Future eBay Plans

If only I’d kept that bobcat…

Mini Reviews on the Way

I have recently aquired a few bargains on eBay – Assassin’s Creed, Fifa 08 and Mass Effect for the Xbox 360. I have heard mixed reviews of all the games from various sources, but I will be playing these – most likely from Saturday onwards – and writing some little reviews of each.

At the moment, I’m still pushing on with my assignments, leaving mimimal time for playing games of any sort, going out, or anything else that provides a source of entertainment, for that matter *sigh*. Oh well, all over in 3 days – then it’s 3 weeks for the end-of-term Easter break. Funny thing is, I have an assignment due in directly after then on the 22nd April, although I have already got started on that (Blackjack game), so it won’t be as hectic getting that done.

Looking forward to going home on the 4th April. I have my interview with Moov2 on the 3rd – Not sure how I feel about that. Kinda looking forward to it, but still a little downhearted about the placement hunting front, I guess, after the “rejection” (I hate that word, as it implies I didn’t get far at all ) from Microsoft.

Easter

Assignments are going slowly, as usual. Started the OOP assignment yesterday, sorting out classes and such, and setting up NetBeans with a new Desktop Java application. It was 5000x easier than trying to set it up in eclipse, which we had been told how to use. Unfortunately, eclipse has had an update recently and to get the Visual Editor working in that is a pain, and not obvious either.

So with three or four clicks, I had my project set up and ready for work. After messing around in that for a few minutes, I went on to search for images of Blackjack tables so I could create a background image for my Blackjack application. I found the perfect one after a few pages in on a Google image search. I loaded up Photoshop and got to work creating my own version of one of these tables; It turned out pretty well in the end and is now ready to be put into my game. I also created the chips I was going to use. 5 beautiful designs of my own – I was pretty happy with just how well they turned out.

New Phone

I have a second contract phone now. The phone is the Nokia N95 8Gb version (Details of how gorgeously amazing it is here)

The contract I have been put on for this phone is a staff contract at £15 a month (with 125 minutes only) – The phone itself was free. I am soon to be selling my K850i on eBay, starting at £150 and Buy it Now at £250 (This seems to be around the price these phones are selling at on eBay at the moment). I am keeping my Orange SIM, unlocking my new N95 and putting the Orange SIM in the new phone. With the money I make from the sale of the K850i and the cashback I will receive from taking out the phone contract, I will be able to pay off the Vodaphone contract outright, and reduce my monthly contract on Orange to about £7 a month. This is for 500 minutes and unlimited texts I phoned up and cancelled one of the insurance policies today and got the second reduced to £7.99 a month, which I think is worth it for a phone worth over £500. After all, I don’t want to have my N95 broken or stolen, and then have a contract to pay for the rest of the year :/ I have created a listing for the K850i; it’s sitting in my drafts waiting to be made active. I will be paying close attention to every little detail with what I am doing here, as I am determined to see it through and not have me put out of pocket. I phoned up Vodaphone on 191 to confirm my tariff is the correct one, but the contract details had not yet gone through to them. I will try again tomorrow.

With regard to the N95 8Gb, the phone is amazing. Picture quality, video quality, the phone’s build quality are all top notch. The phone even comes bundled with TV-Out cables to allow you to watch phone content on your TV. The phone also comes with Spiderman 3 pre-installed on the memory (flash memory – separate to the internal phone memory).
I’ve spent a good portion of this evening trundling the web for applications and games and have found a bundle – most of them at http://www.series60v3.com

At the moment, I am messing around with all the phones functions, trying to take in how unbelievably much it can do – and it does a lot, trust me. Today I have looked at the GPS functions, the wi-fi functions, speech recognition to launch applications, the music player and used the Nokia Application Installer from their PC Suite software.

Tomorrow I have my second interview with Web Host Dir, in which they want me to demonstrate what I can do web development wise. Hopefully this goes well and I will have a confirmed placement by the end of the week.

In other news, Xbox 360 have just released the December (Fall) update to the Dashboard and EVE developers CCP will begin rolling out their free Trinity expansion pack tomorrow

A Successful Day

Today went well. Was up at 8am this morning, showering and ironing, getting ready for my interview today at Phones4U. Was an interesting morning – Phones4U had an admin error regarding some stock that my interviewer, the assistant manager Mark, had to sort out, so my interview was delayed a little. I walked into town, leaving at about half nine. Last time I walked into town it took 40 minutes, so I was hurrying the walk a bit more this morning. I arrived at 10am on the dot (luckily), but due to the stock problem, I was asked to come back in about a quarter of an hour. I went to McDonald’s, bought a coke and sat down to think. Unfortunately the problem seemed bigger and it was about 11am before the interview started. I didn’t mind this, because I was able to listen to a few contract sales around me to give me an insight into the sales process.

The interview went well. I felt I was able to answer Mark’s questions and wasn’t nervous. I don’t seem to get nervous about interviews, however, ask me to do a presentation (powerpoint and such) and my knees quake and I freeze
I asked a few questions about how contract phones are sold, and some of the things behind the scenes – It was straightforward and I now understand how things work in this kind of industry a little more. I was told that they’d get in touch over the coming week – either the store manager or their HR department will give me a call. Hopefully, I will have a job either starting next week or the week after.

My iPod arrived today, and in all honesty, I was overjoyed / relieved that it had finally been delivered. It’s been a while since I bought it, although it was the Royal Mail strikes and backlog that left it ending up in an East London sorting office :/ The iPod itself is gorgeous. It’s sleek, very thin (0.39in / 8mm) and the overall product is worth the hefty price tag. I bought the 16GB version, as it will give me plenty of room for my music, and then some extra room for TV shows or DVD’s that I can convert to mp4 format. I won’t be paying the £1.89 per show price tag per TV show episode off iTunes. I don’t see why you should pay for something I could record of the TV anyway. The iPod has a built in Internet Browser called Safari, a specialised Youtube portal (which is more handy than I thought ), music player (of course), video player and photo slideshows. Other applications include World clock, Timer, Stopwatch, Alarm and Calculator. I uploaded some of my music and converted some of The Simpsons series 16 into mp4 format, so they could play on my iPod. I watched a couple of episodes earlier. Overall verdict is that this nifty little device is awesome. I’ll probably write a longer, more detailed review in a separate post later.

With this last purchase, it means that my eBay feedback rating is now 10 (Yay!) and I have a lovely yellow star next to my name to show how good I am at buying things

By request This is me ready this morning

Postal Strikes and eBay

Last week my Student Loan came through to coincide with the start of the new term. This was all well and good, as it came in allowing enough time for me to transfer my money over for the house rent. As I had a little extra cash available, after the work I did over the summer, I have been a little eBay happy, buying things a little recklessly. The “spree”, so to speak, has come to an end, but an unfortunate encounter with one eBay seller has left me £39 out of pocket and attempting to have Paypal refund me. I have to wait 1 more week and then they will “review my case”. There isn’t much of a case to review, to be honest; The seller was selling stock he hasn’t got, and has left a number of people having to claim to Paypal to get their money back.

On the other hand, their are a few items (Halo 3 Collector’s Edition, an iPod Touch and a DVI cable) that I’m still waiting for, but the postal strikes are causing problems. I half think that all of my stuff is hidden in the local sorting office, just waiting to be unearthed and delivered to me. Just a side note here – I did not buy this all on one day, and did actually think before buying

When they finally do arrive, I’ll be less stressed out and be able to return to normal life, whatever that is Oh, and I’ll probably write a little review of my new iPod.