Hello from Helsinki!

Christmas is over and 2006 is rapidly approaching.

I'm planning on seeing 2006 in here in Helsinki with Karoliina, though there were times yesterday when I feared that I wasn't going to make it.

Over the past few days there have been some serious wintery storms across Europe, including England. My train was delayed by the snow, but seeing as I took it for granted that my train was bound to be delayed knowing GNER to be as it is, that wasn't such a problem.

I had a connection in Copenhagen to get all the way to Helsinki, but there was pretty much a blizzard there. Sitting on the tarmac for over an hour, I saw the takeoff time for my connection through to Helsinki come and go, and thought that I might be having to stay the night in Denmark.

when I found out that that flight was delayed, it was actually the only time I'm ever likely to be glad that my flight was delayed.

Eventually I landed in Helsinki three hours late, with poor Karoliina and her mother picking me up at 4:20am local time.

Sorry about that...

I'm on Holiday!

At last I've had my last exams for the term and I have Christmas and the New Year to look forward to!

Karoliina went back to Helsinki yesterday so I'm all alone in my flat - and as I've just realised, it's the first time that I've spent any substantial time here by myself. Before term began Lari was staying here while he was getting his own living arrangements organised, and since then I've had Karoliina here all the time, so being here alone makes this place unusually quiet.

I'm heading back to Yorkshire on the 21st to spend Christmas at home with my family which I'm really looking forward to, but I'm particularly looking forward to flying to Helsinki to spend New Year's Eve in Finland with Karoliina.

I'm really excited about seeing Finland in the Winter, but it's likely to be quite chilly... I guess I'm going to have to try out the famous Finnish saunas to keep warm.

First exam gone, still not feeling on top of the world.

That's genetic approaches down.

I'm still not feeling great, but hopefully it didn't affect my results too badly. unfortunately, it was kind of difficult to do my usual heavy revision for the last couple of days with the feeling of my tonsils trying to strangle me on Monday and my head feeling like it was about to burst yesterday. Having my sleep patterns messed up wasn't very convenient either.

I've told the people who need to know about it in case it mucked up my exam worse than I realised. It makes me feel like a moaning hypochondriac doing it, but I know that it's the only sensible thing to do. That and going to the doctor, which I'm going to try to do this afternoon.

I just hope that I'm better for Friday and can do myself justice in my next exam...

Yuck. I appear to have caught the lurgy.

After a week of Karoliina being ill, I thought I was safe from the nasty lurgy she has, but I was woken up by my tonsils about an hour ago and they're refusing to let me go back to sleep again.

I really hope I don't get this as badly as Karoliina did (she's getting better now). The timing's meticulous - my finals start on Wednesday.

At last, I have flights booked!

I'm going to Finland for New Year!

I managed to find flights that weren't horribly expensive through Scandinavian Airlines, leaving London City Airport at sensible times on the 29th and returning on the 5th of January...

I'm really looking forward to seeing Finland suring the winter, a pleasure I've not yet had. I'm also looking forward to seeing Karoliina's family who were absolutely great when I last got to see them.

The only thing I have left to worry about now are my 4 exams coming up in the next couple of weeks. They're pretty important, but I'm feeling better prepared than I've felt in the past about my exams.

Why is organising trips abroad always so difficult?

A little while ago I decided that I wanted to visit Karoliina in Helsinki over New Year's Eve, but I'm having a nightmare working out how I'm going to get there and back.

Having researched the flights, I could get extremely cheap flights to an airport 2 hours away from Helsinki (£10 plus taxes). However, that would involve me either having to spend most of the night at Stansted airport waiting for a 6:15am flight, or arriving at in Finland 10:00pm in the evening, cutting it extremely fine for any chance of public transport down to Helsinki. I sure as hell don't want to get stranded overnight in central Finland in late December when there'll likely be nowhere to stay.

Flying back is giving me a similar headaches, with me having to be able to get back up to Edinburgh.

I wish I could just blow a couple of hundred quid to make the whole problem easier, but I'm too much my mother's son.

