No Time to Title

You know what really annoys me sometimes? Copyright warnings on DVDs. Back in ye olde days of analogue cassettes, it was a simple matter to skip past them but that's now rendered impossible. What makes the whole thing worse is that I'm seeing them for countries I've never been to and in languages I'll likely never understand.

These are Region 2 DVDs in PAL format with English speech. Why am I seeing copyright laws for Australia in Swiss? For all I know, those Swiss ones aren't even actual copyright law. It's just some really bored guy who happens to know Swiss saying “Ha ha! You silly person who doesn't speak Swiss, I am wasting your time and there's nothing you can do about it! I crack me up sometimes, you know.”


Moving on. I promised yesterday that I would have a well thought out post that I would take my time with over the course of today. That's not worked out.

I have my excuses though. I've been wracking my brains trying to come up with some solution to my Computing project problems. I have a couple that I plan to test tomorrow and, if they don't work, I can always resort to just cutting the feature altogether and carrying on.

Actually, now that I write that down, I'm basically exactly where I was yesterday, give or take a few scribbled notes and a diagram or two.

What's really wasting my time these days is these stupid hospital appointments. I was thinking about it this morning and I realised that the whole thing takes over an hour on average. While I can handle getting up early, I then have to have a shower as well as deal with removing the bandages, etc. That second bit may not take long but it's hardly pleasant. That takes up to half an hour.

Then, after a rushed breakfast, it's about a twenty minute drive to the hospital, another ten minutes (again, on average) sitting around waiting and then a twenty minute drive back home.

By the end of all of this, I've basically been awake for an hour and a half before I can start my day.

It's more tolerable during the weekdays. I'm not making the trip just to go there – it's more of a detour on my way to school, a detour that at least lets me miss Life Skills occasionally. The staff on weekdays also know me and what to do by now, so everything there goes smoothly.

What makes it worse is that, as each day goes by, it becomes more and more apparent that I don't really need all this. That's overall a good sign but the wound packing today fell out before lunch and the only discomfort I've felt is from the now largely useless dressing. It just makes me wonder why I'm still going in there every morning.


Enough of that. I dislike complaining so much but the whole point of this blog is to give me somewhere to solidify and write down my thoughts and this whole situation has been weighing on my thoughts pretty heavily. The end is in sight but every time I seem to be getting closer, it moves a vague distance forwards.

Anyway, I really have to post this now. No time left. More tomorrow. Actually, here's some development about that Mass Effect debacle. The vapid “psychologist” actually apologised. Still waiting on Fox though.

Late to Today

I've really left this far too late again, for which I apologise. I'm not quite sure why, but I just seemed to keep putting it off and not realising the time. But anyway, on with whatever I have to say for this post.

...

Which isn't much.

I guess I could talk about school. Today's common room movie was Donnie Darko, which I rather enjoyed, though I was disappointed that I didn't get to see the ending. I think we've got it on DVD somewhere so I'll have to dig it out.

I'm happy with my Maths now, more or less, and my Computing is still coming along. No way I'll get it done before the start of the holidays, but it shouldn't be too difficult to get the bulk of the coding done by then. I'll try to do as much as possible, since I hate always having holiday homework hanging over my head. I love alliteration though.

Lunch brought up one of my pet peeves. People who talk over movies. I don't mind the occasional comment, provided it's useful or, at least, funny but some people are just perfectly happy to chatter inanely on in the background no matter how many times you ask. You can turn up the volume all you want and all they'll do is talk louder. When you eventually try to kick them out, they'll act as if you're the one being rude.

Of course, there are worse things in the world. Such as people who constantly ask questions during films. “Where are they?”, “What's it about?”, “Who's he?”... all asked at the worst possible moment and before the audience is even expected to know such things. No one but those actually trying to watch the film and find out the answers themselves realises how ridiculous and annoying this can be, and usually is.

It's like having someone tell you that they're reading a murder mystery novel and then asking who did it. Absurd and bloody annoying; even more so, in the case of the latter, if someone nearby has seen the movie, isn't watching it and takes it upon themselves to explain every plot point in detail.

I really should turn that into a “Things that Bug Alasdair” post.

Anyway, after lunch we went to see the junior department's nativity play. It's usually kind of funny though the seating arrangements left much to be desired. We were on the floor of the gym (fortunately, I'd brought along my cushion, or else I truly wouldn't have been able to take it) and I had the bad luck to be sandwiched between two groups of idiots.

As it became clear that we had more space than we thought, all the rows shuffled forward a bit to give everyone more room. Except the jackasses in front of me, none of whom moved an inch and most of whom took the opportunity to stretch their legs in the metre wide gap now available to them.

Behind me, I could hear a pair of girls who did nothing but complain that they couldn't see. Except when they started to complain about there being songs. In the junior school play. Like there is every single freakin' year.

