It's been a while, hasn't it?

So, despite what my update schedule may imply, I'm still here, meandering angrily through life.

I can't even remember what my last blog was about, before the Arthur C. Clarke one. Huh. A completely random post in early March about my Computing project. Well, I've finished that, after some more difficulty. And my Physics project. And my exams. And my whole school career, in fact.

As of early June, I've been done with Sixth Year and done with my secondary education. Next up, tertiary, but I'll get to that a little later. I spent the time after that mostly hanging around at home, occasionally going in for the odd event. Went in to help with the odd event as well as play Laserquest and some practice for my last ever house marching. Didn't go the prom, again. Still can't see the point.

I wrote a decent Sixth Year Show, something I've been looking forward to since Primary 7, when I first saw the fun the S6s had making fun of the teachers on-stage. I had some good jokes and everyone I showed it to seemed to like it. They did karaoke instead, since apparently a few of the precious shows have offended teachers.

It was, quite frankly, one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. It wasn't just the fact that it was karaoke, which is gut-wrenchingly horrible at the best of times. There was the feeling that I could have done so much better, if I'd been given the opportunity. There was the knowledge that the experience and the feelings would be some of my last memories of Wellington School, a place I've known for over a decade.

I did what any sane man would have done in the situation - I listened to my iPod. A couple of people noticed but nobody whose opinion I actually cared about thought it was anything other than funny. I don't know if any teachers noticed but none of them called me on it if they did. Unfortunately, I still had to traipse up to the front of the hall with everyone else and sing, or at least pretend to from behind everyone else. I have a funny feeling that I will never again be able to enjoy "Bohemian Rhapsody".

But then it was over and it was time to go home. The next day was Speech Day, where I got to sit and listen to the usual droning on from the school governors about fiscal years and fee increases, the usual preaching from the headmaster about commitment, teamwork and how it all came together to make Wellington fantastic at playing rugby and the usual overly-long prayer, thanking God for every little thing that had happened during the year. The guest speaker wasn't too bad this year, compared to some.

I think it's now one of my goals in life - to get good enough at whatever I do (writing, video game design, comedy, whatever I wander into) to be invited back to speak at one of those things.

Anyway, before the main thing (and for a few days previously, in fact), all the leaver's books had been getting passed around. I'm always useless with things like that - it's hard enough for me just trying to conjure up something emotional or deep, let alone doing so under pressure and on paper. So in the first one I was handed, I wrote:

"Bye.
- Alasdair"

This apparently wasn't good enough for the girl who'd asked me so I thought about it some more and wound up writing a couple of paragraphs. I wrote some more generic stuff in some other people's books - mostly just people who were doing the rounds and getting everybody, I think, along with some more joking entries for people I'm confident I'll see again.

I even got one myself. Well, kind of. I happened to have a notepad with me which I took out of my bag, scribbled "Alasdair's Impromptu Leaver's Book (and waste of a perfectly good notebook)" on the front of and got a few people to scrawl in.

But back to my main point - my last day. I grabbed some photos of the common room and savoured the smell one last time before I left. Maybe I'll share the photos at some point. Then it was down to the town hall, some last minute writing and chatting in the chairs on the stage (I'd managed to grab a seat relatively hidden from view, allowing me to play around on my iPhone or read Private Eye if I got too bored) and the speeches I mentioned, then I walked up to get my books (Dune and The Time Machine for the Advanced Higher Maths and Advanced Higher Computing prizes respectively... I'm starting to get an inkling about why people call me a geek).

Back to my seat to sit some more while more people received more prizes (as I did more wondering just how many awards for sporting achievement one school needs). There were some tears and lots of hugging once it was all over. Just to be clear, I was only involved in the hugging, and somewhat reluctantly so at that.

And then I went home. To play Smash Bros Brawl, which had just come out.

I think I'm going to leave the narrative here for now. I may follow up with more tomorrow... or, more accurately, later today. Ah, the joy of not having to do all my posting before midnight. Anyway, there'll be more at some point, if I can be bothered.

RIP Arthur C Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke, one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries, has died in hospital at the age of 90.

I have only read a few of his books (I read, and greatly enjoyed, 2001: A Space Odyssey and then something distracted me before I finished 2010: Odyssey Two) but he has had a huge influence on my life, if only as a byproduct of the influence he has had on the world as a whole.

He was among the first to think about and formally propose the concept of a geostationary satellite, a technology that is the basis of almost all global telecommunication systems, and he was always at the forefront of scientific knowledge. He also brought the concept of space elevators to his audience, an act he believed would leave a far greater legacy than even the satellites.

Really, there's nothing more I can say. He was a great man. Read all the tributes and, more importantly, read his books and you will undoubtedly see why I and so many others think so.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a bookmarked copy of 2010 lying around here somewhere that needs read...

Not Done Yet

I really should have spent more time today trying to write this thing. One year ago today, I wrote this. Now here I am, one year later, challenge more or less fulfilled, and I can't think of anything to write.

Would it be suitably ironic if I just called this a crappy post and left it at that? I don't think I have it in me tonight to write much more. I'll at least try to do a woodle for tomorrow.

Something's happened now that hasn't happened in a while – I have too many ideas. There are a lot of thoughts swirling around in my head, some related to my experience with TWToday, some related to my various fiction projects, even a couple of solutions to my Computing project code problem (which I really need to work on tomorrow).

The problem is that I don't feel like I can do any of them justice in the time I've given myself, especially given that I'm now very tired and can barely type a sentence without at least three spelling errors cropping up.

I think that's the problem with this one post a day strategy. I'm naturally lazy and keep leaving things too late and even if I didn't, I don't think I'd have enough free time in one day to write some of this stuff down the way I really want it done. That ridiculous sentence is probably the best example of what happens when I get rushed.

Or is it ridiculous? It seemed that way at the time, a mere moment ago, but surely with a bit of proof-reading and editing, I'd be happy with it. Maybe I'd be happy with it now if I simply read it over again. Maybe I could have been happy with it before had my poor typing and tiredness not been putting me in a bad mood already.

Was that the right tense?

I don't care. I can't be bothered going back to fix it.

Okay, I've made a decision. Tomorrow, I'll spend some time collecting my thoughts and writing them down. If I don't have them in a form I like by the end of the day then I'll simply save it, go to bed and work on it some more the day after. I'll also try to find some time to make a woodle and start writing The Grey Line again*. And I have to get something done on that Computing project I keep mentioning.


Crap. I went away for a minute and completely lost my momentum. Anyway, that's the plan for now. Hopefully, it heralds some better quality updates around here as well as the completion (or, more accurately, start of) several other plans and projects of mine.

And with that, I bid you goodnight.

Because I was really starting to get sick of that other catchphrase.







*Those paying attention (which at this point is probably just me and even then only for about half the time) will have noticed that I deleted the all the posts at Corbett's Fiction. I wasn't happy with them and I've decided to go for a whole new method, just as soon as I find the time.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Birthday

Well, my day started out fairly badly and went downhill from there, at least for a while. The weather has been miserable all day (rain, wind and hailstones in varying combinations and intensities throughout), I had trouble concentrating in any of my classes for no discernible reason, some of my closest friends had to be reminded about my birthday by an acquaintance and, once word did spread around, all most people were interested in was when I was getting my first driving lesson and what car I would use.

Basically, I was just feeling a bit down and the fact that it should have been a good day made it that much worse.

Things got a bit better when I got home. I put on some nice, warm clothes. I turned on my computer and went through my strangely comforting routine of checking webcomics, blogs and forums. I chucked my school uniform out to the wash. I went downstairs to get something to eat and returned with a mug of Ribena and a mixing bowl of excess chocolate icing. Then, having settled in my chair, I ran Adium and read Garfield while it logged me in.

Aside from the chocolate icing, it was entirely normal. Then, the moment I logged on, I got a message saying “happy birthday!”. It was a genuine surprise and it seemed to me, in my admittedly depressed state, that it was the only birthday greetings I had received where it wasn't someone just going through the motions.

So I spent the next two hours talking to the friend who had sent it, leaving reluctantly to go and have my tea and open my presents.

I got the usual assortment of cards and cash from the usual assortment of relatives. Mum insisted that I keep a careful note of who gave me what for the purposes of writing thank you letters – an annoying reminder of that outdated practice that I truly hate having to perform. After tea – fish and chips, again nothing unusual and I wouldn't want it any other way – it was time to work my way through my pile of presents.

I got a few gadgets that I asked for, minus a couple that were still in the post, along with some DVDs, books and games that I had also asked for. There were some surprises – a little book on the iPhone and a slight variation on a top I already had, with buttons rather than a zip. I didn't really have anything against it but I prefer the zip version to the buttons and didn't see the point in having what was essentially two of the same thing. When I said something to that effect, the whole discussion devolved into an argument for some reason.

I also got some L plates to put in the car, another reminder of something I wasn't really looking forward to, and a book on space exploration from my grandparents, who also gave me £20 in case I didn't particularly want a large, hardback book on space exploration. Which, to be brutally honest, I didn't

And that was that. I returned to my room, laid my assorted gifts out on the bed, where they still sit now, and went about the continuing my normal, happy activities. There was a minor interruption when Skippy phoned, one of the very few calls I've ever had on my iPhone, to ask about some arrangements for a party I'm not even sure I'll be going to but, other than that, my day just continued slowly until we arrive at this point here.

This point being the point where I've probably spent over an hour composing this relatively short little blog post that I half hope no one will ever read. I'm finding it hard to figure out what kind of mood I'm in – it doesn't seem to fall into either happy or sad, usually the two most basic possibilities. I think I'll settle for pensive. It's reasonably accurate and it's a word that I don't use nearly often enough.

