On prelim results and some other stuff too

Despite all my worrying and total lack of proper revision, I seem to have done okay in all my prelims. Enough to secure three A's, anyway. I got 70% in Computing, which doesn't sound too great until you consider that everyone else was getting 50-60%. Fortunately for us all, our teacher knew that the paper wasn't great quality and he even said he'd been fairly harsh on the marking, so that seemed to be okay.

Maths was a pleasant surprise – 84%, a mark which meant I was tied with two other people for top marks in the class. I really didn't see that one coming, I figured I'd screwed up a lot more than I actually had. Ditto for Physics where I managed to get 79% somehow.

So that's that over and done with and I'm fairly happy with how it turned out. Now I can move on to dealing with the myriad of other problems, crises and decisions that are fast approaching.

One of those will undoubtedly be what to do about my update schedule for TWToday. Though I think I've done my full 365 posts by now, this being the 366th, the anniversary of my challenge is actually tomorrow due to the leap year.

As we've once again had to postpone the Key to Time marathon (reminding me once again just how bloody inconvenient these constant hospital appointments are), I should have some time tomorrow to flick through the blog archives and ponder what's happened over the last year. Then on Sunday... I don't know. Maybe I'll update, maybe I won't.

I've been getting sort of lax with the daily schedule lately. I know I manage to get a post done each day but I keep leaving it far too late and they have a tendency to come out like rushed diary entries. My current thinking is that I'll keep blogging but I'll take my time with each post and try to have something interesting to say in all of them.

Hopefully, I'll also be able to devote some time to my other projects on a regular basis. After all, the entire point of this little exercise was to prove to myself that I can stick to a schedule if I want. I suppose the next logical step would be to stick to a schedule and produce something of consistent quality.


Well, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. You know, I reckon that if I stick to this idea of only posting when I have something interesting to say, meaning that there's no pressure to post late at night, this may well be the last time I round off a post with the fact that I'm going to bed.

Anyway, I'm going to bed. Have a nice day.

End of the Prelims

Physics... went reasonably well, I guess. It's kind of hard to gauge, looking back on it. I managed to get through most of the mechanics section without too much difficulty, then I started to struggle a bit with the electricity and magnetic fields and was more or less completely stumped by the final waves section.

That was just on the first pass through, though. I think I managed to fill in a few blanks as I went back over it. In the end, I was just flicking between the pages, looking for conspicuous gaps in my answer sheet, so it's a bit hard to remember what exactly I got right or wrong. I wouldn't have minded a few more minutes to do some extra checking but any more than that would probably have driven me nuts as I sat there, racking my brains for facts I didn't know.


Anyway, for the first time in weeks, I feel like I've got no pressure on me. Other than my Computing project... and my Physics project... and the need to learn to drive and to choose a university... Bah. It's a lot less pressure anyway, so it's still a good feeling.


I decided to take my free time today and spend it playing one of those games I got last week. I decided to go with Eternal Sonata over Final Fantasy XII, for no particular reason other than the fact that it was already on my desk.

From what I've played so far, it seems pretty good. The battle system is interesting and the plot seems to be fairly deep. Developer tri-Crescendo still seems to be having some trouble with localising their voice acting, as they did on Baiten Kaitos. It's not all bad and I think I will leave it on sometimes, since the cinematics are now fully animated, meaning that if it wasn't on I'd just see the characters mouths moving to the subtitles.

I'll hopefully get some more of it done tomorrow.


Nothing much else to say tonight. I should be able to think about my prelim results tomorrow and I'll hopefully be able to spare some time to consider the end of my little one post a day challenge.

Or maybe not. Who knows?

Have a nice day.

Almost There...

I think I've reached the acceptance stage now. The point where I'll be willing to flick through my notes a few more times, and I certainly will do when I'm waiting in school before the prelim tomorrow, but I know that it's not going to make a huge difference and I just want it over and done with.

More colloquially, the acceptance stage is also known as the “fuck it” stage.

Seriously though, I'm not quite sure what to do now. I know that there's stuff I don't know, stuff I almost certainly ought to know, but I just can't be bothered looking it up and trying to memorise it at this point. I'm not sure it would even help if I did.

It's just coming up to ten past eleven as I write this, so if I finish this off now, I can go to bed early. Well, early for me anyway.

To round things off, here are a few links.

Seems an executive at Sony doesn't like the Eee PC very much. While I can sort of see his logic, it doesn't really make much sense to me. I might talk about this some more when I have more time and I've done more with Eridani. For now, draw your own conclusions.

Just because I happened to come across it today, here's a clip from the movie of the old Batman series with Adam West. I actually had this film as a kid. I'd say it made more sense when I was that age but it really didn't.

Finally, I shall maintain until the day I die that this is one of the funniest scenes in television history. It builds up slowly but watch it through to the end or you'll be robbing yourself of a classic piece of British sitcom humour.

And that's it. I'm off to bed.

Wish me luck.

Nothing At All

It's six o'clock on Tuesday and I believe I've finally entered panic mode for Thursday's Physics prelim. I've given up on doing my Computing project since I reckon I can get away with it and I need to give priority to my Physics. I could have easily done both if I stopped being so lazy but, hey, I could also have done both if I had a team of Visual Basic coding monkey physicists. One's about as likely to occur as the other so there's no sense speculating.


It's later now, almost half past ten. I didn't get much further with my studying, just a couple more questions on a past paper. Seems that panic mode was, unfortunately for me I suspect, a false alarm. I'll probably do more revision tomorrow. Probably.

I think I've reached the stage now when I just want these prelims out of the way. I still want to do well and I know I'll be kicking myself later if I do badly because I didn't revise but all I'm really after now is less pressure and return to normality. Same goes for my constant hospital appointments, though I won't go into that right now.


I've really done absolutely nothing today. I've just been flitting between being bored out of my skull and checking my usual roster of websites. I've been trying to avoid starting any new games or DVD sets since I know it'll just distract me but I can't be bothered doing any work either so I just sit around being bored and miserable.

Which really isn't a great state of mind to write in or, for that matter, about.


I think I'll just call it a night.


Actually, one thing first. It's just occurred to me that I'm days away from meeting my original challenge of one post a day for a year. That's... kind of scary, actually. Well, with any luck, I should be able to find some time and energy from somewhere to mark the occasion properly. The exact date falls on Saturday, I think, so I might not get much done then. I'll probably be too busy recovering from my prelims and watching Doctor Who. Maybe Sunday. If I don't spend the whole day doing my Computing project...

I'll get round to it eventually.


Okay, now I'm actually stopping.

A fairly small post in which nothing remarkable is said

I managed to make some progress today. Nothing much but it's a start. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about my Computing project – looks like I'll be working on it over the weekend at the very least. Well, on Sunday. Saturday is still Key to Time marathon day.

I figure I'll go into panic revision mode sometime tomorrow. The one semi-advantage to these constant hospital trips is that I have to get up early in the morning, which seems to help me get work done. Sort of.


Anyway, nothing much else happening today.

Like, nothing. At all.

Seriously, I've nothing to say.

My mind's just completely blank. I think the effects of going to bed at two in the morning and getting up at seven have finally caught up with me.

I think I'll call this a mini-post. That means that I need a few things to link too...

This old comic from the 80s, starring none other than Chuck Norris, is absolutely hilarious. I really have a hard time believing that anyone ever took this seriously or even thought that it would be a good idea. I suppose there must have been at least a few people for it to get published but still...

And... uhh... hold on, I'll find something... okay, no I won't.

I'm going to bed.

Have a nice day.

A day of little things

I finally completed Mass Effect. That's kind of like doing something productive... right?


Well, it's the end of the day now and I've not really done much else. Woke up too late, I think. That always upsets my routine.

Come to think of it, my routine largely consists of doing nothing so it doesn't really upset it so much as it encourages me to follow it through rather than doing any work.

