More Cancelled Lectures and Work

Well, it's the end of another week and I've had most of today off due to three of the four lectures I should have had today being cancelled. Thankfully, in some ways at least, I have had some work to do, just a bit of German homework but it's better than having nothing at all to do all day I guess.

Lacrosse was a bit less intense than I had expected last night, after last week especially. For some reason I'm not aching anywhere near as much as I was after last week though I was completely wiped out after training. I had some difficulty getting up this morning for my 9am lecture, which was annoyingly the only one not to get cancelled, I could have used the lie in to be honest. I rediscovered how uncomfortable gum-shields are last night too. I hate how they make you feel as if you are going to be sick every now and then, it's not a great feeling while running. I also haven't got used to talking with one in which could make for some very interesting calls during games.

I also discovered that I'm one of the quickest people in the team which is something, considering I'm one of the smallest too, so I guess I'll have to try and use that to my advantage and dodge more tackles than anything else. I wasn't too bad when competing on the ground though so I could probably hold my own against some people of a slightly larger build I reckon...

I'm really enjoying Lacrosse so far. It's been fun to learn a new sport completely from scratch and it wasn't so hard to pick up the basics, it'll be interesting to see how they translate into a game situation like the one we have on Wednesday. That should be interesting...

Now for a nice relaxing weekend of reading and German translation before my one year anniversary with my girlfriend on Monday and then her birthday on Wednesday. A busy couple of days at the beginning of next week so hopefully I can get some stuff done this weekend. Wish me luck!

Currywurst, Reading and Grammar

Well the weekend has ended, and lectures have restarted again. I thankfully had my 5pm cancelled which was nice, it gave me the chance to get some washing done and to cook some Currywurst from scratch which was interesting... I had never made a sauce from scratch before but it was surprisingly easy and tasted really nice, so all in all a success I think.

The first two lectures of the week were some of the most boring lectures I've had since coming to uni. IT was two hours back to back of the lecturer reading exactly what was on the powerpoint and then repeating it in slightly different words which is just as exciting as it sounds. The next lecture was german grammar which actually wasn't that bad, I've never liked grammar lessons but this one was actually reasonably enjoyable, which is something I never thought I'd say.

I spent the rest of the day putting my washing on and looking for my housemate's room key which still hasn't turned up. The weird thing is that she seemed more distraught that the watermelon key-topper had been lost than she was that the key was missing... Some peoples priorities are odd. It still hasn't turned up so in the meantime she is using the landlady's spare key. 

I spent this morning reading about domain name ownership, cybersquatting and copyright infringements online and how they are dealt with and regulated. This is an area of the law that I am quite interested in and am enjoying reading about. This reading was done so that I could put it on the online discussion board that we have within the university network which I hadn't realised was open until I got an e-mail this morning so that was a nice thing to wake up to! 

I have another three lectures today before a day off tomorrow with some more lacrosse training which  should be good fun. I am also going for a meal for a friends birthday this evening so that'll be nice. Anyway, I'd better get ready for those lectures, lunch time I think!

First week of lectures

Well, the first week of lectures is now over and it didn't go too badly. It was mostly introductory lectures so that wasn't too bad, not a great deal of things to write and learn so that's nice. I also had my first proper lacrosse training which was interesting to say the least.

I wasn't so surprised at the fact that the lectures haven't been particularly intense but the introductory portions have been a lot shorter this year than they were last year, which isn't a bad thing. The topics so far have been fairly light but I can see EU Law and Public law developing into slightly heavier topics, with comparative public law presumably doing the same thing. German has been mostly simple things but the translation class was surprisingly difficult considering we were translating Children's literature.

A goal similar to the one I hit

Lacrosse hurt. Not as much as I was expecting, there weren't any crunching tackles or anything like that. However I did get pushed over and ended up sliding into the metal five-a-side goal that was on the side of the pitch, which hurt a little bit, but I seem to have come away without bruises which is a plus. I'm beginning to get less surprised by the fact that I caught a ball now which is good because it means that I'm able to think about other things too, instead of catching the ball and panicking about what to do with it. 