So. I think I'm going to go and unwrap a couple of things. The wrapping paper obviously came off a few hours ago but I'm actually going to properly open them now. I'll play the new Advance Wars first, I think. Then maybe read a book on Doctor Who, or browse the Mass Effect instruction manual.

Yes. That ought to cheer me up

On seventeen and surgery

My mum just said that 17 years ago tonight, she was in hospital, giving birth to me.

Tomorrow I will wake up 17 years old. And I just realised that now.

I mean, I've obviously known the fact of it for a long time. I could easily have worked out precisely when I would be 17 at any time since I learned simple arithmetic but, due to one thing and another, it's still kind of crept up on me.

Other than the whole learning to drive thing, there's nothing particularly special about turning 17. And I'm not hugely enthusiastic about driving so I'm at a loss to explain why it seems significant. Maybe it's the realisation that, over the course of my seventeenth year, I will leave behind my school and my home, the two greatest forces in my life so far. I'll probably lose touch with all but close friends, I'll have to adapt to an entirely new walk of life, I'll have to meet new people and do new things...

That's a lot to think about. And I suppose I've been putting off thinking about that because I also have a lot to think about now. I have to choose that new walk of life as well as deal with my current one.


Bah. It's too late at night for me to get philosophical about all this. Maybe I will tomorrow.

In other news... It looks like I'm going to be going into hospital every day for a couple of weeks yet. On the bright side, my brother's done with his treatment, so that's good for him and it means I don't have to hang around to wait for him to be done. It only makes a small difference but I'll take whatever I can get at this point.

If the nurse's estimate was right, it'll definitely cut into the half term holiday and maybe even the start of my prelims. I'm hoping that it'll heal sufficiently that it won't need packing and they can just give me a supply of dressings to put on myself before too long but I'm not really expecting that to happen.

I'm not sure quite what I'm going to do at the weekend, since I might be staying at a friend's house for most of it. And when the holiday arrives there was apparently some plan to go up and stay in Edinburgh, which my medical problems may have scuppered* or, at the very least, complicated.

All in all, I'm not really sure what's going on now or will be at any point in the future.

I can figure it out as I go, I suppose, and wait for the pressure to ease up a bit. It has to eventually.





*Why is “scupper” fine but not in the past tense? Answer me, spell check!

Too Little Time to Title

You know you're procrastinating when, instead of creating the next slide in your presentation, you spend ten minutes fiddling with the toolbars so that the “New Slide” option is visible when you shrink the window to fit in a DVD player.


Nuts. I started early, too. And now it's a quarter to midnight.

Still not got much of that Computing presentation done. I intend to read over all the notes tonight, save some images and then put it all together on my laptop tomorrow. It'll be close but I reckon I can pull it off.

Other than that, I've no idea what I've spent the evening doing. I had an interesting conversation with a girl who was putting off doing her Geography (if I remember correctly) as much as I was putting off my Computing. I agreed with a friend that another friend was Dodongo, the Zelda boss, specifically the one from Ocarina of Time.

I accidently saw through the rather flimsy GAME bag on the kitchen table to see what games I was getting for my birthday. So far, so good. Still no word on my laptop though but I wasn't exactly expecting it to be on time.

The Maths test that I was going to have tomorrow got delayed, which is very useful. I was thinking about asking my teacher to delay it and spend some more time on revision but I was worried that it would get put off to Friday and I'd have to spend my birthday studying. As it is, it looks like I won't have any homework that night.

I was talking to one of the nurses at the hospital this morning and they said my wound may take another 2 to 3 weeks to heal. Which is odd, since another nurse said, somewhere between last week and two weeks ago, that it would take 1 to 2 weeks to heal. I'm truly getting sick of this now – not just the not knowing when it'll end but the actual necessity of the appointments themselves.

My friends are doing various things at the weekend which I would've liked to take part in. Nothing hugely special or anything but it's the first time I've really felt like I'm missing out on something because of this crap. That and I'm not doing anything for my birthday. I may yet, particularly since I tend to invite round a couple of old friends that I rarely see at any other time, but I've really got no idea.

Wow. When I let myself just rattle off thoughts and complaints, I can really write an awful lot.

Shame I can't turn that into something more productive... Maybe I will over the half term holiday and my study leave. I still want to make a fresh start on The Grey Line and I've been developing this old idea for a sitcom which may or may not amount to anything.

Anyway, I really need to wrap this up or I'll miss my deadline.

Have a nice day. I think I might have, but I'm not entirely sure.


Oh, one last thing. Better deal for iPhone users. Awesome.

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.

More Mass Effect and More of My Life

Another late night post, I'm afraid. I really have to get out of the habit of doing these.

I'll begin with a brief update on the whole Mass Effect/Fox News situation that I've been talking about for the past few days. First of all, Joystiq has an excellent article from GamePolitics.com's Dennis McCauley that goes over the whole debacle and looks into just what Fox's attack and EA's stand means for gamers and the industry as a whole. While you're there, look through some of the comments for further insights.

The latest piece of action has been Fox's claim that they invited EA to appear on the offending show to provide a counter-argument, saying that they have heard nothing back and somehow trying to paint EA as the bad guy in all of this. EA has no reason to go on the show – they have done nothing wrong and so don't need to defend themselves, they could probably expect the exact same treatment that Geoff Keighley got on the original segment (being ignored and cut-off literally mid-sentence) and they have already made their point.

Let's face it, if you wanted to make a public statement that Fox News had made a huge mistake, insulted your company and several others along with hundred of thousands of gamers, would you want to make that statement on a Fox News program? No, of course not.

I'll keep my eye on this; I don't think it's over yet.


Anyway, not much else going on today. Managed to get into school fairly early, before lessons started. That meant that I got the whole of Computing in but I still didn't manage to make a huge amount of progress with my project. I now know exactly what the problem is and I've got two possible ways to tackle it – one I know will work but which will require a lot of work and another which is theoretically simpler but I'm not quite sure how the details would work yet. Sorting that'll probably take up a chunk of the weekend.

Other than that, it's just been a regular school day, except for the fact that I found my Maths lesson easy, which is good but fairly unusual. I spent most of my time playing Street Fighter or one of several N64 games that I brought in for the console that I finally managed to hook up. Now that I think about, the table that holds all the games and TVs is probably newer than anything sitting on it – neither the consoles nor the TVs are post-2000. Maybe I'll bring in a Gamecube again.

I'll have to wrap things up now, though I promise to have a better and more timely post up tomorrow. Anything to put off doing that Computing project.

On Torchwood, Life and the Gaming Community

So I was talking to my dad and my brother about Torchwood, which they each caught some of last night as well. We all agreed that the concept was pretty good but that the execution was flawed. There was some discussion about the quality of the actors, though I happen to think they're all okay, given a decent script. See, for example, any episode of Doctor Who, the show where Jack isn't regularly treated like a emotionally distant nymphomaniac.

The overall consensus was that it was all a bit rubbish but I think I'm going to stick with it – partly because I know it's going to impact on Doctor Who again at some point and partly because, as I said before, I like the concept and want to see if they can actually take it somewhere. If next week's episode is back up to the standard set by last week's (this week's being a bit too violent and melodramatic for my tastes) then I'll know the show stands a good chance.


Anyway, more of that some other time. I would normally just run through my day at this point in the post... so that's what I'll do. Got in more or less on time. Went over the Physics test I did a couple of days ago – managed to get an A but my marks were still a bit lower than I would've liked. It was apparently a hard test though, so I guess that's okay.

Computing proved to be a bit of a problem since I still haven't made much progress with my project, despite reassuring my teacher that I was doing exactly that every time he asked. Technically, it's not working right now, but I'm confident I can fix it fairly easily now that I've figured out the problem. If needs be, I can just remove the feature that's causing the problem. Seems like a bit of a waste but it might just be necessary for the sake of simplicity and speed.

Last three lessons were all taken up with Maths of some sort. I picked up some revision sheets that I had rather foolishly left behind yesterday and spent a while going through them until I was fairly confident. I then sat the test and I reckon I did well enough. I'll probably find out tomorrow.


Okay, that's that little record of my life updated for today. On to something more important and interesting.

You may recall that, a few days ago, I provided a link to a Fox News piece about Mass Effect which not only managed to completely misrepresent the game but also to prove just how incredibly stupid all the people on it were, except for the one reasonable guy who got cut off in the middle of his rebuttal.

Well, EA, parent company of Mass Effect's developer BioWare, has written a letter to Fox specifically addressing all the points raised in the segment and systematically shooting down each repetitive and equally incorrect one. In my opinion, Jeff Brown, the man who wrote it, has taken exactly the right tone – he comes across as calm, as opposed to the sensationalist piece itself, and he doesn't make any demands or accusations.

He basically tells them that they were wrong and that they should know better before politely asking for an apology and some clarification. He makes his point eloquently and presents a far more intelligent and dignified image than the supposed journalists and experts responsible. I rarely find myself in agreement with the yearly-incrementing sports franchise factory that is EA but in this case I have to say that I'm delighted to see them taking a stand.

Yes, they are defending their own product, but they have every right to do that and in doing so they send a clear message that the video games industry and gamers themselves are not the depraved fools that the media often suggest them to be and that, if attacked, they can and will defend themselves on the public stage.

On another note, even ordinary, non-corporate giant gamers are making a stand. Just take a look at the reviews of the so-called expert's book on Amazon.com. She was the one who laughed when asked if she had even played the game she was on national television attacking – I very much doubt that she's laughing now, or that she'll be so eager to make similarly unfounded claims any time soon.

