I shall fix that this weekend as well as posting a little article explaining the DIY below. It’s been written for ages but never finished properly.

Lastly if you’ve got a spare 5 minutes check out Sians website at:

http://www.sianhampton.co.uk

The villa we were staying in turned out to be the HR Manager of Hilton Hotels winter home, so was as you can imagine very big and very plush. We were about 25km outside of Angouleme in what you could call the South-but-not-very-South part of France, the temperatures still hit 45c though!

Disaster soon struck, in a moment of acting like a loon something bad happened.

The ceilings turned out to be lower than planned and I ended up on my back, bleeding everywhere and managed to get 3 stitches out of it. Luckily though the only downside was I couldn’t go in the Pool for a few days and a week later they were out.

Much fun was had on holiday and it was very sad to come back to England where the temperature was only about 25c (a heatwave apparantly) but with insane humidity which made it unbearable.

A week or so later my master plan sprang into action as alluded to in the previous post. A trip to B&Q gained a considerable amount of 18mm Plywood and 40×50mm Timber, Blue paint and some heavy duty bolts. With some great help from Sian and my Dad something marvellous started to take shape.

It’s the test piece for the final project and as it stands, its done but you’ll have to wait till the next update for the photo’s.

Lastly I finally got round to my birthday present from Sian, a Rally Taster Experience. All I can say is it was awesome! After a short briefing by a man with only 2 fingers on one of his hands, we had a lesson in a Mercedes E-Class on a Skid Pan. To those that don’t know what that is its a device with wheels that sits under the car and the instructor can adjust the height of those wheels to simulate understeer, oversteer or no grip. He whacked it on a highish setting and sent us round his test track against the clock.

A quick start controlling the massive induced wheelspin followed by a cone slalom, a sharp 180 turn then back down another slalom to a 90 degree sharp left and a long 270 degree right with plenty of space for huge powerslides. After that you had to hurtle down the straight towards a cone wall, slam on the brakes and lock them up, before releasing and avoiding the now very close clones. Another 180 turn followed with more slalom before reaching the finishing line. Managed to avoid a complete spin like some of the others and held a big slide as well as a nerve wracking bit of fish-tailing for 50m or so.

Here’s me going sideways round the cone slalom. To prove I am going sideways, the wheels of the skid car are going in the direction I’m going.

In the full size picture you can see the woman in the back half-laughing, half-screaming. The experience sessions are in groups of 5, so when one person is in the skid car, the rest of you are in the back watching, laughing and learning. Once the skid car session is done we wandered over to the rally car part. The weather hadn’t been kind so we couldn’t go on the off-road parts so we were on the backup tarmac stage, which is nowhere near simple or as easy as it sounds.

Very dusty strip of potholed road with a chicane of some sorts every 50m or so and a handbrake U-turn at each end. Two runs up and down it was what we had and certainly made the heart beat faster when you’re flying into a fast left-right-left chicane at 60mph with inches to spare at each side.

A fantastic present from a fantastic person.

Answers on a postcard please.

Over a year infact. Lots of things have changed in that year, I’ve finished University for one and as such thought I’d turn this back into a blog rather than a portfolio site. The site needs updating so thats what I’m doing tonight so expect things to be a bit iffy for a while.

In the mean time you can check out my portfolio site over at http://www.johncrewe.com

Enjoy

• National Three Peaks Challenge is a mountain endurance challenge in Great Britain in which participants attempt to climb the highest peaks of each of the island’s three countries. Whilst the challenge has no official rules ot time restrictions, many participants try and complete it within 24 hours, or more leisurely over a weekend, using motorised transport to travel between the mountains.

  The mountains climbed, in order of elevation, are Ben Nevis in Western Scotland (1344 m), Snowdon in North Wales (1085 m), and Scafell Pike in North-Western England (978 m). In all the challenge involves some 26 miles of ascent and descent, with total travel approaching 500 miles. The challenge is usually undertaken starting with Ben Nevis, the highest, and for many the most distant.

Just to re-iterate:

• Three Mountains
  
• Three Countries
  
• 24 hours
  

Vince, Lewis and Dave are doing this, with the driving done by myself in my mighty Clio. Its gonna be tough. We’re doing it for MacMillan Cancer Support and have a donations page setup here:

Click Here

So please give something, even if its only a quid.

There will of course be a photo journal to go with this extraordinary event when we return.

Thats 6 days on too. Whatever will happen next.

My Hard-Drive is however completely knacked. Turned it on after a Windows Update to be greeted by a Bluescreen of Death which appeared for only as long as it takes your brain to go “Hmm, something blue just flashed there” and then it rebooted. After video recording it and playing it back frame by frame on my iMac it was an “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME” error and off to the MS site I went.

All their fixes didn’t work, infact the next time I turned my PC on the Power Supply cut out very quickly and very loudly…..

...

Not good.

So blitzed down to PC World half an hour before it closed and nabbed an OEM Samsung 250Gb HDD and the only SATA cable in the entire store. Quite why I spent half an hour looking for this cable when I knew the old HDD one had one I could use and so did Uisdean. Never mind.

So two days later I’ve just about got everything back to where I was, minus all the data that was kicking around in My Documents and my own folder. Luckily everything important was on the other HDD.

