Well today sucked right up until about 7pm. It started sucking at around 2am with me being unable to sleep and feeling very ill - an experience which was only made worse by having my flat mates making a hell of a racket in the kitchen. Eventually I got to sleep, though, and woke up around 9am and promptly had a woman from Accommodation Services banging on my door with the usual "can I see you in the kitchen please?" crap. Turns out my lovely flatmates had left the kitchen in its usual state and the cleaners were less than impressed. Since I was the only one awake at 9am - the others all being awake 'til about 5am so not waking up again until midday I was charged with the task of cleaning the kitchen before she returned in an hour. She really didn't care that none of it was my stuff - I did repeatedly point that fact out to her - all she could say was that if I didn't clean it then she'd get a cleaner in and bill us all. Since I refuse to clear up stuff that isn't mine I just made doubly sure that all of my stuff was out of the kitchen and left it for whomever woke up later on. Apparently part of the problem was my two Tesco Home Shopping trays that were under a work surface in the kitchen totally out of everyone's way. They are such a "problem", apparently, that they're going to stop Tesco delivering to halls so I'm just supposed to not eat or something. Whatever. I've since written a 480-word notice to my flatmates that I will pin in the kitchen later which basically says "tidy your shit or you can pay my end of the cleaning bill".
The rest of the day was taken up feeling sorry for myself with this hellish cold I appear to have gained. I can't breath, talk or think properly which has kinda stunted my ability to do stuff - not too helpful when I have three pieces of coursework to do in the next month.
My day finally improved when City Link updated their website at 6:05pm to reflect the fact that they had delivered my Ebuyer order at 1:30pm. Quite what the delay was caused by I'm unsure. Anyway since the post room is closed between 6 and 7 in the evenings I had to wait an hour to get my post, but eventually I was able to get my stuff including a nice letter from the "Marketing and Student Recruitment Assistant" in the School of Computing telling me that my £500 scholarship cheque is ready for collection, so I can go and get that tomorrow and be richer for a short while. In addition to the letter I also had the stuff from Ebuyer and Lindy to collect, so I ended up coming back from Accommodation Lodge with a box, two letters and a jiffy bag (sellotaped to the box). The contents of the box and bag are as follows:
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An audio adapter cable to convert red/white phono cables into a standard line-in jack, which finally allows me to play my GameCube on my PC with decent quality video AND sound!
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A cheapy 25-in-1 memory card reader to replace the one that broke. I only need it to read xD cards but that's a very uncommon card format it seems.
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A KVM switch that I bought with the hope that it'd allow me to switch between PC and Xbox 360 on my monitor easily, but seems like it might not ever achieve that task, unfortunately. At the moment it's just a pile of wires on my floor.
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A female-female VGA gender changer so that I can actually plug my Xbox 360 into my monitor when it arrives.
The aforementioned card reader has created 4 more drives in My Computer, so that it now looks something like this:
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Or to put it another way:
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Also I took a photo of the moon since I noticed it was very visible tonight and fancied testing out how good my camera is with bizarre subjects like that. This photograph is with the shutter speed on maximum - 0.5 seconds. I would love to have much greater control over my camera's shutter speed to create really long shutter speeds of 30 seconds or more but you need really nice (read: expensive) cameras to do that properly (noise reduction, etc. Long shutter speeds create a lot of noise. This photo was fairly noisy before I ran it through Paint Shop Pro X's noise removal feature and that was with only a 0.5s exposure time..)
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I should point out that the nice white dot just above the Moon in that picture is actually a defect in either the camera's CCD or a lens somewhere, not a star or somesuch. That dot appears on every photograph I take in exactly the same spot and it's annoying. It normally appears more of a cyan colour, though.