So... It's been ages since my last post, I know. I'm sorry :p
What's happened between then and now? We've (my flatmates and I, plus Dave - Yana's boyfriend) gone bowling twice. First time I lost (i.e. Came last), the second time I won and totally thrashed everyone else. The others now believe that I spent every waking hour at the bowling centre between the two sessions. It's a lie. I'm just good sometimes and bad others.
Web2Messenger is still broke, much to the dismay of, well, everyone. Not much else to say about that.
I've also found some incredibly cool software that hooks the video card, creates a second "virtual" monitor and steams the image that would normally be sent to that screen to another computer on the network. This allows me to use my laptop as a second screen for my desktop so that I can control both with the same keyboard & mouse and switch between MSN Messenger and Counter-Strike: Source - which I have been playing an awful lot over the past few days - easily. Speaking of CS: S I had to spend 2 days reinstalling Windows and grappling with Steam in order to get my Source games working again. Pain in the arse to be honest. Turns out that after the latest update (which broke stuff for a lot of people I've heard) I needed to go to Windows Update and download EVERYTHING, including "optional" and hardware updates. Don't ask, it's just madness.
I spent a few minutes (aka about 30) this morning creating an entity-relationship diagram for Web2Messenger since I've been telling Iain in our Information Resource Engineering lessons how easy it all is and how I do that sort of thing all the time. I just thought I'd better test my skills and make sure I really could do it. Turns out that it was somewhat of a masochistic idea of mine as the finished diagram contained 27 entities, with 15 relationships with the User entity alone. It got to the point that I had run out of space around the User entity and I had started joining relationships to other relationships just to get them to fit to some degree. We also have four entities which have no relationships to anything and a sub-system of four entities with relationships only to each other, not to the main system. I also got to experience the joys of a many-to-many relationship between one entity and itself. It looks silly. You end up with the link entity as normal and then two lines between that link entity and the original entity. It almost seems like it's a waste of time, but if you think carefully you can see why it's necessary.
Apparently the cleaners have got fed up with our kitchen being a mess and have now put up a nice poster in our kitchen telling us to keep it clean and such. However the cleaners (or whoever wrote the sign - probably not the cleaners, in fairness) don't seem to have any grasp of the English language. Specifically the use of apostrophes and the difference in the usages of "their" and "there". Check out this lovely photo of the poster in question. I am more than a little tempted to get out a permanent marker and correct the damned thing myself. Wonder how much the cleaners will have a go at us then...
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The offending poster
We have some kind of room inspection happening on Thursday. I'm out all day, luckily, so they'll just come in, look around and leave, without involving me in any way. My room's pretty clean & tidy anyway, so I don't have anything to worry about. It's not as if I've got to spend hours tomorrow cleaning it or anything.
I've just glanced at the date and noticed that it's now the 26th. Therefore I have been here exactly one month. Woot, perhaps.
Update: Poster has been, uhh, "fixed":
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My fixes
Unfortunately the camera flash obscures my scribbling out of the apostrophe :(