This year my university decided to enter all the third year BSc computing students into a competition held by O’Reilly for the best and most original dissertation; my entry was of course phpAnalyzer. A couple of days ago along side the results of my degree, I got my prize in the mail as well as a little certificate – definitely a good way to end three years of higher education!

In addition to getting good results and winning the contest held by O’Reilly I also got a new job as a software developer, so now when I’m not at home programming, I’m at work programming! It’s been a bit tough making the transition from the life of a student to doing five full days of work every week but I can’t complain as I am doing something I love and I am working with nice people who are helping me get to grips with their way of doing things. As a result of starting my new job one of my new projects has been slowed down a bit, as well as the development of EDK (which is now nearly finished) but I’m slowly picking the pace back up as I get adjusted to working life. My new project is another Xbox LIVE game which I will also make available on the PC, I have managed to get quite a lot of people on board so far; at the moment the team consists of:

• One developer (myself as you can imagine)
• One artist
• Two graphics designers
• Five level designers
• Two audio engineers

The only thing really missing at the moment is someone to come up with a storyline, but if I fail to find anyone to come up with a plot I’ll just throw in more blood and violence – that is a suitable replacement for a good story isn’t it?

I am back sooner than expected from my vacation in Nevada, Manchester airport considered the weather conditions too dangerous for my plane to land which led to the cancellation of my flight, unfortunately nothing could be rescheduled within reasonable time so here I am still in Manchester!

On the bright side I just picked up some new games for the Xbox 360:

• Assassin’s Creed 2
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• Forza Motorsport 3
• Monkey Island: SE

I really can’t get over the Super Mario reference made by Ezio’s uncle Mario (in Assassin’s Creed 2) when he introduces himself with the line “it’s a me – Mario!”, that truly invoked a nostalgic moment.