My hastily revised plan is now to work on my Computing project tomorrow as well as look over my Physics notes and identify any problem areas. With any luck, I should be able to get the coding done by Tuesday and, no matter what happens, Wednesday is constant Physics. If I still can't get it finished, I can always stall on Friday (we'll probably spend the lesson going over the prelim anyway) and have a go at it after the Key to Time marathon on the weekend.

I'll muddle through somehow. Just let me enjoy my ever-so-brief respite.


A couple of other interesting things happened today.

Some friends of mine randomly appeared on a certain very popular website that I won't link to because it's really not a very pleasant website most of the time. It seems it was a photo taken from someone's Bebo page though no one's quite sure how it ended up where it did. It could have just been a coincidence or it could have been a joke by someone who hasn't owned up yet.

Either way, it was extremely funny for reasons I won't go into.


I don't know if I've said this before, but the wireless network in our house tends to suck. It's like the walls are made of lead sometimes. We figured we'd solved the problem a while back by setting up Home Plug stuff so that I could wire my room and then adding range extenders so everyone else's computers would work.

It's a setup that's worked fairly well up until now, when one of the range extenders died last week. We had someone come out and look at it and he thought it might have got knocked or dropped. It didn't really matter since it was under warranty anyway and it was just a matter of sending it off to Netgear and waiting for a replacement. In the meantime, we moved the second range extender to where the first had been, since it was that one that gave my brother's room and the kitchen wireless access.

Then the second one died. It stopped working yesterday, apparently due to the same fault as the first. We know that this one wasn't knocked or anything so our best guess is that it has something to do with the power supply, which we left in place when the first one died and used when we put the second one it its place.

Since my brother doesn't like being left without internet, this necessitated a trip to PC World to find a Home Plug adaptor for his room that he could use as a stop-gap measure. We eventually picked one up, after having a little difficulty finding them and then more difficulty finding just a single one rather than a more expensive pair. Hopefully, once the extenders get fixed, he'll stop needing it and I can steal it off him to use with Linus and my Beaten Up Old Laptop^TM, neither of which are near enough to my current adaptor to connect easily.

While we were there, I took a chance to poke around the monitors as I still need to pick one up for Linus and the PC I'm planning to build. There were a few good deals, especially the ex-display ones that were going cheap, but I figured I ought to see if I could get anything better online first. I'll probably get round to that later in the week.


It's getting close to my arbitrary midnight deadline now so I'll call it quits for tonight. With any luck, I'll have got something useful done by this time tomorrow.

Day Off

Another lazy Saturday almost over and done with. Not very productive but I'd already decided that I'd be taking it as a day off so that's not a problem.

Finally got round to going into Ayr this morning and trading in some old games that I never play. Some of them were pretty worthless but a couple of Wii and 360 games were worth enough that I ended up with £60 of store credit. This was, of course, promptly spent on Eternal Sonata and Final Fantasy XII, along with a plush Sonic doll.

I had heard of Eternal Sonata and dimly remembered good reviews of it so, since it was on special offer and I tend to like RPGs, I figured it might be a good deal. I originally bought my second-hand PS2 purely to try out some of the vast RPG library, something which I've singularly failed to do, so a new Final Fantasy game going cheap seemed like a good idea. I don't really have a reason for getting the Sonic plushy.

So I guess I can add two more massive RPGs to my ever-expanding list of games I need to complete. Maybe once I get my prelims, projects and hospital visits out of the way, I can go on a total gaming binge for a week, see how much I can do.

Well, even if I don't (and, knowing me, I probably won't), I can at least try to get a bit more done once everything serious is out of the way. I'm also way behind on my plans for a few other things, like VersusCOM and The Grey Line.

Anyway, no point dwelling on that now. This is my day off.

Which means that tomorrow is my first day back on again. I'm hoping to have a shot at tackling my Computing project so that I can get it out of the way and focus on Physics revision for the rest of the week.


It's just occurred to me that I've once again forgotten all about the woodle for this week. Never mind, I'll definitely have one ready for next time. It's relatively simple and my “artist” should find it fairly easy to draw, which means he'll probably do it. If he remembers.


I think that's about it really. Nothing too deep or interesting but there rarely ever is.

Oh, actually, there is one last thing. I bought a copy of Hey You, Pikachu! off eBay earlier. It's an interesting little game that the Wikipedia article can explain in more detail than I can be bothered to do. Unfortunately, it only ever came out in the US and Japan so it's an NTSC version and I don't have an NTSC N64 or a convertor, so until I get one of those, all I've got is a £17, voice-recognising paperweight.


And that's really it for today. I'll be back tomorrow, I guess.

Two Down, One to Go

Computing actually went quite well. I showed up about forty minutes before the exam to find that the other three guys in my class had been there for a while. Two had been in all day. Judging from the amusing panic that ensued before we left for the exam room, they'd spent that time doing anything but revision.

I'd spent the morning trying to decide what to revise. I glanced over my notes but they're all either in a huge PDF or in single paragraph, Flash diagram-laden web pages that I really couldn't be bothered looking over. In the end, I skimmed through some of the presentations I'd made for class, which basically just summarised the notes and added some amusing pictures.

I didn't get to finish looking over them at home so I took them in on my USB key and Sam and I spent a while alternating between chatting, panicking and glancing at them on Deimos and Eridani*. We were mostly chatting and panicking about how screwed we all were if certain topics came up (mostly algorithms of any kind).

Once it began though, I (and presumably the others as well) were able to relax a little. There were a few annoyingly vague or badly worded questions but it never really got much harder than the tests we do each week in class. Of course, there was still the usual assortment of errors we've come to expect from these commercial prelim papers (missing question numbers, schedules showing projects ending before they begin, etc.) plus the usual annoying pop culture references (an example database full of Harry Potter characters).

Timing wise, it was a mercifully short (though constant writing made it seem a lot longer) one and a quarter hours. I was never really rushed but I finished pretty close to the deadline. I wouldn't have minded a couple more minutes to check over everything but it's better than sitting around for twenty minutes going insane over unknown answers.

Like in my Maths prelim.


Still, as the title says, that's two down with one left to go. I figure I'll take tomorrow off before starting on Physics some time on Sunday. Between now and Friday, I also have to find the time and energy to scrape together a solution to that problem with my Computing project that's been bugging me for weeks now.

I've a couple of ideas and it'll hopefully be pretty straightforward once I remind myself of how everything works. As for the Physics revision, I've got a pretty good idea of what I need to look up and practice. Once I skim through everything, that mental list will probably double in size but meh. Better than being unprepared.


That's all for tonight. I'll try to get a woodle up tomorrow, unless I get distracted by another five hour session of Mass Effect. Which I probably will.






*Our respective Eee PCs, in case you haven't been paying attention.

Maths Make Brain Hurt

Maths could have gone worse, I suppose. There were a few things that I just completely blanked on and a few others that I got by trial and error but, overall, I think I did okay. A solid B at worst.

Still, no matter how well it may or may not have gone, three hours of Maths has left me kind of drained. I've spent most of the afternoon and evening just lazing around, browsing websites, playing Mass Effect and catching up on some TV shows*.

I know that I probably should have done some Computing revision but I just can't for some reason. Let's called it tiredness and stress combined with natural laziness and arrogance and leave it at that.


Bleh. I'm trying to come up with some kind of interesting point to make about my prelims and what it was like sitting them and so on but I think it'll have to wait until I'm less braindead.

I've also been meaning to go through all the news that's been coming out of the Game Developer's Conference over the past few days. Just check out all the coverage at Joystiq.


You know, I don't want to call this a mini post but I do want to go to bed now and I can't be bothered adding much more...

How about some links? That always helps justify stuff... somehow.

Anyway, this has basically sealed it – I am buying Rock Band.

And... uhhh... there must be something else I can link to... I haven't mentioned the Doom comic yet, have I? Well, here's the Doom comic. Don't ask why, don't ask what. Simply read it and either laugh or go insane.


That'll do for now.







