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.

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).

I thought I’d go over some stats for the year as I like stats, until real maths is applied to them. Then, they suck. So with no mathematical value and without further ado, I present some statistics:

Total Posts: 46 (Really should have a lot more… maybe a New Years resolution in the making there)
Total Hits: 8,763

Busiest Day: Valentines Day :Z (755)
Busiest Month: February 08
Top Post: New Phone

Top 5 posts:
New Phone (1,510)
iTunes 7.7, 8.0 Vista/XP Downloads (1,140)
[Review] Nokia N800 Internet Tablet (507)
Upcoming Games to Pre-order (September to November) (269)
BT Suck… Oh Yes They Do (163)

Top 20 search terms:
nokia n95 – 1,169
n95 – 389
nokia n95 8gb – 240
itunes 7.7 vista – 199
n95 8gb – 141
nokia n 95 – 128
itunes for vista – 68
n 95 – 65
itunes 7.7 rapidshare – 59
http://www.ashclarke.co.uk – 54
itunes 7.7 xp – 50
nokia n800 review – 49
nokia n95e – 49
itunes 7.7 for vista – 44
new phone – 40
ash clarke – 36
n95e – 34
n95 nokia – 26
nokia n95 8 gb – 25
itunes vista – 24
From my stats I can conclude that people like being given links to software, people like being told about cool games to pre-order, and people like reviews or information about technology. Using this, I decided that I am going to start trying to do more reviews (unfortunately, they take the longest, depending on the product) and offer links up to cool software I find. Oh and tell people what games they should buy.

I’ve recently acquired a few games to play – most likely too many! The PC/360* games that you should be looking at this Christmas include: Brothers In Arms: Hells Highway, Call of Duty: World at War, Dead Space, Fable II, Fallout 3, Far Cry II, Fifa 09, Gears of War 1/2, Left4Dead, Spore and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

*Possibly available on PS3 too!

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.

Keeping an eye on calories may seem a tad obsessive, however, it’s more common sense to be honest. Don’t go over the daily allowance, and try to balance crap foods with healthy foods. I am no longer buying multipacks of 2 finger kitkats. As much as I like to have them, I like them too much. Going through six in a day at 107 calories each certainly isn’t “the way to go”. So they won’t be on the next shopping run. I am getting used to this internet shopping lark, well for food shopping that is. Buying any other goods online I pretty much have in the bag. The problem I noticed with internet food shopping, is that once presented with my “favourites list”, I have little motivation to go browisng for other things, and often forget things I needed, or end up with the same all the time.

At the moment, it’s not much of a problem. I buy things to make into meals, and try to substitute my cravings for chocolate with fruit. That’s a real hit, however I find myself eating a lot of fruit to make up for not having chocolate snacks. Oh well, there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing, surely?

I like this new reform I have in the way I eat, and my exercise levels are up too – I walk to and from work every day. That amounts to 4 miles a day; about an hour’s worth of brisk walking. I walk quite fast, averaging about 4.5-5 miles an hour most days (My phone has a sports application. I used it a couple of times to measure my speeds with the GPS)

In other news, I went to the doctor’s today about a chest pain I had. Turned out it was nothing – no way near as serious as I was expecting, and probably muscular. I think a came down with one of those temporary bugs too – No idea if they were related, however, I seem to have a kickass immune system, because these things usually fade fast. This one has, anyway.

The last time I went to the doctors’ before today, was 6 or 7 years ago. I did have to make an emergency visit about a couple of years ago, but I don’t count that, because it was hayfever related, and I just needed some eyedrops to calm down my eyes that summer.

In unrelated news, I received SPORE through the mail today. I can’t play it though, because I am still waiting for my RMA’d (returned) hard drive to be replaced. eBuyer sent it out today at about 7pm. I sent it to them last Saturday. I hate waiting this long, for something that seems like it could be done so simply and quickly. Anyway, from what I see and hear about SPORE, it looks great and plays great too. I watched the “Making of…” DVD and “How to build a better being” National Geographic featurette DVD. I bought the Galactic Edition of SPORE. Basically, it’s like an extended edition dvd box, but for PC games. I read through the art book that came with it too. That was an interesting read, and gave a look at how the designers of the game go through various stages of development.

