Last friday I had to hand in the final essay for one of my classes. I enjoyed writing it, and I'm still feeling fairly proud of the result. The same goes for a previous essay I had to write. It feels like spending all that effort on a well-written essay that'll only be read by about 3-5 people is just a waste. I've had a few people comment on how they thought my writing was pretty good, so lately I've been toying with the thought of looking into semi-professional architectural writing.

To that end (and to let more people read what I think might be an interesting read to people other than just me) I turn to you, flist.



Here is a Mediafire download of my essay, ~1.5 MB pdf file. The text is about how architects could/should consider the use of light in their designs, comparing it to photography. It's not too long, and I'd much appreciate it if some of you would give it a read and let me know what you think. I tried writing it to be accessible for most people, leaving out jargon as much as I could.

I'd love to hear some feedback from you all; comments and critique on stylistic and overall writing would be great, but I'd be quite happy with any opinions you might have.

Thanks!

Since the weather was awesome today, I still had to take some pictures of the situation for my current design project and I wanted to check out the prices of some compact cameras I'm interested in (which turned out to be more expensive than online, contrary to my hopes :[ ), I went out to Rotterdam today.

And while I was there, I took some unrelated pictures of the Cube Houses, most of which came out pretty nicely. Although admittedly, it's a very rewarding building to take pictures of. It's hard not to take interesting pictures of them if you put even a little thought into it. Either way, here I am, randomly showing these to you, flist. E-enjoy, I guess? >>;










I'd like to hear any comments you guys might have, btw :')

EDIT: Man ImageShack's default links/coding suck so much ass. All links checked, fixed and working now.

Happy Earth Hour 2009, everyone :')

Didn't hear about this before today, but hey, why not? Jumping onto events like these can be fun sometimes, even if it's mostly just silly symbolism. It's amusing how the American friend of my British housemate who is staying over for a bit got so very into this. SAVE THE EARTH LET'S ALL GET A BASEBALL BAT AND SMASH THE STREET LIGHTS

This e-mail is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind. In no event shall I be liable for any loss of profits, loss of business, loss of life, loss of use or data, interruption of business, or for indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages of any kind, arising from any use of this e-mail, sent attachments and/or all included links.

E-mail. Serious business.

So I ran a search on Google Image search for "suddenly ninjas" yesterday. This is one of the things I came across.

this is awesome y/y?


In unrelated news, university is kicking my ass time-wise. Last week one of our professors literally admitted they expect us to work around 12 hours per day on weekdays, and spend at least one weekend day on work as well.

hahaha sob ;_;

I am back from Brazil and on the internet, on my brand new shiny workstation laptop. Imagine that!

I don't particularly feel like making a very long post about my time in Brazil right now, but I can assure anyone who's interested I had an absolutely incredible time with ishtar_vr and I did meet with angeling a few times, who's pretty great despite telling bad stories about ishtar_vr and me to her cats. But she let me play some Radiant Dawn, so I guess I can forgive her for that.

I also took very little pictures, despite the packs of sugar constantly telling me to take more. I DO however have this picture (which wasn't even taken by me) I want to share with all of you in this post:



all you can eat pasta restaurants with paper tablecloths and crayons and pirates ftw, even if I suck at drawing pirate hats.

That's my faculty ;_;

I don't think we'll be using it in the near or distant future. Watching it burn from a distance was pretty impressive in a "man this kinda hurts" kind of way. I'll miss you, you clunky, far too small and yet surprisingly awesome concrete ship of a building.


Apparently, this is what happened: sometime early in the morning, a water pipe sprung, and the 7th floor of the building was almost entirely covered in water, and water was slowly running down the stairs. Instead of temporarily shutting down the building until the whole mess was cleared up, whoever manages the building decided to keep the building open for classes today after all.

About an hour later, a coffee vending machine short-circuited and caught fire. Flames spread quickly and there was a lot of smoke; by the time people got to it, it was too late to extinguish it... partially because it was the water pipe that lead to the fire extinguishers that sprung.

About 30 minutes later, the windows on the 6th floor explode. Another 30 minutes later and a quarter of the building is gone.

What kind of RETARDED building manager keeps a building open in a situation like this?


The good news is there were apparently zero casualties, or even injured. The bad news... well. Everything else, pretty much. I don't even want to think about how crappy all the temporary measures are going to be. Temporary measures that will probably outlast my stay at this university, sadly. It'll be years before there'll be a new faculty building.

...at least they can inspire a whole range of assignments on this case in the future.

EDIT 18:00: No, DEFINITELY not returning to this building, ever. RIP, Architecture faculty ;_;

HELLO LIVEJOURNAL, LONG TIME NO SEE AGAIN

Is today strike day? I really have no idea since no one invited me, but if it is, sorry! If only just a little, since I don't really care myself. Stupid LJ management is stupid, I think that's a fact by now. Acceptance or moving to a different journal system both seem like more productive options than a (probably pretty limited?) one-day content strike.


Either way, I'm at my parents' place for easter. I've been here for... 5 hours now? I've had a good meal (hurray boerenkool proper dutch food for the win), I've had a coffee break...

And I've fixed the internet connection on two pcs, and right now I'm working on getting my younger brother's pc spyware/virus free again. Removed about 5 viruses and 100+ spyware infections so far.


It's good to be home again, I guess. I'm a little sad when I think about how I'd consider my father and brother to be a little computer savvy. What about all the poor people who aren't even that ;_;

So it's January.


Blablabla exams. Blablabla uni paperwork stuff. Blablabla going to look for a job for the semester.

I wish my pc would stop overheating and/or randomly rebooting. I cleaned the fans, so that doesn't seem to be the problem. But it's still the most likely cause. Sigh.