The whole thing makes me proud to call myself a gamer.

Basically, it's just a rambling description of my day

It 's been a busy day. I got in later than normal because a new nurse was watching over my dressing change for training or something so that took twice as long. The when I did get in, I had to look over some Maths problems for a kid I'm mentoring, so that I knew the answers and didn't have to work them out as he did them.

Second lesson was just plain old Maths as normal but third I had to do that mentoring. Wasn't too much of a problem and I at least managed to take the computer that was in the room and work on my Computing presentation. Wouldn't have minded having a proper free period instead though. Fourth was Maths again but I got stuck doing some practice test instead of the revision work that I wanted to do.

Also, I meant to collect some revision sheets from my teacher at some point today and completely forgot. And the test is tomorrow. Anyway, lunch was Computing club – nothing hugely taxing, Sam and I just chatted with one of the teachers about movies and TV shows that we'd each downloaded, occasionally stopping to help some kid with a program I didn't know how to work. Still solved the problem though.

Fifth period, straight after lunch, panic set in because I had Computing next and hadn't finished my presentation. Thus, I quickly dug out my Beaten Up Old Laptop^TM and worked through my notes on Processor Architecture for 55 minutes straight. I managed to produce something that looked reasonable so we went through that in Computing. We ended up interrupting each other and chatting so much that it took us the bulk of the lesson to get through four presentations.

And that was my day. Add in some Maths revision and an episode of Torchwood and you've reached the present moment.

I'm trying to think what I've learned from today, if anything, because that seems like the kind of thing I ought to do on a blog supposedly dedicated to my random musings on life.

Doing those junior Maths problems and seeing the kid, apparently one of the brightest in his class (hence the separate tutoring), struggling with them reminded me that I was probably doing the same at his stage. Makes me think about just how far my education has come since then, how much my knowledge has expanded in all directions... Doesn't really help me with that Maths test tomorrow but at least I can now expect to look back on this stuff once I complete university and laugh.

All evidence above suggests that I'm still a forgetful procrastinator extraordinaire, but I'm hoping the panic has scared me enough to get back on track.

Not that I've done any more of my Computing project tonight. I'm really starting to fall behind on that. Now that my shoulder's largely recovered and I have nothing much else to focus on, I'll have to put some serious work in on that at the weekend.

On the bright side, Torchwood was pretty good. Quite a lot of violence and death but it did have an effect on the plot and characters and there was no random sex or swearing. Previously, solid helpings of all three were a requirement of each script so that's an improvement. I also liked the injection of more dark humour into the show – it particularly helped lighten up the formerly dull and depressing character of Ianto.

Anyway, that's all I've got time for. I may yet do some revision before going to bed but I doubt it.

Have a nice day. I can't decide if I have or not but it was good to write it all down, I think.

Fretting and Facepalms

Well, I left this late again but I'm not in such a rush. I just have to finish a Computing presentation that I've half done...


I really need to get on top of this whole procrastination thing. I still need to do my Computing project, I'm regularly lax about getting work done in school, either in class or in the common room (where it's nearly impossible anyway), I have two Maths tests coming up that I've hardly revised for, I was meant to go over some questions before I tutor some kid with them tomorrow and haven't, that I managed to get past today's Physics test seemed to be pure fluke, not to mention my Physics project, where I still feel like I've no idea what I'm meant to be doing... Then there's prelims.

And that's just school. I've got my usual array of lengthy to do lists lying around at home but my main priorities probably ought to be choosing a university course and thinking about driving lessons. My current excuse for both is that prelims are coming up.

With universities, I'll admit that I'm a little scared to make a final decision. It's a huge thing to decide and so far my only thought on the matter is that I shouldn't deal with it right now. Part of it may yet come down to, effectively, where everyone else is going.

As for driving, my parents, and, in fact, most of the people around, seem to expect me to basically just hop into a car and on to the road the moment I hit 17 but I'm not to happy about it – I know I need to learn and that I'll have to do it sometime, I just don't really want the pressure and the timing, right before prelims, doesn't help in the slightest.

So that's most of what's on my plate right now and I suppose it feels good to get it off my chest... I'm not sure how it was on my chest and plate simultaneously in the first place so solving that paradox has probably lifted the weight of my shoulders... Yeah, enough metaphors. Especially since that last one just served to remind me of my ongoing shoulder pain. That seems to be clearing up though, which is good.


In other news, there's a brand new video game controversy going around between people who have no understanding of video games but love a good bit of controversy – the mainstream news media. Just check out these Joystiq articles and the related ones they link to.

There's this one, linking to a Times article that I haven't yet forced myself to even skim through. The quotes on the page where enough to tell me just how much utter rubbish it was.

It's definitely a bad sign when you want to punch everyone in a news broadcast except for the guy who gets cut off in the middle of his rebuttal but, nevertheless, Fox News seems to be doing all right for itself. If you can make it to the end of this video without feeling an unbridled hatred for everyone but Geoff Keighley then you deserve a sainthood. If you manage to hunt down and bitchslap everyone in that video but Geoff Keighley, you are equally deserving.

If you followed the links, you'd know that it's all been sparked off by Mass Effect, an Xbox 360 RPG that's caused controversy because of it's depiction of sex... by which I mean implication of sex and partial nudity... for less than two minutes in a 30+ hour game... in an optional section...

The whole thing was inspired by the article, which I won't link to, that inspired this Penny Arcade comic, which I just did link to.

The whole thing just gets me so incredibly mad – it's not just that my hobbies are being vilified and grossly misrepresented, it's also that this vilification and misrepresentation is par for the course in most media outlets today, which seemed to be staffed by talking heads and attractive bimbos with no concept of journalism or proper research.

But enough about that. I still have work to do and I have no doubt whatsoever that another opportunity to rant about this will appear very soon.

Have a nice day.

I don't have time to think of a title relating time pressure and Guitar Hero!

I've said before, I believe, that I enjoy working under pressure. This goes some way towards explaining why I've only just begun to type tonight's post at twenty to midnight. It also factors into the tale I'm about to tell you, concerning a particular event, and the series of further events that it sparked off, which occurred during my school day today.

The latest craze in the common room is Guitar Hero III on my friend Joss's Xbox 360. Now, I've nothing against Guitar Hero – I haven't played it very much but by all accounts it's a good series and I was considering getting either it or the related game Rock Band for my birthday. Guitar Hero is of course a music rhythm game, based primarily around rock songs.

I can't say I'm a huge fan of said genre but I do find it annoying when it's constantly being played, often badly, throughout the entire day – something made worse by the limited selection of people's favourite songs. But, nevertheless, it gets played all day.

Anyone familiar with 360s and their design flaws has now no doubt realised what happened not long after lunch today.

We first assumed and hoped that the 360 had simply overheated and that unplugging it and leaving next to an open window would solve the problem. Everyone, their entertainment taken from them, began to filter out of the room, save for a few of us, three to be precise – myself, Sam Potter and a girl called Philippa.

We decided after a time, when the console had evidently cooled down, to try it again. No luck. The Red Ring of Death was still present, mocking us with it's glowing... red ring-ness.

Our first plan of attack was to panic lightly as we tried to think of what to do. Sam and Philippa took turns pressing the power button in the hope that it would fix itself and I decided to pace up and down, occasionally yelling randomly.

We tried various different tactics – hitting it, turning it on and off again, hitting it harder, drawing a poor facsimile on the wall behind it to try and convince Joss it was the real one. The best plan we could come up with was telling him that it was stolen. In broad daylight. By Batman. Who broke it.

I considered trying the “towel” fix – wrapping it up to overheat it further and let the components, distorted by the heat, fall back into place for a short time. It wasn't until Sam Stafford got there that we actually plucked up the courage to try it. We used our blazers and had Stafford sit on it to make it warmer still.

After another half hour or so, we unwrapped it to find only two red lights instead of the three that show a fatal system error. Our joy was short-lived as it quickly returned to where it had been before. We knew we had a problem on our hands as the day was ending and one of us would have to explain what happened. I somehow drew the short straw.

The whole explanation, withheld until he was above me on the stairs and we were heading in opposite directions (me at great speed), took about five seconds and I ran out of there.

To be honest, we knew he wouldn't mind and he didn't. I can't say why but the whole ludicrous exaggeration of the situation made it an awful lot of fun.

I may go on more tomorrow but I've only got five minutes to publish this online so I'll have to stop for now. Still, I've managed over 600 words in fifteen minutes. Not too bad.

Right, nothing more that I can say until tomorrow. Sorry for the rushed post which may or may not be funny. I don't have time for a quality check.

Have a nice day.

A small day spent thinking about big ideas

I'm making an early start on this post because I want to get to bed early and I don't want to have anything else pressuring me while I do Physics revision later. Also, I don't want to do said Physics revision now and this is as good an excuse as any.

It's been another fairly slow day. I haven't got much homework done which is going to be annoying tomorrow but I'll deal with it. The fact that my shoulder's been hurting like hell for some reason hasn't helped. I certainly doubt I could have used the computer constantly enough to make any headway with my Computing project. The deadline for which might be Tuesday. That's not going to work out well.


Okay, so it's an awful lot later now. My shoulder is feeling a bit better, or at least it was until I tried typing this, but I've still not done a lot of my Physics revision. I think I should be able to get by with doing some before I go to bed and some in the morning but I can't be sure. It's not a hugely important test...

