Was out for Alex’s birthday on Friday night which was nice. Was good to see various people and have a cheeky catch up.

Over the weekend, Emma, Adam, Sariah and myself headed down to Westward Ho! for some land action. Wind wasn’t anything special and gosh damn it was cold. It was a good weekend and we had the beach to ourselves which was nice. I really need to sort out water proof trousers and shoes. Combats with running shoes doesn’t keep you warm or dry! Over the weekend Emma and were chatting and decided that if we were going to really go for it in April we needed to be fitter and stronger etc. To this end, Sunday saw the first day of me not drinking until mid-April. I am allowing myself a couple of drinks at Christmas, and one on my birthday – apart from that: zilch. I am also going to start some fitness training at the start of the new year. I am currently 15 stone and 3 er, other units. I want to be 14 stone by April. Wish me luck.

Monday saw an invasion of Ant and Gaz. Gaz, true to form brought 4 beers and ended up drinking some of Ants. Ant didn’t drink all that much and I stayed tea-total. It was good to see them although I didn’t feel all that sociable due to a head cold.

Last night I headed to the snowdome (head cold intact but not as bad) and did my third snowboard lesson. The aim for the third lesson is to re-cap the previous lessons and start initial turns. It took me a while and I found myself getting really hacked off to begin with. In my head I was sure it wasn’t too difficult and ultimately I thought too much and stacked it time and time again. As soon as we weren’t being directly watched by the instructor it clicked, I relaxed and managed to nail it. Not only doing the turns but by the end of the lesson I was happily carving down the slope, linking turns and, if I might say so myself, looked pretty bitching The instructor wanted some fun time and allowed us to have an extra half hour. It was also cool to bump into Baz who I know from kiting – another person to hang out with there! Now my problem is that I have booked my next lesson before this one and to be honest, I have kinda done everything the final lesson is for. So I am going to see what I can sort out in terms of cancellation or something. (I’m still going back again tomorrow with Emma, Rob and some others)

I can’t wait for this week to finish so I can get some holiday time to work on work stuff. Wikkid.

And in other news, my cold has reduced to an occasional cough and a blocked nose. hurrah.

I think Emma is amazing.

I wrote this function this morning and feel it is nice enough to post here. Some people have stated that I could have used hex constants to make the in-place constants shorter, but using binary constants shows the exact byte pattern that the code checks thus making it more approachable for people trying to understand the code. This is, of course, in ferite. The code is quite fast and will return as soon as the first UTF-8 character is located.

function detectUTF8( string str ) {
    number isUTF8 = false;
    number length = str.length();
    for( number i = 0; i < length; i++ ) {
        number b1 = String.charToNum(str[i]);
        if( (b1 & 0b11000000) == 0b11000000 ) {
            number b2 = ((i + 1) < length ? String.charToNum(str[i+1]) : 0);
            number b3 = ((i + 2) < length ? String.charToNum(str[i+2]) : 0);
            number b4 = ((i + 3) < length ? String.charToNum(str[i+3]) : 0);

            // We do a proper check
            // 2 byte
            if( (b1 & 0b11000000) == 0b11000000 and
                (b2 & 0b10000000) == 0b10000000 ) {
                isUTF8 = true;
                break;
            }

            // 3 byte
            if( (b1 & 0b11100000) == 0b11100000 and
                (b2 & 0b10000000) == 0b10000000 and
                (b3 & 0b10000000) == 0b10000000 ) {
                isUTF8 = true;
                break;
            }

            // 4 byte
            if( (b1 & 0b11110000) == 0b11110000 and
                (b2 & 0b10000000) == 0b10000000 and
                (b3 & 0b10000000) == 0b10000000 and
                (b4 & 0b10000000) == 0b10000000 ) {
                isUTF8 = true;
                break;
            }
        }
    }
    return isUTF8;
}

Part of the reason for posting it is due to the fact that from about 15 minutes of search I was unable to find a function to do it (or even an explanation).