This weekend my parents are visiting which should be nice. Not just because I'll be able to see them but because they are likely to buy me a week's worth of shopping at least so that saves me money there. Just what I need as student life is really draining my bank account! I also have a job interview later today for a local mobile phone store so we'll have to see how that goes! Anyway, time to get ready for my final lecture of the day!

Law Lectures and Lacrosse

With the first day of lectures over, this year looks like it could be a lot of hard work. This may not be the worst thing ever if I can get into the habit of it as the work itself does also look quite interesting. I have to do a couple of core modules which seem ok but I got to choose one module so the freedom there means that I have been able to pick a module which particularly interests me.

The core modules are Public Law and EU Law and I have been forced to do Comparative public law alongside this all of which seem reasonably dull at times but I think they'll be alright. It's the module on the Law and Internet Commerce that I got to choose which interests me the most. This is because of how different it is to everything else. It is very much an independent research based module with barely any teaching throughout the entire semester, leaving a lot to the students to decide on. The essay question is also very broad which is nice because it gives me the freedom to do pretty much whatever I want to do with it.

I also have a german module to do which doesn't seem too bad. Just a lot of grammar which isn't the most exciting thing in the world, though we were told today that grammar isn't something to be afraid of...

Hopefully I can settle down into a routine of reading and studying for all of these modules and I am hoping that the Internet module will help with that as that is pretty much all based off my own work. 

Alongside my studies I am hoping to start playing Lacrosse which should be fun. I'm not 100% sure what I may have got myself into, having never played before, but that I suppose is part of the fun of it. It should also be good because not many people here have played it before therefore no one is expected to be any good so I might be able to get into a sports team for once! Hopefully this year will be the year I finally learn how to study properly and get good at a sport, either way it looks as if it'll be a lot of fun!

Back to work

Here it is, the end of the summer holidays. It's a shame in some ways, the lack of important things to do was quite nice, however it has started to become a bit boring. Having nothing to do all day is surprisingly difficult even though during the busy periods of the year they seem so easy and are often what we look forward to. 

I came to realise that there are two kinds of boredom over the summer. There's the boredom you get while working or studying where you are mainly bored due to there not being much to do other than what you've been told to do, and the boredom you get when you've done everything you want to do and there's nothing left. I managed to get some sort of mixture of these over the summer through the few weeks of work at the beginning of the holidays and the free time throughout the rest of it.

I can't decide which I prefer. Obviously boredom is never a good thing, but the advantage of the boredom when there are things to do is that often there is some reward at the end of it. This could be the wages that you are being paid or the satisfaction of completing the work at the end of it, which is nice. But then the other kind of boredom is normally a lot easier to get rid of because you have the freedom to do whatever you want and are normally not constrained by anything other than the things around you. 

Obviously I can't really speak for everyone but I much prefer the first kind of boredom. I think I just have issues finding things to do that will keep me occupied for longer periods of time. I keep finding things to do that keep me occupied for a while but then would become boring after a while.  It's not that I have any sort of attention-span issues it's just that I can't go back to something that I've gotten bored of for a while.

Either way, university lectures start back again on monday so that should give me something to do. I am also hoping to do a few more extra-curricular activities this year so that should give me plenty to do. In the meantime though, I'm going to go and watch some random videos on YouTube...

My trip to Berlin

It's almost the end of the summer holidays, I'm going back to Aberystwyth to start my second year tomorrow, though lectures don't start for another three weeks. I'm going back so early as I have some job interviews during the later part of this week. It's almost the end of the summer holidays, I'm going back to Aberystwyth to start my second year tomorrow, though lectures don't start for another three weeks. I'm going back so early as I have some job interviews during the later part of this week.

This summer has been varied and fairly busy, which has been nice as I've always had something to do and I haven't got too bored. I started the summer with six weeks of work which was really boring but I needed the money so I can't really complain. I then spent a few weeks at home, not doing a great deal but enjoying my time, relaxing and catching up with friends from school who I hand't seen for a few months. 

