I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire

A red sky of apocalyptic proportions this morning, transitioning from a sullen, pale orange to a full on fiery crimson as I drove northwards to work. I was feeling rubbish too, with aching limbs and the beginning of a cough. I hope that it doesn't turn into anything worse in time for my week off.

Work was a buzz of low level irritation, with the usual slew of irritating ring tones topped up by an incessant beeping noise like a brain damaged R2 D2 whilst the tech support guy set up our new printer. This seemed to involve keying in vast strings of random characters to the keypad on the machine. Quite why a printer needs such loud keypad tones when there is a perfectly good visual display built in is beyond me. At least we no longer have to walk down to the far end of the office to pick up documents now.

In M255 news, I have finished Unit 3, and while it was reasonably straight forward, it introduced some fundamental concepts of object orientation in Java, as well as some quirks and oddities of the way that reference variables behave. I think that, as with any language, some of this is not going to fully click into place until I have done a bit more programming of actual code rather than looking at individual snippets out of a wider context. My current plan is to keep working at the rate of one unit a week, with a week for TMAs, which will put me comfortably ahead and give me the option of starting another course in parallel in February.

In games news, I have mostly been playing the usual triumvirate of Words, Carcassonne and Pocket Frogs on the iPhone combined with Rock Band on a Friday and Saturday night. I have a hankering to complete Fallout 3 properly before getting Fallout : New Vegas, possibly to play over Christmas, when they've fixed the reported bugs. There's Fable 3 due out as well, but I might wait for the reviews on that one. We shall see.

In telly news, we watched the first part of Mark Gatiss' 'History of Horror' on BBC 4, and it really was a superb look back at the classic early films of the thirties, in particular the iconic work of James Whale with stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, through the RKO shockers of the 40s and into the early 50s when SF ruled the roost. Well worth a watch on iPlayer, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the short series.