Thunderbozz

I deliberately woke up early this morning. Partly because, well, "seize the day" and all that... and partly because the fire alarm gets tested every Tuesday morning just after eight, so there's no chance of a lie-in. It's very loud. Which means that, writing this at twenty-past-ten, I've had quite a long day. From my early-morning visit to the Co-op, mid-morning visit to the charity shop, refreshing Thunderbozz over lunch, and spending the afternoon updating my CV, it's also been quite productive. The highlight has to have been walking past The Banker's Draft pub at 9am, only to find a queue of at least half-a-dozen old men, desperate to get in and start drinking the day away. To be honest, they all looked like thoroughly decent fellows, although I wouldn't fancy bumping into any of them after [counts...] thirteen hours of solid quaffing. The low-point was probably trying to find more than one bullet point of things I had done while workin...

When we moved from our old house to the new flat, we bought quite a lot of rubbish with us. Literally: we loaded about four bags full of trash into the removals van, because we'd overloaded the bins at the old place and there was nowhere else to put it. Obviously we put it in the bins here straight away... we didn't keep it in the house or anything weird like that. I also bought quite a lot of stuff that I knew I didn't really need any more, but that I'd left too late to offload on Amazon/eBay/friends/charity shops. For the last few weeks, it's just been taking up space in my room, but I'm finally beginning to shift it all now. This morning I traded in some of my old and unwanted CDs and DVDs at Cex , and got rid of my remaining textbooks at Division Street's famous Rare & Racy bookshop. (I didn't get very much cash for them, but to be honest, I'm just glad to see the back of the damn things). Tomorrow, the rest of the stuff is going ...

I went for a drink down at Sheffield's Leopold Square last night – and sadly, when I say a drink, I mean only one. And that had to be bought for me. A combination of my as-yet fruitless job search, graduation on Wednesday and a healthy student overdraft means that I'm pretty much skint at the moment. Leopold Square is not a place for the cash-strapped. It's full of posh expensive bars and restaurants, precisely the sort you'd find in the upmarket streets of Bluewater. It looks great, and it was nice to hear some live music, but it definitely ain't my scene.

Well, that's it then. I'm now officially a graduate of the University of Sheffield. Graduation itself took place on Wednesday, but mum and dad came up to visit on Tuesday because they were driving up from home. If all goes to plan – by which I mean finding a job up here in Sheffield – then I won't be going home as much this year, so it was really nice to see them. We had a quick tour of the town and my new flat during the day, then enjoyed a meal out in Broomhill at Buon Deli, a fantastic little Italian restaurant, in the evening. I must confess to being quite nervous on Wednesday morning, but then that always happens before things like this. My main fear is falling over and looking like a right goon in front of everyone. This fear was increased by the acquisition of an extremely ill-fitting (too small) mortarboard hat about half an hour before the ceremony started: I was now also worried about the blasted thing falling off, which effectively barred me from moving my...

I mean, where does he get off? Let me just make clear that I have nothing against Gareth Barry personally. It's just that it really infuriates me how he has employers fighting over him – actually in a bidding war to pay for him to work for them – while I'm sat at home all day long, sending e-mail after e-mail to dozens of businesses, pleading with them to give me a job. It's so unfair*. * Of course it's not, he's far better at football than I am.

A good few weeks ago, I fell asleep while listening to Test Match Special . Earlier that day, I had been playing Grand Theft Auto IV . The resulting dream was a very strange, slightly disturbing hybrid of the two: I had to run around a flooded cricket ground doing drug runs for Jonathan Agnew. A few days ago, I dreamt that we went to visit one of my old course-mates at his flat in Newcastle. When we got there, the flat turned out to be on the middle floor of a ridiculously tall futuristic skyscraper. The lift lobby on his floor was so big that it had it's own cinema, where we all sat down and watched DVDs (despite the fact there were loads of people milling around) before climbing a ladder to get into his lounge. Then last night, after a day spent playing Age of Empires II and talking about Traffic Cops (the television series), my dream involved travelling around a badly-rendered 2D version of Sheffield, building a hotel (I think), and then getting busted by the cops. I go...

