So last weekend I was in Sweden (Malmö to be precise) to see one of Eric Saade’s concerts (Sweden’s Eurovision entrant last year), because frankly all of his music is awesome! No really, it is!

As this was an el cheapo trip I flew with EasyJet from the misc airport Stansted in the middle of nowhere, which required getting a coach there late on Friday and sleeping at the airport. -_- Though I do have to say that an airport at 2am with no-one around apart from the odd handful of people sleeping is rather tranquil. Fast forward several hours after throwing away all of the liquids from my bag and re-purchasing them on the other side of security and it was time to board! As far as budget airlines go this was all very streamlined and efficient, window seat and everything, no hassle, leg room quite reasonable etc.

Now the downside (there had to be one right!) was that my flight was landing in Denmark and not Sweden…….. which was of course entirely intended ; Malmö is a 10 minute train journey over a bridge from Copenhagen airport!

(said train journey over a bridge)

Got out at the station in my destination, got some local cash (which turned out to be entirely un-needed as *everywhere* took card), and ventured outside! First impressions; the place is like a clean quaint version of a built up 70′s English town but with all the signs in foreign. Second impression; jesus christ the wind is cold. The weather app on my phone said it was currently 10°C, but it clearly didn’t take into account the freezing wind rolling in from the sea at full force… conveniently my hotel was only a short walk away (via getting a map from the tourist office opposite the station)!

Checked into hotel with ease, informed I had free breakfast awaiting me the next day, bonus! Hotel was really nice too, free tea/coffee 24/7, free wifi, super comfy/warm beds etc. Then went off exploring the town after a short nap:

After a few hours it was almost time for the concert, I thought I’d turn up an hour beforehand rather than queue up all day because it was bloody cold. This turned out to be a good decision as those of us with VIP tickets were let in right after I turned up… so turn up, get passes, walk straight in and straight to the front, no queuing!

The average age of the concert attendee’s everywhere outside of the VIP area seemed somewhat younger than I was expecting (mostly 10 year olds with parents :s ), but oh well, at least where I was there were quite a few people from other countries (I believe I saw German, Finish, Danish, and Icelandic flags there) that weren’t 10 year olds… so I didn’t feel that out of place, lol.

As for the concert itself: FANTASTIC! Probably the best produced/choreographed concert I’ve ever been to (not highest budget mind, just truly well produced… slick, so much attention paid to the dancing on every single beat of every song). I think also the only concert I’ve been to that I could sing all of the lyrics for. :s There was also not much of a proliferation of camera wielding terds, \o/ most people were too busy screaming at him or singing/jumping. \o/ \o/ Lots of the songs seemed to be special extended concert versions too (with room for audience singing… a few thousand people in a crowd singing Manboy acapella is pretty amusing), nice when someone takes care of what they’re doing for a concert rather than just playing an album and singing it. Lets not forget the ending either, he had the water shower thing on stage, lol.

After that I think about 10-20 of us with backstage passes were waiting around backstage because he was gonna come out and meet us (pretty sure half the people with backstage passes weren’t Swedish, lol… lucky he speaks good English!). He’s definitely a funny guy! I did have to ask him about the lyrics to “Backseat”, and suffice to say, yes, they are as rude as they sound (“You’re the pilot girl I’m cruising”, “I’m riding in your backseat” etc.), but apparently no-one else noticed this? He said he was just angry when he wrote it, lol, funny hearing an entire crowd singing it though.

It was a good length concert too, think it started at 19:00 and finished at ~21:30, we didn’t end up leaving until about 22:45.

At this point I had to find somewhere to sample the local beer and night-life, ended up in the local brewery for a couple of hours. But at the prices they charge for beer in Sweden one could hardly drink much (like £7 a pint >_>). Cheaper to get the train to Copenhagen, go out there, and get the train back (I was too lazy to do that).

Next day, all you can eat buffet breakfast, meats, fruit, cereal, toast etc. etc. Very filling! Packed up my stuff, checked out of the hotel and went out to do some tourist stuff. First stop purchase a tin of Surströmming (aka fermented/rotting herring), sadly I didn’t get to taste it as Danish airport security confiscated it as tinned fish is apparently considered liquid.

Anyway, tourist stuff. I went around Malmö Castle/museum, rather interesting if not very castle-like. Apparently the locals dug up plague victims remains and used their bones to make bone china. Also went around the kinda scummy looking “beach” which was freezing and full of goose poo. Then followed that up with eating moose and gravlax at a local restaurant and watching some football on their TV. They do seem to like their patio heaters out there, screw environmentalists!

And with that as the weather was starting to turn, time to head back to Copenhagen airport and home. God knows how I ended up sat next to a bunch of Danish weeaboo’s on the flight back, jeez listening to them was almost as bad as suffering a screaming baby. But oh well, a fun weekend!

