Hi, and welcome to my webpage. My name's Hal, and I'm currently a third year student of biology in the University of Edinburgh. To get to features such as my gallery (where you may leave comments for other visitors to the site) and Virtual HAL (the artificial intelligence version of myself), you can use the navigation on the left hand side of the page. If you have any suggestions, comments or contributions, contact me.
Well, I've been all over the place in the past week or two.
I went down to Yorkshire on the 25th for my Birthday (with a God-awful hangover) where Tom and William promptly got me drunk again. Waiting for me at home were presents of a new watch, a hipflask, a book on weirdness and a new soundcard.
Easter was great, chocolate and all. Headed down to London soon afterwards to catch up with some of my Africa Venture friends, many of whom I hadn't seen since we'd come home. That also was great.
I'm now back in Edinburgh wanting to murder my computer. Whilst installing my shiny new soundcard, I've run into a few difficulties. Whatever I try to do, I just get the same error message "This device cannot start. (Code 10)". I've tried all of the little technical tricks I've learned over the years to get it working, yet still it mocks me like a geek's version of Poe's raven.
All the more infuriating is the fact that I use my computer for everything - it's my music player and library, DVD player, television, games system and work system, so without a working soundcard I'm stuck in a weird and silent world. It's so bad I've started reading.
If this sound problem goes on any longer, I might even start revising...
Hal
Although it may seem that I've been doing nothing over the past few months, I have been messing around with various concepts for this site. At last, I've got bored of just poking around and have sat down and made some serious changes
The most obvious change is the complete overhaul of this front page, beautified with the aid of an open source template from oswd.org.
Apart from this, there is now a fully functional and rather more attractive photo gallery. In it, you can browse my photos and even leave comments. It's dynamic, as in it creates all the pages you see in there on-the-fly, which means that it is incredibly simple for me to add, remove, or change photographs. If you have any photos that you think would be good to see in the gallery, email me!
As for life, I'm approaching the end of the second semester of my third year here in Edinburgh, and I'm about to turn 22 on the 25th of March. This scares me, as the next big landmark age is 30, and I will have undeniably reached reached my "early twenties" - I'm getting old!
I've decided that this site is no longer so embrassing that I won't tell everyone about it, so I reckon I might start getting a little more traffic and this may be the first time you've been here. Seriously guys, let me know what you think.
Hal
It has taken more than a month, but finally I have an update for you.
The more observant of you will have noticed that the site still looks awful, but the even more observant of you may have noticed that the photos link is now active.
I have uploaded a sample gallery using some photos from Camp California. As they were ripped from Camp Cal's own site, the names are all messed up. At some point I will try to tidy them up.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to set the gallery up to be dynamic (allowing comments from you guys and suchlike), but I will continue to work on it.
Still on my to-do list is to design a slightly more attractive front-end and make all the code nice, tidy, and clean (watch me learn CSS!).
On a more personal note, Christmas was fantastic down in Yorkshire, as was New Year in Lyon with Karoliina. Hopefully it won't be long until I have photos up for those as well.
Please - if any of you have any ideas for what you want to see here, let me know. It's going to get harder to change things the further down the line I get.
Hal
In the past few days I've been thinking about exactly how I'm going to get this page working, how it's going to look and what features I'm going to integrate. You may have noticed that I have already managed to integrate a simple chatbot already under the heading "Virtual HAL".
Unfortunately, I lack the skills at the moment to do everything I want, but luckily I have two brothers who can help me learn.
I had my last exam yesterday, and am heading back down to Yorkshire tomorrow. Exactly what that means as far as progress here is concerned, I'm not sure, but it's certainly going to be nice to be home.
Hal
and so it begins...
Welcome to halclive.co.uk, my personal site. This is the very first version, so expect to see major changes over the coming months. Don't expect everything (or even anything) to work yet. I know it's all a bit rubbish so far, but it'll get better. I hope.
Hal