It's coming up to that time of the year when I have to renew my e-mail account subscription. I know this because Another.com have been bombarding me with e-mails for the last two weeks, reminding me. In the world of Hotmail, GMail and various other free services, it may seem archaic to still be paying for an e-mail account – indeed, I even have access to my own mail server because I own my own domain (where I keep all the images and files for Thunderbozz ). Unfortunately, I have registered my e-mail address with so many websites and services over the years that it would take far to long to update them all before my account expires in four days time. Despite quite a good spam filter, once in a while, junk e-mails manage to make their way into my inbox. Usually I just delete them straight away, but the one pictured above caught my eye. The whole point of spam is to encourage you to reply, right? In that case, why not put some effort into making your message believable? From...

I've recently found myself reading the forums of Skyscraper City , a website dedicated to architecture, new buildings and construction projects across the world. Specifically, the Sheffield forums, because change is a-coming: cranes litter the skyline, and wherever you turn, there's a building site . As part of the council's " Masterplan " for the city centre, Sheffield will undergo a massive transformation over the next few years. The process has already begun – in the three years I've been living here, there have been significant changes already. But these have only been relatively small projects, like the renovation of the train station, or the construction of the Information Commons. The next phase of the plan is a complete overhaul of the city, redeveloping the riverside, moving the markets, re-routing the roads and creating brand new communities. This is excellent news for architecture enthusiasts, because a city-wide construction project, on a sc...

One of the pitfalls of moving into a new flat – or even one which has only been empty for a couple of months – is that you'll probably find that BT have disconnected the phone line. This turned out to be the case for us. Understandably, being faced with a £125 re-connection fee, the prospect of paying £11-a-month line rental, an extra £15 or so for broadband and then a little bit extra for the privilege of making a few phone calls didn't really appeal. I hardly ever use the phone for actually making calls (the only time I ever use it is to speak to my family at home), but having internet access has become a necessity these days. With this in mind, I thought I'd investigate some of the mobile broadband packages all the phone companies seem to be offering at the moment. In the end, I went with Orange. For £15/month, you get connection speeds of "up to" 7.2Mbps – as good as, if not better than, you can get on a landline – and a 3Gb monthly limit. Again, the sa...

As a special treat, we all went off to the Odeon last night (it's literally over the road from our new flat) to watch Dreamwork's latest animated movie, Kung Fu Panda . (There's a bit of a back-story to all this. Originally, the girls were going to watch Sex And The City while we went off to the pub. But then I found out that Kung Fu... came out yesterday, and it turns out that the girly film was no longer showing, so a happy compromise was made.) The film is brilliant. A fantastic combination of visually-stunning films like Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , martial arts games like Tekken , the special effects of The Matrix , and the wonderful humour of Dreamwork's previous creations ( Finding Nemo , The Incredibles , Shrek ...), the film enthrals for a very entertaining 90 minutes. The fight scenes are breath-taking, as are the incredible panoramas of the Chinese countryside. The kung-fu itself will have you gasping (at the incredible physical prowess...

On Tuesday, it was the first of July – and that meant moving out of our student house in Broomhill, and leaving behind student life forever. I'm writing this now in my new bedroom, in our city centre flat, from my new desk and over our new mobile-broadband-enabled computer network (which only took 3½ hours to set up... more on which later). Moving day went quite smoothly, really. After an early morning trip to the estate agents to collect the keys, we had to move all our possessions downstairs and into the front room, ready for collection. It's quite surprising just how much stuff you can collect over the course of a year. I'd never have been able to carry it all home on the train, even if I'd made half-a-dozen trips, but luckily we had a cheery van driver from Dudley to help cart it all to the new place. On arrival, however, there was a slight snag. OK, quite a big one. The front door keys didn't work. We were told that the same key would let us into the mai...