So I recently spent the past 3 weeks creating a program from scratch in Java with no prior knowledge, reading no books on the subject, and no tutorials:

https://code.google.com/p/winebrewdb/

It all came about because keeping a record of the homebrew wine I occasionally make somewhat outgrew the spreadsheet it was originally kept in. Cue a search of the internet looking for a proper program that does the same thing, records brews, notes, recipe’s, pictures, has various calculators and info. All I could find at the time was a couple of outdated websites that looked like they were made in the 90′s, a few programs for storing homebrew beer data (doesn’t quite fit the needs of wine brewers… different processes), and a rather large and expensive program for more professional vineyards/winery’s, which was somewhat overkill for my needs (I did later find BrewTrax which is basically what I ended up writing a very simple version of, but more on that later).

So failing to find an appropriate bit of software at the time and definitely needing one, I fired up Eclipse and thought “how hard can it be?”… turns out, not very! If you want to learn programming don’t bother reading anything, just have a project with an end goal and then just start. First problem was obviously “how do I make a window?”, google it, insert result into your program. Next problem; “how do I add some buttons/text to that window?”, again google it, insert result into program. That’s where I was when I had that (lol):

…a very Java looking application with a rough idea of the buttons I wanted and zero functionality. Next problem then; “how do I make the buttons do stuff?”, google again, use result. And so on, how do I store data in a database, how do I retrieve data etc. etc. Just keep furiously googling everything until you have a working program that does all you need! Then once you’re at that point you just have to make it look pretty and fix all the bugs (there will be bugs, there are always bugs), et voilà:

An entire perfectly working (minus 2 cosmetic bugs that I have no idea how to fix) open source program that doesn’t look like poo and does exactly what I need it to without any bloat (even works on linux and mac)! Made as I said above, with no prior knowledge, no books, no tutorials, just a whole lot of googling! All in the space of 3 weeks too, god knows how long it would have taken to get that done in an actual office environment with professional qualified programmers… even simple things like a text change can take weeks in some companies I’ve worked, lol.

As for that BrewTrax thing I mentioned earlier, it pretty much is a far more complex version of what I made. I paid for it because I wanted to check it out, and on paper it sounds great, but in practise it was far more effort to use than I cared for. Not to mention if what seems like half of the application is taken up by menu’s and toolbars then something’s gone horribly wrong. See below (green highlighted bits are the bits of the program that aren’t menu/toolbar):

I could list the other silly design decisions (no search function, only endless “filters” for example), but then it’d just turn into a long winded rant, lol. So back to the original point of my post…

You don’t need to be a programmer to make a program!

Anybody can do it with a bit of googling. Now if only drawing ability could be acquired through a quick google!

Edit: On further playing with BrewTrax it’s not too bad once you change the layout, pick what columns you want, set your filters and then hide the filter box. Still could do with smaller icons/padding though. And it seems there *is* a search function, just not particularly obvious at first, lol. Now if only it had more users so that their live data thing and online recipe’s etc. had more use.

Not updated here in a while, feel bad for neglecting the place, but it’s mostly due to moving house, starting a new job, and having no internet for several weeks. >_<

A certain someone keeps complaining I never write what i’m doing here anymore and only use twitter, so I shall use this post for rambling about all that stuff. ^_^

So I handed in my notice at my old job in Milton Keynes at the beginning of last month after having got a job offer in London (yay, real city! …though to be fair, MK is actually quite nice). Some househunting ensued and lo I’m now in 1 bed house in Wimbledon 15 minute walk from my new workplace, living on my own for the first time, fun fun fun!

For those not facebook stalking my pictures; here’s the house:

General comments; Wimbledon is a *very* nice place, parts of it you’d think were a village in the country and not part of London (funnily enough the locals seem to call that area “the village”). The area the house is in is very quiet apart from the railway line, but I stopped noticing it after about 3 days, lol. Gotta say though that driving around London compared to Milton Keynes is *madness*, no-one seems to know how to drive properly in London, and dear god the traffic lights make things sooooo slow. T_T MK had nice easy long straight roads + roundabouts with almost no lights anywhere!

Oh and while i’m on the subject of driving, that same certain someone demanded I put my car pictures on my site and not just twitter. >_>

1998 Vauxhall Astra 2.0 Diesel. Bought it back in May after I passed my driving test (actually did I ever mention that here? Well I passed it back in April, lol). Got it for a bargain, quite an old car, but the only thing wrong with it was the handbrake not working at all (which was soon fixed), everything else seems to be fine (not that I know anything about cars). It’s certainly comfortable cruising down the motorway, and the diesel is a nice bonus! (another bonus being the new house resulted in my car insurance going down by £150, nice!)

