Ben Nuttall | Blog: A Day In The Life...

I'm now at the end of my third week of university. I've moved away from home and now live in halls of residence in Manchester, which is a completely new experience for me. I can cook and generally fend for myself but it's still very different from being at home. I'm having a wicked time out here and loving the whole Manchester scene - the parkour's awesome, the bars and clubs are pretty cool, my flatmates are a great bunch of people and I've also joined the canoe club which is brilliant.

There are ten of us living in my flat - five boys and five girls - which sounds a lot but I think it works fine. We've each got our own room on the corridor and we share a sizey kitchen which we all use at different times so there's only ever a maximum of two or three of us cooking at once. I couldn't have asked for a nicer group of people to live with. We're all from different areas of the country (even one girl from France) and we're all completely different in person which makes us gel in that we all have something to bring to the group and there are plenty of questions bouncing off each other about all our hobbies, interests and ways of living. We all went out together the first few nights and got to know each other and the city, but now we're tending to do our own thing in smaller groups (a few of us joined different union clubs) and we're all settling in to our own ways.

In Freshers' Week I had no lectures, just introductory sessions. So after two weeks of lectures I'm feeling like I'm definitely on the right course; it's exactly what I was hoping for and I can see it being challenging enough to be worth doing, I feel like I'll be learning useful things rather than stuff that's pointless. My degree title will be BSc (Hons) Mathematics and Computer Studies - I opted for the Combined Honours programme where you pick two separate subjects and do the core modules of each rather than a single course where you do lots of extra modules. This was because I wanted to keep my options open by doing a combination of two subjects and develop a wide range of skills in two fields. Interestingly, the Maths course at my uni is very computer-oriented, and the Computing course is very Maths-oriented, so they'll go together very well.

I'm having to learn two new programming languages; M-Code for solving complex mathematical functions in an application called MATLAB (Matrix Laboratory), and Java for writing and executing programs.

My modules this year are:

• Mathematical Fundamentals
• Programming (Java)
• Discrete Mathematics
• Linear Algebra
• Programming (MATLAB)
• Computer Platforms
• Statistics
• Learning & Employability (lol)

I have the option to select a major and minor next year (i.e. do more Maths modules and fewer Computing, or vice-versa) or just leave it at 50-50. I'll see how I get on.

Maths started easy (C2) on Day One, then zoomed ahead to FP3 on Day Two, which is way more advanced than I did at A-level, but I understood the lectures and managed to do the questions afterwards so that's good. I did ICT at GCSE and A-level and learned nothing of any real use to me - everything useful I can do on computers has been self-taught. Schools just don't teach anything that's useful to people today. I'm glad to say that so far the Computing lectures and practical classes have been interesting and I can see me getting a lot out of the course.

Yesterday evening I had the best midweek parkour training session for such a long time! There were about 15 of us out, and even Sam Corbett had come over from Sheffield to see a Swiss guy called Tobias who he had met in Lisses who was staying with Scott McQuade. We did some great training for about three hours, we chatted about parkour and there was a brilliant atmosphere within the group. Then Sam departed for his train home, which he missed and so ended up staying the night at mine. We did some more jumps on Oxford Road on the way home and chilled out with a pizza and watched some Futurama! Unfortunately Sam had to set off first thing in the morning to make it back for his lectures but it was nice to have him round. The first overnight guest at my "pad".

I absolutely love the location of my accommodation. It's a maximum of five minutes away from where my lectures are, ten minutes from a massive ASDA and ten minutes from the parkour meet-up spot. Oh and canoeing takes place every Wednesday evening at the Aquatics Centre across the road. I love how I can nip home in between lectures for food or if I forgot something, it's so convenient. I can't imagine any other way now! I went on a beginners' river trip in Bury with the canoe club last weekend to get the freshers started (in fact, sue to my experience and qualifications they asked me to help lead the trip) and I'm going on an advanced trip this weekend! They've also asked me to take one of the three places on a BCU Event where you learn how to run a uni canoe club, which should be really informative and exciting! Tomorrow I'll be showing prospective students around the halls of residence (like I looked round last year).

I can see it's going to be a wicked three years. Watch this space.

