Welcome to MekTrix 4.0

The london expo was much like previous years, but as with LWE, it’s getting noticably cheaper — whereas a couple of years ago everyone in the queue was given a carrier bag full of free stuff (card games, DVDs, posters, magazines), this year we were allowed to pick up a tiny (8 pages of A7) short story and some flyers. And the short story sucked.

After an hour and a bit, we left to go to oriental city for food and gaming. They have a lovely system for serving many people — there’s a court about 50m square with bars all round the edge; each bar being plastered with photos of food; you tell the person what you want, and are given a ticket with a number; when the number comes up on the display above the bar, you go and pick up the food~

The food itself was lovely, although I fail at chopsticks. I was advised to go for medium spice on the basis that I was english; which was quite helpful, since it still managed to be painfully hot ;_;

The business side was quite shiny, with demos of things like the accelerated desktop, and multiple terminals running on one PC. Freebies failed though; I got a load of leaflets, some pens, and not much else :( I’m told it was much better in previous years, but it seems that conventions are getting smaller and cheaper everywhere…

Meeting some people I knew, and watching them attempt to get unofficial freebies (like, entire racks of servers, or giant tuxes) was quite the hilarity~ I also saw jono bacon IRL \o/

Having wandered round and seen everything, we (50 odd random people from london LUGs and some others) went and DOS’ed a pub, and spent the evening talking of random things~

• Tea: \o/
• Hugs: \o/
• Badger: \o/

Lots of other fun things were there, but threes are more dramatic…

After tea, some of us went to see Dan Blood, who was also excellent; the band he was supporting were acceptable, although too loud (and I found another person who understands what I’m referring to \o/)

I don’t even weep softly. I weep fucking hardcore. I have to wait for these people to catch up before the interesting stuff starts :(

For reference, the full question:

You have an ArrayList called “library” which holds some Book objects. The Book object has a method called getTitle() which returns a String. Write a for-each loop (which we’d been learning about in the lesson) to print the titles of each book, one per line.

And the answers:

• for(Book title : library) {System.out.println(title);}
• Shouldn’t the title be of type String, rather than Book?
• Replace “title” with “book”
• The print line should have book.getTitle() in it
• Actually, use the “String title” in the loop, then print book.getTitle(title)
• No no, the book already has the title, you want library.getTitle(title) !

The lecturer (a temporary one) was encouraging them with things like “that’s sort of right”, whereas the regular guy would just have said “no”…

And then as I’m walking out of the lecture, a cocky voice from behind me — “ha, they all fail – it says one title per line, and they all forgot to put +”\n” in the println command”

;___;

Yay for being awake at 4am, when nobody else is around…

Having been done with shopping, I went on a wander around canterbury town, mostly looking for somewhere to sit. I eventually found a bench next to the enterance of a small park-like area. Inside the park was one guy with a dog, and a couple of guys with some bags. Nothing suspicious as such, but then a guy with an earpiece appeared on the other side of the enterance. People with earpieces in public tend to be either hard of hearing, or doing something interesting; and this guy didn’t seem very deaf.

Thinking that something interesting might be about to happen, I hang around, and the guy with the earpiece does too, looking into the park. Then one of the guys in the park passes a package to the other one, and the guy with the earpiece says into his cuff “they’re sitting and talking, a package has been passed across”. I think this could get yet more interesting, and I take a closer look at the earpiece guy on the other side of the enterance. We make eye contact; he looks surprised, mumbles something into his cuff, and quickly walks away.

At this point the guys in the park are also starting to look at me, since aside from them I’m the only person there. I figure it best not to get too involved, so I walk off to continue my wandering elsewhere.

I go into the town square, and see the guy with the earpiece again; I think it weird, but I continue walking, going off into a random alley, and stumbling across our local Games Workshop store — I pop in to see what they have, come out, and notice the earpiece guy hanging around on the other side of the street. I think this very weird, and decide maybe it’s time to go home, so I head for the bus stop. Once there, I note that the guy is there too, apparenly waiting for the same bus as I am. Wondering if it’s just coincidences, and I’m being paranoid, I think — if he’s queuing, then he won’t be following me; so I quickly turn a 180 and leg it through some alleyways. About 300m later I come to a bench, sit down, and look over my shoulder, to see him casually leaning against the corner of a building and looking around.

At this point I see a couple of my friends walking through town with a load of shopping, so I run over to them; I would guess that walking round in a group, carrying shopping, is much less suspicious than one guy on his own, since the earpiece guy seemed to stop following me after that…

Having tried mozilla calendar, evolution, and a couple of others, I found them all less efficient to work with than my phone calendar — the only desktop calendar app I’ve seen which looks nice to work with being iCal, and that’s OSX only D:

But lo; google have made something which looks (and I assume works) similarly to iCal, and it’s OS independant \o/ That alone would only be enough to fill it with Awesome though. There is one last feature which I consider the most important thing ever — it needs to be able to alert me to my appointments wherever I am, since I spend a lot of time not at my desktop. Google have this sorted though; entering a mobile phone number lets the calendar message me, and it seems free /o/

Although, it depends on me having a good enough signal to get SMS traffic D: I shall try anyway, since google calendar is so much more functional than the phone one that it may be worth it…