Crap, I need to stop rationalising away my laziness like this. I may screw up this test completely but it'll at least provide an incentive to study harder for my prelims...


Anyway, I finally managed to find somewhere online that could get me an Eee PC delivered in time for my birthday. It was slightly more expensive than the other places but I didn't really want it arriving after my birthday since I knew it would probably just distract me while I tried to revise and so on.

I'm still trying to find somewhere that has the accessories for it, particularly the extra battery and the mouse, but I can live without them. I could probably live without the whole thing, to be honest, but it's a birthday present so why not.


As I said above, today's been pretty slow. I moved around my computer setup so that the iMac is now at the better desk, which is a lot more comfortable and gives it better lighting. It's not a final fix but it'll do for now.

I got some stuff in the mail from the University of Edinburgh either this morning or yesterday morning. Can't really remember, which speaks volumes for the attention I've paid it. I also have some stuff from St Andrews lying around from weeks ago that I need to take half an hour and read through but I just haven't had enough time.

I'm also trying to put the whole university thing out of my mind, at least until after the prelims are over. Otherwise, I'd be dealing with four “big” things at the same time – prelims, learning to drive, deciding on my entire academic future and, of course, the only pain in my ass that isn't metaphorical.

All falling around my birthday.

Well, no sense whining about it here. I've got to go and do that Physics revision as well as do my whole “shifting all the crap off my bed that gets put there during the day because I have no freaking storage space in my room because all the shelves were either taken down when it was redecorated or are taken up by other people's unwanted junk I mean honestly why do we keep that giant box full of McDonald's toys in my wardrobe of all places not to mention the old printer that's up there why do we hang on to that thing I don't know if we even have a computer that'll connect to it” routine.

So have a nice day.

Torchwood and Timetabling

Well, I watched the first episode of the new series of Torchwood tonight.

I'm impressed.

The first series went a bit overboard when trying to be “darker and edgier” than Doctor Who and often ended up with unlikable heroes and unsympathetic villains shooting at and having sex with each other for no particular reason, usually to the detriment of the character development and plot.

Right from the start, the new series establishes a lighter tone with the now sans Jack Torchwood team chasing a sports car-driving alien through the streets of Cardiff in their trademark SUV. This isn't played for laughs however as we quickly learn that, despite its humorous appearance and introduction, this alien is armed, dangerous and knowledgeable about the team. This whole section also serves to reintroduce all the characters and give Captain Jack a suitably dramatic entrance.

While some witty banter helped a lot, the thing that really made the Torchwood characters more appealing was that they were actually competent at their jobs. Remember in the first series how they didn't notice a half-converted Cyberman in their own basement for months? None of that here, much to my relief.

The team manage to work together and actually save some lives for once rather than just whining and letting a combination of Jack and random chance fix everything. This makes the characters and their role as defenders of the planet so much more believable than it was before.

You could try to chalk it up to character development – everyone had to grow up while Jack was away or else the world wound have imploded – but really this is how it should have been in the first place. There's been a subtle but hugely important shift in the tone of the show and it's all the better for it.


Nothing much going on today. Spent a lot of time watching Firefly in between lessons, to my great delight. Room changes are still going on so we got put in one of the science labs for Maths today. It was the lab where I had Higher Chemistry and it reminded me that, more or less one year ago, I would've been studying like mad for my Chemisty prelim. And now I barely remember any of it. Strange.

I also currently have a problem facing me – I have no idea where my Physics class is going to be tomorrow morning. I know we've been shunted out of our usual room but I think the room we're going to has changed several times, meaning that the schedules posted around the school are probably wrong.

Normally, I'd just go for safety in numbers and hang around with my classmates until we either found the room or collectively gave up, hoping that any blame would be spread thin. Since I'll be coming in late, presumably after everyone else finds the room, I'm more or less screwed.

I was about to ask Sam to leave me a note of some kind when, for the first time I can ever recall, he decides to go to bed early and logs off. Hopefully, someone in my class or, more likely, my teacher will have the common sense to get me the information somehow if the room has indeed changed.

Much Ado About Macworld

Wow. I really left this post late. It's almost half past midnight.

At least I have an excuse this time. I've been busy pouring over all the details coming out of Macworld. For those of you who don't know, the annual Macworld conference is where Apple reveals all their latest and greatest gadgets, hence the deluge of Mac-related articles all over the media.

I can't be bothered tracking down links to articles and so on so I'm just going to link to the main Apple homepage and let anyone interested browse from there. I've not had time to take it all in myself so I'll just go over the major points of interest and then maybe tidy it up for a MacTake article tomorrow.

As I type this, my iPhone is sitting in its dock, waiting for the latest firmware (1.1.3) to finish downloading and install. It's a relatively minor update, merely adding a few neat features such as a locator function on the Google Maps app and some ability to customise the home page. It's this customisation function that I find most revealing – it's very obviously gearing up for the release of the official software development kit in February. I'm still not quite sure what to expect from that myself but at least the company behind it has confidence.

I should note that by installing this update, I'm basically giving up on hacking it anytime soon. I've been considering getting an iPod Touch purely to fiddle around with the various apps that have sprung up semi-illegally on the internet over the past few months.

Oh, and that's another thing. To update the iPod Touch, adding in a number of functions that come as standard on the iPhone, Apple is expecting customers to pay over £10. I'm a little disappointed by this but I expect it to work out quite profitably for Apple.

Still, we'll see how that works out later.

Another big announcement was the MacBook Air, an ultra-portable being touted as the world's smallest laptop. Looking at photos and the guided tour video on the Apple site, I have no reason whatsoever to doubt this. For all the people who will complain about it being a typical “style-over-substance” Apple gadget, there's no denying that some serious engineering and design skills went into this.

The absence of an in-built optical drive comes as no surprise in such a device but Apple's means of getting around it are ingenious. As the “Air” name implies, there's a large focus on wireless technology. If you're on a wireless network with another computer, PC or Mac, all you have to do is install a small program on said computer and your Air can instantly connect to any available optical drives and use them for its own purposes.

There's also a small, USB-powered optical drive for those who insist on watching movies not rented from the new iTunes movie rental system.

The final big thing is the Time Capsule. A wireless device, no larger than an average router, it is essentially a 500Gb or 1Tb server-grade hard drive with a wireless network connection. Any Mac running Leopard can connect to it using Time Machine, which will automatically back up to it. I don't know much about it but it sounds very impressive and keeps with the whole “wireless” theme Apple's had going this year.


So, in summary and in brief, there's nothing hugely revolutionary. To be honest, given the revelation of the iPhone last year, this year's show was almost guaranteed to have fewer surprises. The same thing happened to the first few E3s and other video game trade shows after all the new consoles had been released – all the secrets were out and it was just a matter of improving things.

Well, that's getting kind of late now and I still need to finish some Computing homework and discuss some of this Macworld news with Sam. I have a feeling Skippy will have a lot to say on all this tomorrow, in one medium or another, as will my other technology-inclined (or, as they are more commonly known, geeky) friends.

I can't think of anything conclusive to say so... Have a nice day.

A Wasted Day In Darkest Glasgow

Well, I lived through the ordeal that was my grandma's 80th birthday party. Not that I really saw much of my grandma – we “children” (which, rather insultingly to him, included my 20 year-old brother) were sent off to eat in a separate room. Since we see the two cousins we were left with about once every five years*, the conversation was predictably dull. Actually, it was a lot more than that. It was, for about four and a half hours of the five hours we were there, non-existent.

Seriously. The only thing we have in common with these two is one living grandparent and vaguely similar age brackets. James, brave and mostly sociable soul that he is, tried to engage them in conversation a few times but it quickly petered out again. I can't remember Erin speaking a single word for the whole time we were in the same room as the cousins, except to politely decline the occasional offer of something to drink.

The only thing keeping me sane was my iPhone, which served as an excuse not to talk or eat the unidentified food in front of me as I tried to appear engrossed in writing an email that I never even bothered to send. Erin and James had no such excuse and while they each made at least a token effort to toy with their food, neither of them ate much either. The one thing that I was glad about during the whole experience was that no one asked why or pressed us to eat more.

I later learned that my dad, having foreseen exactly these events, had asked my aunt not to leave us alone with our cousins but the decision had, alas, been made and there could be no changing it. For some reason.

So the whole thing was really a very unpleasant waste of time. I later described it to Skippy as “four hours of uncomfortable silence while wearing uncomfortable shoes”. Shoes that, incidentally, I didn't even know I had until Mum pulled them out of the bottom of my wardrobe a couple of days ago. I doubt I'll wear them again.

On the way home and for hours afterwards, we were all complaining about it and congratulating ourselves on getting through it without yelling at anyone for offering us wine for the umpteenth time.


Anyway, I think I've got most of the complaints out of my system now. Unfortunately, between hospital in the morning, going up to Glasgow and coming back exhausted I've not really done anything else all day. I haven't even done the homework that I was planning to do. I can probably get away with doing it in the morning if needs be, though I now have to rethink my plans for finishing my Computing project.

Ah, well. That's enough for now. I'm going to go to bed, where I plan to fall asleep as quickly as possible and not wake up for as long as possible. Of course, as long as possible will probably be about seven hours.

Damn.




*That wasn't an exaggeration. Thinking back, I can only recall meeting them one other time. I don't remember talking to them very much but I do remember playing TimeSplitters 2 instead of talking to them, so it must have been a few years ago now. Before that, I know I had met them, it's just too long ago to remember.