Labels: Computers, Kayaking, Maths, Parkour, University

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The internet is such an extraordinary thing. While I was googling for a good picture of Aslan for the video I posted last night, I came across a blog post about a guy who had gotten himself an Aslan tattoo:

I left a comment on his blog, saying I thought the tattoo was cool and that I shared his admiration of Aslan. I tend to comment on blogs when I find them randomly, but never expect a reply - you never know when a blog is redundant or still in use. Anyway, today - I received a reply. He commented after me to thanks me for the positive comment and he wondered how I had come across his blog, so I told him I was looking for a picture of Aslan for my parkour video and linked him to my blog post with the video. He went on to comment on the video post on my blog to tell me that he had posted a new post about the random incident of connectivity between us. His post explained how I had found his blog, that he realised he can't have known me because I was from the UK (he's American), that he had never heard of parkour before he saw my video, and that he enjoyed my video (which he had embedded in the post) and compared it to Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. He finished by warning blog-reading teens not to go out and try parkour, and explained that I referred to it as "training" and mentions the bail I talked about in the post.

This guy is called Rev. Josh, and his About Me says:

"I am an ordained UCC clergyperson serving as an Associate Pastor in the Connecticut Conference. I am also into fantasy, science fiction, video games, and Dungeons & Dragons... Contradictory? You'll have to decide for yourself!"

I love how the internet brings people together like this. Remember the time I was contacted by a guy who found my secret message from Danny Wood and Paul Maunder? And you know who are always at the heart of it all? Google! It was the same for Dave Gorman who ended up flying all over the world simply because someone had entered the words 'Francophile Namesakes' into Google. For more about this see this post. Speaking of Dave, I recently discovered he has a blog, which he updates regularly - it's worth a read (and even a subscribe if you like what you see). Also check out his awesome photography portfolio (again, which he regularly adds to) on Flickr.

If you were wondering why I have a fascination with Aslan, then I suggest you read the Chronicles of Narnia. I recently read them all (as you know if you read my Pyrenees post) and even though they're written for children they're really enjoyable and thought-provoking. They helped me understand my beliefs and opened my mind to new ways of getting my head round why things happen and what there is beyond the scope of the plain-thinking view of existence. It's hard to explain but the stories put situations into a different context and use analogies to explain things that most people fail to comprehend about faith. C.S. Lewis was a genius who gained a Triple First from Cambridge, and had a thorough understanding of theological concepts and a brilliant way of telling a story. I have to admit the books are, for the most part, rather dull as not a lot happens until the very end when Aslan the King of the Beasts and son of the Emperor-Over-the-Sea comes and sorts everything out and explains everything. My favourite book was The Magician's Nephew which is where two children from Earth enter into an uninhabited world by means of magic rings made by the boy's Uncle, and they witness the creation of Narnia by Aslan. This tallies with the story of Genesis and even has a tree of forbidden fruit and shows the temptation in personal greed.

This has been a crazy post. I somehow managed to refer to four of my own blog posts, as well as four other people's blogs. Two of these people I have never met. I never plan my posts, so I tend to drift off the point and write way more than I intended. I'm working on cutting them down!

I had a great Bank Holiday Monday - I spent the day in the park with my Sister Kate and my four-year-old niece Olivia. Here are a couple of photos I took of Olivia:

With under four weeks left in Sheffield I have lots of people to see, so I need to arrange days to spend with friends I haven't seen in ages and those I won't be seeing much any more. If you didn't see yesterday's parkour video, you can watch it here. Oh and check out the new 'Post to Facebook' links which appear at the bottom and the sides of each post - click one of those to share that post on Facebook by either sending it as a link to one of your friends, or posting it directly to your profile feeds to share with anyone who visits your profile.

To close I would like to quote Rev. Josh:

"Be safe & be good to each other"

Labels: Computers, Faith, Featured, Geek, Google, Internet, Parkour, SPKD

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Thanks for reading (or at least skimming) this post - I hope you enjoyed it. Please feel free to give your thoughts or ask any questions - they will be responded to.

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Last week you saw the revival of the Sheffield Parkour Diaries. This week I'm bringing you a parkour special edition of the recently-revived diaries with episode 15, edited by yours truly. It contains 90% parkour and just 10% silliness and promises to be entertaining and inspiring. This is a showcase of the movements we have accomplished during this week's training, and features training at the University of Sheffield English Department and also Tapton Flats, an abandoned estate outside the city centre of Sheffield. I hope you enjoy the video.