The Brandenburg Gate

I have also just got back from a week in Berlin with my girlfriend which was really nice. We were both quite interested in going to Germany and Berlin in particular, but for different reasons. I,  as a German student, really enjoyed being surrounded by the language and being able to test myself in an active environment where everyone is speaking it around me and I think I coped very well with this. My girlfriend, Emma, is a history student who is really interested in the history of the 20th Century, and especially the Cold war. This did mean a certain amount of her inner "history nerd" as she called it being unleashed anytime we passed some sort of museum or memorial. However that was not a major issue for me as I am also fairly interested in that period but I was more interested in attempting to improve my German. 

Our 1986 Trabant

We started the trip off with a self-drive tour in a Trabant at +Trabi Safari Berlin, which was an amazing experience that I would recommend to anyone who can drive and wants to see the city in a unique and different way. We then went to the Jewish museum which was incredible, the architecture was designed in such a way that you were always unnerved or uncomfortable, which added to the emotion as we read accounts of German Jews during both wars and saw various pictures of Jews in ghettos and concentration camps. 

Checkpoint Charlie

We visited a few other museums, my favourite, the Neues Museum, which boasts the bust of Nefertiti as it's prize attraction. This museum was full of exhibits about ancient cultures such as the Egyptians, the Romans alongside the Germanic tribes of that period amongst other things. We also visited the Checkpoint Charlie museum, which was quite good, however it felt a bit like they had tried to fit too much information into to small a space which was a shame, it all felt quite cluttered. However they did have various examples of contraptions people had made in order to escape from East Germany which were really interesting.

It's a shame that the holidays are almost over but I'm sort of looking forward to this year, I guess I'll just have to see how it goes, anyway here are a few more pictures from the holiday.

Das Fernsehturm - The TV Tower

Berlin Wall Memorial

Memorial to the Jews killed in the Holocaust

Summer break so far...

I had been meaning to put out another post a bit earlier but I have started work recently and that has taken up a lot of my time and I had not anticipated quite how tired it would make me which left me unable to do much in the evenings... (The world cup being on every night probably hasn't helped either.) However here I am again, not really sure what to write but here we go...

My job consists of receiving marked exam papers and then checking that the total marks that have been added up by the examiner are correct, exciting I know but it's money so I can't complain too much. The work is tedious but I have been listening to podcasts such as the BBC Radio 5 Live film review show and the +YoGPoD which have both kept me entertained while working, maybe a little too entertained as while listening to these through headphones I have occasionally had to consciously stop myself from laughing out loud, which is a lot harder than I was expecting it to be. 

I don't think I'd ever really appreciated weekends properly as I would always have homework or something like that to do once school got properly difficult, and since this job, which is 8:15-5, Monday-Friday with no work whatsoever on the weekend, I have realised how good weekends are. I can imagine that they can only get better as the length of employment increases as they only seem a little better than the week or so I had off in uni after my exams had finished. 

One annoying thing about living in Britain is that the weather can be very temperamental in that the weather changes from sunny to raining very quickly, this trend also seems to follow a pattern that it'll be really sunny during the week while everyone is inside doing work and then as soon as the weekend arrives tit'l decide to rain for a large proportion of the weekend. This is true of this weekend where it had been fairly sunny up until wednesday and thursday was dry, but overcast and Friday onwards has been raining on and off. This probably means that I'm not getting as much out of this weekend as I could have hoped, but then again the +Steam summer sale may also have something to do with that...

The summer looks ok once I have finished this six week long job, I am about to start my third week tomorrow so I am almost halfway which is a nice feeling and after that I have a fairly free summer but no money to be able to afford to do much, oh the joys of being a student!

Oh well, now that I know that i'll probably struggle for money next summer I can plan ahead and will hopefully be able to look forward to some form of holiday abroad... 

Factorio (Again)

My slightly muddled factory

I have had a lot more time to play +Factorio since my last post about it and have had more time therefore to form a more in-depth opinion. I have played a few games  with the longest lasting around 12 hours gameplay so far. I have not managed to get as far as I'd like I don't think but that's probably because I was/am still discovering more things about the game.

I hadn't had any issues with the game in terms of bugs or glitches until the latest update which was released last friday (6th of June) but the developers had warned users of this. However these glitches have been merely graphical and can be attributed, according to the forums, to my VRAM allocation being low due to my web browser or another similar programme being open. 

