Revamp

I’ve decided to ditch the WooTheme I had been using for the past couple of years. I’m going to begin modifying the TwentyEleven theme created by the legends themselves at WordPress to suit my needs.

These edits, in addition to updating the content within portfolio will tie-in with assignments given on my new degree.

The site will probably be buggy and broken in many places whilst I do all of this, users of Populous-Online wanting to contact me with an administrative related query should use the contact form on there.

Student Housing Advice

As a student I don’t have the capital nor finances to rent my own house/apartment during my studies and therefore have to band together with friends and rent somewhere together. I’ve recently been through a lot of experiences in relation to deposits and general dealings with agencies/landlords.

In Brighton, the city containing my university; there are a large number of lettings agencies with an extensive list of houses for rent by students or the general public. One of these agencies was the go-between between us and our landlord.

According to Rip-Off Britain’s page on naming and shaming ‘Businesses don’t like bad publicity. Customer retention is vital to a company of any size…’ I thought it would be a good idea to let other students know of my experiences and let them decide for themselves. The lettings agency in question is Kendrick Property Services. They provided us with a 5 bedroom house in a sought after location near the center of the city.

We had all sorts of problems with them from the get-go, contacting the landlord through them seemed to be near impossible the majority of the time. Issues we faced were, for example: damp in one of the lower bedrooms to a mattress that felt more like a medieval torture device than something you sleep on.

Now it’s probably worth mentioning that you are probably going to get some sort of issue with any sort of rented accommodation you take on with a tenancy agreement. After a few months of constant phone calls and arrangements we had fixed or found compromises for the issues at hand.

When you go into a rented property for the first time it may not occur to you the things that are absolutely necessary to avoid falling into traps when it comes for you to leave the place. A few things to be wary of at the beginning include:

  • Take photos of everything, right down to the smallest detail – you can’t overlook how important this is
  • Keep a record of every piece of communication with the letting agent / landlord
  • Keep any records of financial commitments and bills at hand
  • Try if you can, to get the contact information for the landlord him/herself if the agent isn’t contactable
  • Have at least one of you present when official visits are being made, also when the inventory is being taken
  • Take note of dates, keep a record of them and challenge them if they are changed for no reason

There may be other things I have failed to include in the list above, but from my experience these are the most important. In nearly all tenancy agreements you will find a clause stating that it’s expected of you to return the house in the same condition that you found it when the end of the tenancy comes around. Don’t overlook this, as the bullet point above about taking photos is essential in making sure that the agency can’t sting money out of you for problems you didn’t cause.

We ran into problems around about three weeks ago from the posting of this blog. We were owed around £2k overall by the agency for our security deposit put down at the beginning and naturally, I had been warned by others that they may and try to sting money out of you either way just to make a profit. I passed this off as a myth at first; how wrong I was.

In a nutshell, the agency didn’t notify us about the correct method in getting the deposit back through the Deposit Protection Scheme, they listed a large number of charges for things which were either un-necessary, nothing to do with us or for problems that had already been rectified us prior to vacating the property.

One of my friends, a fellow tenant even agreed to fix one of the issues after we had left, going as far as getting to the house with a drill in hand to discover that the problem had already been fixed by the landlord without notifying us or the agency.

A good thing to do if you end up in a situation like I did is to get all the parents involved. Assuming there are five of you like there were with us, that’s five sets of parents you have on your back to fight your case for you.

You’ll find that with the careful wording and by recording all communication you have with them, they will be soon to back down if the allegations are false. Companies like these don’t want to go through legal action in case of their public image being tarnished. From our point of view, the fight is over; the deposit has been returned and the legal process supervised by DPS has been completed. Any request for payment from here on is unfound and without reason.

When going through these sorts of situations it’s a good idea to get your Student Union involved, they will have a huge interest!

The Library and University Transfer

I have news my faithful ‘minions’..! Right, well, my university studies are continuing after all – I decided to go back through the UCAS system (how UK students get places at the top universities) and came out with an Unconditional offer to the other university in Brighton; obviously named Brighton University.