It's been a great week of training. Tuesday was horrible weather but a great session nonetheless, then we met up again on Friday and had the sickest day of training I've had in ages (in glorious weather too) and again on Saturday when we did some cool stuff even though we were very tired, but enjoyed the company of the group, talked about parkour and other stuff and had a great day.

One thing I feel I ought to mention is that I had a pretty bad fall on Tuesday. I wasn't hurt, injured or damaged in any way, but the potential was there. I did an arm-to-arm (as seen successfully executed in the video at 4:46) at Tapton Flats and it felt really good so I was raving to Will and Danny about it; they seemed a little less enthusiastic and weren't really up for giving it a try - for some reason this irritated me and I made it my mission to persuade them that it was fun and that they should try it. I was just on a buzz from this movement I'd seen, done and enjoyed. I started to get a little arrogant about it, which is odd, and did it again, but somehow slipped on take-off, missed the other wall and slid down it to the floor. It's probably a 10 or 12 foot drop from where I took off, and I slid down the side of the wall I'd failed to catch the top of, landed on my feet thinking myself lucky. I came down from the buzz and chilled myself out. The other guys tried it eventually (with a little more care than my second attempt) and found it fine.

This led me on to the point of discussion with Danny that parkour gives you a sense of immediate recovery. In a situation where you fall or slip (even in normal life situations other than training), your inner parkour comes into play and adjusts your body to where it needs to be to prevent injury. You just suddenly become aware that you are falling and in potential danger and you immediately and sub-conciously do whatever it takes to stop yourself; whether you need to put your arms and legs out, take a drop or force a roll, you just do it. This is like an extension of natural reflexes such as shutting your eyes to shield from something, ducking from something, putting your hands in front of your face or whatever. Parkour just gives us that edge, from all the practise of movements and being in unusual positions where accidents can easily happen, we're just used to adjusting quickly to defend ourselves from pain.

I used Windows Movie Maker to edit the video; I think it's a great piece of software to use, or at least it would be if it didn't crash every two minutes. I'm not kidding. I would be dragging a clip into the storyboard and then click to view the next one and ... FREEZE. Damn. I'd have to Ctrl + Alt + Del it and end the process. Then open up again, locate the project file, wait for it to load, hope that it worked and that I hadn't lost too much in the process. It's so temperamental! And incredibly hypersensitive. It just doesn't like you clicking something while it's doing something else, and instead of just ignoring you it simply freezes and there's no solution other than to close it down by means mentioned earlier, and waiting for it to load up again. That's the last time I use WMM for anything. I've used Adobe Premier and Adobe Premier Pro before (Pro was just annoying, as if they'd removed the useful features) but it's a massive application to run so not really the best option for me at the moment. I've heard good things about other software, so if anyone has any recommendations (except Paul telling me to get a Mac) they would be more than welcome.

Here are my photos from the week's training. View the photoset here.

Labels: Computers, Featured, Parkour, SPKD

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Thanks for reading (or at least skimming) this post - I hope you enjoyed it. Please feel free to give your thoughts or ask any questions - they will be responded to.

Remember - you don't have to be signed up to Blogger to post a comment - just put in your name (or remain anonymous if you prefer) and type your comment.

This is a screenshot showing my desktop background, the album cover of Less Than Jake's new album entitled GNV FLA (an abbreviation for Gainesville, Florida - as the album consists entirely of songs about their hometown), with my Start Menu replacement ObjectDock showing my icons, with the mouse hovering over Media Player Classic, revealing its name in a font called Ismini, which is made up of greek letters. The resolutuion is 1600 x 1024 on the new widescreen monitor I mentioned in yesterday's post. It's a rarity for me to be able to refer to a post (in another post) as yesterday's post as it's usually a lot longer between posts. I'm hoping to make my posts a lot shorter but much more frequent. Anyway, here's the picture:

When viewing this picture, I had the idea of hovering over the same icon in the same place, and taking another screenshot. I did this a few more times and I really wanted to make an Infinite Regression, so I did it about a hundred more times until the Less Than Jake background was barely visible and thought that was just about enough (click for Flickr then go to Fullsize):

I love the colours in this; the way they all sweep towards the centre of the image, and the way each icon and character starts off crisp and clear around the edge and becomes less and less so until you can't make them out at all and they even become too small to count. See how each picture is directly proportionate in size to the one it is directly inside, and that the scale factor decreases geometrically? I think it's pretty awesome.

