Working on a New Blog

I’ve been contemplating doing this for a while, and planning a new site for years, but I feel I’ve finally got there with a pretty good design and am now focusing on creating my own blog and focusing it entirely on my speciality language, C#.NET.

I am basing my site on the fittingly named dot net based blog, BlogEngine.NET. I have been playing around in VS for a couple of days and figured out how to get a list of latest posts and integration with twitter too. The twitter feed pulls in the latest tweet from my account.

I am using the Yedda .NET Twitter API wrapper which, after a couple of hours of fiddling around with the code, I managed to get data pulled succesfully into my site.

The site will be officially hosted at www.ashclarke.com, and www.ashclarke.co.uk will point to the hosting at the .com site. I hope to have it done by this September, ready for the next, and my final, year of University.

Happy 1 Year 1 Month and 8 Days to me!

Ok, so I somehow managed to miss the fact that my blog is over one year old, so I’ll just wish it happy returns for the year now. It has been a long year – ups, downs, lefts, rights, although the year has had more ups than anything else, so I thought I’d focus on them.

If anything, having a blog this long has made me realise a number of things. The first, is that it serves as a great tool for remembering the little things that tend to get pushed out of your memory, so I think it’s a great way to reminisce. The next are the not-so-obvious-at-first-but-soon-become-obvious-very-quickly, such as the amount of effort it takes to constantly have things to write about and having the time to write them. Finally is how blogs can be used as a great way to promote content/software/or anything for that matter. My most popular post, sadly, but understandably (the search engines love it), is the iTunes 7.7 and 8.0 post. In just over a month of it being posted, it has received over 1,100 hits. For a relatively small blog like mine, that is a good amount of hits (just about an eighth overall).

End of the Week Update

This week has seen more ups and downs than an 8 year old with an addiction to Sherbert. I have had an interesting week. The beginning was the usual work and play routine. I’ve managed to reduce my lunch spending by about £2 a day, which all adds up from month-to-month. I’m not going to McDonalds much any more, which although I made sure I kept an eye on my calorie intake and such, I feel will probably be better for me. I mostly ate the Deli meals they make, but even they have a few hundred or so more calories than a sandwich. Calories are odd things. It’s amazing how some things that are small, could have more calories than something like a burger. 4 kitkats and that’s more calories than a Big Mac… yeah, weird.

Google’s New Browser, Chrome Released!

Google have succesfully released their new web browser to beta. Named Chrome, this browser offers intuitive new twists to web browsing, tab management, window management, as well as enhancements to security and performance. It utilizes the power of web kit, the javascript virtual machine V8, as well as features such as incognito windows (privacy mode) and “sandboxing” to limit the access of the browser and it’s features to protect from web sites accessing your computer unwantedly. More info, links and pics after the break…

Upcoming Games to Pre-order (September to November)

Gaming at the end of 2008 is going to be awesome, with many great titles heading on to the shelves. I currently have 16 games on my shortlist for the end of this year, but have pre-ordered six… for now, to cover me gaming wise for September and some of November This post ties up nicely with my last one!!

The list I have compiled is mostly a collection of PC and Xbox 360 games, but there might be some that are also going to be released on multiple platforms, such as PC, 360, PS3, Wii, etc. – Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for example, which will be on 360, PS3, PS2, Wii and DS. I’ll be ordering my list by Date Released, starting with the closest to release, to furthest away and then Alphabetically should any dates have more than one release.

I am not going to give a huge description of why you should buy each game on the list, because there are plenty of websites and magazines that would do a much better job of hyping them up than me, but here are some titles you should definitely be keeping an eye out for/on.

Saving some money on pre-orders @ Game UK

Expired, as of 01/10/08

Hi everybody. Here is something I discovered at GAME online.
I was about to pre-order a selection of games, that I would have bought upon release, with a £3 off voucher code I came across.

Here’s the thing. It was suggested to me by a mate on irc that I should not buy them all at once, but buy each game individually. This was a bit of an eye-opener for me, as well as a “duuuuuhhh” moment.

This £3 off code: ID734TJAW takes £3 off your order (my cheapest item was £29.99), but I do not know how long it lasts or if there is a minimum spend.

EDIT: It looks like it could be £30, looking at somewhere online, but my cheapest item was £29.99 and I still got the £3 discount, so not sure about that one.

I pre-ordered 4 PC games (Spore, Brothers in Arms: HH, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2) and an Xbox 360 game (Fable 2). The total cost of these came to about £180, however, they are not all released at the same time (They’re released at multiple dates across the next two months) and GAME only charge your card upon dispatch.

This means that I have until around 2 days before the release date to cancel should I change my mind. I have saved £18, by ordering each game separately and applying the ID734TJAW code each time. I also selected the Free Delivery option.

In addition to this, GAME offers double points for pre-orders, so I earned about 3000 – 4200 points (about 12-14 quid).

That’s a total saving of around 27-29 quid on a bunch of games I would have bought anyway, and the 12-14 pounds of reward points I can use for the next game (In fact, I’ll probably save them for now )

If GAME decide to be stingy and take away the discount on 4 of the items, I still have made a £3 discount and the reward points. I’ll update on any changes.

Happy buying!

It’s been a while…

Ok, as it has been over a two months since I have written a real post, I thought I’d try and get back into the swing of things. On the list of things I have done in the last couple of months is:

• Secured a third year placement (A Job)
• Secured accomodation for the year (Moved house)
• Passed all but one of my exams (retake tomorrow!! :Z )
• Got paid… twice! Woo!
• Spent more money than I have
• Saved money for the first time in years
• Taken out an ISA
• Taken out a Credit Card
• Worked out my Student Loan Debt

And of course, various other happenings also.

So where do I begin?

iTunes 7.7, 8.0 Vista/XP Downloads

Ok, as it seems that apple are having some network issues (on their download page, you get timeout errors), due to the recent release of iTunes 7.7, I thought I’d upload the setup exe to allow people to download the Xp/Vista 32-bit version (Don’t have the others, sorry).

Edit: 8.0 has just been released, so I have uploaded that too.

The files are located here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/128684562/iTunesSetup.exe.html (7.7)

http://rapidshare.com/files/144907764/iTunes8Setup.exe (8.0)

Enjoy!