Hmm, what else…

Oh yes, leaving present from my old company was a lampshade… kinda funny.

Living on my own for the first time means I get to learn to cook properly, lol, Delia’s “how to cook” is coming in very handy (I can even boil an egg now!). Maybe i’ll do some more food posts at some point, can’t remember when the last one I did was.

Moving in itself was fun, setting up all those accounts with all those bills that need to be paid. Not to mention the palava with the internet/phone line, which went something like this:

Me: Right, first things first, order internet.
*picks up phone*
…..no dial tone
*phones BT*
BT: “There is no line at your house, we’ll charge you £130 to be connected.”
Me: Ok.
BT: “Your installation date is set for September 3rd, your new phone number will be xxxxxxxxxxx”

*picks up phone next day*

…there’s a dial tone.

*tried calling my phone, works, matches the number BT said my line would be the day before*
*calls BT back*
BT: “Sorry but there’s no line at your house.”
Me: “I’m calling you from it right now.”
BT: “Uhh…”

A week and a half later BT pulled their finger out and decided that there was in fact a working telephone line at my house and that I didn’t need to pay £130 to be reconnected. >_< And now I have internet (not with BT of course… that would be silly)!

Other amusing things about the house:

• It took me 3 days to figure out how to turn the light on in the cupboard under the stairs. I could see a bulb, but no switch. Turned out the switch was hidden almost behind the fridge. o.O
• Couldn’t figure out the hot water, wondering why it was barely hot. Turned out it was because I’d turned off the heater on the boiler that actually heated the water (which i’d assumed was the broken one as it didn’t light up). It in fact automatically turns on during the night. Still can’t find the timer for that though, it’s nowhere. >_<
• Still can’t find the stopcock for the water, found what I thought was it, turned it, and had a nice stream of water shooting everywhere from the pipe, lol.
• …and I had to re-wire all of the downstairs plug sockets and fit new ones. Looks like the previous tenant took them off to paint the walls, then refitted them badly (loose wires, not screwed into the wall properly etc.). They all made a crackling sound when they were switched on, HUGE fire hazard.

Other stuff; the weekend before last was Amecon, but i’ll write that up separately later. And last weekend was a lovely BBQ in Bournemouth with various H!P fans… except it was raining and there was no BBQ, but there was watermelon smashing on the beach in the back garden, and pleanty of foul tasting alcohol (honestly, who ever thought of making cream + vodka alcohol out of aero mint??). Thanks again for letting us stay on your floor (though you really need a new sofa >_<).

Anything else i’ve done recently, let me think… I pre-ordered Final Fantasy XIV, anyone else? Oh, and I bought running shoes about a month back, I do intend on using them on a reasonably regular basis (even registered on Nike+), Wimbledon Common is only down the road.

…anyway, back to attempting to catch up on drama/anime. 11.5mbit connection, yay, far batter than the barely 1mbit of MK. There shall be more posts within the next week!

The last day.

Got up, had breakfast. As we were leaving Sunday night we had to check out that day, so we dumped our bags and stuff in @CDevil’s room (who for some reason was camping out *again* despite today’s signing session being a lottery… I don’t think they ever actually slept in their rooms at all the entire weekend).

Got to the expo, lined up and was pretty much let straight in, and we all rushed off to the lottery thing. Sadly the staff had finally caught onto people lining up multiple times to pull out tickets, lol (took them long enough ), so no ticket for me. Ran off to join the An Nakahara signing thing instead (just had to buy a KiraRevo DVD to get a ticket for that… a DVD with French dubbing might I add).

Got to the signing area and the line mostly consisted of people far far shorter than me, lol, oh well, I wanted my stuff signed! There was also one of the staff going through the line asking people questions in French with a microphone, sods law that she’d come and talk to me. >_< After a confusing few seconds explaining I was English, she switched her questioning to English mode, lol. She asked me why I was there and why I liked Kirarin Revolution, then translated it into French… not entirely sure what she said but it resulted in some clapping from the French people in the line, lol.

Eventually made it to the front, translator started talking to me in French, I ended up replying in Japanese that I had no idea what she was saying, and just ended up talking to An Nakahara directly, lol. She seemed very nice, we had a brief conversation about Koharu saying that she thought Koharu was “like a doll” amongst other things. ^_^

After that dashed off to find the Q&A thing with Morning Musume. Sadly everything in French mostly, but I think they were talking about their thoughts on new members at one point, and Linlin responded with something like “We’ve got people from Japan and China, I think we should have more members from different countries!”. I think also they were asked whether they’d come back and they said they wanted to (by all accounts from certain sources, they enjoyed this expo more than Anime Expo in LA… not surprising, AX has a history of annoying their guests).

