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.