Customs duty, inaccessible audio plays and other banes of my existence

You remember I bought a load of stuff from ThinkGeek back in November? We just got a bill in the post for various customs duties and taxes which adds £40 to the price. I've no idea why it's that much and I also don't know why it's taken three months to get here after the items arrived. I've apparently now been banned from ordering any more stuff from there, though I fully intend to look into what of this stuff actually requires customs duty.

It's all a bit ridiculous, to be honest.


You know what really bugs me? The way all audio players are geared towards music. Okay, so music is probably the most common use for them but what about audio books and plays? As far as I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong, all the major audio programs are geared towards music. Everything is referred to as a track and default settings merge the end of one track into the beginning of the next – a cool effect for fading finishes and intros but a pain in the ass for dialogue.

Yes, I know such things can be switched off. But it's not what's there that's the problem, it's what's missing. Compare your average DVD player program to a CD/audio equivalent. When watching a DVD, hardware players will remember where you were so long as they don't lose power and software ones will remember it for as long as needs be. Most have some form of bookmarking as well, should you wish to jump to a specific point that isn't near a chapter.

Not so with audio players though. If you want to stop in the middle of your arcane, sound-based story, you darned better have a piece of paper handy to write down how far into the track you are. Same thing goes for podcasts as well, which are even less likely to have any form of division between start and end.


That's probably one of those things I should think about more and write about when it's not twenty to midnight. I'll give it some consideration and maybe try finding out if such programs exist.

The whole thing was sparked off when I discovered that the audio plays on the last disc of my Davros DVD boxset couldn't simply be taken off the disc. I wasn't expecting to be able to play it in a CD player or with iTunes, it is still a DVD after all, but some plain audio files on the disc would have made everything a lot easier. As it is, you put it in and it's just hours of audio with a still image of the relevant CD boxart changing once in a while.

It would have been even better if they'd made some basic animations to go along with it, such as they did for the unfinished-serial-remade-as-an-audio-play Shada.


This post is pretty rushed and incoherent and I apologise for that, as usual. Between going back to school, this being the first weekend off again and still going into hospital in the morning, my whole sense of timing has been thrown off.

It's a better excuse than normal.

On the bright side, I've managed to find some time to start a short story based on The Grey Line. It introduces a few secondary characters and a few background points. It started off as a minor thing to solidify a particular character in my head but by the time I reached the fourth paragraph or so, it had taken on a life of it's own.

It's now a key part of the arc and helps form some of the scientific principles behind the operation of the Grey universe.

Awesome.

I might not get it finished tomorrow because I'll be going to that lunch at my aunt and uncle's for a large part of the day. At least I'll have plenty of quiet time to think about it, though, because I'll be going to that lunch at my aunt and uncle's for a large part of the day.

That's all I've got time for and a reasonable amount of all I've got to say.

Have a nice day.

In which I describe some stuff that happened

Left it late again. I'd really like to start a post without having to say that.

Well, that's the first most-of-a-week back and I'm kind of looking forward to the weekend. On the one hand, it's not school. On the other hand, I have a load of homework to do, I still can't lie in in the mornings and I have that visit to my aunt and uncle in Glasgow to “look forward to” on Sunday. My only hope is to rip all of the Davros audio plays off the disc in my boxset and try to listen to them surreptitiously.

I doubt it'll work.

On the bright side though, I've managed to convince my mother that I don't need to buy new shoes or clothes or anything specially for the occasion. I'm hoping that by the time the day in question rolls around, I'll have convinced her that I can just wear a t-shirt instead of a “proper” shirt. Just for the record, I hate wearing shirts, ties, uncomfortable shoes and generally anything I deem impractical or uncomfortable.

I forget where I was going with this but I fully expect the whole thing to be annoying, awkward and, above all, mind-numbingly dull. It will also eat into the time that could have better been spent working on my homework – finishing off my Computing project, working out what I need for Physics, finishing some Maths exercises and... some other stuff, the details of which escape me now. One thing might require a PowerPoint presentation.

Nothing much else going on today. Someone brought a 360 into school a couple of days ago so we were using it to play Halo 3 and watch some DVDs today. I also spent a fair chunk of time playing the original Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive I'd taken in. No particular reason, I just felt like it.

What else is there to say...

A couple of reminders to myself. Play all those games you have piling up. Seriously. Also... actually, no, it was just one reminder to myself.

Screw it. It's too late at night and I'm getting little enough sleep as it is, as always. I'm going to bed.

So get lost.


Wait! I just remembered another thing I need to do! Check with Skippy about TWToday visitor numbers.

That's seriously it now.

Go away.

Projects, Panic and Precipitation

Another quick post I think. I'm going to try to get this all done in under fifteen minutes so that I can spend the remaining half an hour before midnight doing some Computing homework. I probably should have done it earlier but it mostly just involves editing some documents so that the initial design I made in about twenty minutes three months ago reflects the program I've actually created since then.

I might draw some diagrams as well, just for good luck.


The effects of the weather are still being felt around here. Rain this morning either made or revealed a number holes in the roofs of some school buildings. A room on the top floor of the main building had to be cleared out, along with the eight or so computers it held, due to a leak. The biggest one, however, was the first one I noticed. Upon walking into the Advanced Higher science lab this morning I was greeted by, not my Physics class, but by half a dozen buckets and a steady stream of water.

My class had just moved into the next lab over though, so that wasn't really a problem. Other than the fact that the next lab over isn't really designed to be used for teaching. Or as a lab. It's basically a big long corridor with workbenches along each wall, all covered in complicated looking Physics equipment that gets used once a decade.

That reminds me. I have to figure out what I need to construct a half-wavelength dipole antenna so that my teachers can order in the right supplies. I've tried looking it up but everything online involves serious hobbyists trying to recreate the VLA in their back gardens using nothing but coils of wire with very complicated serial numbers.

All I need is something a lot smaller, though I think the components may be pretty similar. If only I could find something more specific than “lots of wire”. I'm actually quite worried about this Physics project. I'm not quite sure what I'm meant to be doing but I might have slightly overcomplicated things again, as with my Computing project.

I get this feeling partly because, as I said, I don't know what I'm doing and partly because it requires my teacher to explain to me things that aren't in the course but that he's used before... in his PhD thesis.


Well, I overstepped my time limit slightly but if I hadn't stopped to watch Father Ted every few minutes, I think I would've managed it so I claim the moral victory.

Somehow.

Childhood Nightmares and Roofing Problems

Well, I left this much too late again. Tonight's excuse is that I've spent a good chunk of the last twenty minutes tracking down an X-Files episode that I remember seeing years ago. It all started when I watched this Zero Punctuation review of a new Silent Hill game. Sam said he'd played a demo years ago that scared him for weeks and it reminded me of my own childhood experience with this X-Files episode.

Here's a summary. It doesn't make it sound quite scary enough but imagine watching it all when you were about eight. Yeah. Spooked me for ages afterwards.


Huh. I thought I'd be able to spin more words out of that... Here are some pictures, anyway.

I walked into school this morning to find all this stuff lying on the ground, having fallen due to the high winds the night before. On the way to school, we heard the traffic report on the radio. The list of roads closed due to fallen trees or other wind damage must have gone on for a good two or three minutes.

Also, the common room was freezing all day and we had no games consoles. I'll have to remember to take a sweater, a TV and an N64 tomorrow.

That's all I've got for now. Sorry about the short post again.

No, I'm not going to end the post with my usual catchphrase.


I'll end it with this little postscript. This is awesome beyond all reason.

I should make a joke about the weather here

On a stormy night, there's nothing quite like the lights flickering to make you wrap up your computer-related tasks in a hurry.

Okay, stopped for a couple of minutes there and the lights just flickered again. I'm going, I'm going!

To bed, most likely. I don't know why but I'm having a hard time typing this. I'm going through a strange period where I suddenly become very aware of my own fingernails and how they affect... stuff I press. Like buttons on the keyboard, obviously.

That and I'm really tired anyway... I don't want to do a mini post so I guess I'll briefly extend it by discussing the first day back at school.

For a start, we discovered that Sixth Year is a lot more boring without any games consoles. I had brought in an old Playstation but I realised too late that I'd forgotten the multi-socket adaptor that we always used and which we need to make the power cables stretch from around the TV to the wall plugs.

We could have just temporarily moved the TV but we decided to just move the whole table it was on instead, just for complexity's sake.

Lights dimmed again, just so you know.

After that we noticed that we'd need both sockets to run the Playstation and the TV so we would have to unplug the electric heater and deal with the cold if we wanted to play any games. Any single player games, I should add, as I only have one controller – Sam normally provides the other and he hadn't brought his in.

And again. Holy crap, I want to go to bed. The wind is howling outside.

We may just keep the room as it is now, since it gives us a bit more space and access.

Let's see, what else?

Oh, you know all that homework I didn't do? I got away with not doing it. As I had suspected, there was no official stuff for Maths so that didn't come up. Mr O'Connell, after spending the entire first half hour of the lesson talking to Jimerson about the trip to India before Christmas, just bought our lies about whatever work we had or had not done and let us get on with the usual stuff we do. I played that flash version of the Hitchhiker's Guide game again.

Physics was the big worry of course. Fortunately, due to some communication and some form of hive mind, none of us had done all the homework. Most of us had barely done any, having given up either in the holidays or during the lunch immediately preceding the lesson. Our Physics teacher seemed to have been half expecting this, no doubt because it happens every single time any techer sets holiday homework, so he was okay about it.

He won't be if we fail all our prelims but that's neither hear nor there.


And that's enough of that for now. I'm off to hide under the covers and stick a pillow over my ears to muffle the sound of the wind and rain.

Have a nice day.


