MisterCow.com

Seems I've been neglecting my blog :(

Ah well, not really had much to write about.

I bought No More Heroes for the Wii on Saturday and it's pretty fun. Some parts of it can get kind of annoying (like the seemingly unresponsive controls sometimes) but overall it's quite fun to play. I was hoping it would be reminiscent of side scrolling beat 'em ups but it isn't really, oh well.

Lucy's birthday coming up soon and I've got her some great presents :D

It was my birthday on Friday :O

I'm now 2 decades old (20 for people who can't figure that one out).

Got some nice stuff for my birthday, including posh chocs from my grandma and some Goldenschlag from my parents.

I also bought and started playing FFXI because my friend insisted.

Woo, Uni is over until January so it's time to relax a bit.

Christmas is just around the corner and I've got all my presents ready for people (just have to wrap them, heh). I bought a ring for Lucy, hope she likes it.

As for my favourite hobby, I bought Super Mario Galaxy a week or so ago and have been enjoying that (more than I had expected). I also bought Assassin's Creed which was pretty good, you can see my review of it here.

Finally, I realise I haven't really been updating my blog all that regularly... I guess I just can't think of things to write, heh. Anyway; next update will be after Christmas, I imagine.

So... I've started a new blog with a few friends. It's nothing spectacular as yet, but we hope to expand it and make it popular, we'll see what happens I guess.

We all share relatively similar views on video games, and these views quite often don't fit in with the generic fanboyism of a lot of game blogs, so hopefully people will find our stuff interesting.

The site is called BooEMPIRE and we've only got a blog at the moment, but we might expand and have a proper site too.

A few days ago I threw a quick site together for a domain that I own, courtesy of a man named Hagar.

Visit it here!

What is it?
Not even I know yet! :D

Well, in the past week or so I've made a fair few purchases and I haven't really posted in a while... So I decided to tell you about my purchases.

One obvious purchase is the iPod touch which I posted from yesterday, which I absolutely love so far.

I bought a 4GB memory stick for the PSP and have Lumines on the way so that I can downgrade it and start playing some open source goodness on the PSP; which should be nice. I also hear that if you make backups to ISO of your PSX games, you can play them on the PSP but I think the legality of that may be questionable...

I also bought a couple of games for the PS2:

• Metal Gear Solid 3
• MagnaCarta

I've been after MGS3 for a while but never got round to picking it up, so it's nice to finally have it. MagnaCarta, on the other hand, I had never even heard of, but after putting about 10 hours into it, I'm really enjoying it.

Finally, I bought some gear to go with my iPod touch; a nice leather case, some "indestructible" film cover and a mains to USB charger majigger.

Kind of bad spending so much, I guess, but I did get a cheque for £250 the other day for a bit of work I did, so the damage isn't too bad :D

My iPod touch arrived yesterday and it's totally awesome :D

I'm making this post using the built in browser/wireless set up, heh.

Anyways, can't be bothered making a long post with this, later.

Well, apparently the Student Loan Company have made a cockup. Marvellous.

I went into Uni registration today with the only letter I've received from the SLC in the last couple of months, the one with big red letters saying "TAKE THIS LETTER TO REGISTRATION", and handed it over at registration to be informed that "the SLC don't have your National Insurance number and won't be able to pay you" and also that "you need to give me this form before the SLC can pay the University or you". "This form" being a form that I have never seen, was not sent to me and was never mentioned until now.

I rang up Student Finance Direct when I got home, and was on hold for 25 minutes on a non-free number (great) and, when I finally got through, the guy (who didn't even apologise for the ridiculous wait) told me that they had my NI number, so that's OK. He also claimed that this letter I needed had been sent almost a month ago. The only letter I got a month ago was the one I took in today. So either the guy on the phone was lying to me or the guy in the Uni was lying to me. Either way, I'm getting screwed over.

Anyway, the guy on the phone said he would resend but it would take 5 to 10 days to arrive, then I'd have to take that into the University for them to verify it. It would take another 5 to 10 days after that to clear...

Click to read full entry.

In an effort to make my site a little more user friendly and accessible, I've altered the way links to direct posts are handled.

The change hasn't made any great difference to how the site works, but now direct links to posts include the title of the post in the URL so you know what you're going to be looking at, for example; the link to this post will be:

Site Enhancement

This might even make my pages a little more search friendly too, one can only hope.

Apogee Search is an SEO Company in Austin.

For those of you who aren't sure what SEO means; it stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which basically equates to how likely your site is going to show up in search results when people search things related to your company. The better optimised, the higher your site will show up in searches.

Anyway, Apogee Search specialise in helping you optimise your site for search engine marketing through various methods such as; restructuring your site to be more friendly towards search indexing, providing you with advertiser accounts with search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and more.