I plan to do more updates like this in the future. I’ll most likely keep them to Friday End of Week updates, but may make mid-week or beginning of week updates instead, or as well. Dunno, let’s see how it goes.

Bye for now.

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…

The original news of the browser came about at this site, which also included a link to a scanned and uploaded comic, that explains the browser’s new features in a somewhat less techy and more user-friendly way.

The browser can be downloaded from http://google.com/chrome and installation is a breeze.

Could this be a Firefox replacement!?!?!? I just did the ACID browser rendering test at http://acid3.acidtests.org and Google’s new browser received a 76/100. A modest 5 point lead ahead of the current leader, Firefox 3.

The Browser is currently version 0.2.149.27 build 1583 and for all the devs out there, the user agent reports as:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13 

Pictures:

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.

* “Days to go” dates as of 31/08/2008
** Release dates are tentative, at developers’/publishers’ discretion and are liable to change at any time.

Obviously some games may not to be the taste of some people, but these are the main games I will be watching over the next couple of months, and there should be a few in there that you should be too

EDIT: As of 05/09/2008 (5th September), the release date of Far Cry 2 has been pushed back a week to the 31/10/2008 (31st October).

EDIT: As of 17/09/2008 (17th September), the release date of Mirror’s Edge has been pushed back to 14/11/2008, although there are rumours in the air that release has been pushed back to Jan 2009.
The PC version of Brothers In Arms: HH, has been pushed back to 03/10/2008 (3rd October).

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!

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?

By my post on June 13th, the second year of Uni and our exams had finished, and I was focusing on getting a thrid year work placement secured as soon as possible. After having two successful interviews and passing with “flying colours”, I secured a ~60 week (June 08- ~End Sep09) placement at appius (http://www.appius.com). I have been working there since mid-june and have been very successful and working on a number of projects, while adhering to excellent standards. So far I have worked on projects for DLR (Docklands Light Railway), Sunseeker Charters, CTC Wings, Greenwich WHS and Royal Wimbledon Golf Club, to name a few :] I enjoy working there, and I’m hoping that I’ll soon be able to help encourage the move over to the use of ASP.NET C# as opposed to Classic ASP (A case of code reuse there )

I moved to my new house in mid July and photos of the place are in the previous post. I have been living in the Winton area for about a month and a half, and am happy with the location. It’s close to Uni (although I won’t be visiting there as much this year) and very close to shops and every takeaway you can imagine. It’s a half hour walk from town, which I often take twice a day, to and from work. If I don’t fancy walking, I take the bus home which costs a modest 50p (student fair). I refuse to take the bus in the mornings as the price of a single is about £2.20 and the price of a return is £2.70. Considering it used to cost me £1.50, I wasn’t impressed. Student fairs saw me paying even less at 50p single, 80p return. I can’t get a student ticket before 9am, hence the price of the tickets is a lot more.

I am doing a good job of controlling my finances this year. I have taken out an ISA, as well as a credit card to aid my purchasing power and increase my savings. The credit card is mainly for online purchases where the protection may not be as high, or I am dealing with a site or company I have not dealt with before. The “CCA” (I think) agreement protects you against fraud, whereas a debit card does not. I am doing well with my ISA – saved over £150 and will be over £300 in a few days.

Ah yes, now. A couple of days ago, I was talking to a colleague and the subject of being a student, etc. came up. Student loans were a part of this conversation and this got me thinking. So later on I paid a visit to my SLC (student loans company) website, logged in and totted up. So far, I have accumulated over £17,300 in loans. Yup, over £17,300 in 3 years of education, with another £7000 or so for next year (~£3000 tuition, £4000 maintenance loan).