Other than that, it was mildly entertaining. Not as good as the one our class did at that age, though. And I swear ours was longer. And less gimmicky.

And then last lesson, I was bored out of my skull as other people took over the games area to play Guitar Hero on the 360. Watching someone play that game well is quite impressive for the first wee while. Watching someone play it badly is amusing enough for a few minutes. Listening to the loud, repetitive music as well as hearing an awful lot of “miss” tones for the better part of an hour without being able to play anything, is neither. It is very dull and very likely to induce a headache.

I could probably have had a go if I wanted but, as I remarked later to the agreement of Sam*, I didn't want to have my first go at such a game in the common room because I would, logically, suck at it. Normally, I'd be able to practice but in there, I was fairly sure that someone else would snatch away the controller and I would be forever known as unable to play Guitar Hero.


Still, for all my complaining, it wasn't a completely awful day. It was rounded off quite nicely by some rather impressive kill counts in Halo 3 online. Speaking of which, I've somehow acquired a reputation as being bad at that, too. Not sure how, since I managed to get 25 of the 100 kills my team (of eight) needed to get to win the match, just a couple of hours ago.

Oh, well. That's me off to bed, I suppose. Right after I pack my bag for the morning...





*Who had disappeared for most of the lesson to finally go talk to a girl he had “unofficially” asked out yesterday, after months of everyone knowing about his crush and bugging him to just get it over with. Very nearly including her.

Things that Bug Alasdair #345896

I really like having non-uniform days at school. Everything becomes so much more relaxed somehow and people seem more natural than when they're in uniform. That, and it takes me about 5 seconds to kick off my shoes and that's me changed when I get home.


Anyway, on to what bugs me. There are a number of people amongst my group of peers and close acquaintances who are into, not just sports, but “exercise”. This includes weight-lifting, running, whatever the hell bench pressing is, etc. And, as people do when they share a common hobby, they like to discuss these activities at length.

And I can't understand a word they're saying.

Seriously. Not a clue.

It's not really that the individual words don't make sense, it's just that I have no idea of the scales these people are using. If they've run xkm or lifted ykg, is that good? Bad? Average? If they tell me that their "BMI" is "something point something", should I call them fat or claim they're a reincarnation of Hercules? I have no idea.

I have, however, learned to live with this. The basic method is, as with my treatment of sports and other things that disinterest me, to smile, nod and make non-committal, monosyllabic grunts until the conversation moves on. Additionally, you can learn to interpret certain adjectives and tones of voice. If someone sounds proud of their achievement, you say well done. If someone else says it's not so good, you can always claim you were just humouring them.

If they use the word “only”, I tend to avoid saying anything very much. They may not be too impressed with what they've done, but it's still almost certainly twice what I could manage.

So, yeah. People talking about sports and so on annoys me. I know I don't really have a right to be annoyed, since I can get a lot of blank looks when I start going on about computers and video games, but at least I tend to shut up quickly. Curse those socially confident, sporty people. But it still bugs me that they expect me to understand what they're talking about half the time. Sometimes I just have to say, “Come on, this is me you're talking to. I don't know what you're talking about and I probably wouldn't care if I did. Get out of the way of the TV.”

Tact is for suckers.

And that is my new motto.


Wow. Motto looks weird when I write it down. And it's even weirder since I was having a conversation earlier today about that exact phenomena of words just randomly looking weird or like they're spelled incorrectly if you repeat them or suddenly become aware of how often you use them or something like that. I love "study" lessons.


A final note. Bungie and Microsoft parting ways? Who saw that coming? Aside from the internet rumourmongers.

Things that Bug Alasdair #5762

You know what bugs me?

People who, when trying to say that they don't care about something, say “I could care less”. What they mean to say is “I couldn't care less”. If they just thought for a second about what they were saying, they'd realise that “could care less” makes no sense in context.

Imagine if you put “caring” on a scale from 1 to 100, 100 being the most caring and 1 being no caring at all. There is no level of caring below 1 and none above 100. So if you “couldn't” care less, this means that there is no level of caring beneath yours. You are at level 1 and you don't give a shit about what happens to the subject at hand.

If, however, you “could” care less, then you are at any level other than 1. You are somewhere between 2 and 100, which is hugely unhelpful. In fact, if you think it through logically, you are likely to care more than average. 50 is the default level and, since there are more levels between 50 and 100 than there are between 2 and 50, probability indicates that you care more than normal about the topic you're discussing.

The whole thing seems to arise from some slurring together of the two words during speech and a collective lack of attention when writing. You can't defend it as a “quirk” or a “regional pronunciation” thing. It's a not a saying like “daft as a brush” which doesn't make sense now, but did in the past, due to cultural changes.

