406 Not Acceptable

As I said, not much to do here. Sadly the internet is monitored too, if it wasn’t I’d be writing up a bunch of posts on here Geez, after doing tons of work at Tesco, I thought being lazy would fun fun… how I was wrong…

Anywho, 2 interviews coming up!

Yep, that’s basically my job. I am supposed to be taking sales calls, but I seem to be getting about 10 a day. So in the 20-40 minutes between each call I just sit around doing a few ‘Killer Sudoku’. Boring, but I’ll take the money right now!

On the other hand, it seems once I get a job everyone else wants me. So the psychologists did get it right, I kind of feel like the toy no-one wants until someone picks it up. I just took part in an assessment day (aka aptitude testing) this week, have an interview with someone else next Thursday, and turned down a crummy christmas job in retail.

I’ve done aptitude tests before and I felt really good about this one. Like most of these tests you had to answer a load of questions in a short amont of time. I worked out that in the first test you had 15 seconds a question! I was happy to actually complete all of the questions, I didn’t feel that it was actually that hard… despite someone commenting that it was practically impossible! The second one had more questions in the same amount of time, but required reading! I got about 75% of the way through; after scanning the others sheets at the end, it looked like they only managed 50-60% of the way. Whilst it ended with one of those yes/no/unknown comprehension tests, which wasn’t that bad.

I really feel that I passed these tests. Especially when there were a few jobs going and less than a dozen of us taking part. I was actually shocked at how much help some of those taking part needed with the example questions for each section…

So unless something strange occurs, that should be two interviews next week

Quite funny how I said I have nothing to do. I just got a job today…

Woo, finally recieved my final mark. Thanks to a nice (or should that be agonising suspense from a?) text message and later some sneaky student taking photographs of the results board. I was nowhere to be seen, as I couldn’t be arsed to drive 60 miles to find my results. Is it worth me repeating my grade?

On the flip side, as not everything can be rosy, I tried to get an easy job. After what must have been the easiest interview I have ever had, I was deemed overqualified. That really is annoying… as anything (well apart from working in a coffee shop) will do.

Applied for a ton of IT jobs, but I fear my non-existant experience really hinders me…

Strangely enough a temping agency turned me down, as I had no recent office experience (quite obvious really, I have been busy at university this past year…)  What was annoying was that I had been advised by friends and family that this would be the best way to gain aforesaid experience.

The job hunt continues…

Oh and yes, I know I incorrectly spelt underqualified and overqualified in the title.

This happened ages ago, but was rather annoying. Must have been a all nighter due to some project… lets hope this does not occur on Monday night/Tuesday morning…

My last 60 pence too!

In a strange move, you can’t move an image down the page in Wordpress 2.6 if there is no text above it. Makes me think: bug, feature, or hidden button? Mmm… medium picture size is tiny too, I don’t really want to resize my photos down to 640×480 every time. That images shows what Wordpress does to a nice 5 mega pixel picture if you let it loose.

Will there be another picture next week? Will there be the shock of another post tomorrow? Who knows, accidentally stumble here thanks to the wonders of Google to find out!

As you may have noticed, I’ve changed the theme on this site to Diary Notes. I found one annoying issue with the theme — the author decided to leave his/her meta tags in. Mmm… not so smart! I don’t think many people will want those in!

So this post is just to make sure the happy google bot has another look at this site, before the dodgy tags break stuff. Nice to see that this site actually ranks in google these days.

Project inspection/demonstration on Tuesday (silly department can’t organise themselves.) Now, that’s not so bad… but its at 9:30 in the morning! No I am not that lazy, it’s just I live around an hour and a half from Birmingham — that’s without the morning traffic! Lucky for me the drive in means I’ll be on the main commuting road in my county… and I have to pass through another city… brilliant! So I’ll have to set off well before 7 am to give myself the time so set things up for the demonstration.

In even better news, I should see my project supervisor beforehand. Now I can’t do that on Tuesday, so I have to go in on Monday too!

Perhaps an allnigher will occur? Me thinks so!

I’ve decided that it would be best to me to hold back any articles on J2Me until after I have finished my project. I am not doing this because I do not have the time, but instead for plagiarism purposes. After all I would be posting code from my project onto this site and that may flag up on some plagiarism detection program and give me some serious hassle. The bigger issue is if anyone steals the content from this site (unlikely) and that gets picked up… then I’d have even more hassle to deal with.

Anyway, expect this stuff in September/October. I’ll have a few articles written ready for when I finish the project.

What’s really annoying is that some people get an extra 4 days to do their coding… that’s not what I’d be calling fair…

Well so far, anyhow it’s time to celebrate! Well, somewhat… I’ve got a project to do!

Over the summer (read till October,) I’ll be busy working on my project; hopefully it won’t mean a massive lack of activity like my exams caused. In fact I should be able to write up some tips on using J2Me as I go along. I am rather lucky as I managed to persuade my supervisor to let me develop a game using J2Me, which should be lots of fun to make and test

I have noticed that although there are a few good sites, tutorials, and guides on developing games for J2Me; there is a distinct lack of help on how to use the Visual Game Designer and Visual Map Designer features that were introduced with Netbeans 6.0. (Correct me if I am wrong, but they weren’t in Netbeans 5.5.) Because these tools haven’t been around very long there is also a lack of books covering them. The only real useful information about using them is the sample ‘game’ included in the Netbeans Mobility pack. So when I get the time I’ll provide a guide on using these tools for a simple ‘game’.

In addition, I should be able to host the odd version of the game. As it will need testing on multiple devices and I can’t just go out and buy a load of phones! Of course the emulators are useful, but there are situations where the device can act differently. I’ve noticed this being the case when using JSR-226: The 2D Vector Graphics API. Annoying really as Vectors can be a great tool for mobile games. With their being a number of resolutions to work with vectors have a great advantage over sprites, but with the low implementation of JSR-226 in devices, I’ll be overlooking them.

Back to beer!

Well done Hull for their victory over Bristol in the Championship play off final! The Premiership is going to be full of underdogs or historically ’smaller’ clubs next year; thus, it should be really interesting at the bottom of the table. Looking forward to the Leeds Doncaster game tomorrow too; although, revision might just get in the way! I tried to read throughout the match… and it didn’t really turn out so well. Fifteen pages in 90 minutes isn’t really progress!

Oh, the BBC have some new kids show called ‘Meta4orce’ on their homepage. Now I get the idea with the number 4 being used instead of just calling the program Metaforce, like ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’; however, it looks like the shows creators have made a little mistake. The way it currently is, the title would be pronounced Meta-four-orce; now I doubt that was the intended pronunciation!

With the final term of University comes the big push, exams are nigh! I hate exams, as I feel they are not a good indicator of ability; instead they reward memory skills more than actual ability or comprehension. Anyway, I have 3 exams in the space of 5 days in the middle of May, then one all alone in June. It’s not hard to guess where I will score my highest mark. I will be getting around two weeks of hardcore memorising for the last exam, meaning a high mark is, without major calamity, almost assured.

Bah, off to be grumpy and revise…