Mucking about in photoshop

I've just been mucking about in photoshop (a bit of task cycling so revision doesn't frazzle my brain) and made a picture of a gryphon. I think it's ended up looking quite good:

The evolution of halclive.co.uk

As I've learned more and more about the intrecacies of setting up and running a website, this one has been through several versions. Only three have made it off from my hard-drive and onto the web, and you're only like to have seen two of them.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be) I never deleted those pages from my webspace, so you can follow the links below to see them:

Obviously, you've seen this version (powered by blogger), because you're looking at it right now.

The last version before this one wasn't dynamic and looked considerably more bland. It really sucked having to go and manually code the html every time I wanted to update, too.

The first version to make it onto the web was the most embarassing one. It was almost scarily ugly, and only a couple of people ever had the dubious honour of getting to see it.

Shiny new site!

It's taken the best part of a year, but I've just made an update that fundamentally changes how this site works.

Superficially, this means that the front page has changed (and will likely change more in coming weeks and months) and you now have little comment buttons to play with. I'll be surprised if anyone ever uses them, but at least it's nice to know that they're there....

I've also transferred my posts from earlier versions of this page to stop it from looking so sparse.

As for me, I'm now in my final year of my biology course on a genetics honours course. It's quite hard going, and I have a lot to do, but I'm really enjoying it.

To top it all off, I'm now living with Karoliina (my girlfriend) in a really nice little flat in a great location.

Well, I've been all over the place in the past week or two.

I went down to Yorkshire on the 25th for my Birthday (with a God-awful hangover) where Tom and William promptly got me drunk again. Waiting for me at home were presents of a new watch, a hipflask, a book on weirdness and a new soundcard.

Easter was great, chocolate and all. Headed down to London soon afterwards to catch up with some of my Africa Venture friends, many of whom I hadn't seen since we'd come home. That also was great.

I'm now back in Edinburgh wanting to murder my computer. Whilst installing my shiny new soundcard, I've run into a few difficulties. Whatever I try to do, I just get the same error message "This device cannot start. (Code 10)". I've tried all of the little technical tricks I've learned over the years to get it working, yet still it mocks me like a geek's version of Poe's raven.

All the more infuriating is the fact that I use my computer for everything - it's my music player and library, DVD player, television, games system and work system, so without a working soundcard I'm stuck in a weird and silent world. It's so bad I've started reading.

If this sound problem goes on any longer, I might even start revising...

Hal

Although it may seem that I've been doing nothing over the past few months, I have been messing around with various concepts for this site. At last, I've got bored of just poking around and have sat down and made some serious changes.

The most obvious change is the complete overhaul of this front page, beautified with the aid of an open source template from oswd.org.

Apart from this, there is now a fully functional and rather more attractive photo gallery. In it, you can browse my photos and even leave comments. It's dynamic, as in it creates all the pages you see in there on-the-fly, which means that it is incredibly simple for me to add, remove, or change photographs. If you have any photos that you think would be good to see in the gallery, email me!

As for life, I'm approaching the end of the second semester of my third year here in Edinburgh, and I'm about to turn 22 on the 25th of March. This scares me, as the next big landmark age is 30, and I will have undeniably reached reached my "early twenties" - I'm getting old!

I've decided that this site is no longer so embrassing that I won't tell everyone about it, so I reckon I might start getting a little more traffic and this may be the first time you've been here. Seriously guys, let me know what you think.

Hal

It has taken more than a month, but finally I have an update for you.

The more observant of you will have noticed that the site still looks awful, but the even more observant of you may have noticed that the photos link is now active.

I have uploaded a sample gallery using some photos from Camp California. As they were ripped from Camp Cal's own site, the names are all messed up. At some point I will try to tidy them up.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to set the gallery up to be dynamic (allowing comments from you guys and suchlike), but I will continue to work on it.

Still on my to-do list is to design a slightly more attractive front-end and make all the code nice, tidy, and clean (watch me learn CSS!).

On a more personal note, Christmas was fantastic down in Yorkshire, as was New Year in Lyon with Karoliina. Hopefully it won't be long until I have photos up for those as well.

Please - if any of you have any ideas for what you want to see here, let me know. It's going to get harder to change things the further down the line I get.

Hal