It just doesn't make sense at all. People will understand what you're trying to say but don't expect them to be very impressed with you if it seems you don't think about what you're saying. There's no excuse for it. Sure, maybe you did hear it wrong a few times. But if I hear someone say “so them ramshackled a zebra” I tend to realise that this doesn't make sense and assume that I heard wrong. The same goes for this example.

Incidentally, the phrase “daft as a brush” seems to derive from young Victorian chimney sweeps falling on their heads and receiving some, often very nasty, brain damage. This meant that the fatality rate among sweeps was fairly high and skilled sweeps were, in fact, something of a rarity. In some places, it is still considered good luck to run into a sweep.

Malicious entity that runs the universe - 1, Corbett - 0

Why must everything be so freaking hard?

I try to send an email to my little cousin congratulating him on winning a race and then Thunderbird asks for a password to connect to the SMTP server. It's set up to receive emails fine but somehow sending them doesn't come into the ordinary account set-up process. Fair enough though, I think I can still remember the password so I try it and a few variations. No luck.

I then check with my dad, who remembered it last time, but he can't recall it either. But, luckily, I'm sure that I wrote it down last time, since I had so much trouble tracking down the damned settings without using any importing functions. So where would the piece of paper with this precious information be?

Uh-oh.

Chances are my mum filed it. This meant having to argue with her for several minutes, listening to complaints about why I should be able to remember a password that I never came up with and that's probably been put in only once since we switched ISPs and then eventually getting the keys from wherever she hides them and going downstairs to the filing cabinets. After 5 minutes of scrabbling around in there and being blamed for every technical problem in the house, I gave up and went back upstairs.

Then I figure, hey, I'll just boot up the old Windows laptop and send it from there. I know it works because I used it for my ISP email account before I set it up on my iMac. So, I copy the message over, re-insert the image I want to use and hit “Send”.

Hurray, I think. It's over.

No, says technology. It isn't.

A few minutes later, I get an email telling me that the message has not been delivered. I know that the address was right – it was a redirect and the failure message tells me that it came from the Hotmail address it redirects to – so I have no idea what went wrong. I don't think I'd sent any emails off the laptop before so maybe it needed a password as well and, for no good reason, decided not to tell me.

I'm going to try one more time using my Gmail account because I don't want to disappoint the little guy, who's been told by his dad that I'll be sending him an email. Apparently, he doesn't use email a lot and my uncle wants to convince him to do so more often. Anyway, if that doesn't work, I'll give up, go to bed and lie awake, marvelling at the lengths the universe and software developers will go to simply to inconvenience me.

Well, that didn't work. I got the same failure message back so I'm just going to give up now. I'll probably end up walking Hamish through setting up a Gmail account over the phone tomorrow, if I can't make this work.


Ranting about technology aside, I'm sure I had some topics for today's post, some of which were actually interesting and had surprisingly little to do with the apparent ancient conspiracy to keep me miserable.

Ah, well. They'll keep till tomorrow. For now, I need to follow through on my plan and go to bed. Writing the above has helped me work off some excess rage, so I should be able to get to sleep.

I guess it's just a perfect example of how a well-planned and simple thing can go ridiculously wrong and screw up a load of other plans in the process.

It's the central theme of the play, people!!!

There are a lot of misconceptions about Shakespeare and his work. I'm no expert and I'm sure I've misquoted him at various times. Some people get angry over the misinterpretation of words and phrases. Try telling an English teacher that Juliet is just trying to find her boyfriend when she says "wherefore art thou, Romeo?". It'll hurt. A lot.

But there's one thing that bugs me more than anything else, or at least it has since I thought of it this morning. It concerns one of his most famous plays, the origin of the line above. Romeo and Juliet, that famed tale of star-crossed lovers. It's a tale of happiness and woe, love and loss that has become the archetypal love story in modern culture, defining a genre.

To this day, young men are called Romeo by joking friends as they attempt to woo the love of a beautiful woman. New couples, so very much in love, are oft compared to those erstwhile lovers. To compare a pairing to that of Romeo and his Juliet is to say that they are suited for one another, that it is destiny that they meet, fall in love and be happy for the rest of their lives.

Romeo and Juliet died.

It's no big secret. Shakespeare even says that they're going to kick the bucket in the sixth line of the play. They're lead characters in a Shakespearean tragedy, for heaven's sake. Most of the supporting cast don't make it through those things alive.

And yet everyone forgets it. Sure, there are some people who, when calling someone Romeo, do so because they honestly believe that he's going to fall in love then commit suicide in an act of tremendous stupidity and that his father is going to have a party with his girlfriend's father afterwards.

But then there are those who write adverts with little logo people scampering around saying "ye" and "wherefore" like their lives depended on it. I hate those people. I hate advert writers in general but that's a complaint for another time.


