Zombie. I started off just thinking I'll just shove on some fake blood and face paint and wear some grubby baggy jeans and that'd be that. I then thought I'd put a bit more effort into it. I then made the outfit so much better with some weird coloured contacts! I had a bit of a palava getting them but I finally sorted it out. I bought them on Thursday on The Body Jewellery Shop website and was expecting to receive them the next morning but thanks to a big bomb scare in an airport in England, which actually turned out to be a real bomb, my package was stuck on a plane somewhere in England until today. I managed to reorder them and get super fast delivery and got them the next day intime for Halloween. Bad thing is I ordered white ones and they send red ones! After some fretting that my outfit was ruined I embraced it and went with it. It's impressive how much better my outfit looked with them! So with them, some corpse coloured facepaint and some green and black eye shadow I made it work. Check it out. 

Pretty happy with it, this is my favourite photo. 

As Finlay wasn't going out he had the chance to capture some ace photos of the rest of us while we were getting ready to head out to the party. Everyone looked ace. 

I can safely say I feel broken and exhausted as a result of last night. It was well worth it though!

As for the other stuff I've done this week, well can't say they're very exciting. We have a project we need to design and prototype an app for either an iphone or ipad but the content has to use collections from the British Library. It's been coming along for a couple of weeks now and after last weeks horrible session in the studio with Ewan I really wanted to do what he asked me to do to prove that I could do what I was aiming for. So I prototyped the app in Flash. This involves making an animation of the app with each transition and button being used and showing what happens. Sort of like a demo for a buyer or something. It was basic graphics wise but it did what I was aiming for and impressed Ewan!! Winner. So I didn't waste my whole saturday night doing it all for nothing, I did it and managed to finish it leaving me worry free for halloween! As for the computing work, I handed it in on time and was pretty happy with it! Rod had been taking ages over the coding and coming across all kinds of problems so I was totally avoiding doing it all week and then I basically locked myself down in the labs with Cassie to get it done and managed to get it done in one night with a wee bit of help from some other computing students. Meant to have the results back for it today but turns out I didn't submit it properly so I guess it'll be tomorrow or the next day till I get it back..

I know one things for sure about this week. I didn't get nearly enough sleep. I need more. 

What did everyone go as for Halloween? Any tales? 

I'm going to leave you guys with a video to watch. It's a Pearl and the Puppets song and the video is basic but lovely. It consists of photo memories of her Pearl's and her fans all over the place. (You might also notice 2 near the end of me!) 

Pearl and the Puppets - I Say Yeah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VyO8BiT3tc

Over and out. 

x