So there has been a recent dashboard update that allows one to view movies. There are about 30 on there at the moment, ranging from Superman 3 to The Matrix to 300. Cool I thought, I have some Microsoft points (the xbox currency) and decided to check them out. I was genuinely under the impression that, like buying things from the iTunes Music Store, you bought, downloaded and kept the download. The prices they are charging are not unreasonable for this method of distribution. For instance, 300 is translates to about £9. There is a kicker though, you are only renting the movie. If you don’t watch it for 14 days? It goes. If you watch the movie? It goes after 24 hours. In my opinion this is a pretty sucky and I personally wont be dipping into their catalogue.

Last week I was in Sweden for work and it was a good giggle including a Christmas party. On the way back from Sweden I took some photos from the plan, the sky was amazing. The full album (about 4 shots) is here. Not bad for a mobile phone.

Monday evening, Gaz and I went to see the Kings of Leon. By a stroke of luck the tickets were free and thanks to Kilgore. Was a good concert and was nice to go and see a random band I had partially heard of. Gaz really enjoyed it. Today my snowboard bindings showed up, so my board is complete:

This evening I decided to amble to the snow dome. I did 1 and 2 lessons, of 5, to get a recreational pass to go snowboarding on a regular basis. It was good fun. Can’t wait to get fully qualified so I can make a tit out of myself on a regular basis. The only thing that hurts is my thumb. It kinda bent the wrong way. And my knee. It hit some ice when I hit the wrong edge. Apart from that, shitniz is great.

I bought this off iTunes the other day and to my delight I really like it.

There are a few tunes on there that I have heard before – The Prayer, I Still Remember and more recently Flux. However I have listened to it a number of times now and I have to say that I really like the album. Hunting for Witches, Song For Clay, Waiting for the 7.18 and Sunday are some of the highlights. I am listening to it again for the 5th time or so today. I might have to stop soon before I start to dislike it.

The album works really nicely as a whole and I can whole-ly recommend it.

Been busy.

Was at EKS on Saturday and got to witness this sunset:

Went to the German market with Emma a number of weeks ago:

(More photos here)

Mike asked me to be his best man. Which rocks. Gaz proposed to Jen, she said yes, which also rocks. With the plans to go on the snow kite trip with Turbulence I went and got a snowboard and some boots. I’m on the look out now for some decent clothing. I have some stuff that I am going to try in Sweden when I am out there.

Work has been busy. But fun. More to discuss about that another day! I took some other photos that I like so going to pop them on the bottom of this post:

You might find that you receive a message from your friends to go to a site.

It looks like this:

http://www.free-offers-for-you.com

Clicking on the link will redirect you to blockdetele.com.

If you have received it from a friend, it means that they have used the site. It pretends to be a site that allows you to check if you have got people on your contact list that is blocking you, at the same time it keeps your login details and will then use it to spam other people on your contact list. If you read their terms it even states that they are going to do this. It will only get your details if you login to the site, simply looking at the site will not affect you.

If you have received it from someone it is likely that they don’t even know that it has happened.

SOLUTION: change your password to your msn/windows live! account. To do this go to http://www.passport.com. Login using your details and then click “Login to Account Services”. It will give you the standard hotmail/xboxlive style login prompt. It will then present you with a list of options, the top one being “Change your password”.

NOTE: Changing your password will change the login password for your msn/windows live/hotmail account. This means that you will have to use the new password where needed, but also means that the gits at blockdelete.com can no longer access your account.

Hope this helps.

If you know anyone who has sent you a message as described above, please show them this message. I’ve written these instructions because I’m started to get a little hacked off with the spam on MSN from my various contacts

Some references:

Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.msn.messenger&tid=8344132f-d827-4dd8-a0cd-a0ad0a3f2814&p=1

A blog post about it: http://petesbloggerama.blogspot.com/2007/11/warning-blockdeletecom.html