Phew.

However I did get a BSOD this morning….it may not be over…

Having gotten rid of one “group” project we are now wading head first into the minefield that is the “Negotiated Group Project” whilst also having a intensive Online Publishing class. Their reasoning is its better to have 3 classes a week on it for 6 weeks than one for 13 weeks. In theory that works…

Anyway, nothing more to say yet. I’ve also enabled comments again, see if they work.

We went there the other day for a refreshing change from Tesco and all that we came away with was anger, hatred and a general desire never to go back to ASDA. Ever.

Where do we begin? Well for starters ASDA is a lot further away and the Car Park is on a slope and a completely random layout. Who builds supermarket car parks on slopes knowing full well what happens to trolleys full of shopping when left unattended?! Cue dented cars. So we finally get in to ASDA, well briefly anyway as we need to get cash but the cash machines are actually out the other side of the lobby. I wouldn’t mind this if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s nothing out the side of the building, no car parking spaces so you actually have to go out your way to get there or go through the entrance and out again. Genius.

Cashed up we set foot inside whilst being eyed up by the security guard keeping watch over the 6ft Mumble stuffed penguin in the lobby after apparent attempts at kidnap. Setting foot in unfamiliar territory we decide to just go from right to left and up and down each aisle. Off we go, but we have to go through a thoroughly useless electronics and homeware section before we get to the food. Yawn.

We then make our way down the food aisles till we reach the other end where we realise we actually haven’t found anything worth eating. We quickly spot what are actually the only saving graces for ASDA, two packets of Kit 4 Kat Chunky’s for £1 and the full selection of Frey Bentos pies. So we go down the other aisles which should be frozen food, which they were. But there was only about 3 of them and 1 was full of chips and frozen veg and the other was full of…nothing really.

The pizza selection was laughable. There must’ve been about 3 brands outside ASDA’s own and they were all over filled. We decided to risk the ASDA own brand (big mistake as they are actually inedible). The same can be said for the meat aisles although Uisdean did find a Peppered Rump Steak on offer, but he was feeling rather horrid the next day so that may have been the cause. My own steak was full of fat and gristle, not something I expected for the price.

All in all we walked away with various amounts of food last Tuesday, which we had pretty much eaten by yesterday and they weren’t even any good. The prices are more than Tesco, you get less anyway and the font on the labels is the worst ever. They have hardly any 2 for 1 offers either. Shocking.

It’s so out the way and utterly useless I doubt anyone would actually miss it if it disappeared overnight.

We went to Tesco today. It was much nicer despite the fact we bought absolute junk food to console ourselves.

So whats changed between the last update and now? Quite a lot! The Uni workload has gone from pathetically small to ridiculous. Last year I was in 2-3 half days a week at most with any homework being able to be done in 10 minutes or so. This year is much much different and there are some major grumblings going on. Here’s an example of my average week this semester:

• Monday: Elective, every week is a progress meeting so work has to be done. Next week is the deadline so have plenty of work for that (posted at bottom) and a presentation to do.


• Tuesday: Max’s Director lesson. Each week he sets a coding task to do for the next lesson, would be fine if every other lecturer didn’t set homework and I had no social life. Oh…we also have to design and create a 2D game from now till next year. Great


• Wednesday: Pembertons Theory lessons. A good laugh but group work is pure evil, everyone relies on everyone else to do something and most of the time nobody actually does anything. Unless you are Group 3 in which case, we do stuff.


• Thursday: Rogers XSI Lesson. Rigging and animation magic and then if we have time we all fight for his attention to help us with our own models for the assignments he has set us.


• Friday: Day off! Unless of course we have a Director Test and/or Academic Guidance sessions in which case we are back in.

So that leaves the Weekend to do on average 4 teachers homework/tests/assignments. What about the evenings? Don’t be silly thats drinking time. We get back, have a rest, cook dinner, eat it and its already 9pm. I also go run the climbing club twice a week so thats two evenings written off from homework time!

grumble

Anyway…

The assignments are now coming on thick and fast, five down, seven to go! Oh, thats only this semester, so thats to be done by February 19th. XSI is going quite well, done two models; a Koenigsegg CCX and a Communist Pig:

Now we are entering the nasty phase of rigging and enveloping them, anyone thats rigged a model knows the pain that lies ahead.

Everything else is going as best as can be done, I’ve got an idea for my 2D game but not sure if it will work or not, group game is coming along and is the best game ever (What can beat Pirates, Butlers, Priests, Guitar-Mice and demons in side your head? Nothing.)

[/rant]

So whats going on outside of Uni? The usual. Still climbing, or more accuratly teaching new people to climb. Treaser/VP of the Uni “unofficial” climbing club, I say unofficial as the SU won’t give us any money. Got about 4-8 regular new people this year which is fairly good. Went outdoors for a few climbs last week which was good, nice weather.

The weather here is abysmal at the moment, rain every day and for the past few days strong strong winds. Half the main street in Carlisle was closed as a building was nearly falling down in the wind. Shall be interesting driving home if the weather keeps up, I suspect it will snow instead.

Oh here’s those elective things, guess the Elective.