Star Hopper.

No news is good news.

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 20:07:00 +0000

Hello their readers. Once again I find myself apologising for not making more contents, but at least I have a rather compelling string of reasons / excuses as to why this has happened.

Going back to the end of April, I returned from the Falklands ahead of my ship to take a weeks leave in preparation for my leadership, a three-week intensive course which helps develop an understanding of core values and ethos required for those taking a promotion to Leading Hand in the Royal Navy. I passed the course with flying colours, the only thing i need to work on is to use smaller words more often (and avoided severe blistering this time around too). And have been given a ver nice £5000 pay rise too.

After Leadership I had a couple of weeks off, during which my laptop decided to go all wibble wobbly (turned out to be a failure of the HDD causing the windows 7 install to become corrupt), which left me without a laptop for the best part of a month. I could boot the Ubuntu install I had, and duplicated the windows partition, so nothing lost there. And that takes me to the middle of June anyway.

Not all of this time has been spent entirely on my haunches, I have been toying with ideas for some simple tutorial videos for Liberty BASIC, as well as other things like my origami, or some game play videos (World of Tanks has taken up far too much spare time).

After that, I finally decided on the laptop i wanted to give myself as a congratulatory present for getting my promotion, which took a little over a week and a half to get put together, tested, and shipped to me, in Bournemouth, all the way from Shanghai in China. So Dell are way up in my good books to be honest. Yes the poorly laptop was also a Dell, but that was the first thing to go wrong at all in 18 months of heavy use, and now it is my dad's laptop. It must be an improvement over the Vista desktop because it is still in one piece :)

Anyway, now that I am in possession of my shiny new Dell XPS 17 (with a few bells and whistles). I can get back in the saddle with my consolidation project for Liberty BASIC, as well as playing Portal 2 (GlaiDos cracks me up).

Thanks for sticking with me, and here is to more from me soon.

Update 06/05/2011

Fri, 06 May 2011 21:37:00 +0000

Hey gang, today I have made some progress with the Star Hopper Games App page. Links have been added for dev documentation, as wella s a few anecdotes added. IRL progress of the app is slow due to most of my time at the moment being spent getting ready for my LRLC promotional course in the Royal Navy. I have made some progress though with integrating the rock / paper / scissors game logic with a GUI built using Free form, th LB bundled GIU builder (which was written in LB!). It is a lot trickier, and I am wandering if I many have been better off coding my own GUI, it would have been less elablrate, but I would have a better idea of what I am doing. Oh well, too late to think about that now I suppose, I shall let you know when I reach a point at which I am happy to share it.

Update 03/05/2011

Tue, 03 May 2011 13:38:00 +0000

Starhopper.info has been through the cleaners, various spelling errors have been removed or corrected, as well as some grammatical errors being adressed. Lots of new pages have been added, I just need to fill them up with shiney new contents. Facebook connect has been added as a login option as well. That’s it for now, more coming very soon.

A Week Off.

Sun, 01 May 2011 02:47:00 +0000

Well isn't that nice. They chucked me off the ship a week early so I can relax a home a little before I FINALLY go for take 2 of my LRLC promotional course. I'm still apprehensive. This is probably more so that the first time I went there in fact, but I'm a little more confident too, it's almost like deja-vu, I know what to expect, I just have to be that how-high-guy for a few weeks.

Anyway, as I hope some of you have nostice, a few things have changed around the site, all for the better I think. I'm hoping to have my progress so far on my first project, up to dat eby the end of the day too :)

The voilin has gone the way of the dodo, and astronomy is hard to do when youre half the world away from your telescopes, but I can usually find enough space to open my laptop up, mwahaha!

Arrays! Arias! and the Flaklands.

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 14:26:00 +0000

I have now been slowly but surely working through my first book on programming for nearly three months, and I am a WHOLE THIRD of the way through it. Now despite the fact it's title ends "In 24 Hours" I swear I have not been dragging my feet on you. I am just taking it slowly as I a) am really interested, and b) am taking a lot of notes, and am thinking about making some tutorial videos to help join what I have learnt thus far. As the title of the blog post alludes however, I have finally gotten to the part about Arrays, which is part and parcel of the Algorithms chapter, all of which is so fascinating I have had a couple of stupidly late nights just because I have lost track of time where I have been so absorbed in the book and the learning of new things.

Secondly, I have also found some time again to pick up my poor, poor, neglected violin, which has sat in my wardrobe since October. Bless her wooden pegs she was still in tune when I took her out of her case, and sounded gorgeous as I played some open strings. A few scales and renditions of Twinkle Twinkle later, I realised that I may have lost what little muscle memory I had developed, which kind of brings me to the third part of this blog post title.

I'm going to the lovely, far-away, mysterious Falkland Islands again, courtesy of Her Majesties Navy, but I shall be returning again in May to re-do my leadership, which I may have blogged about a while ago ~Whistles innocuously~ So I have plenty to keep myself occupied and focused for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for reading yet an other slightly random update on everything important to me,

PEace and Love

Neil