So really, if you want to pull visitors and potential customers towards your website, it would be worth investing a bit of time and money into Apogee Search to help get your feet off the ground and your site at the top of searches. If all goes well it'll pay for itself and then some!

After a quick browse on the internet, some time yesterday, I couldn't find a LocoRoco wallpaper that I particularly liked or that fit my resolution comfortably.

Because of the lack of awesome LocoRoco wallpapers, I decided to make my own.

Here is the result of 498234892378423 hours of work:

So I bought LocoRoco yesterday for the PS3 and it is so insanely addictive. I was playing it all day and I've only just stopped now. I'm ranked 16th globally :D

LocoRocos love to sing, so the more you save and have on screen the more vocal the music gets. Different colours have different tone voices and they all sing different parts in harmony. The song is stuck in my head now D:

Also, shrubbery.

A while ago I signed up to a service called PayPerPost, or PPP for short.

PPP are a blog marketing company that pay you to blog about companies and products that interest you, which I think is a great idea.

Signing up is easy and takes hardly any time at all. Then you've got to add your blog, which takes a little longer while PPP verify that you're not a naughty spammer out steal their monies... Or something like that. Once you've got your blog set up with PPP the fun begins. You can view a huge list of opportunities that suit all sorts of blogging genres. Once you've found something you like the sound of you can take the opportunity and blog away about it to your hearts content. PPP will then check to see if you've met the requirements of the opp, and if you have the money is yours. It's marvelous.

Since signing up I've only actually made two posts with PPP because of not really updating my blog that much, but I plan to make more as I start to post more regularly.

It's a really good way to make a bit of pocket money and the money I made from the two posts went towards doing the thing I love most: playing video games.

At any rate, here's to more blogging and more money through the greatness that is PPP!

Click to read full entry.

So the Uni finally got around to sending me my resit results, which arrived yesterday...

I passed :D

Hopefully I won't have any useless lecturers this year, especially not Old Man Death.

Last week I got a couple of letters in the mail.

One was a load of junk from the student union which went straight in the bin. It's like physical spam mail, wish you could get the postman to filter it D:

The other was from the Department of Computer Science (the area in which I study), giving me a time table of the events I need to go to in the next few weeks before we go back to Uni.

It's just stuff like when to go in to register myself for the new year, to sign off the modules I'll be taking this year and other stuff like that.

I'm hoping that this means that I am definitely in this year without having to use a compensation mark thing...

Well, if I ever get my results I'll know for sure.

No idea when that will be though...

I am at Joshkip's house.

He is busy burning his tongue off with absinthe, the nub.

That's all D:

Exactly a month to go until my resit. Got my results a little while ago and I passed all but one of my modules - Computer Systems.

I knew I was gonna fail that one anyway, I guess. I'd never done any of the stuff prior to going to Uni and the lecturer we had for that subject was beyond a joke. He spent about 40 minutes of a 60 minute lesson whining/time wasting so we only ever got (at most) 20 minutes of actual education, but usually a lot less. Not only that, but he gave us no indication of what sort of things we should know for the exam, so it was guess work deciding what to learn from books. The most annoying thing is that we complained about him to the student rep. and nothing was done about him. Not a thing.

Anyway, I need to do a load of 'revision' and hopefully I'll be able to pass this time, no thanks to Old Man Death. (Note: I say 'revision' because you can't actually revise what you've never been taught, so you should probably read that as 'learning')

Later.

Well, not posted in a while... Mainly because I lack the motivation... But I've finally decided to make a post.

My Mac went in for 'repair' on Tuesday. I say 'repair' because they couldn't even tell me if they will fix it, but they will phone me at some point to tell me if they will, which is annoying. The actual problem is that the screen has insects inside it, which shouldn't be able to happen, so it's a fault on Apple's side. Also, pretty sure my SuperDrive is nackered, so I guess they might fix that.

Oh yeah, I went to an awesome party over the weekend and had a really great time :D

Oh, wow.

Well I had a rant here, but the comment that was made to it (see below) has cleared things up. I see no reason to keep the post here.

Well, two weeks since my last post and not a great deal has happened.

Went into Hull yesterday and bought a load of stuff that I've been after for a little while (Shadow of the Colossus for PS2 (Which works on the PS3, thank god), a new N64 control that doesn't have a buggered thumb stick and a component cable for my Wii - looks much nicer on my HDTV now).

Doesn't look like I'll be able to do one of the projects I had in mind - can't find anywhere to actually build it.

Might as well say what that project was gonna be, now; I was planning on building an arcade machine (like the ones in arcades in the late 80s and early 90s). My main reasoning behind this was because I love Space Harrier and it would be awesome to play it arcade style, but also because a lot of arcade games were better than most console games today.

Also popped into the Apple store and didn't buy anything, which is nice.