Halloween Weirdness (Halloween Eve)

Part One: Prologue. Sort of. Halloween Sunday, I suppose.

Part One of Sunday Bit.

Crappy halloween/bonfire night flavoured joke. What do bonfires (perhaps creepy bonfires with cauldrons and stuff on) and my halloween weekend have in common?

Answer? They both feature lots of kindling. Haha, hoho hehe etc.
Yep, after the astounding success of my most recent technological awesomeness, or getting a second free printer, I have now returned from the outside world to my cosy little lair, with yet another piece of sparkly technology. Don't panic though, I paid for this one. That's not to say that I should have paid for the last ones, no, they were gratis and therefore no payment was required :-).

At college, Jim (the one who fights with shrubberies) has gotten into the habit of bringing E-textbooks and other course materials to college to read on his shiny Kindle Keyboard. I instantly thought "Hey, something like that would be really useful for my course".

Of course, I've always used my ipod to read ebooks, but I fancied something with a bigger screen, something that wouldn't become impossible to read as soon as the sun came out, and the kindle seemed like an obvious choice, and so, digging into my miniscule overdraft, off I went into town to look for one.

I had quite a nice time, wandering around the bookshops, little gadget shops, expertly ducking and weaving around to avoid being emotionally blackmailed by the various "hello-sir-can-I-talk-to-you-for-a-minute-did-you-know-that-processed-food-is-radioactive-and-the-animals-don't-get-colour-tv-either-it-will-only-cost-you-10p-a-day-to-provide-chickens-with-sky-digital" folks.

Eventually, after ages of wandering around, I found my way to one of the larger department stores in town (its windows already filled with hanging snowflakes and christmassy scenes), where surely I'd be able to find one. And I found two.

Initially, I fancied one with a keyboard, but these things aren't really cheap, and I didn't really want to pay £40 extra for a keyboard. Instead, I bought this shiny little one. It seems to work fine, it looks great even when it's turned off, and it has 1.2Gb (which sounds like a miniscule amount until you remember that most ebooks take up anywhere from 100KB to a couple of MB a piece. Even the four largest ebooks I have, great big reference texts of 1100 pages plus, only take up 97Mb in total. Perhaps in time I may run out of space, but not for the forseeable future.
I even bought a nice leather wallet thingie to keep it in decent condition in my pocket. £6.50 on ebay :-). So yeah, it's sparkly, it's easy on the eyes (ever tried reading an ipod or an ipad display in direct sunlight? Whereas their LCDs become bright, glary and impossible to read, the rather cool E-ink display of the kindle absolutely and blatantly does not. If anything it's even easier to read the sharp contrasty display in bright sun). I'm glad I bought it.

I've done my mock exam for the end of semester 2 final exam, and the result was an encouraging 85.1%. Now I know what I need to read up on, the real exam should end with a higher score.
I hope so at least. We lost another student this week - having been off due to health issues, he has since decided that he has fallen too far behind to continue with the course. Shame.
Those of us that are staying the course though, are looking forward to our cool Christmas party thingie. We're predicting pizza, lots of lovely fireballs, cider, beer and whatnot, and lots of fun to be had.

Prologue Part 2 - Halloween. And Fireworks.

I'm not sure why, but Halloween seems to have turned into a weekend long thing. I don't mind, I like festivities. I was zooming about at work last night in the lovely autumn rain, and saw my first band of trick or treating folks attending a party. On the 29th! I suppose if you like beer on halloween parties, it makes sense to have it on a day that isn't the night before going to work first thing in the morning.

I'm expecting to see substantially more trick or treating folks out and about today, as the weather is better, and a few more folks might have put up their scary decorations.
I've got work in a couple of hours, I suppose I'll be able to find out for myself.

As for my ickle nephew, he has a cool bat costume, and he's also (now) got some cool glowstick thingies, and we're all looking forward to going out tomorrow, which I have off.

Unfortunately, I don't have bonfire night (the 5th) off. But it's not such a big problem. Since I'll be out and about all night, I'll get to see plenty of fireworks anyway.

So yeah, that's it for now. I've got some studying to do :-).