*I've started using the BBC's iPlayer service. Our Sky+ is still on the blink, usually to the point of being incomprehensible, so it's the best way to catch up on show's I missed. Used it for Ashes to Ashes and Torchwood, mostly.

Mostly Nonsense

Well, I shaved off my proto-beard.

...

Now my chin is cold.


Anyway, it's getting late in the morning and I haven't done much in the way of revision yet so I'll go do a prelim now. I may end up doing one of those “blogging throughout the day” posts that I haven't done in a while. I'll probably try to post it early as well, so I can get as much sleep as possible. I get the distinct impression that I'm going to need it.

Oh, and since it's almost 11:30, Sam should be in the last couple of minutes before his English prelim ends. I'll have to ask him how that went later.


Huh. Judging from the fact that it's now half ten and dark outside, it seems that plan didn't really work out so well.

I'll have to finish this off pretty quick now. I'm actually seriously completely determined to get to bed before midnight tonight.

But first, I have to do some more Maths revision. I've been meaning to look over complex numbers (an accurate title if ever there was one) for the past week and I've no idea why I left it until now but I did.

I really have no idea where I'm going with this. I'm fairly sure my brain's been fried by Maths and stress. This time tomorrow, it'll have been fried by Maths, Computing and stress. I'll hopefully have recovered by Saturday, at which point the cycle can begin anew with my Computing project, Physics and stress.

I reckon that from here on in, I have two options: become accustomed to my situation and approach it calmly and logically or go slowly insane. I have yet to determine which will help more.


Okay. That's it. I'm going to bed. I know this post has been kind of rambling and incoherent but that's really just a reflection of the mood I'm in and there's no sense in trying to change it.

Actually, first, I need to pack my bag and make sure I've got everything ready for tomorrow. And I might glance over that stuff on complex numbers.

Crap. Well, whatever. I'm ending this post so that I can get on with that other stuff and then go to bed.

I really think I'm addicted to Mass Effect now

So it's a little after three o'clock now and something just occurred to me. My Maths prelim is the day after tomorrow.

I'm going to go do a practice paper. That way, I won't be lying next time someone asks me if I've done any work.


Well, that was frightening.


Anyway, I'll finish that paper off tomorrow, then do some last minute panic revision on the stuff I think I need to know... I'm getting the distinct impression that this isn't going to go at all well for me. Sometimes I think I have a handle on it and then the question just throws up some obscure little rule I'm meant to have learned in S3 and everything goes nuts from there on in

I'm still hoping that Computing won't be too bad. I've almost forgotten about Physics for the time being. Ditto for my Computing project.

Nothing much I can do about all that now, I suppose. The plan for tomorrow remains Maths, Maths and more Maths. I've managed to clear enough desk space in the study that I can work in there, where it's normally pretty quiet. Only other person who goes in there regularly is Erin to do her homework for a while each night. But that's just for a short time and if I'm still studying at that point, or worse yet, if I haven't started, then I'm probably completely screwed anyway.


You know, I only have a couple more weeks until I reach the one year mark with TWToday.

Lately, I've become a little despondent over it. Partly I feel the quality is sliding due to my own laziness and partly I think I've just not been up to it lately. Over the last few months, I've been putting up with this stupid pilonidal sinus, or rather, I've been putting up with the effects of the surgery to have it removed, which have proved to be a far greater and far more literal pain in the ass than the original problem.

Then over the past few weeks I've had my birthday, quickly followed by my prelims and people telling me I have to decide where and how I want to spend the next four years of my life and that I need to learn to drive or else I'm doomed...

All in all, I've not been having a great time over the last few weeks, and the quality of the last few months has been less than average.

I'm hoping things will pick up in a while. Once the prelims are over, I'll be able to relax more and that may well coincide quite happily with the end of my hospital visits as well, the way things are going. I intend to spend the entirety of that first weekend off watching old Doctor Who serials. Specifically, that Key to Time marathon that Sam and I have been planning to do since I got the boxset at Christmas.

I refuse to delay it again.

Of course, me saying that I refuse to do something doesn't necessarily mean it won't happen (see yesterday's promise not to play Mass Effect today). And me saying that I will do something doesn't necessarily mean that it'll happen either. Like my promise to my mother that I would shave off this strange proto-beard I've been growing over the holiday.

Actually, I probably will do that.

Oh, and if I say I'll probably do something... well, then you're getting into some serious crazy quantum stuff and it's way too late at night for me to explain that.

I'm going to bed.

Have a nice day.

Not even worth titling properly

Well, I managed to get some work done at least. It wasn't much but it was a (very late) start. My plans have now shifted to a combination of Maths and Computing tomorrow, then panicking for Maths on Thursday.


I really have completed wasted my day. I flicked through some notes, played some more Mass Effect*... and that's about it really. I've no idea where the time's gone.

I suppose my lack of concentration isn't helped by the fact that my wound has been acting up a bit, making it very uncomfortable to sit in my chair. And my neck still hurts. There's not really anywhere else in the house I can go to be undisturbed, or to sit in a comfier chair and be undisturbed. In fact, my brother's started making a habit of coming into my room to play TimeSplitters, so even my inner sanctum can get noisy without my own intervention.


Aaargh. It seems like the more I think about my day, the more depressed I get and the more my head and neck hurt. Maybe this is stress. Or some other kind of psycho-babble. I don't really care at this point.

I'm calling this a crappy post and going to bed.

Have a nice day.








*I really need to stop playing that for the next week or so. Maybe I should do what I did with my iMac's power cable before the last exams and just tell my sister to hide it so it can't distract me.

On revision plans and ridiculous names for budget laptops

Once again, I've spent the whole day doing nothing. I could normally justify taking the weekend or even just Sunday off but that would only be possible if I were taking them off from doing something.

My current plan, and I'm absolutely sure I'll follow through on this one, is to do Maths revision tomorrow, Computing on Tuesday and then more Maths on Wednesday. I'll have some time after my Maths prelim on Thursday afternoon to do any last minute stuff I need to do for Computing. Then I'll probably take Saturday off and go from there, working on my Computing project and Physics revision.

It's not a great plan but it seems reasonable.


Nothing much else to say. I was meaning to do a woodle but I haven't got round to that. I might do one for next Saturday but I know there's one I definitely need to do for the Saturday after that, since it needs to stay pretty current.

I'm still playing my way through Mass Effect. I'm starting to get into the swing of things now, having got to that bit that shows up in most games like this where you're pretty much free to wander around and advance the plot at your own pace. Still not quite sure how the biotic combat powers are supposed to work but I'll figure it out.

I'm still working on my Eee, adding software and looking into mods. Oh, and I figured out what I'm going to call it – Eridani. Technically, Eridani, or Eridanus, refers to the constellation, which contains the trinary star system of 40 Eridani. Within that system is 40 Eri B, the first white dwarf star to be discovered.

So Eridani is basically a nickname for my laptop, whose full name is 40 Eridani B.

Interestingly, the 40 Eridani system is also usually thought to be the home system of the Vulcans from Star Trek, although that fact has never been explicitly stated on screen. There's just some corroborating evidence involving distances and some mentions in non-canonical books like tech manuals. But hey, fanon has to start somewhere.


Well, it's getting late and I've said everything I need to.

Have a nice day.

Titles are easier when you have topics

Holy crap. It's just gone past four o'clock and I feel like it should still be the morning. I got up just before noon and had just enough time to turn on my computer and have some lunch before I had to have my shower and go into hospital, wait for about half an hour, have my dressing changed and then come home.

All in all, I didn't get to actually start my day until just after three.


As a consequence, I've done absolutely nothing of any consequence. That's really making me very worried now. Tomorrow, I'm determined to do at least the equivalent of one Maths prelim paper and to look over some of my Computing notes. With any luck, I'll also have time to sort out the design for my Computing project.

That might just be wishful thinking but I've got little else at the moment.


I've no idea why but I'm feeling quite tired. And my neck is still sore. Still, I've got a couple of points to get through before I wrap this up.