But things are pretty decent overall, I guess,

...which makes this a good time to look back to 2007?

I don't particularly like the end of the year. I like the holidays; Christmas is always enjoyable, even if we don't celebrate it much. My mother likes decorating the house, and she does a good job at it. Christmas dinners are generally nice, with or without extended families (none this year). I even like Last Christmas.

New Years, I don't like quite as much. I like the fireworks, I like how it's the start of a new year, I like celebrating the end of a year with my family... I hate the local New Years party. It's depressing. Since my life has been mostly away from this town ever since high school, I barely know/care about people in this town aside from a few friends. Those friends will always go to the traditional party there. I've gone there for four, maybe five years now, with varying results. It has yet to be something I'd consider an enjoyable time. Not sure what I'll do this year...


But anyway! I wanted to make this a POSITIVE entry, since 2007 was pretty much AWESOME. If I remember correctly, I started the year with a slight winter depression after my least successful uni semester so far.

But I joined Heritage in February, had a great design class teacher for the spring semester and I read AQUA/ARIA... and by the time spring rolled in, there was nothing I could call a depression left, and I proclaimed spring to be my new favourite season. I(t) felt great.

And that hasn't really changed since.

2007 was a good year in almost all aspects. For a quick summary:

HEALTH: Not bad, not impressive either. Got really sick at some point, but recovered quite well, so at least my defenses are still working. I was hoping to get some excercise in this year, but I guess I never succeeded at that. Better luck next year.
MONEY: Borrowed more money from the government, had more expenses as well. I'm not doing too bad, but I need to find a way to earn more money if I'm going to spend some time outside the country like I want to. Maybe I'll have to get serious about finding a job for summer this year.
GAMING: HORRIBLE. Still don't have a new console or gaming pc. In fact, I barely played any new games, or games at all. I enjoyed playing FEAR, but other than that, it was mostly bits and pieces of random games. I was totally drooling over SRW OGs though. I want a modded PS2 ;_;
SCHOOL: Although my spring semester didn't get me great results, I did learn a lot, and like I said, the teacher was inspiring. The fall semester was INCREDIBLY tough, and it cost me much more time than I ever expected, but we did some stuff I'm really proud of, and it's definitely the semester I've learned the most from. With the best results too: if I play my cards right (and actually study this break) I can score a minimum grade of 80 for every course, which would be considered extrememly impressive here.
FRIENDS: Lost contact with some friends, both RL and online, but also met a whole bunch of new ones, both RL and online again. With the coming of a new roommate, the atmosphere in our student house also improved quite a bit so that's all good~ Heritage people: you're all awesome, thanks for this year and I look forward to spending more time with you next year. FESS people: the next semester SHOULD be a bit better, so I hope to see more of you than I have in the last 6 months.
LOVE: Best year ever, easily ♥ Here's to that timely realisation, and a 2008 that can only be better~


( And now for a meme, happily stolen from ishtar_vr )

2007, Overall Score: 80/100

Not bad at all, 2007. That might be a new high-score :')

tcg_exchange card page behind the cut. Nothing to see here, move along.

( card page like I said )

As stolen from vampiricdescent



Well, I imagine there's not a lot more left to be broken after that many tries, yeah.


Sigh. I'm can't help sighing right now. Started with no actual reason, too. It's annoying.

You know, I've been having a LOT of dreams lately. For the last, what... 4 weeks now? I've been having dreams pretty much every day. And most of them are full-length stories as well. It's pretty awesome, since it makes sleeping that much more enjoyable. Even more than normal XD

Although I do wonder what caused this sudden dream explosion. I used to have dreams only occasionally, so four weeks of continually dreaming is kind of odd. I think I'll look this one up.

Back in 10 days, huh... Eheheh >_>;;
So it was 30 days instead. Lemme just give you guys a quick synopsis of those days and continue as if nothing happened afterwards.

Vacation was great. We had 10 days of perfect weather. 30+ degrees Celsius average temperature. And the average day was waking up at 10 AM, buying stuff around 12, eating, going to the beach for most of the afternoon, get back, start drinking, cook (which was up to me, most of the time) and either spend the evening drinking at the tent or someplace else.
Quite enjoyable. Although I might have like the day I went off to explore the island on my own the best.

After that, I didn't do much, really. I got some great results on my exams, passing every single one I took. Even if some of the grades were nothing to write home about. Watched some anime and played some GC games, mainly Gasaraki for the first and Super Robot Wars GC for the latter. Nothing too special.

And now, I'm back to studying. Finished one exam last friday - expecting something ~70% - and I have two more to go. And then uni really begins again september 1st. Summer was too short, that's for sure.

In other news, I quit my job in my parents' town. This means I don't have to travel back and forth every weekend, which should be good. Downside is of course the loss in income... I'll have to find a new job in my uni town sometime.

This also the seperation from my parents' house is getting close to completion, since they now turned the room I used to stay into my little sister's. Well, I knew that was coming :P

Too much stuff to finish, far too little time. Let's see how well I can control my laziness. I'll HAVE to, if I don't want to miss out on a lot of credit in just one week.

Internet will be low on the priority list. I hope.

._.

Yeah. I ran a search on Google Image search for "suddenly ninjas". This is one of the things I came across.

WARNING: NSFW
Link contains badly drawn cock. It's nothing shocking, and hilarious, but it would be kinda hard to explain at work XD

http://scathedobsidian.livejournal.com/118880.html

Enjoy. Made my evening, anyway.


In other news, I'm in for two extremely busy weeks. The semester is coming to a close, and EVERYTHING suddenly ends in the same two weeks. I've got 5 major projects to finish with deadlines very close together. Ouch.