As part of my Chemical Engineering I do a placement year during my third year where I spend 12 months working for a company as a Student Engineer (This is for me to get my DIS with my degree). I will be starting at Croda on the 2nd September.

I was supposed to start work at Artenius one the 1st Sept but unfortunately they went bust 2 weeks before I was supposed to start work. I fortunately managed to get a new placement at Croda, which seems to be a better placement. And they give me the first 4 weeks of accomindation free of charge which will keep my costs down nicely.

Will keep you updated.

I just got my first year results and I managed to get a 72.5% average which I like to round upto 73% .
It was what I was aiming for but was only expecting to get around 60 - 65% because the exams were not easy but I guess they went better than I though they had have gone.

So now I just have to keep this up for the next 4 years

Just though that Ill give a quick update on my life at Uni. So far exam wise I have had 3 exams with an average of around 70% which I am quite happy with and 2 bits of coursework with an average of around 80%. The main thing that I cannot wait for now is the Easter break which is in 2 weeks and will last an entire month and ill only have 1 bit of coursework to do and I have almost already finished it so ill probably be doing a lot of work on all of my websites, trying to improve where possible.

One of my mates at Huddersfield Uni is studying Game Design and he has not had a single exam so far so has only had coursework and even that coursework sounds like fun because he has to do research into games like Half life 1 and World of Warcraft etc. I was really tempted to study Game design at uni but I would have probably gone to America because there are more game companies over there than over here in England. I would have probably gone to http://www.iadtvegas.com/ because I have heard good things about it.

So to summarise I am quite happy on my course “Chemical Engineering with Management”, and even though there are other courses out there that might have been more fun and less work, I would still stay on my course.

I have been waiting for this moment for quite some time now and now it is here, the Christmas holidays… I ahve been waiting for this holiday for quite some time because my University don’t have half term like Sixth Form/High School so we only have 2 breaks, Christmas and Easter. The only bonus is that they are both a month long so that’s quite nice apart from that fact that when I return Ill probably have forgotten everything that I have learnt that semester and get chucked straight into exams. But who cares, its a whole month off

Ok I better stop with the boring bit to do with my life and get back onto what this blog is about. Over Christmas I am hoping to get some work done with the new design of SpudMud , I have already gotton a designer to do me a new design and now that that is finnished and coded (by me) I am slowely brining it to life. You can have a look at how the development is going over at beta.spudmud.com. I have still got a lot of work to do i.e. finishing off the games, video and pictures sections as well as trying to make all of the code valid (not sure why I want it to be XHTML valid but I just do).

I better write a bit about the designer now that you have seen the great job he did with the design. I found Ed’s site over at the DP forums and immediately contacted him to ask for a quote after seeing his great portfolio. The quote he gave my shocked me at first, it just seemed to low (I wont mention any values), but I shouldn’t complain should I. His work was done in about 1 and a half weeks which I was quite happy with considering it was 5 pages fully custom designed. He was great at communicating and always kept me updated. The thing that I was really amazed about was the way he could understand what I wanted because as you probably can see from this blog, I am not the best at getting things across.

I am hoping to get the new design up and running by Christmas but I think that that’s very unlikely because I’m simply too lazy at the moment due to Uni taking everything out of me and I have coursework and exams to revise for.

Innoix.com is my latest project. Currently its still in the planning stages so am not releasing any more information but expect an update within the next dew days.

If all goes well it is going to be a very long term project that will span many years. Sorry about not releasing much about it but I dont like people stealing my ideas etc