Just going to add, lights almost went out there. I heard some kind of electronic thing bleep as well. That's not a good sign. I have to hurry up and post this.

Oh, crap. Sound of branches breaking! Go, go, go!

Written with surprising speed

Working... That was the plan. Didn't quite work out, as I should have guessed. I've got most of the Physics done and I'm confident that I can finish it tomorrow morning. Well, I say “most of the Physics” but what I actually mean is “most of the one paper my classmates and I agreed to do instead of the two that we were supposed to do”.

I've done nothing, nothing, about my Computing project. I'm now hoping that school will kick me out of my holiday slump and I can spend the next few days finishing up the code, rewriting the early and now-irrelevant design (linear time is for suckers) and doing the various bits of paperwork that I need to prove that my program is working.

Maths... Well, I'm not even sure what Maths I had. I expect I'll panic about it some time tomorrow but, right now, all I want is some sleep.

One day, when I have a load of free time on my hands, I'm going to force myself to get up early in the morning and then go back to bed. Seriously, every time I get up these days, I'm wishing I could just crawl back under the covers and I really want to know how it feels.

I'm having to get up particularly early tomorrow morning because of the way things are going with getting to school and James and I both needing hospital appointments. James says he's getting so sick of them that he's planning to give up on them, requesting that he get no more treatment unless it recurs badly. He came to this conclusion after being asked a few days ago “when”, not “if”, he wanted surgery and being told today that his treatment may take another month.

I can certainly sympathise with him. We were talking today and started listing back-and-forth the various woes and problems we've encountered with our pilonidal sinuses. The whole thing ended up reminding us both of a scene from House so the conversation had a punchline of “I got shot!” for reasons that most readers probably won't understand.

Assuming I have any readers.

I need to ask Skippy for some visitor numbers again – it's been months since I last checked.

But, like I was saying, I need to get up early tomorrow so that everything works out time-wise, hopefully leaving me with a couple of minutes to stuff some consoles and so on into a bag to take to school.

Speaking of which, I need to go and pack my actual schoolbag with my actual school books and folders and so on. So I'll call it quits for the night, upload this, close all my Firefox tabs and just leave the computer running for a little while longer to charge up my iPhone via the USB connection.

You can leave now.

Procrastination Plus Random Links

Wow, that's depressing. I haven't done any schoolwork in so long that Firefox has forgotten the URL of Scholar, the online reference thing.


Okay, I've figured out what's distracting me. It's my socks. They're thick, sweaty and uncomfortable but if I take them off, my feet will freeze. It's an awful dilemma. Not as bad as my complete and utter inability to get any work done but still pretty nasty.


Yeah, I took the socks off and now my feet are uncomfortable, sweaty and cold. Not to mention the smell.


When I rub my toe up against this metal panel at the bag of my desk, it makes a sound just like the sound made in Half Life when you're walking through those big metal ventilation shafts.

I have taken procrastination to new heights.


Feet still freezing. Work still not done.


Each double-spaced line represents anywhere from two minutes to two hours by the way.


Okay, this one was slightly more than two hours. It's now ten past eleven and the previous sentence was written around, I don't know, two o'clock-ish. Still haven't got any work done though. I'm hoping that tomorrow the pressure will have built up to the point where I can actually make myself do work.

Wow. I'm finding it surprisingly hard to type. I really need to get more sleep. Normally, I'd hate to make such a short post late at night but luckily, I have that weird habit of writing several opening paragraphs long before I even consider writing the whole thing.

I still feel like I should do more though... let's see, I've been browsing the web a lot today instead of working so there must be a few links and bookmarks I can recommend... These are a few of my favourite strips from the comic PhD, the archive of which I just finished off today.

A few days back, I came across the website for Lit Fuse Films. I highly recommend watching all of their machinima, particularly the nearly-two hours long War of the Servers. I considered doing some machinima once... Still might, in fact. Probably won't, but might.


And that's it for now. I have to clear all the crap off my bed now so that I can get some sleep. It was put up there during an arcane, ritualised process that some call “tidying”, designed to appease vengeful gods and angry mothers. Putting it all back down on the floor is probably going to get me yelled at tomorrow, along with the fact that I haven't done my homework. In all likelihood, the yelling will just annoy and distract me further but there's not much I can do about that.

Okay, angsty teenage rant over now. Go away.

Late Night Thoughts on Fiction

Well, I finally managed to complete Half Life. I also managed to get a bit of homework done – enough to tell me that I'm going to have a hard time doing the rest of it. Unfortunately, I've had a headache all day so... something something.

Tomorrow, I plan to finish off the Physics prelim that I started, figure out exactly what I need to do for my Computing project (probably making some headway there as well) and do the first few chapters of Half Life's first expansion pack, Opposing Force.

Though not necessarily in that order.


Actually, since I wrote that earlier, I've played a bit of Opposing Force. Haven't done any homework though.

Right. Another night where I need to hurry through this post all because of my time wasting.

I've been doing some thinking about The Grey Line. My current plan is to have the first few chapters written by... let's say the middle of February. Should give me something to distract myself with when I'm not studying.

It's obviously not apparent from the beginning sections I have up but the universe of The Grey Line contains a number of fantasy and sci-fi elements and my big problem so far has been trying to tie all these together. I wouldn't say that the concept now is “dark” but it certainly used to be a lot lighter and with less need for coherency. That means I have a number of characters and concepts that, while I don't want to let go of them, need to at least be reworked to fit with the story.

I've got a few basic ideas of how all this works in my head but I need to get it all down on paper. I'd like to do that in the next few days but that seems unlikely given the whole homework thing. After that it's back to school where I doubt I'll have the time and then on the weekend it's that blasted trip up to Glasgow and then probably finishing off the homework I didn't do in time for school...

This might take a while. Still, at least my mind is ticking over on it. I'd reveal more but that might ruin the story. And I'd hate to ruin the story before I'd even figured out what it was.


Huh. I was just fiddling with the settings in Adium and now I can't make it stop playing the Doctor Who theme tune. How annoying.

I think that's all I've got for tonight. It's getting quite late and these early morning starts aren't being kind to me. I'm guessing they were the cause of the headache I mentioned earlier and still have.

So I'm just going to go to bed now.

I'm not even going to sign off with my catch phrase.

New Year, New Ideas, New Discworld Wall Calendar

So... actually, hold on a sec. I need to put up my new calendar.

Okay, done. Actually, I just need to unwrap my desk calendar as well.

And that's that done as well. No time for much else I'm afraid – it was very well packaged.

I was meaning to do some New Year's resolutions, wasn't I? Might as well do that for ten minutes then go to bed. That isn't actually how I'm going to write this, I was just practising for giving up on all these plans later in the year. Sometime around January 10th.


1. That little Dilbert desk calendar I have but that I never change for months at a time. I've got a new one now and I'm determined to actually use it.

2. Do more writing. Preferably stuff for The Grey Line but if I need to do something else to start with then so be it.

3. Work on that sketch comedy idea I've been mulling over for about a year now.

4. Do something with all those tutorial books I have lying around. Reading them would be best, I suppose.

5. Find some kind of permanent arrangement for all my computer-related gear.

6. Finish all those games I need to finish.

7. Resurrect the VersusCOM podcast and website.

8. Do all the other crap on my many to do lists.


I'd add one about exercising more but I know that it's not going to do anything except make me feel bad for not following through with it.

Okay, that's enough. I know it's not hugely interesting but I want to get to bed so... first post of the new year is a mini post, it seems. It's not my fault. I got distracted by the agony booth and playing the original Half Life on my beaten up old laptop.

Which reminds me, I need to try installing Starship Titanic on that thing tomorrow. Should be fun. It'll hopefully distract me from the mounting pressure of my holiday homework needing to be done before this time next week. I wouldn't call that a good thing precisely but it's better than the alternative.

The alternative being still not doing it but not having anything else to do.

Have a nice day.

Hey, you know what? I think this is now long enough not to count for mini post status. Huzzah!

No, wait. The number of paragraphs is deceptive - it's still under 400 words. That's the new criteria now. Except it's now over 400 words! Huzzah again!

...I really need to get more sleep.

Last Day in December

So what have I achieved this year?

I passed my Higher exams and did very well, English notwithstanding. I won the Cup for Higher Computing and I've been helping out at the school's Computer club, educating the younglings in the way of the Force basic computer programming and animation. I entered Sixth Year at school and everything there seems to be going fine. I applied to and was accepted by several universities for the course of my choice.

Outside schoolwork, I managed to keep going with this whole once-a-day post thing, minus a few uploading problems and holidays. The important thing is that it averages out properly. I at least made a start on some of my writing projects and have plans for plenty more.


What have I failed to achieve?

I've not done nearly as much writing as I'd hoped to have done. I also had plans for working on a few game designs and prototypes but not much has happened there so far. Progress on my little sketch show comedy project has been... non-existent. The VersusCOM podcast, along with my plan for VersusCOM in general, is still on hiatus.


That's a fairly short and blunt summary but it marks out a few goals to work on come the new year. I'll try to write them down into some actual resolutions tomorrow. Maybe if I call it a list of resolutions instead of a to do list, I'll actually do some of it. Or resolve some of it. Whatever.

I got dragged out of bed fairly early this morning to go to the hospital for a dressing change. It was a real shock to my system for some reason, possibly because I'd just had a couple of days where I could actually lie in because the district nurse was coming in later than normal. I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to need these daily dressing changes – everyone who examines it keeps saying how quickly it's healing up and how small it's getting but no one will give me even an approximate time until I can stop.