First of all, it's more or less official now that Toshiba have killed off the HD-DVD format. This has a number of important repercussions, the most important being that I now owe Sam Stafford a tenner. We made a bet a couple of years ago over which would be the victor – obviously, he supported Blu-Ray while I went with HD-DVD.

The fact that we were planning to settle the bet on January 1st 2010 shows just how much of a surprise the sudden departure of HD-DVD has been. In the last few months, Toshiba's lost many important allies to Sony's format, mostly due to the resurgence of the PS3. I know people who are buying PS3s purely to use them as Blu-Ray players. That'll probably stop once prices of standalone players come down but Sony is probably hoping to have enough of a foothold by then to get by on profit from software sales.


Our second item of news for tonight is that I'm trying to come up with a name for my Eee PC. As you may or (more likely) may not know, Sam and I have a system for naming our computers. Old or second-hand systems are named using jokes, usually puns or funny references. Hence, my seldom-used Linux box called Linus (a reference to Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux) and my Mac LC called Lucy (Sam was originally going to call his LC Lucy but I convinced him to use Luke instead once I realised the potential for a Peanuts reference).

New computers follow a different pattern. Sam names his after moons (his Mac Mini, which he'd just got when we started the system, is called Luna) and I name mine after stars, hence why I occasionally refer to my iMac as Deneb. Moving outwards towards the edge of the solar system, Sam named his Eee after the smallest moon of Mars, Deimos, and I'm currently examining white dwarf stars for mine.

I should have a name by tomorrow.


Bah. That's it for now. You know, when I get my priorities sorted out and start doing these earlier in the day again, I've got a few things I want to wax lyrical about. The current weather, for example. Sort of not quite winter and not quite spring. I like it.

But I need to get to bed. I probably won't because I'm having a discussion about the mysteries in Life on Mars which may drag on but it's the thought that counts.

Have a nice day.

More of all the stuff I usually mention

If my day were a game and hours were the points, Mass Effect would have beaten revision 5-nil.


And now you see why I never use sports metaphors.

I did play a lot of Mass Effect though. Five hours is probably a good estimate, with a little rounding. Sadly, nil is a good estimate for my revision time as well.

On the bright side, I did spot and dig out from under a pile of my other crap some more Maths notes, including my practice prelims and the sheet which tells me what topics are going to be in my exam. It's not exactly pulling an all-nighter but it's progress nonetheless.

I was reassured (mildly) by Sam telling me that he's done no revision at all. I say mildly because a) Sam doesn't take Maths, just its way easier, no-need-to-revise-for-it arch-nemesis, English, and b) he's a lazy git.

Turns out that one of the many reasons he hasn't done any work is that he's got himself an Eee PC as well. He went with the 2 gig version and spent the extra money on an SD card to make up the memory and a DVD rewriter since he needs an optical drive to put Windows on it and he apparently wanted one for his Mac Mini anyway.

All he really loses out on with his version, other than the memory, is a small increase in processor speed and the inbuilt webcam. It seems he was willing to sacrifice those to get it a bit faster (the 4 gig version, of which mine is one, is still out of stock almost everywhere). Last I saw of him, he was copying a cut down version of XP to a thumb drive to try and boot from that. I'll have to ask him how that went.

As I hate being outdone in the general geekiness department, I decided to enable the desktop mode on my Eee while he was doing that. All it required was a few command lines and some package installation and it now has a full desktop GUI, though I may set it to boot up into the simpler one just for convenience.

Now that I can install and access non-default applications, I've also added GIMP (the image editor), Audacity (everyone's favourite open source audio editor) and versions of Bejeweled and Minesweeper (because I have way too much time on my hands).

I'll probably play around with it some more tomorrow, after I get through with (or when I need a break from) doing some actual revision. Now that I have the sheet saying what I need to do, Maths doesn't seem quite so daunting. I figure it'll start being daunting again once I start actually doing the work but I may as well enjoy this brief respite while it lasts.

I also need to get on with my Computing project. As I can't be bothered using my Beaten Up Old Laptop^TM every time I want to work on it, I've decided that I'm going to steal the little Thinkpad that my brother got for university a couple of years ago and which is now only used by my dad for his office connection once every so often.

I could theoretically work on it on another computer but, to be completely honest, I just want to sit at my desk and have two laptops and my iMac in front of me, running all three major operating systems. I'll probably laugh maniacally to myself and pretend I'm some sort of hacker supervillain.

I can but dream.


And that's it for tonight. Nothing much else to say, except that I'll probably have a woodle up tomorrow. Now, I'm off to bed before this headache gets any worse so...

Have a nice day, I suppose.

My neck's better but now I've got a headache

I really need to tidy my room. I was just looking through some drawers to find a packet of Blu Tack so I could stick up my exam timetable when I came across my provisional driving license. I'd totally forgotten I had that thing.


So my exams start one week today. In fact, looking at my timetable, this time next week, I'll just have come home from my Maths prelim. With any luck, I'll have had time to recover a bit and have some lunch before needing to start last minute Computing revision.


My head's still killing me so I've sort of given up on revision for now. Making last minute use of the BBC iPlayer to catch up on Ashes to Ashes so that I can watch the second episode tonight. It can only go back 7 days so at first I thought I'd missed my chance, since the day selection only went back to last Friday. Turns out the content from Thursday was still online though, assuming it was on at a later time last Thursday than the current time. If that makes any sense.


Okay. Watched Ashes to Ashes now. A bit meh, to be honest, but it has promise. I don't particularly like the new main character but she may yet grow on me. The second episode was on tonight, so I'll watch that tomorrow and see if it gets better.


I think that's all I feel like saying tonight. My headache has yet to subside and I really need it to be gone by tomorrow so that I can get on with my studying, so I'm gonna head to bed earlier than normal. By which I mean, before midnight. I'll call this a mini-post and those traditionally end with some amusing links so...

Ah, Doom. King of all shooters, according to some. Didn't really work out so great as a comic book though.

And speaking of amusing comic books, here's a few more over at the appropriately titled Stupid Comics.

You know what? I don't link to Superdickery often enough and it seems to fit with the theme I've got going here. So go there.


That's all.

Another post about stuff I did during the day

Things that tell you you ought to keep you're desk tidier number 1013:

Moving an old copy of Retro Gamer to discover several pieces of unopened mail marked January.


In addition to the aforementioned tidying, I also managed to get some revision done today. It wasn't much, just going through a Computing prelim that I don't think I even have the answers for, but it was a start. I expect to get more done tomorrow, now that I've finished watching Life on Mars. Well, after I've watched the first episode of the sequel series. And the Torchwood episode they showed on BBC 3 tonight.

Speaking of Torchwood, it was pretty good tonight. They toned down the melodrama a bit, which made the characters a whole lot more likeable than usual. There were a few similarities to a certain Star Trek episode (and I'm sure it's been done in other media as well... come to think of it, I remember a plot synopsis for a Torchwood novel that had a similar basis) and an episode of Red Dwarf, of all things.

Still, it was pretty good overall, if you're willing to pave over a rather large plot hole involving the character of Rhys. Which I am, since I rather like the character of Rhys. He was a jerk in the first season (then again, so was everyone else) but now he's been rounded out a bit, it's become clear that he's the only person in Torchwood who doesn't have some kind of glaring mental defect.


What else have I got to talk about...

I said yesterday that I was going to talk more about Assassin's Creed but I ended up not playing it any more so that'll have to wait for now.

I didn't play any more of Mass Effect either, though I did play some more of Link's Crossbow Training and a couple more Advance Wars missions. Crossbow Training is actually a lot of fun, if fairly easy. It certainly fulfils its simple purpose of showing off (and justifying the price of) the Wii Zapper.

Oh, and I've done a bit more writing on the background of The Grey Line. It's funny how just sitting and bashing out ideas on the keyboard can help me solidify them. Maybe it's because I have them all there in one place, rather than drifting separately into my mind from time to time. I've been able to combine a few plotlines so that it hangs together better as a whole and I've sorted out a few problems with the physics.