The technology tree at the stage I'm at

The tech tree has been more expansive than I was anticipating. It looked pretty in-depth when I started the game for the first time, but as you unlock technologies more get unlocked and this leads to yet more and the list seems to go on and on. I still haven't touched on a load of the technologies but I am already overwhelmed with choice, however this appeals to me as the technologies so far. Although they have made the game more complex they have also made the game more enjoyable as the craftable items become cooler, or more interesting, or more useful. I'm constantly surprised by how well the game runs and how polished it seems at such an early stage of development. 

A train, cause why not?

The gameplay itself is very easy to pick up and creating vast, expansive factories is easier than I had anticipated. The beauty of the game is that every factory is unique. Of course there are going to be some similarities between games in terms of certain areas being set up efficiently but as the map is randomly generated resources will have to come from different places leading to a new challenge every time. A friend of mine also has the game and when we look at each other's factories we can see bits of what is happening but it is so much easier to understand what is happening in your own factory as you placed everything there, so you know how it works exactly.

I cannot recommend this game enough, I have been playing it every day without fail since buying it over a fortnight ago, granted these sessions have not been particularly lengthy but they have been enjoyable and I have managed to rack up the hours very quickly whilst maintaining some sort of a social life...

Moving House

The House from Outside

Well, this post is a bit later than I'd hoped it would be... As the University year has come to an end I was kicked out of my halls accommodation this weekend and moved into a really nice new house. Or so we thought...

We had found a house that was all alone on the side of a main road opposite one of the university campuses which was convenient for me as that is where most of my lectures are but the rest of the house will have to walk twenty minutes to get to theirs, which is still not bad. When we had a look around back in January everything was clean, there were no obvious issues with any of the house, of course it was slightly unclean in places but, what can one expect from a house where six people are currently living? However having now moved a few things in we have started to find a few little problems with the house.

My room

My first impressions were once again very positive, the house was as spacious as I remembered and it seemed pretty nice. It was only after I started looking at the house with a bit more scrutiny I started to notice a few issues. Some areas of the house were unclean and just seemed to have been poorly maintained.

I was then told of what had happened in the morning. My flatmate had to catch a train at 11:30 that morning so that he could go and see his girlfriend for her birthday. But when he turned up at 10:15 to move in the 'previous' tenants were still moving out, even though they had been told to vacate the property the day before. He was not best pleased and ended up missing his train and staying in Aberystwyth.

Some of the issues we found

There were issues with some of the furnishings, mostly that they were unclean which isn't a major issue but it would have been nice to not have to clean a house we had just moved into. A few of the fittings were loosely attached to the walls as seen in the photo below. There was a damp issue in both shower cubicles and possibly on one of the walls in the hall. The bins had also been filled and then had more bags piled around them. This seems to be because there is only one wheely bin but the bins weren't even piled tidily, they had been thrown roughly in the direction of the bin by the looks of things and had just been left dotted around the gravel area.

Hopefully these issues can be resolved or at least noted (for now) so that any damage is charged to the previous tenants and not to us. Anyway, summer has begun and relaxation can begin!

End of Exams

Well, exams are now over for me and most university students here in the UK. It's been a tough month but I'm just glad it's all over. I've already been binge-watching youtube videos for the past day or so and I keep feeling as if I should be doing something before realising that I have no work to do and can pretty much do whatever I want all day and not feel guilty about it. 

I have now got another three months of this more or less. I have a data input job for six weeks with the local exam board in Cardiff which should cover my summer rent for the house that I will be moving into in just over a week and then leaving for three months, and some more on top so that'll be nice. Maybe not while I'm doing the job which sounds  little on the boring side but hopefully it won'r be too bad, and after all, I'll take pretty much any job at the moment to make up for being a poor student.

The rest of the summer looks reasonably balanced between activities and relaxation. I have a one week residential training course at the beginning of august and am hoping to go away for a few days with my girlfriend to paris which should be nice. Though I'm slightly worried that after that holiday I'll be broke and with all of the time doing nothing that I have I'll end up spending more money on things that are totally unnecessary, especially with the +Steam Summer Sale coming up. 