I am not going to be getting all worried about it, however. A) The money will be deducted from my wage packet in future, adhering to the minimum payments (whereby my wage is over the minimum threshold of £15000 (it most likely will be). B) The interest on the loan, increases by the rate of inflation each year. To counter-act this, I will be opening multiple ISAs and investing the maximum I can. The rate of an ISA is generally higher than the interest rate of my loan, so any money I would have used to pay off the loan would make me more interest, and in turn more money, by sitting in my bank. And finally C) The debt is written off after 25 years (as of 2006)

More Info: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/loans/student-loans-repay

In other news, I have a new graphics card – The XFX GTX 280 1GB. More to come on that later (Including pictures).
I have also saved a bunch of money buying from GAME online – This I will follow up with a new post too.

Until then, have a good weekend!

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!

Warning – Really long update post ahead. This last week has been a pivotal and successful week for me. I have been busy sorting out all the arrangements toward having a flat and a job for next year, as well as tying up loose ends from this year. In the last week I have spent about £400 on sorting out accommodation (my rent needed paying for this month and then up came the deposit for the new house) and then about £50 getting food sorted; the cupboards were bare, so I needed to stock up a little.

Not only has this been an expensive week, it has also been an athletic one. In the space of 3 days I’ve probably covered about 4-5 square miles and walked about 8. On the map below, I had to walk the black route 3 times, each yellow route once and the blue route are bus routes.

Obviously it’s not exactly correct as I have modified it for internet viewing.
Anyway, on Monday, I went in for a second interview with Appius to demonstrate my technical skills. I was told it would be a practical test, or something along those lines. Little did I know, they had assembled three website designs (in Fireworks, an Image editing tool) and told me to best recreate one of the three in CSS/XHTML. So I took a seat and got to work.

Four hours or so, and a couple of small interviews later, I had an almost finished version of the site. I was told that they were happy with the work I had done in the time I was given and would be happy to see me start as soon as possible. I was thrilled to say the least. I’ll be starting on Monday 16th – bright and early at 8.30am. *Shudder* It has been a while since I have had to be up that early!!

A bonus of finally getting a placement, is the huge relief it gives. It now meant I could get to work on getting somewhere to live – the contract for the current house ends next month, rendering me homeless. I saw an advert on Facebook a few days back for flats in Bournemouth for Students, so I returned to Facebook in an attempt to find the ad again.

Luckily, I found soon. I phoned Capital up the same day and arranged a viewing for 2pm. I’m glad I did. I strolled down to the middle of Winton and found the place. A friendly and extremely helpful lady showed me around a couple of the flats to demonstrate what was available. The flats were extremely high quality and I am glad I decided to put my name down straight after. I chose a single-bed room, as it would be adequate and also save me £25 a month. The layout of the room was better too, in my opinion. Overall cost is £420 per calendar month, however it is all inclusive, meaning that I won’t have bills to pay for electricity and gas. The flats are fully furnished to a high standard too.

Here are a few shots of my new accommodation:

The entrance leads into a small hallway kinda area, that has a door to the bedroom and a door to the bathroom. The kitchen includes a combination microwave over, kettle, toaster, 2 hobs and a fridge/freezer. The LCD tv and wardrobe are also included. As you can see, everything is to a high standard.

In other news, I spent a good few hours over the last couple of days playing Race Driver: GRID, by Codemasters, which is undeniably awesome. I have been racing on Extreme difficulty, Pro Mode (No flashbacks available) and “Locked to Head Camera” (In-Car View only) and have been doing quite well. It can be hard navigating a track of people that want to sling you off, but I’ve had a good few victories and plenty of podiums. It’s a lot of hard work, but worth it. The following is a link to a video, where I finally beat the Real Life World Record for the Spa-Francorchamps Grand Prix circuit in Belgium. The current World Record is 1.45:108 and was set in 2004 by Kimi Räikkönen. I beat that time by about half a second. Follow the link to take a look.

http://www.vimeo.com/1162846

More about GRID here: http://www.racedrivergrid.com

]]> http://ashclarke.wordpress.com/2008/06/13/preparations-for-the-coming-academic-year/feed/ 1 Ash http://ashclarke.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/10062008268.jpg http://ashclarke.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/exams-are-over/ http://ashclarke.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/exams-are-over/#comments Fri, 30 May 2008 18:25:28 +0000 Ash Clarke http://ashclarke.wordpress.com/?p=71 ]]>

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