I'm not going for hard science fiction or anything, but I do want it to be internally consistent. The problem came up because, while I don't want time travel to be a regular or easy thing, I did have one story (from the earlier, more carefree days) that I didn't want to give up but which required a form of time travel.

Also, trying to do more writing about them has made me realise that about half the cast don't actually have names, or at least not full names. That's probably something I should work on.


That's everything I think. Now, if you'll excuse me, my neck has been killing me all day and I deeply desire to rest it upon a pillow. Although that may just make it worse.

We shall see.

Revision, Assassins and Miscellaneous

You know, it's on days like this, when I'm sitting at my computer, sunlight streaming into my room, casting intricate shadows on the floor, that I realised just how dirty my windows are.

Seriously. They're filthy.


Well then... that whole revision thing... yeah...

I didn't do any. I moved some folders around and slightly cleared up a desk so that with a little more shifting of stuff I can use it as a work surface but other than that, I did nothing.

I'm determined to start properly tomorrow. I figure the best thing to do would be to try out some of the prelims to see what I need to learn and then focus on Maths and Computing, since those are my first two exams. I'll probably have to look more at Maths but I'm determined to do more than I strictly need to for Computing.

I've managed to get a prize every year for about nine years in a row now and I'm not failing my last chance. I figure Computing's my best bet since I won it for Higher last year, beating out the rest of the class in the prelim, and... well, I don't reckon I can do it in either of my other classes to be honest. I'm not bad but I know there are people better than me who deserve it more.


Anyway, let's forget about revision for now (because if I think about it any more it's just going to depress and annoy me).

I played Assassin's Creed some more today. Assassin's Creed is apparently one of those games that you either love or hate. Most reviews indicated that it's pretty repetitive so if you like the kind of stuff it does, you'll get plenty of it, but if even one section annoys you, it's all going to go downhill very fast. I hadn't liked it very much when I played it at school but I figured I might like it a bit more when I could hear the dialogue and take my time with the game.

Turns out I was wrong.


You know what? More on Assassin's Creed tomorrow, or maybe some other time. Turns out I have an awful lot of ranting to do. I may even turn it into a proper review. For now, here's Zero Punctuation's look at it.


I figure I'll try to divide up tomorrow between sessions of study and sessions of Mass Effect for balance. No idea if that'll work out well or not. I might also try to get a bit more writing done – I've taken some time today to type out some of my thoughts for The Grey Line, the first time I've done so in a long while. I think I've mostly resolved, in my head at least, some of the problems of the sci-fi and fantasy elements residing in the same universe.

Which may have just given away some of the plot. Or maybe not. We shall see.


For now, I'm off to bed. I was told today, after yesterday's more optimistic view, that my wound may still take a few weeks to heal, which means it almost certainly won't be done before the end of the prelims. Calling it “incredibly annoying” would be a gross understatement.

Still, nothing I can do right now, unfortunately. Well, nothing except get some more sleep and get up early tomorrow morning again.

Have a nice day.

Insert Title Joke Here

I hate short holidays. I take a day to relax and I feel like I've wasted time that could have been much better spent on something else. And that feeling basically defeats the whole point of taking a day to relax in the first place.

Other than the odd late-night feeling of despair and hopelessness, today's actually been a pretty good day. Went into hospital in the morning and got some good news – I should be done in about a week. Nothing definite but a lot closer and a lot more specific than anything I've got in the past. At the very least, I should be done before my prelims start, albeit cutting it a bit close.

Sam came round in the afternoon and I gave him those revision sheets I was keeping for him – fat chance he'll use most of them but at least it's one task done for me. We spent most of the time either playing Link's Crossbow Training or watching Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged and Homestar Runner on my Eee. That thing really is becoming ridiculously useful.

We also dug out and watched a Simpsons episode which came up in conversation for some reason. It was that brilliant one with Hank Scorpio. I'm trying hard now to remember why we were all thinking about it but I honestly can't – I just keep reminding myself of scenes from it and laughing.

Other than that I've mostly just been browsing the web and watching Life on Mars. Still, that counts as a good day in my book.


I've also had a few good ideas regarding some of my creative endeavours. Sam agreed to do a woodle more-or-less weekly so I'll get him a precise script (I already gave him a rough description this morning) and the first one should go up next Saturday.

I've solved a few problems and come up with some more background information for The Grey Line. One of these days, I may actually write some of it down. On an even more unusual day, I might just show it to someone.


Anyway, I think that's about it. Haven't really got through much of the list I set out yesterday but... ah, well. Time to go to bed.

Have a nice day.

More things to do

11:09 counts as the morning as well.


I really need to change my sleeping habits. Getting up late is all well and good for a couple of days but I always feel like I've been wasting my time afterwards. It's back into the annoyingly normal routine of going to hospital in the early morning tomorrow so I'll have no choice but to be up and about by eight at the latest.


Aargh. I just finished a session of Link's Crossbow Training. I'm getting pretty good at it now but playing it for about an hour straight does tend to make your arms a bit sore. I may as well keep typing because it's just going to hurt anyway and I want this out of the way.

I've got a few things going round in my head that I want to do so I think I'll take a second* to write them down, in no particular order.

1. Revise. Obviously.

2. Tidy my room, if only so I can find my revision notes.

3. Write thank you letters for my birthday presents, however much it may annoy me.

4. Something else which I remembered a few minutes ago but has now slipped my mind again.

5. Do some work on The Grey Line.

6. Make some woodles. I may even do one later tonight if time permits - I realised as soon as I had posted yesterday that I'd forgotten to do one then.

7. Figure out what number 4 was.

8. Do something, anything, about VersusCOM. Write a sketch, think about game news items, scribble something on the back of an envelope. Well, maybe not that last one - Mum gets a bit touchy about wasting envelopes for some reason.

9. Sell some of my junk and unwanted games. Come to think of it, that was probably what number 4 was meant to be.

10. Strike number 7 off this list as I've now probably done it.

11. ...I'm sure I had an 11 but my Eee crashed on me and the document recovery only got me back to number 6. Not sure why it died but it's been running, albeit mostly in sleep mode, for most of the day. Got pretty hot too - I had to do some impromptu air cooling. By which I mean holding it at an open window.

12. Take slightly better care of my brand new laptop. This includes such things as turning it off more often and not holding it at open windows, as well as generally trying to avoid situations where the latter becomes necessary.


I think that's about it for now. Not much else to say and not much time to say it in. Revision starts on Tuesday so I probably ought to try to get the most out of tomorrow. Well, I say revision starts on Tuesday, no idea if I'll hold myself to that. I certainly hope I will.

We shall see, I suppose.



*Re-reading this, I find that statement particularly ironic seeing as it was written at around one o'clock and it's now fast approaching midnight.

First Day of a Short Holiday

So it turns out that the Eee's version of Open Office does have languages other than UK English. The spell check still seems a little off though - it wouldn't let me select any other languages last night (I found another way this morning) and now it doesn't find anything wrong with the phrase "Englash is awexome". Maybe it'll catch on to it later.


Ah, the first day of the holidays. Remember, even if the clock says 11:48, it still counts as getting out of bed in the morning.

I finally got around to playing Mass Effect last night. I played for a couple of hours and got a pretty good feel for it. The conversation system is very interesting but I've yet to be completely convinced by the combat and "talent" systems.


Okay, so it's a lot later now. I haven't really done much all day. As I said, I woke up late so that there wasn't much point in starting anything much before my hospital appointment at two o'clock. I hate going into the ward (rather than the normal treatment room) but I have to at weekends. The afternoon appointments do give me a lie in but it's usually a longer wait and the nurses up there don't see it so often and usually seem to put in a bit too much packing.

Today's appointment was pretty quick but I got the whole "it's looking much better than last time" speech again and I'm really starting to get sick of it. If it's getting so much better each and every bloody time, why isn't it bloody well healed yet?