Anyway, the point is that the lack of sleep is starting to catch up to me now so I'll try to keep this short.

Not much success so far, unless you're only comparing it to the last two days' posts.

I expect that there'll be a lot of people staying up late and letting off fireworks and so on once midnight rolls around. That'll probably be annoying for a few minutes and then subside so that I can get some rest. I've never been one to do anything special at the end of the year. It's always been just another night, arbitrary calendar designations notwithstanding.

Wow, that's twice I've got to use notwithstanding in one post.

Thrice.

And I got to use thrice as well. Awesome.

That's enough I think. More tomorrow next year.

From July to December

I believe that yesterday, after some problems getting the stupid post to publish on time, I had just finished June. Over the last 16 years, I've noticed that June is usually followed by July so we may as well follow that pattern here.


July was of course in the summer holidays. I alternated between lazing around, buying stuff on eBay and occasionally producing something of merit. I went driving for the first time at that off-road place that'll show you the basics before you can go on the road. Sam and I went a couple of times but I didn't enjoy it much and I thought it was a waste. Now I have a copy of the Highway Code sitting on my floor and I'm going to need to start reading it at the beginning of February.

July was also when I first received the NESi along with a load of other eBay stuff as Sam and I entered our seasonal pattern of buying loads of crap to tinker with in the summer. We still need to sell those NESi, along with... well, the loads of crap we bought to tinker with and never used.


August... More of the same, really. Summer would have been drawing to a close but the only truly significant event to differentiate it from July and the couple of holiday days in June was that I got my exam results. Despite my confidence at the time and my A in the prelim, I somehow managed only a C in English. I hadn't been expecting to do brilliantly but given my track record I thought I would manage a B at least.

Fortunately, it turned out that I wasn't alone. Many of my classmates and, indeed, many students around the whole of Scotland had got English results that were much lower than they or there teachers had predicted. The teachers said that they were doing their best and that the course was useless and the SQA said that the course was fine and the teachers were useless.

I'm paraphrasing slightly but over the next few weeks and months, the slagging match subsided and a couple of official investigations were launched. I eventually got up to a B on appeal which seems to have served me fine, looking at my university offers, but I know a lot of people who got really screwed over by that exam and none of the investigations and changes for the future were going to fix that.


We returned to school in the last few days of August but most of the interesting stuff took place in September. Those first few days, all we had was a beaten up old SNES that we used for huge Street Fighter II tournaments. The class hadn't divided itself up into rooms as it has now. I know this was only a few months ago but it all seems so strange.

September was also when we first had to start thinking seriously about university applications. I'd always had some ideas about doing Computer Science but I really didn't know where or even if I definitely wanted to do it at all. Nevertheless, I made some progress towards making choices and writing my personal statement.

That month was also when I first made some posts on Corbett's Fiction. Unsurprisingly, I've done almost nothing since then. I suppose the concepts have become a bit clearer in my head if that's any help.


All these recent months now begin to blur together so I get the feeling that I'm going to have to refer to a lot of posts from October to get my facts and memories straight. Don't expect me to link to them; that's far too much like hard work.

So many things happened then that seem so long ago... I apparently got my new chair then but I'm so used to it now that it seems like it's always been here. It was Erin's birthday and so we used Citizen Cane again. You know, I think I forgot to mention that big ol' cane anywhere else? Looking back it seems we built him in March. It felt so much more recent than that...


Moving on, it was in late November that I had my surgery. That's still bugging me now but, again, the surgery seems so distant. I'm not sure why. We had our annual fireworks party in November as well. I remember talking to Sam a lot because I didn't like anybody else there. We watched The Muppet Show while everyone else was downstairs eating a meal together, proving once again how anti-social and geeky we are. Oh, and after a long wait, both in a queue outside the store and in the many months beforehand, I got my iPhone. Well worth it, I believe.


December... do I even really need to go into that? Last week and a bit of term, if memory serves; not much going on – watched some films in the common room, cleared out the common room, went to last ever Christmas service, went home, had holidays, had Christmas, ended up here, doing this.

That's pretty much it.


And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my year. It seems like there's a lot I haven't mentioned - going to the computer club each week and helping out the kids there. Sam finally asking out that girl he'd had a crush on for months. All the stuff we did to Jimerson's locker.

It's strange how my recent memory blurs together. Perhaps I only remember the best bits in the long term, making the short term feel a lot more cluttered and connected. Major events like picking a university and doing projects each take so much time that I can't put a precise date to them or relate the details of a single event.

Maybe it was a mistake to go through the year chronologically rather than just think of the highlights. I think tomorrow I'll pick out my favourite bits and put off sharing my resolutions until January 1st.

Yes, that sounds like a plan.

From January to June

I said I was going to do something where I looked back on the year, didn't I? Well, I've got nothing better to do, I guess.


January seems like a good place to start. I expect that at that time I was still getting to grips with my new iMac, as strange as that may seem now that my Mighty Mouse feels like an extra limb. I can't remember what games and so on I would've been playing at the time. It wouldn't have been too long after the release of the Wii and my acquisition of one, so I might have still been playing Twilight Princess. I could have finished it, but I recall I was still thinking about it and discussing it as it took Sam a lot longer to do.


February brought with it my Higher prelims, in which I managed to get all As. Somehow. I do recall that English was rather close but it was the same for everyone else who got an A in my class so we just assumed it was a really hard prelim. Oh, if only we had known what was to come.

It must have been sometime in February that Skippy suggested that we start doing a blog together. I'd had various ideas and projects swirling around in my head for months by then but I was having trouble actually following through so I agreed in order to prove to myself that I could keep something like that going. We put it off until after the prelims, at which point Skippy sent me a rough draft of an introductory post. I almost completely rewrote it and then published it in late February.


My regular posting didn't start until the 1st of March, when I challenged myself to keep up daily posts on a variety of topics for exactly one year. So far, I've made a pretty good job of that, I think. Skimming over some of those posts now, they seem to be a bit more light-hearted and relaxed than what I write now. I can't be sure, although one of these days I'm going to read through everything I've written here and find out for certain how it's changed.

March was the month I went up to Edinburgh to do a Chemistry competition of some kind. I'd completely forgotten about it until I read up on it right now. I've forgotten a lot of what happened in Chemistry, since I dropped it before going into Sixth Year. English, the other subject I dropped, and a whole lot of other stuff that happened in S5 seems like the distant past now. I'm not sure why.

Oh, and it was in March that I was playing the first Phoenix Wright game as well, having borrowed it from Sam... It's still on my shelf.


April... April... what happened then? Easter holidays, I suppose, and the build-up to the exams in May. I went through my general gripes about holidays though I did concede that that particular one had been quite fun – especially the bits that didn't involve anything that holidays are generally supposed to involve. While away, I made fun of the Street Fighter movie and watched House and then when I got back I had to panic about doing holiday homework.

It's remarkable how similar all my holidays from school turn out to be.


May held the dreaded Higher exams. I can distinctly recall the day before the English exam: I spent it lying on the bed in the guest room, highlighted chunks from essays and pages of quotes lying around me and my DS in sleep mode at my side. I somehow found the mental strength to study for most of the day, occasional snatches of Final Fantasy III the only thing keeping me sane.

As far as I knew, the English exam itself went fine. That afternoon, I headed into town with Sam and Sam to pick up imported copies of the new Pokemon games. We'd planned to spend the rest of the day there but it began bucketing down so we headed back to the school, hoping it would pass while we found shelter. It eventually did but by that time Potter had already started jogging home and Stafford and I had called my mum to come and pick us up. It sounds fairly miserable but it was a fun experience.

Interestingly, I suspect it may have been that brief stint of getting caught in the rain with Stafford's infamously unreliable mobile phone my only lifeline that truly convinced me I needed a phone of my own.

The rest of the exams... I don't have such clear memories of. I recall going down to the play park near the school several times and I think that that was this year. It might have been at Standard Grade, when we also did it. Who knows? I'm slightly annoyed that the exams next year, with their greater length and my smaller classes, aren't likely to lead to a similar situation of giving up revision en masse in order to play on swings.


With exams out of the way, June was a breath of fresh air. It also seems so very long ago, when we were trapped in that strange limbo between Fifth and Sixth Year, using our old form rooms but having three study periods a day and spending half of them just lying outside on the grass. That was absolutely fantastic. I think we eventually got told to stop but I can't remember if we actually did.

Then came the end of the term and the last time I would see certain classmates and teachers. I remember Speech Day being held in a local sports hall instead of the town hall, which was being renovated. I went up to collect my prize then I just went back down to my seat to sit through the proceedings. Luck and random chance had placed me next to my two best friends so I was able to pass the time talking to them. Well, during the rehearsals and before the event itself anyway.

At the end, I suppose the departing Sixth Year would have been doing what the departing Sixth Year always do, though I can't recall seeing them directly. They would have been hugging each other and some would have been crying. For many years, I'd never really understood why – I knew they were leaving but the friends would stay in touch. Now, I think I have some better idea.

That'll be me in six months. I doubt I'll be hugging anyone or crying but I'm honestly not sure how I'll handle that final moment of school life, knowing that I'll never again share a classroom with that diverse bunch of people, some of whom I've known for most of my life. Sure, I'll keep in touch with my friends and there's a good number I'll be glad never to see again but it's those ones in between that just sort of make up the background of my life without being close...

I'm not quite sure how to express it. I hope I'll have found a way in six months time. Even if the challenge I started in March has come to a close, I'll still keep putting my thoughts up here and, well, there'll be a lot of stuff going on then that'll give me some interesting thoughts.