Last week's post about +Factorio was probably my best received post so far, so I was thinking of maybe trying to do a few more game reviews and maybe some other things around that, maybe a +YouTube Let's Play series on a  few things if people were interested at all? My flatmates were thinking of starting a +YouTube  channel at some point, at the moment getting the hardware together is proving a little time consuming, especially considering we have all had exams for the past month and haven't had much time to do anything other than revise. 

Anyway this is just a post to let people know about the coming few months and there will hopefully be a new post every week  at least for the foreseeable future depending on page views, time and whether I have anything to write about.

Factorio

Factorio is a game where the player has landed on an alien planet and is tasked with preparing the planet for a colony ship to arrive from earth. This is done by mining ores and then using them to produce materials and machines. All of this can be automated using conveyor belts, automated assembly machines and many other things. The game is in late alpha at the moment and costs €10 (roughly $13US or £8.20) which is a very reasonable price for a game as well put together as this one seems to be on first impressions. 

Official screenshot (not one of mine)

The game is a bit like Minecraft in some respects, however this game is a top down view of the world rather than a first person view and there is much less physical mining to be done and more automation, engineering and even research needed in order to progress through the game. Obviously as the game isn't finished there are a few things that will change, but nothing seems broken. Everything works as it should, there don't seem to be any bugs or glitches and it is surprisingly fun. I have only just got the game so this is a bit of a first impressions post at the moment and I can't say that more of the late game stuff involving logic and complex wiring works perfectly. But the early game, mechanical system of automation works very well. 

The amount of planning that is needed to ensure that the conveyor belt lines all stay separate and that the right goods go to the right place and then they get made into the right thing that then gets taken somewhere else is substantial. I have played a game where I ended up not giving myself enough room to work and messed up my production of science packs a little bit and spent a good while trying to fix this issue. I was surprised at how not-boring this was, I guess I just enjoy problem solving and things like that and I guess that's one reason I really like this game and would recommend it to anyone who liked Minecraft or who is interested in this sort of thing. 

Yes, trains!

Although it can look really complex and quite daunting, so far I've found that it really isn't that hard so long as you take it slowly and think about what you are trying to do and think about what each part of the "machine" needs to do and how it will do that. There are so many different things that you can do and I can see myself spending hours on this game.

There are enemies and there is a working combat system with regenerating health and auto-aim with the pistol and the SMG. There is an abundance of technologies to research, unlocking more and more things that you can craft that will enable you to build more complex machines that are able to do more so that you can automate more and your base grows exponentially in complexity and in size as you progress. However as everything can be done slowly it isn't too difficult a task for even a novice like me to set up some reasonably complex (I think) systems without much trouble.

To conclude, I would recommend this game to most of my friends as it is really fun, but I can see that some people might not enjoy it quite so much due to the complexity of bits of it but when you finish building a machine that works it just feels good and it looks incredibly cool. There is a free demo, which includes the first three levels of the tutorial campaign over on the Factorio website so if you're interested do go check it out.

Mid Exams Update

I am now about halfway through my exams with three of the five exams completed. I'm happy to say that the exams have all been a little easier than I had been expecting which could go either way in terms of results to be honest. I have also had two of my assessed essays back and got mid 2-2's on both of them which isn't so bad considering I hand't done an essay subject since year eleven up until this year.  So overall everything seems to be going ok.

On receiving my essay back and getting a solid 2-2 of 56 marks, a girl I know on my course who got 57 remarked that it "wasn't good enough". Now I understand that other people have different levels of expectation to me but I always assumed it would be general common courtesy to keep thoughts like that to yourself or at least only divulge those views to people who have either done as well as you have or better. It was a bit of a demoralising comment to be honest. I had just got a mark that I was happy with and was quite willing to sit on but the comment caused me to get a bit self-conscious, which I know I probably shouldn't have, I mean why should I compare myself to others?