Bah. All I can really hope for now is that it'll be done before the prelims start. I'm determined not to become complacent about it. I tend to ask every couple of days and as soon as I get told that I could probably just put the dressing on at home, I'm done.


Enough of that. It's getting very late in the day now and I tend to get more complainy around then. Doesn't help that the alarm just went off downstairs for no particular reason. It seems to just be a fault with the phone line but Mum's still being paranoid about it and insisting on checking everything. She just called me through to ask if the lights on the wireless range extender were all right, as she'd never seen them like that before. I had to patiently explain that one was the power light, one showed the network cable was plugged in an one showed that the Wi-Fi was active – and that all were perfectly normal and always on.

Other than the things I feel like complaining about, I've not done much else all day. Haven't really played any games – did a bit more of Advance Wars in the waiting room but I haven't touched Mass Effect, Link's Crossbow Training or any other of the half dozen or so games I keep meaning to play more.

My Life on Mars DVDs arrived this morning so I've been watching them a lot. I quite like it but I'm not entirely convinced that it's as great as everyone says. Maybe it's just backlash from the hype. Oh, well. I'll keep watching all the same.

And that's about it. I'm basically just resting up now because I know that I'll have to start doing revision and so on at some point soon. Probably on Tuesday, since I want to spend tomorrow playing some of the games on my list and I was thinking of having Sam round on Monday, if only to give him some revision sheets that he missed getting on Friday.

I really have to wrap this up now. I've no idea how it got so late but I have to get this post up within about fifteen minutes or... well, or nothing really. But I've got nothing else to say and I want to get to bed so I may as well stick to my self-imposed, arbitrary deadline.


Oh, and one final side note. Today, my mother dismantled Citizen Cane. He shall be sorely missed by all who knew him and who had used him to remove objects from high up areas.

Which reminds me... isn't there still a flying disc thing stuck on the roof from a while back? Did we ever get that down?

I forgot to mention that I finally played Mass Effect tonight

Back on the Eee again, just for a laugh.

I still can't quite get over just how small this thing is. Any previous laptop of mine, and the vast majority of models on the market today, would either crush your legs or boil your blood (often both) if actually sat on your lap. On the way home from school today, however, I took it out and typed up a script for a little comedy sketch. The only problem I encountered was the motion of the car itself.

It continued to be useful at school. I managed to get some of my Physics project written up, in between people stealing it to play Frozen Bubble and Penguin Racer.

That's another thing about the Eee. Even with my crappy old laptop, I only left it in the common room knowing that it was password protected and after telling a friend to make sure no one would use it. I can't imagine ever being willing to take in an expensive ultraportable along the lines of the MacBook Air into school. I'd never be happy leaving it alone and I wouldn't want it in my bag lest it somehow get scratched or damaged.

Yes, the Air and its expensive ilk can do more, but I think I'd be too frightened to use it to its potential, even if I did need such facilities while on the go. With the Eee, I'll happily leave it lying around when I'm not there and when the day's over it gets bunged in my bag along with some crumpled Physics sheets and my pencil case.

The whole little package just seems so durable and robust. Okay, so it's probably not what you'd take on a trip to the Sahara or into the rainforest but it feels solid enough to handle every day wear and tear.

I'm even considering doing some mods for it. Sam, who was off school today due to illness, says he spent most of his free time looking up details on the Eee PC and now seems determined to get one of his own. He says he's found this relatively simple mod that'll give the Eee a touch screen, the components for which only cost about £35.

Assuming he can get a copy of XP cheap enough (or, by some means that I don't wish to discuss for legal reasons, for free), he'll be able to put together a touchscreen, Windows laptop for less than £300. And, since he's doing English for which he'll only really need a word processor and, in the words of my Computing teacher, some "dusty old tomes", it'll likely be enough to get him through several years of university, along with his Mac Mini.

I know I seem to be waffling on about it a lot but I've just become really attached to this little thing. It's useful, fun and practical straight out of the box with the potential for a lot more, for people who know how to find it. And, eventually, I hope to be one of those people.


Anyway, time for something else. An amusing anecdote from my day at school, in fact.

I recall wistfully the days of primary and early secondary school, days when exams were unheard of, when homework took ten minutes and when the length of essays and projects was given in pages rather than words or experiments.

Back then, writing up essays on computers at home was quickly becoming the standard and everyone swiftly realised* that increasing the font size was far easier than writing more words. After all, a small increase in font, say by 4 points, could change a ¾ page essay into a 1½ page one. 2 wasn't even much of a stretch, provided you knew your way around double spacing.

I had cause to wonder this morning if someone hadn't been a little overzealous in their application of the same technique. The only other, and more likely, alternatives were some sort of accident or practical joke.

When we arrived in Computing this morning, lying beside the printer was a huge stack of paper. At first glance, you might think it had been a teacher printing out several booklets of notes or something when the photocopier was in use. The only clue to their origin was that on the top page, in landscape orientation and something like size 90 font, the words "Asgard is" was written.

Flicking over to the second page, we found "the Viking" and carrying on we found page after page of one or two words, including ideas about "the home of the gods" (about three pages) and something so exciting that the exclamation mark following it somehow got its own page.

Comparing it to a packet of printer paper lying nearby, we guessed that there must have been about 150 pages of it, repeating at least a few times. It wasn't until our teacher checked the network logs that we got anything exact - it turned out to be the same 29-page long document (or, quite possibly given the font size, the same sentence) printed out 6 times.

We were never told, though the logs probably said, who printed it (well, whose account it was printed on - would you do something like that under your own username?). The Vikings are one of the topics done in P7 so we guessed that it came from there.


You know, I think that might have been much more amusing if I had got to the point an awful lot faster. I do tend to ramble on a bit. I suspect that it's something about this little keyboard. It takes a while to get used to but once you do it's quite comfortable and I can type remarkably quickly with it.

That's about it for tonight. I've just checked the clock and realised how close I'm drawing to my arbitrary deadline. I may still get a woodle up tomorrow but Sam, who I was relying on for the art, was off school today and doing something after school yesterday, so I've not actually had a chance to tell him about it yet.

Maybe next week. I'm considering changing it to something more based on my own experiences, though still with some random, gag-based ones. Like the Tech Support 2257 series, which I guess would now be Tech Support 2258. I've still got a few old ideas for that kicking around, plus the original images, so I might put together one of them.

Wow. This has gone on to three pages now. I can't even remember when that last happened. But like I said a couple of paragraphs back, I need to wrap this up for tonight.

Have a nice day.






*And I just realised now that this version of Open Office only has USA English spell check.

This is basically just an update on yesterday's post

Coming to you straight from his now wireless-enabled Eee PC, it's everyone's... what's between favourite and least favourite? Like, right in the middle. I don't know. Doesn't really matter. Anyway, it's me, Alasdair Corbett. Not between least favourite and favourite, I mean here right now, typing this.

Typing, as I said before, on my Eee PC. I'm not quite sure what was up with the Wi-Fi last night. I definitely tried the correct password a couple of times then but I suspect that wasn't the only problem, since the family desktop and another laptop were having the same problems at the time.

This little thing has already proven surprisingly useful. At the very least, it's been a fun and helpful gadget. I took it into school today, partly to use it, partly to show off. Both plans worked out fairly well - I managed to type up some Computing homework and I intend to use it for a Physics report tomorrow and throughout most of lunchtime, it was taken from be by a gang of Frozen Bubble addicts.

Did rather distract me from my Maths revision though.

But the remainder of the test went well enough. It has got me a bit scared for the prelim though. Not just the difficulty of the work but the sheer volume of it in such a short time. I'm still not hugely concerned about Computing. The only problems I've had so far with the practice stuff consisted of not knowing a few facts and some badly worded questions.

