M. Willis Monroe

Yesterday I cam up with a cool idea for a movie. I gathered the troops (i.e. my mates) and we shot it this morning in all of two hours. It was all done in stop motion and then compiled together into a film. I’m going to mess with the codec etc… to get a copy working on windows. I might also add a simple soundtrack and some sounds. Overall, however, it’s awesome. Chair zombies everywhere, awesome stop motion action shots. It has everything. I’m really pleased.

As long as my computer stays on the internet you can get the raw video here: Lazy Zombie Afternoon. I made a small (1.6mb) version of the movie, it’s too small to appreciate the cinematic qualities but you get a taste. Download it here: Lazy Zombie Afternoon (miniscule edition).

I went for a walk tonight to do some night photography. The best of the photos I put up on flickr.

London weather is awful, this is pretty much what I see when I step out of my dorm room every day.

Today I went to a revision class for my Text in Archeology exam, my literature class, and I picked up two essays. One was superb (a first) the other was ok (a second). I also did a lot of calling around to estate agents asking about houses. I’ve been finding out that estate agents don’t update their webpages once lettings are taken, Lucia thinks it so people will call up anyway, and they can try to sell them another property. I’m inclined to agree. I’m also starting to wonder if we aren’t starting this way too soon. I have a little guide that talks about looking for places in August. Maybe that’s a better idea.

Oh and I added a little thing to the top of the page, it shows the latest five pictures uploaded to my flickr account.

That was kinda fun, just on a whim I had people from my dorm take it, two brits and one italian, they all scored highest for general american english.

I did some more work on reverse octopus, it was remarkably easy to get back into it with the help of svn diff. I could see exactly what my previous changes were and what I was working on. I’ve added coins to it, now the players can run around picking up coins. That’s about it, I haven’t added anything close to a point yet but it’s fun. Here’s a screenshot of zak and I doing exactly that, running around picking up coins.

p.s. I uploaded my photos from Chris’ barbeque to flickr, you’ll find them in a set here.

I messed with my hair again, this time I really like it. I wondering if I should just keep it these colors, it’s pretty easy to do, just a bleach and then get someone to paint on the black. I’ve gotten into a pretty respectable rhythm recently. Every two days I wash my dirty clothes in my bathroom sink and hang them up, and then right after I start baking bread. The bread is done in time for dinner (and lasts the next two days). While the clothes are dry later in the evening. I don’t know how much money baking my own bread saves me, but I’m no longer spending three pounds a week on laundry, plus it’s fun do wash your clothes. I usually try to play half and hour of guitar and fiddle each night too.

I installed the new hard drive the other day, it was a breeze. Now my computer is back up being awesome. The linux desktop is really awesome. I can auto import pictures from my camera, watch videos on websites without any difficulty (a sticking point in the past) and everything else that you’d expect a desktop computer to do. And it does all this while looking smooth and cool (see the screenshot link to the right).

P.S. I finally added myself to the flickr meme whatsinyourbag the link is to the right, or here.

• I bleached my hair, it looks cool because the black remained.
• Breezy development has started.
• I bought a stereo, and it is amazing. I’ve been listening to music off my iRiver (courtesey of line-in) and classical FM non-stop.
• My tent came a few days to late, so no scotland right now.
• ParcelForce double charged my bank account for the VAT (uk sales tax) on my tent, thus pushing my account balance into the negative.
• NatWest were very nice about it, I’m all cleared of any charges once I get the refund from ParcelForce
• ParcelForce weren’t so nice, they didn’t apologize and acted like it wasn’t their fault, plus they won’t fix it till monday.
• Till then my account stands at: -£23.42

There isn’t a picture today, because my laptop hard drive destroyed itself. I lost a lot of stuff (mainly all my e-mails), and I’m sorta without a computer till I get a new hard drive.

So today I made cinamon rolls for breakfast, washed more clothes in my sink, baked a loaf of bread, did a lot of reading, and listened to some music on Lucia’s cd player.

This is really sad. It looks nice from above, why can’t we look at it?

I went up to Chris’ house for a barbeque. It took my three hours to get from my dorm to his door, something I was not happy about. Getting just from my door to the bus to Oxford took almost an hour. When I got there I hopped on the local bus up to Chris’ house and Ed and Marco met me and we walked the short distance to the barbeque. Once there I ate a lot of vegie sausages. Later we stood around:

Later it began to snow, and things got cute:

Once it started getting late Amanda, who was heading back to london that night, and I caught the bus back to Oxford and hopped back on the Oxford tube back to London.

This is the typical picture of me, smilling more then face will allow.

In other news I had to do something about the lag in Reverse Speed Octopus, so I looked around for other socket handling methods. Asyncore was a bust, but select() worked like a charm. Now movement is instantaneous. I invite anyone running linux (or perhaps an odd bsd) with pygame and subversion installed to: svn co http://www.irmak.org/svn/mmorpg, username: guest, password: guest. Maybe I’ll set up a server on this here computer and keep it running as development progresses.

Tomorrow morning at the sound of my cell phone alarm, I will:

• Pull back the covers
• Sit up
• Put feet on floor
• Put on white shirt
• Put on running shorts, containing:

• Left Pocket: Dinwiddy entrance swipe card
• Right Pocket: Flat and room keys

• Put on totally awesome pirate socks ( I have 10 pairs )
• Roll socks down to my ankle ( as per custom )
• Put on and lace up my old running shoes
• Walk to door
• Using keys from right pocket lock it behind me
• Walk down to the entrance and…
• Do some running

Every once in a while I go running on the canal near my dorm. I think now that the weather is nice, I’m going to do it more often. Well that’s that, goodnight.

I wrote a game today. That picture is from zak’s computer. He was running the game server on his home computer, and was logged on from his school computer, I was also logged from my computer here in London. The end result, two octopus men that move around really slowly. But it’s cool. Theoretically any number of people could log on, and everyone could move around to their hearts content. I’ve since added a the capability to use your own avatar. Tomorrow I’m going to go over the whole thing and organize the code. When I started working this morning I didn’t know how to use the pygame library or implement socket programming in python, and now I do.

In other news my sweet talking to the tent people paid off.

Hello Willis,

Thank you for your email.

The tent has come in so your order will ship from our warehouse
tomorrow.

Happy camping.

Sincerely,

Sydnie Dickison

Update: the game is getting better: look here.

The time: 6:15 pm, The place: my dorm room:
I was sitting deciding whether to take a nap or think about dinner, when I realized I was very bored. So I stood up, put on a nice shirt, grabbed my jacket and hopped on the tube to Leicster Square. On the way I texted a friend to see if she wanted to come along. Once I got there I sidled up to the half price ticket booth, secured one ticket to “A Life In The Theatre” with Patrick Stewart (!). I then had a good hour or so to walk around Soho until it was time to head over to the Apollo theatre. I presented my ticket, and took my seat on the balcony and preceded to watch a pretty good play. Afterwards I walked home.

This is something I have to do more of. London is so full of events and goings-on. It took me 20 minutes to go from laying in my bed to buying a cheap discount theatre ticket to a west end production.

I got an e-mail from the company that I bought my tent from, the model I wanted is backordered and won’t be shipped until the 21st of April. I sent a kind e-mail back saying, I understood their predicament, but it would be really great if I could get that tent before I exam time came around.

Oh and I moved all the old entries to the archive page on the right.