This image also makes an optical illusion - do you see a pyramid-type shape (i.e. a 3D object with the point at the top in the middle) - or do you see the inside of an object, like a corridor with the door at the end that you can barely make out? Personally I see a corridor, but I can just about force myself to see the outside version.

I've been working on the new site today. I'm getting closer to it being finished.

I mentioned Less Than Jake earlier, they're a band I've liked since was about 13 and were the first band I ever saw live (at the Octagon at Sheffield University). I've just bought tickets to see them in Manchester on my 20th birthday! They're doing a UK tour and will be playing at the Academy at Manchester University, 5 minutes from where I will be living! I look forward to it! The new album is great. I recommend it.

I'm off to Manchester tomorrow morning for a Euphony training seminar led by Rick Smithies, who's given great support to me over the last few months. Then I'm meeting up with Paul and the Manchester parkour guys for some training in the afternoon before getting the train back to Sheffield for a night out at Owlerton Stadium (dog racing track) provided by Esporta, where (until recently) I worked as a lifeguard.

More to come soon. Watch this space!

Labels: Computers, Euphony, Geek

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Thanks for reading (or at least skimming) this post - I hope you enjoyed it. Please feel free to give your thoughts or ask any questions - they will be responded to.

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- New computer stuff from Ebuyer!

- New blog template (in fact an entirely new website) in the making!

- New Firefox out last week! Version 3!

The night before last I bought some stuff from Ebuyer:

• Hannspree XM New York 19" TFT widescreen Monitor


• Western Digital Elements 500GB External Hard Drive


• Extra Value All-In-One Card Reader


• Labtec USB Webcam

And they all arrived this morning at 9:00! I got free delivery and they were here within 36 hours! How amazing is that? I first saw the external hard drive in the ebuyer edeals email (I get it every week and take a look for good deals on things I want/need but have never gone ahead and bought anything from looking at the email) because it was such a vast amount of storage at such a low price! Half a terabyte (500GB) for £50! Compared with the last external hard drive I bought for £60 in 2006 (60GB), with both storage/cost ratios measured in gigabytes per pound (GB£^-1).

Therefore, based on my purchases:

In 2006 the cost of external hard drives was 1GB per pound = 1GB£^-1

In 2008 the cost of external hard drives is 10GB per pound = 10GB£^-1

To measure the rate of change in cost over time, we can use a simple calculation used to measure acceleration, which similarly is the measure of changing speed over time:

Acceleration = (Final Speed - Initial Speed)/Time

a=(v-u)/t

Therefore, the rate of change in cost over two years is (10-1)/2 = 4.5

So we can say that, based on my purchases, the ratio of storage to cost in external hard drives is falling at a rate of 4.5GB per pound per year! (That one's for you, Woollard!)

Anyway, I thought I'd treat myself to a sexy new monitor and get rid of the bulky old one that takes up half the desk. I'm well pleased with it already - I have a huge resolution (1600 x 1024) and I can now watch 16:9 films without huge black space at the top and bottom!

I thought it was about time I bought a webcam, especially seeing as I'll be moving to Manchester soon and won't be seeing much of my friends - and it was dirt cheap, like the cardreader.

So here's my setup showing my sparkly new monitor, webcam blue-tacked to the edge, my awesome mouse (the Logitech MX 1000 Laser Cordless Mouse - also bought from Ebuyer):

You can see a preview of my new blog template on my monitor in that photo! I've been working on it today and I overcame the problem I was having last week with it not rendering properly in Internet Explorer. Seriously, if it wasn't for IE, web development would be a walk in the park! This is one of the many reasons why everyone in the world should use Firefox! There was a new version out last week and there have been some amazing changes and really useful additions! If you don't use Firefox, why not give it a try and see for yourself what all the fuss is about? It's safer, faster and the all-round better choice when it comes to doing everyday tasks on the web! Download it now! http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

I'm hoping to have the new site up some time next week. Watch this space! It might be a bit bluer next time!

Labels: Computers, Firefox, Geek, Maths

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Thanks for reading (or at least skimming) this post - I hope you enjoyed it. Please feel free to give your thoughts or ask any questions - they will be responded to.

Remember - you don't have to be signed up to Blogger to post a comment - just put in your name (or remain anonymous if you prefer) and type your comment.