I'll try the official questions some time during the holiday but I know from experience that they'll be of better quality. As an example, the paper I was doing for homework tonight (which stopped me playing Mass Effect again but did allow time for some more of Link's Crossbow Training) ended with a question on searching, giving a list of terms and asking you to compare the efficiency of two algorithms when looking for a particular term.

Of course, it didn't bother to tell you what term you were searching for, a small fact admittedly, but one that's rather vital to the answering of the question.


I'll say this for the Eee - once it gets a grip on your cables, it does not like to let them go. I stuck my headphones into the jack to watch a video a few minutes ago and now I can't get them out again. Maybe if the end of the cable had a larger grip it would be doable but these are just little iPod ones and they're simply refusing to come out.

I'm currently trying to rationalise this away. It'll loosen up after a few uses, I expect. Maybe it's the fact that it's quite warm; heat making the metal expand, perhaps. I can deal with it in the morning either way.

And that's about all I've got. if I remember, I'll try to get a woodle up on Saturday. Don't get your hopes up but I have some ideas and I know an artist with way too much free time on his hands.

On budget laptops, new games and the joy of decades-old television serials

I just came in from school (after a fairly hefty delay due to one of the main roads being closed) to find my Eee PC waiting for me. I'm just going to get something to eat and then set it up. More later.


It all seems very impressive so far but I've been running into some trouble while trying to connect to the wireless network. I've double-checked the password and the settings but it just doesn't do anything. Curious.


Well, after a bit more tinkering, I still haven't got the Wi-Fi to work. It came with one week of free tech support though, so I guess I can try that either tomorrow or at the weekend. Or during the week after that, in fact, since we go on holiday after this Friday. That would be a good thing, if it hadn't just reminded me that immediately after the holidays, my prelims begin.


I haven't got round to playing Mass Effect tonight, even though I said I would. I've been too busy fiddling with the Eee, in addition to my usual routine. I did manage to play Link's Crossbow Training for a while. I'm not entirely convinced that the Wii Zapper is such a brilliant peripheral but it works well with this game, simple as it may be. I haven't done anything beyond the first set of levels yet – the urge to chase high scores is just too great.

The only minor complaint I have is that the sensitivity and alignment settings aren't unique to each Mii profile. An odd design but I can live with it. It'll probably only be Erin and I using it and she seems to like the same settings as I do.

Hold on a sec, I've gotta watch Torchwood. Will I like it this week?


It was all right. A bit melodramatic in places but, well, it's Torchwood so melodrama's pretty much par for the course. Watching a bit of classic Who now, The Time Warrior, the serial which introduced Sarah Jane Smith and the Sontarans. It was one of the ones I got for my birthday, along with Carnival of Monsters (which has fast become one of my favourites) and The Hand of Fear (featuring the last regular appearance of Sarah Jane).

I still have a few more DVDs that I want to get out of the shortlist I made before my birthday. I got some Amazon vouchers for Christmas and that ought to cover a few. I'm planning on buying Life on Mars at some point, probably soon so that I can catch up and watch the sequel series as it happens. Someone said that it starts tomorrow so I'm going to miss the first episode at least but I'll try to record it.

Shows like Life on Mars that have a planned backstory and arc always make Doctor Who seem all the more strange to me. Every modern show almost has to have some kind of extended story between episodes and will usually have characters and plot arcs fleshed out years in advance. Shows like Heroes, Lost and Prison Break are the clearest examples of this (though the amount of long-term planning in some of them is... debatable) but even largely episodic shows have some connection between episodes. Such as the new Who series, for instance.

But getting back to old Who. The Time Warrior was broadcast just over ten years after the start of Doctor Who, from December 1973 to January 1974 and it was the very first serial to name the Doctor's home planet as Gallifrey. It had taken two years for another Time Lord to appear in the show (not counting Susan), five years for the now iconic sonic screwdriver to show up and it was six before the Time Lords were named as such and appeared as a proper civilisation.

In the scale of Doctor Who, it's not very much. But those ten years would be like the entirety of the first two Star Trek series going by without Starfleet being mentioned. It would be more than halfway through the original series before another Vulcan appeared and we wouldn't even know they were called that until Commander Riker grew a beard and told us so*.

I'm not sure why I find that all so fascinating but I do. There's such a history associated with it and a complicated weave of plots and characters far greater than any single series could come up with today, even, or perhaps especially, if it was meticulously planned out.


A couple more things before I go. I'm not sure what the problem is yet but it seems that a couple of other computers, namely the family desktop and my mum's laptop are having difficulty connecting to the wireless network as well as my Eee. It could be related but they're both a wee bit temperamental anyway so I'll probably still put in that call to tech support, assuming it doesn't all fix itself.

Also, I've got the last part of that Maths test tomorrow. It was technically only meant to be for two days but no one's got it finished and it doesn't really count as anything other than practice anyway. I think that with a bit more time I should be able to get through it but it's got me a bit more worried about the prelims now.

Physics might also be a problem. I'll really need to do some revision on that front. Computing, I'm not so bothered about. It should be fairly easy but doing the practice papers is proving to be annoying. The commercially produced ones, as opposed to the actual exams from previous years, are always quite low quality, often having questions that don't make sense or which give far too many or too few marks for a particular answer.

Anyway, I'll deal with them later. By which I mean tomorrow, since the first one is due in on Friday morning. Bah, I'll figure something out.


I keep having problems concluding these posts. It's worst in the ones where I keep darting from topic to topic, such as... well, most of them. Including today's. I'll just have to fall back on my normal, poorly-planned escape route.

So, loathe as I am to admit to being unable to come up with anything more creative, have a nice day.






*If you don't get the reference, find the geekiest person you know and have them explain it, even though you probably won't like the answer. It's nothing bad, just boring.**

**If you think my timing is a little off with these references, then you're probably the kind of person that people will go to if they need it explained.

Another Look at Another Day

More good news about my Eee PC – it looks like it's finally been dispatched and should be arriving either tomorrow or on Thursday. We paid for next day delivery but the cut-off point for want counts as “next day” was 4pm and I'm not sure if it shipped before or after that point. I certainly didn't realise until after that and I think checked it near the end of school so... probably Thursday.

It would be nice if it did come tomorrow though. I have a feeling that I'm going to screw up the second part of my Maths test as well (first half was today and, as you may have surmised, it could have gone better) so having it waiting when I come home would probably cheer me up.

Otherwise, I'll just have to spend the whole night playing Mass Effect. Woe is me.


Nothing much going on at school today. We got a revised version of the prelim timetable. We were told that it was because some minor changes had to be made to the schedule but the real reason was fairly obvious; the first copies didn't have any room numbers. Knowing when our exams are going to be is nice but knowing where is also fairly important.

I spent most of the morning revising for and taking the aforementioned Maths test. Computing was fairly uneventful as we spent most of it trying to make an online 6502 emulator work with some sample assembly code. Our teacher got it to work but none of us could so we suspect it might have something to do with the different web filters on the different accounts. Whatever the reason, we didn't get much work done.

At lunch, I deliberated over whether or not I should do the Physics homework I had only been reminded of right before the Maths test. Most of the rest of my class hadn't done it either and those who had tried said it would take far too long so we all just left it. This strategy worked pretty well, although our teacher not even asking for it helped a lot.


Thinking back, I've been tired for most of the day. I normally don't even properly wake up now until I'm actually getting out of the car at the hospital and the cold air hits me in the face. By lunch time, I'm so tired that I can hardly concentrate on my work. Admittedly, everyone was talking during Physics (my only period after lunch) so it could have been that but I've not been able to focus on doing any revision at home either.

Anyway, I forget where I was going with that other than the usual “I hate these constant hospital appointments” and “I'm very tired” stuff. So nuts to it.


I'll finish up with a link to an article I read at The Daily WTF today. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before but, in case you don't know, it's a site that updates daily with bizarre tales and practices from the world of IT. A few of them require some basic technical knowledge to get but this one's fairly straightforward and interesting.

It's also worth taking a read through some of the featured comments.

And that's it for tonight.