Met up with everyone else again next, and grabbed some food, then made our way to the airport to wave Morning Musume off. There were only a handful of us there (about 10-20), after waiting for about an hour there they were, walked right in front of us as we said goodbye.

And the day was coming to a close, we all went back to the hotel to pick up our stuff. Though before leaving we did have some fun with the room we were using as storage, stuffed all of the bedsheets, duvet, pillows, towels and such into the gap in-between the two windows, lol:

Left hotel for the last time and went back to the airport, eventually found the entirely unlabelled piece of road that the coach was supposedly supposed to stop at. Coach came, totally packed, everyone ended up sat on their own. So all slept all the way back (minus the stupid long boring border controls at 3am that we didn’t go through on the way over). Arrived back in London and straight into work for me, good stuff!

And so another fantastic trip concludes, yet again another foreign convention puts everything in the UK to shame (the London Expo could easily organize big anime type guests, but do they ever… no). Special thanks to Morningtime, Hexi, and ptom whom I spent most of the weekend with, totally wouldn’t have been as fun without you guys. Also thanks to everyone else we hung out with while over there (everyone  should have been mentioned at some point in my previous posts, feel free to complain if I missed you out >_<).

RAIN RAIN RAIN!!!!

Woke up, had more of that fantastic breakfast (managed to find a slice of cheese so it wasn’t just buttered toast, lol), then left. It was absolutely tipping it down, thunder, lightning, everything. Dash to the bus stop with many many other people huddled in there like penguins, all very damp.

Got to the expo, after being herded through lines outside and inside, then outside again (all the while still raining) we eventually got inside. Off to watch the Morning Musume signing session and meet up with @CDevil @Catchfivebats, @Carlos et all. Now they had been queuing since the day before in the hopes of getting into this “first come first served” signing session, but unfortunately for them this signing session was limited to French people only, and no i’m not joking either. There are “premium tickets” that foreign people aren’t allowed to buy that let you into the convention early, and so everyone with these premium French person only tickets got into the convention and filled up the signing session way before any of the people that lined up overnight even got let in. It takes the piss really when you’ve got people spending money flying all the way from America or even Mexico, lining up overnight, and they still don’t get an autograph because the organizers have something against foreigners (guess they’d get on well with Dawa then ), kinda ironic really, considering they’re running a convention that celebrates a foreign culture.

Anyway, we watched the signing thing, waved, took some pictures as they left.

After that we wandered off around the convention, went to the Kirarin Revolution cosplay and karaoke thing only to find it had been delayed by an hour or so, so walked around some more. Found the Hello Project booth, got to look at the costumes on display up close (the guy behind the desk said they were both Junjun’s and showed us her nametag on the back of the neck!):

(gotta say the green dress was looking a bit frayed on the edges, lol, and according to @RadioHexi they weren’t very well made)

After that, walked off, found the Kyoto Animation stand (incidentally I don’t remember a KyoAni stand at AX last year… do they only go to France?) and took pictures of the Haruhi movie cels and pencil drawings they had on display. And god knows (lol Haruhi) how I missed that before, the aforementioned mecca of Kirarin Revolution, like an entire massive stand of goods, manga, dvd’s, and various other merchandise, lol.

After some wandering around, some getting lost, and some more wandering around, we eventually made it back to the place where the Kirarin Revolution thing was going on. It basically consisted of a couple of 5 year olds dressed up in KiraRevo cosplay, and a bunch of 18+ year olds also dressed up in cosplay being given points by the manga author, lol. A couple of them sung stuff without any backing music (so not quite karaoke), but what really surprised me is that of those that sung it seemed the young 5 year olds were singing the Japanese versions of the songs, whereas the older people were all singing the French versions. Shouldn’t it have been the other way around?! The event did drag on a bit, but it was nice to see more KiraRevo love nontheless, and the guy that came on at the end and done a perfect rendition of Balalaika complete with dance moves (without backing song, or lyrics in front of him I might add!) was a genius!

(it’s such a classic song, I didn’t feel a mere link to it was enough )

Can’t remember what we done after that so i’ll just assume we went back to the hotel, lol. This time we *did* manage to order pizza (with the help of the hotel receptionist using my mobile phone… because they were too stingy to let us use the hotel phone). Grabbed a few bottles of beer from the hotel next door and everyone (namely: me, @MorningtimeBlog, @RadioHexi, @Paul Elliot, @ptom98, @Jltos) returned back to @ptom98′s room to eat and watch the nine smile concert (aka Koharu’s graduation concert). Much discussion was had in-between people falling asleep, everything from bingo wings to a certain monkey and frog.

And eventually the night came to a close, final day tomorrow!