On a tangentially related note, I've finally found a use for something I learned in Higher English classes. Several months too late, but, hey, I'll take what I can get. My sister, reading a book of Poirot short stories, asked me to explain the plot of Othello, since so many references were made to it. While doing so, I got to use the quote "my ancient, a man he is of honesty and trust". I feel so proud of myself. And glad that I dropped English.


Damn it! I forgot the woodle again!

Things that Bug Alasdair #156

Ah, Wednesday. The day when time is turned upon its head, when extended morning form time moves everything forward by ten minutes until balance can be restored by removing a chunk of my lunch hour.

And then we do house marching for half of what's left.

A little summary of house marching for those not in the know:

Boring as hell.

A slightly more detailed summary may be in order, for those of you who are still interested in reading about an item near the top of that mile-long list, "Things that Bug Alasdair".

Many schools, particularly private ones, have a house system, like the one in Harry Potter (to pander to the lowest common denominator). Unlike Harry Potter, we don't have a house where all the evil children go, though Churchill seems to be filled with all the ones who are terrible at sports.

I'm in Nightingale; Curie and Montgomery round out the numbers to the traditional four. The concept of houses is meant to instill competition and friendly rivalries in sporting events and the collection of arbitrarily distributed tokens from teachers that seem to never be given out to anyone beyond S4, which is when actual academic results become important as opposed to holding the door open twice in one day.

One of the traditional competitions under this system is house marching, when the various houses line up in pairs by order of height and walk in a semi-orderly fashion behind their respective house captain*. Naturally, this is a difficult thing for many of the young children, and the older children of similar maturity, to do on their first try each year. Thus, house marching practice.

It eats up half of lunch break for a week every summer term and then they steal a Friday morning to spirit us away to a nearby stadium for a full practice before Sports Day. I have done this same routine every year for the past 8 years and I am sick of it.

I'm sick of the music that seems to taper out once you've come to a standstill only to flare back up again for another minute of ground pounding. I'm sick of seeing the little children, whose turn it shall be in the coming years, mocking us for having to put on this desperately dull display. I'm sick of the one person who can never, ever keep in time like anybody else, thinking that if they slouch and drag their feet they will somehow look rebellious. I am sick of the other person who can never grasp the concept that once you stop moving forward, you stop swinging your goddamn arm, just like everybody else who's standing directly in front of you.

Unfortunately, try as I might to avoid it (which several people with more self confidence than I did successfully this afternoon), it is a tradition and traditions must go on until somebody is offended or somebody dies. I can't imagine anyone dying at house marching, unless the person who refuses to keep in time and the person who never stops swinging their arm are one and the same and standing directly in front of me (it comes perilously close this year), and, as much as the pupils hate it and the parents don't understand it, it hasn't quite reached the point where the school has been accused of warmongering.

And so, on that anticlimactic note, today's little tirade ends. I'll probably mention it again on Friday and after the actual event on Monday. In the meantime, you may now proceed to laugh at my pathetic problems. I shall weep.


*The post of house captain, just so you know, is one created entirely to give the impression that Sixth Years actually do something.

Things that bug Alasdair #13427

Pop-up ads have long been the bane of internet users everywhere. Fortunately, in this age of pop-up blockers and browsers that aren't Internet Explorer*, they've become less of a problem for most people. To be honest, I've never thought of them as that much of a problem and have even got some amusement out of them.

But I cannot stand roll-over ads.

You know the situation. You're happily reading a webpage when, maybe to click a link, maybe to open another tab, you move your mouse. Big mistake. Now, some animated smiley is yelling at you, telling you to click something else. If you're lucky, it won't happen while you're trying to be quiet. If you're really lucky, and I'm often not, you won't have navigated away from the page by the time the sound starts playing, usually a few seconds after you move over it. If this happens, it can be a real pain, even if it takes less than a minute, to figure out what's making the stupid blathering.

It happens with all sorts of things. I've seen adverts for games where all kinds of dramatic music and sound effects start playing for no apparent reason. Car adverts are surprisingly common, with the "window" sliding down over your page, asking you to purchase the Manufacturer Foreign-Sounding-Word and challenging you to a game of "find the X button".

Because they're embedded into the webpage, they're much harder to deal with than simple pop-ups. In fact, I don't know of any software designed to block them out. I'm not an expert on that sort of thing, but I'd think that something capable of blocking anything that annoying would have made a big enough splash to come to my attention. If you know of any, post a comment about it.

I'm no great opponent of advertising on webpages. They're a useful source of income for people running the website and sometimes even the people behind the advert. But, I swear to Trogdor, if I ever find the person responsible for those blasted yapping smilies, I will kill them. Slowly. And painfully.



*Interesting fact: while I was trying to use a school computer to find the sound that a kookaburra makes (don't ask), IE crashed five times in as many minutes.