After seeing the response from them a massive weight upon my shoulders felt lifted, I no longer felt like I hadn’t a clue as to where I was going or what I was going to do. Regarding the course I am about to start there, I am jumping straight into the second year, skipping the courses that I would normally take as a first year (programming, introductory courses, etc). This gives me the ability to continue from the point I’m currently at.

So yeah, I’m moving from Sussex University to Brighton University and I’m going to get to do web media development which is something I’m really excited about. Funnily enough this leads on from the current paid work I’m doing at Sussex’s library. Their website is still under the old design templates which are looking extremely dated. My job with them is to migrate all of the necessary content over to the new system with the new funky design; I tell you, parts of it have not been an easy task. Over all though, excellent experience!

Oh and I have added a troll face somewhere at one point, just for shits ‘n’ giggles of course. ;)

Laying The Track Of Life

I find that a lot of life’s challenges which get thrown at us remind me of a clip from Wallace & Gromit; a scene from the episode “The Wrong Trousers” puts Gromit in a train chase situation where he is laying toy train track whilst travelling through the house. This clip makes me think a lot about how our lives are paved out before us, we have to make decisions relating to what it is we want to achieve but have various influences left right and center.

Influences may be a good thing, but they can get a bit much in the end often resulting in people following a distinct path that may not reflect their interests as a person. In my case I find it difficult at times to focus on where I’m going and what I really want to do deep down.

Since the beginning of this huge education timeline I have always been focused on my love for computers, this endless stream of passion has taken me to the point that I’m doing a bachelor’s degree in it. With the utmost massive amount of stress it is also causing me to think about what I can really achieve and what it is deep down I should be looking for a career in.

I’ve come to realise that the IT industry (to be more precise the gaming industry) may not be the ideal place for me to express my skills, don’t get me wrong – I love gaming, it’s probably the number one thing in my life right now; one thing is for certain however, I love building computers, it’s a huge passion of mine and I would continue doing it every day if it wasn’t for the financial constraints; and hey, want a custom computer but don’t want the fuss? Let me build it!

Either way, things right now for me are progressing a little different to how I would’ve thought a couple of years ago. In the next few months I will be deferring my university studies at the end of this academic year and moving the credits I have into a qualification from the Open University. I have also had the motivation to do something different – this involves researching about joining my local Police force.

A couple of short articles for this month, things have been a little slow due to me having other priorities right now and I’d rather not post something on here without having put a lot of thought into it first! Lastly in regards to the site, I have removed the share buttons, I’ve discovered they’re more of a pain than anything and people are more than capable of sharing a URL with someone if they like it.

Minecraft

Oh Minecraft, the countless hours I’ve spent playing this wonderfully diverse game. For those who don’t know, Minecraft is an indy game developed by Markus Persson and so far has sold over a million copies before even getting into BETA status. The possibilities in this game are endless, building things with blocks and half blocks is limited only to what your mind can come up with.

I’ve recently been so stuck into the game I’ve started to get bored of the single player portion of it (crazy.. really, considering there is so much to do); however I’m venturing slowly into the multiplayer portion. I found this absolutely fantastic map on the Minecraft forums that I have since heavily modified and used to construct a sort of “Citadel” for my personal server.

The server itself currently consists of the bukkit mod with worldedit and istick plugins installed. There are currently no limits on what players can do which is why I haven’t yet opened it up to the public *waves to griefers*. So far only a small amount of my friends and my brother have been online helping me construct things from farms, mine shafts, houses, bridges and a replica of the London Underground (pictured below).

   

Since the beginnings of this server a lot has been worked on. I have had friends join to assist in construction from all over the place, these sorts of things include removing entire islands to increase the size of the sea surrounding the central structure “The Citadel”; other structures include a lighthouse, medieval warship, tree house and James Bond like structure for which I forget the name!

My friends and I are planning on making the server public, once we’ve had our fair share of fun creating the huge structures and projects. For now though, we’re getting to grips with the plugin interface of bukkit and looking into getting a server wide tube system working, focussing on making it a mirror image of London’s Underground.