The construction of the new site is coming along quite well. There’s still a lot of visual tweaking to do but its basically functionally complete. The most tedious job of migrating all the old news is finished as well (excluding comments). It’s worth noting that it’s been constructed in pure XHTML and CSS and has the cool feature of RSS syndication π
From May 2004
Holiday(ish)
Had a fairly leisurely day today, been working on a few projects which I’d been putting off till after the exams so its been nice doing something which doesn’t involve trying to cram textbooks into my head for a change!
As the current randomwire site isn’t very flexible I’ve decided to give it an overhaul with a completely new back-end (probably based on WordPress) and probably a completely new front-end look. There’s nothing inherently wrong with what there is at the moment but its all basically a bit of a mish-mash of different components and I want something a little more powerful. I don’t plan on rolling out anything too quickly but watch this space!
The Princess Blade
As promised here’s my first review of many to come over the next week or so. I’m starting off today with a fairly recent film straight from Japan – land of the ΓΖΒΌber cool and the downright weird!
Shurayuki-Hime aka “The Princess Blade” – 7/10
As you might have guessed from the title this film involves a ‘princess’ and a LOT of samurai swords. Basically its a story of revenge and disaffection about a girl who discovers things about her past which turn her against the people she lived and worked with – a band of assassins!
Turning her back on them isn’t as simple as it might seem and she is soon being hunted down. Whilst on the run she bumps into a man and his traumatised sister who have a complex background of their own. From here on in things get pretty messy and the story doesn’t turn out quite how you would imagine.
Set in an alternate future ‘The Princess Blade’ is a reasonably good film with plenty of action and fight sequences with splashes of emotional dis-abandonment to appeal to anyone. The cinematography is especially pleasing to the eye with some really unique camera angles and a bit of slow-mo matrix style wire-fu.
The girl herself (Yuki) is played especially well by Yumiko Shaku who comes across as a strong willed individual but with a troubled conscience. Her nemesis (Takashi) played by Hideaki Ito is plain evil with a relentless violent streak and a penchant for anoraks (!!).
If you are into Japanese cinema and fast-paced action then this should definitely be on your to-watch list (even if it is just for the cool sword fight sequences!).
I’m back!
Finally the exams are over! OK, so I’ve only had two weeks of them but believe me its enough! As to how they went, the less said about that the better – put it this way, its going to be close, very close. This morning I had the pleasure of sitting the “Functional Programming & Artificial Intelligence” paper, probably the most tricky out of all of them but not as bad as I was originally expecting. Fingers crossed it will be OK but I’m having nightmares about re-sits in August already!
Now I have a bit more free time (in fact a lot of it) I’ll be getting back to film reviews and a few other bits and pieces. I plan to update every day for at least the next week so make sure you visit often!
P.s. Also watch out for the unstoppable Red Ted who may be making a come back soon π
News Update
Sorry for the lack of updates recently but with exams looming in just under a week time has become a little tight!
This morning we had a talk from our lecturers about the possible options for which modules we could take next year – it was pretty funny when people were asked how many of them would like to take the “Computational Theory” course that no one raised there hand, possibly a refection of how certain people in high places taught us this year. It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out next year in the department considering all the changes that have been occurring.
I probably wont be posting much (if anything) till after the exams which end 28th May, a day which I’m thoroughly looking forward to!
Clean Sweep
SEG (Software Engineering Groups) culminated today with some rather pleasing results. Having won the trade fair prize for the most professional system last term we claimed another victory today by winning the ‘Durham University Computer Science IBM Thinkpad Challenge Heat’!! Along with a nice Β£50 cash-in-hand this means that come late September we’ll heading off to IBM Hursley (near Winchester) to compete against all the other university winners for the grand prize of Β£1000 for the department and laptops for all of our group π At this moment in time I am very happy!
GO SEG13!!!!
Drunk Ted
Its been just over half a year since the infamous Red Ted (see the battle of Weasel Massacre) went missing without warning. After sightings of him “in the wild” many believed he may have gone off the rails. Unfortunately today we received fresh news from our Winchester correspondent who sent us the picture below of one very inebriated looking RT.
It seems his battle scars may have finally caught up with him (so to speak). If none of this makes any sense to you then it may be worth reading up on the historical background here. More news on this story as we get it.