However at GCSE level I was getting A's and A*'s and I would only utter my displeasure at getting a B or lower to friends who had got higher or to those that had specifically asked me that question. However at A-level I started getting terrible results. I remember getting a Facebook  message that really annoyed me from a guy in my physics class asking how I did. When I replied UDCC he said that I must be "more than disappointed" which to be fair was true and then when I asked him what he got he told me "ABBC" and said that he was also disappointed and probably would have done better had he started revising earlier than two days before. I however had been doing work (not enough work however) for a good few weeks and that made me feel a bit crap again. 

Anyway, now that I'm halfway through my exams I feel like I've been doing enough work on the whole and that the rest of the exams should go alright so long as the questions aren't too awkward...

Revision, revision, revision...

The University and High School exam period here in Britain is drawing near and has already started for some students, not me, I still have a week to prepare. This is a very good thing as I definitely don't feel ready at the moment and I know that I do have issues with motivation and always have done even though I have always really wanted to pass my exams and move on to the next stage of my life, hopefully one day leading to becoming a solicitor if all goes well. However i don't see this happening if I continue as I am.

I'm partially writing this blog so that I can evaluate myself and realise where I'm going wrong or what I can improve upon. I'm also writing this in case there are others out there who are like me, who either are currently struggling with smiler issues or used to and have found a way around it (if you do please send me a message or something).

I'm studying Law with German and I've started to find that making post it notes of german words and putting them around my room has helped me to learn these words and their meanings reasonably quickly and with minimum effort, I'm annoyed I didn't think of actually doing this despite recommendations earlier. However, I have an issue with the law side of things. The amount of cases that I have to learn and be able to use to reinforce and argument is frustratingly big. I have a most of the key cases memorised but it's the more obscure ones that I feel will probably allow me to push an argument firmly in the right direction to enable me to get the higher marks.

A lot of people keep telling me that it's only a month of hard work and then I can relax. For some reason this doesn't fill me with any comfort. It just points out that I have an entire month of being stressed and generally unhappy, which makes me feel a bit crappy to be honest. I seem to have a tendency to try and avoid situations where I'm likely to not feel to great which is probably the main problem that I have. 

Anyway, that's probably enough for this post, I've had my period of public(-ish) self-evaluation and I feel a bit better although also slightly daunted as I have also realised now the gravity of the situation. Here we go...

Male Rape?

I recently read an article  about why it was legal for men to be raped in the UK. Obviously this statement intrigued me, being a law student, as I was fairly certain that there was something not quite right about it.

Now, there is no such thing as male 'rape' by a woman because under section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003a person commits an offence if "he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person with his penis". Obviously women do not have penises and therefore cannot rape a man and rape therefore is an offence that can only be committed by men.

However there is an offence under section 4 of the very same act headed "Causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent" which criminalises causing another person to engage in sexual activity without consent and if that activity involved penetration of another's body by the victim's penis. This to me seems to mean that if a woman forced a man to have sex with her then she could be convicted under this section which carries the same sentence as rape, but the offence doesn't have the same name as if a man had had sex with a non-consenting woman.

This article does mention this however. It points out that from a moral standpoint forced sexual activity in the sense I have mentioned in the previous paragraph is wrong but not legally. This may be so as the stigma that comes with the word rape is much greater than that which comes with the lengthy name that is included in the act. But why does this mean that we can't call it rape? It's basically the same offence, but the name is different because when the word 'rape' was coined it either described a man forcing himself upon a woman or a type of plant. It all seems very unnecessary to change the legal terminology when the offences carry the same punishment when colloquially it would most likely be referred to as rape anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that there is some argument for the changing of the name. But I also think that given the fact that most victims don't really want to talk about the event as shown in this article, most men would be absolutely fine with it being called one thing legally and another thing outside of court. It's hard to believe that anyone would underestimate the seriousness of such an event. Many would treat it in the same way as if the roles were reversed. All of the negative feelings would be aimed at the attacker, in this case the woman, and all of the sympathy would be given to the victim, in this case the man.

The law still makes the act of forcing a man to have sex with a woman against his will illegal. There is no doubt about this. There are many cases of this in the UK and in the USA where the statistics for this offence are added to the statistics for the rape of men which balances out fairly evenly with the numbers for the rape of women. Is there really any issue with the legal name of the offence? After all the punishment of the offence is what matters in my opinion and not the name given to it.