Exams are Over!

Well my exams are finally over, and now I get to rest for a while before being slung into a work placement for a year. Speaking of which, I still need to find one. I have an interview lined up for next week, they’re a company that operate from Bournemouth Town Centre, which is ideal for my plans for next year.

I’d like to stay in Bournemouth if I can. I really like the area and have “grown into it” in the past two years. Once I finally do get a placement secured, I’ll then have to focus on getting somewhere to live. Ideally, it would be an apartment or something. Somewhere where I have the space to move around, and where I have a large desk – so I can do work and have proper space to do it

I did a Google search for me today. Searching for “Ash Clarke”, I come ninth second.

The third result is, coincidentally, from ThisIsWiltshire and talks about Darts. Apparently, Ash Clarke got beat. Sucks to be him. The fourth result is a post I made in a forum about 2 years ago – 1yr 11m to be precise. Talk about Internet Footprint :/

The thing that brought me to searching my name in Google was down to my stats page i.e. showing what people have searched for that click a link to my site. So, here are a bunch of stats from my stats page:

Since I started writing in October 07, I have had:

• 4,856 Total views
• 755 of those views were in one day (Thursday, February 14, 2008)
• I have posted a mere 38 times (excluding this one)
• The top searched for phrase that brings people to my site is “nokia n95″ with 663 searches. “n95″ Comes next with 178 and “nokia n95 8gb” with 143 after that.
• The top searches that were directed to my site are as follows:
  

  nokia n95	663
  n95	178
  nokia n95 8gb	143
  n95 8gb	80
  nokia n 95	49
  http://www.ashclarke.co.uk	49
  nokia n800 review	46
  nokia n95e	45
  n 95	42
  new phone	34
  n95e	33
  ash clarke	29
  nokia n800 reviews	19
  nokia n95 music	16
  n95 nokia	15
  doing it wrong	13
  bt suck	13
  nokia n95 8 gb	12
  nokia	11
  n800 review	11
  n800 reviews	10
  “doing it wrong”	10

After that, there were less than 9 searches per phrase. The oddest, weirdest, etc. phrases included:

• earn rice
• text advert
• nokia n800 dark side
• pizza hut australia demise
• job adverts 240 x 120
• overkill shop

and best of all: “i love ash clarke”

I chuckled.

Lastly, I have had over 900 spam comments. Luckily, that Askimet thing is doing its job and I only see a spam comment about once every month.

In other News, I bought Age Of Conan. The first 18+ rated massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (or MMORPG). It’s got barbarians, blood, fighting and… barbarians. I’m not doing a review on it here so I’ll just say it is awesome and World of Warcraft is pants in comparison (What with it’s lame graphics and how stupidly annoying it is. The fact children play it doesn’t help either). Age Of Conan looks awesome (I run it at 1920×1200 on all high settings and draw distance (without Anti-Aliasing).

Another game that, if you have a PC, Xbox 360 or PS3, you should have played or bought by now is Race Driver: GRID, because it is amazing. I played the demo – whacking up the difficulty settings (Pro Mode, Extreme Difficulty, Locked to in-car camera, Manual gearbox, etc) – and managed to get from 20th to 1st in 3 laps on the Jarama circuit. I love this game. Unfortunately, haven’t bought it yet, but it’s on the list for the near future.ninth