Something a bit lighter

I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that my Eee PC is due to arrive in stock before the end of the week and should get delivered not long afterwards. I haven't got a specific date yet but progress is progress. Also, I've finally got a Physics report handed in on an experiment we did as a class some time before October. It's two pages long, including diagrams and a graph, and I'm one of only three people in my class of eight to have finished it. Ah, the Sixth Year work ethic.

The bad news is that I've developed a rather painful infection in one of my toes, I've done hardly any revision for my Maths test tomorrow, I still need to do some more work on my Computing project, not to mention any work on my Physics one, and I've just remembered that I probably have a presentation to complete for Wednesday, on a topic that I probably ought to look up at some point. Might have something to do with processor architecture.

There's also some mildly interesting but largely mediocre news – I finally got the timetable for my prelim exams later this month. The school is on holiday for about ten days beforehand, then I personally have two days off before Maths in Thursday 21st, followed by Computing the day after and then a big gap before Physics on the following Thursday. That's the last day of exams so, for some inexplicable reason, we have to go back into school on the Friday for a one day week.

It could be better (Computing on the Monday would have been quite nice) but I know people with worse schedules (such as two exams on one day) so I guess I can live with it. I fully intend to spend the weekend after the prelims finally watching my Key to Time boxset with Sam. We were originally going to do it in the Christmas holidays but never quite got round to it.

And speaking of getting round to things, I still have a number of things to... get round to. I've been playing Advance Wars pretty heavily since I can take that into school and I had it at my friend's house over the weekend but I still haven't opened Mass Effect or my Wii Zapper. I've made a start on the DVDs I got for my birthday, beginning with Carnival of Monsters, a surprisingly good Jon Pertwee era Doctor Who serial.

Mostly, I have a huge stack of books to read through. Maybe I'll pile them up at some point, purely to amuse and shock myself. I'm currently reading AHistory, which is an attempt to reconcile all the major Doctor Who media (all television serials/episodes, including spin-offs, up to 2007 plus most comic strips, novels and audio plays) into a single timeline. I'm still at the origin of the universe and there have so far been about five different “first” civilisations, two of which have specifically been the first humanoid ones.

It's an interesting read but I think I'll put it aside for a while to finish a few other things. It's not really meant to be read all in one go, I suspect, and I wouldn't mind familiarising myself with some of the other media before proceeding.


That's it for tonight then.

Other than one little factoid that's just occurred to me. I started this “post a day for a whole year” thing on March 1st last year. I've known for a while that the end was getting close but I've just now noticed that it will fall on the Saturday immediately after my prelims. And the 365th post will be the day before, since this is a leap year.

I suppose I'll have to come up with some way of resolving that... or I could just do what I usually do and churn out a little mini post in the few moments I can spare between changing discs during the Key to Time marathon.

After all, it's pretty much traditional around here not to comment on special occasions until they've been and gone.

Admittedly, it's usually because I forget about them completely, but the point is still valid.

Warning: Really Depressing

Well, I'm back home now and have been for some time. I considered beginning this post shortly after I got back home but decided against it, because I was too busy not doing anything.

I feel that I probably ought to talk about what went on over the weekend but I'm not sure there was much to say. I spent an awful lot of time, particularly when there were more people around, playing Advance Wars. We watched some films, including A Fistful of Dollars, From Russia With Love and, my personal favourite, Space Jam, on an old video that was lying around.


I'm sitting here and thinking about how best to continue this post. I have some thoughts on the whole experience but I don't really feel like sharing them and they'd probably just be boring anyway. On the other hand, I don't think I have much else to say.

For now, I think I'll just keep my thoughts to myself and write about something else.

My wound is apparently healing quickly. Or slowly. Or an average rate. It all depends on what nurse I ask. I'm still expecting it to be over with by the start of the prelims but I would really love to have it done sooner, so I could enjoy my holidays and get some revision done without interruptions, and if it goes on longer I may well scream.

My mother still feels the need to remind me every so often that I need to do various things that she wants me to do anyway to help it heal, as if she's under the impression that I don't want it to. The whole thing's just getting incredibly frustrating, as are constant reminders about prelims, driving and university courses...


Bah. I'm in no mood to write a post now. I've got my homework done so I think I'll just post this and get to bed. Tomorrow... I'm not sure what I'll do. I really ought to get some Maths revision done and I haven't done any more work on my Computing project since my teacher last saw it. At this rate, it's looking like I won't have any free time until the holidays.

And even then I'll have to do revision, have driving lessons, go to hospital, work on my projects and put up with people reminding me that I should be doing all of the above whenever I sit down...

Like I said, I'm not in the best mood for this sort of thing.


I'm going to bed.

Reporting from Elsewhere

I'm at my friend's house now and I don't think I'm going to get near a computer anytime soon so I've come up with a plan. I'm typing this as an email to myself so that I can log on to his computer later and copy and paste it into Blogger.

It's been pretty good so far - essentially just a load of junk food combined with various DVDs (we're watching Garth Marenghi's Darkplace as I type) and very little sleep.


Well, it's a bit later now. Still nothing particularly interesting or important goinng on which is fine by me. And I've just realized that, with the occasional help of the predictive/corrective typing, I'm actually getting quite food at typing on the iPhone.

Which, incidentally, knows how to correctly capitalist it's own name, unlike some word processors which shall rename nameless.

We watched the Family Guy Star Wars parody Blue Harvest* both yesterday and again today so Jimerson could see it. It had its moments (a nice Doctor Who reference and a Sean Connery impression spring to mind) but they were few and far between and the second viewing revealed little depth to the humour.

I'm going to send this now because I can't remember if I can save it and I want to check my emails without losing this message. I probably won't post without adding more but I'm lazy and bored so who knows what I'm capable of.


Managed to get on a computer while everyone else was distracted by Guitar Hero. Still nothing much going on. I think I'll just post this now to simplify things. This way, I can go back to playing Advance Wars and occasionally looking up if someone laughs that much sooner.

Have a nice day.



*Which I've just found out was titled for the codename of Return of the Jedi, used during filming to avoid fans gathering around and to stop people assuming they had a huge budget and overcharging them during production.

Away for the Weekend

So it looks like I'm going to be spending the weekend at a friend's house. His parents are away for a while and he doesn't want to spend the whole time by himself so a few of us are invited over to stay from tonight through to Sunday, with a party on Saturday night.

I'm not sure if I'll enjoy it (parties in particular aren't really my kind of thing) but it seems like something I'd regret not going to once I heard all the funny stories and so on so... why not? If I don't like it, I'll have proved that to myself once and for all and can comfortably spend the rest of my days as a hermit. If I do, then I'll have had a good weekend.

It does pose a couple of problems though – first, I'm going to need to get picked up, taken to hospital and dropped back off again on Saturday. I just won't be coming back after the one on Sunday. That means that I only have Sunday afternoon to do any homework that I need to do, which includes redrafting a Physics report and a load of Maths revision. I'll also have to do my Saturday blog post from his house somehow.

I was planning to have a quiet weekend after my quiet birthday to watch some DVDs and play some new games (played Advance Wars most of the day at school, still need to try Link's Crossbow Training and Mass Effect) but I suppose I can live without it.

On the bright side, my day went fairly well. I normally have three lessons and a mentoring period on Fridays but Computing didn't happen because my teacher was away, I got out of Maths because the class I normally sit in with was doing a test and I just had to do revision anyway and I wasn't needed for my mentoring. Basically, I spent the whole day in the common room, talking to friends and playing games until last lesson, when we went to Physics and did absolutely no work.

I mentioned yesterday that no one really remembered my birthday – turns out one guy did, hid the present in the room somewhere and promptly forgot all about it until today. Another also remembered but was off yesterday. So that made things a bit better.


I've not got much else to say and I'm in a bit of a rush since I need to get something to eat before I go and I still need to pack a few things. Can't really think of a good way to conclude this post so I guess I'll just end it abruptly.