And that's half of the year done in over 1200 words. Tomorrow, I'll do the other half and then New Year's Eve will give me some time for reflection and resolutions.


You know what? I feel good. I'll leave it to you to imagine why.

Almost forgot to publish this

Uh-oh. Rapidly approaching midnight with a blank NeoOffice document staring me in the face again. I personally blame season 4 of House and the ease with which one can acquire it on the internet.

I'm not entirely sure what I've been doing all day. I can recall doing a wide variety of tasks that generally involve DVDs and video games but I'm not sure how they add up to the fact that I've apparently not had time to either write this post or even read my daily dose of webcomics. Seriously, I just skimmed through all the dailies and closed the tabs for the ones that won't be updating tomorrow so I could read them then. I just don't have the time or the patience right now.

I still have a whole bunch of open tabs for the Half Life wiki but I'll deal with that in a little while, after I've dealt with this.

Actually, that's something I have to say. Well, I don't have to say it but I have it and I wish to say something about it... it being a thought or experience of some kind.

What was I talking about?

Ah, yes. I completed Half Life 2: Episode 2 with the developer commentary today. As I've often noted and stated, I'm a glutton for trivia of all kinds and I wanted to find out more about the game development process. It was fairly interesting although I wouldn't have minded something slightly more in-depth. I'll have to dig back into some of my game design books, see if I can find one that's actually vaguely intriguing and readable.

Who knows, maybe I'll write a book like that someday. I hope to go into video game design and I hope to write a book at some point so it would seem fairly efficient.

I also got round to playing the first episode of Sam & Max Season One that I got off Steam a couple of days ago and so far I'm quite impressed. The humour hits the mark more often than not and there's a distinct shortage of good point and clicks out there, as far as I know. I'll play more of it tomorrow, along with Psychonauts.

Speaking of point and click games, my copy of Starship Titanic arrived from eBay today. Tomorrow's task is to make it work on one of my computers. It should be compatible with XP but it may still require a little (more probably, a lot, knowing my luck) fiddling.

I still haven't made a start on a whole load of other things but at least I'm enjoying myself while I waste time.

This post really has been very video game oriented, hasn't it? I don't think I really set out to do that. Of course, I didn't really set out with any topic in mind... Maybe there's something psychiatric-ish in there.

Nuts to it. I have a headache now. And a whole load of paragraphs on Vortigaunt culture to read before I go to bed.

Routines and Milestones

I'm a person who loves routines. It's the day after Christmas but as far as anyone could tell by observing me, it could be any day of the year. Aside from Christmas day.

Christmas came. Christmas went. And here I am straight back to watching the House boxset I was engrossed in when I stayed up on Christmas Eve, straight through into the next morning as well, to buy an old PC game on eBay. Oh, there are a few changes. I'm now using OS X Leopard instead of Tiger. It works great and I'll have to write it up for the MacTake but it's not made a huge difference.

I haven't made a start on any of the books I got though I have some nice rationalisations for that – I'm still in the middle of another book as well as several magazines I want to go through. Oh, and I don't have anywhere nice to sit and read. Comfy chairs and I aren't getting along so well right now.

Tomorrow I'm going to have to get back into gear. Well, after I've spent most of the day dealing with my little cousins. But if I still have the strength left, I've got a big list of things I need to do before I can even think of making a start on all my big priorities.

I need to get in touch with various friends to find out how their Christmas was and see how the trip to India that many of them went on was. I'm just speaking to Sam right now, which is a start. I need to sort through my presents and tidy my room. I need to do all that day-to-day stuff that I really ought to have done...

Meh. I don't know. I'll figure it out as I go along, I'm sure.

For now, I need to get to bed because it's back to going to the hospital in the mornings tomorrow. Got to have a bit of a lie in this morning at least.

Sorry for the short post. Got a bit sidetracked.

Have a nice day.



Oh, and this is the 350th post on TWToday and my 300th personally. Go me.

I can't decide if I'm more like Scrooge or the Grinch

Merry Christmas, then, I suppose.

I'm a big fan of Christmas. I'm a big fan of anything that promotes goodwill, kindness, etc., and which results in me getting free stuff.

There are two things about Christmas that are important to me – presents and family. I'm not religious so I tend to pass over all those bits and focus on the things that do interest me. You can call me shallow for the whole liking gifts thing but, let's face it, what's the point in the gift-giving if everyone goes all preachy and spiritual and turns them down?

This year I ended up getting a huge number of sci-fi books. I knew I'd asked for a lot but it never struck me until I was actually sitting downstairs unwrapping them just how many I'd got in comparison to everything else. I found it especially strange that I didn't get any video games, given that I'm normally more of a gamer than a reader.

I guess it's because I've been getting most of the games I want at launch and I've been avoiding getting others because I still need to complete the ones I have. Though that said, I did notice that Steam (Valve's online games distribution doohickey) was having a sale so I went on and got Psychonauts. Took ages to download but it was only £5 and it's supposed to be brilliant. I may get a couple of other things off there later.

Actually, now that I think about it, I did get one game-related thing for Christmas:


Yeah, it was Erin's idea. She got a Toad for herself.

I also picked up some large chunks of chocolate, a few comedy CDs, some DVDs (including the Key To Time and Davros Doctor Who boxsets which together add up to... I'm not really sure but several days constant viewing at least) and the usual array of calendars, book tokens and so on.


So, the other thing about Christmas. Family. We had my mother's parents and my father's mother round for lunch, as we normally do. Unfortunately, this time, my little cousins weren't there as well. Now, I love those guys but I'm not above using them and the ease with which they get bored to my advantage. Nobody wants to have a meal around bored children who've finished their food. Nobody wants to let said children run around the house.

The solution? Let big cousin Alasdair take them to go play games. Everybody's happy.

This year I basically just ate my food as fast as I could* and kept making excuses about going to check on various downloads and backups that I had running. On a side note, that seems to have become something of a tradition – last year I had some hefty OS X updates to download and this year I was getting Psychonauts and backing up my iMac in preparation of installing Leopard tomorrow.

But back to the whole family lunch thing. I'm not someone who ritualises eating and the conversation at this sort of thing tends not to interest me. It's nothing personal but when everyone else gets to talking about the new roads or old friends' back problems or anything I don't really care about I tend to find it dull.

And if anyone tries to engage me in small talk, it's always about either how I'm doing after the surgery or what my plans are for university.

Bah. I could go on all night about my hatred of chatting and small talk and I'd never get any sleep. I think I'm going to call it a night here so that I can go to bed and hope that the district nurse shows up late tomorrow so that I can lie in.

As always, I'll have more to say tomorrow.

Hope you had a nice day.






*Rhyming entirely unintentional

TWToday Christmas Eve Special

My body clock is all thrown off because I went for a nap in the middle of the afternoon. On the bright side, it seems to have got rid of my headache for a while. I should now be able to wait up until midnight in order to catch Santa. I'll get him this year, I can sense it...

I'm joking, by the way. I'm not actually sad enough to stay up until midnight to catch a glimpse of Santa. That would be ridiculous.

I'm staying up past midnight to bid on an old PC adventure game by Douglas Adams that's being sold on eBay. I'm hoping that that's so ridiculous that no one else will have stayed up to bid against me.


Not much else going on today. Taking it kind of easy, as evidenced by the nap. I bought an old Doctor Who game (Destiny of the Doctors) on eBay earlier today and that might require a bit of fiddling to get working on XP but we'll see about that once it arrives. I've also been looking at various bits of import equipment for the Gamecube (FreeLoader and a Japanese memory card) for Erin, who finally completed Donkey Konga 2 today and wants to move on to the Japan-only sequel.

In other news, you may have heard that the jet dragster Richard Hammond crashed while filming for Top Gear has gone up for sale on eBay. It's not working (obviously) but people are still bidding for what the seller describes as “a genuine piece of UK automotive history” that's “a little the worse for wear after its much-publicised excursion into the weeds”. It's technically being sold as scrap but the owner says he hopes it'll get him about £5,000-10,000.

As I write this, the auction is at just under £19,000 with 69 bids so far and over five days left to go. Impressive.

I'll keep an eye on that as it goes on. I wouldn't be surprised if it goes over £100,000. Might even get closer to one million. Who knows?


In other news that's more related to me, my grandparents, who are coming round for lunch tomorrow and with whom my cousins will be staying later in the week, are under the impression that my brother and I are infectious.

I'm not entirely sure how they came to this conclusion, especially given that the entire point of my surgery was to remove the infected tissue completely. Maybe they thought it odd that my brother gets it so soon after I did but I'm still half expecting them to claim that my humours are out of balance. Mum seems to have convinced them that we're safe enough to have lunch with and let the cousins see. Not that they could really stop us from the latter.

Speaking of humorism, I made that same joke about my grandparents with Sam and Erin a couple of days ago and only Sam laughed. (Un)Surprisingly few people get jokes based on classical and medieval medical theory.

And yet, as Sam noted later on, we did. Neither of us had any reason to know about it. We hadn't discussed the subject before. But we both knew enough about these obscure little facts to make jokes about them at the expense of old people. Strange.


Anyway, I'm going to wrap things up now. For once, I can say that I'm not going to bed. Unless my headache gets worse and I can't be bothered staying up any later. As always, we shall just have to wait and see what happens.

Have a merry Christmas.

I wish the gun from Portal was real

I don't think I mentioned this yesterday but I finally completed Portal. The fact that it took so long is mostly a product of my own laziness and my computer's tendency to blue-screen when running it after ten minutes of startup and loading so I'll stick to the common criticism that it was too short.

Otherwise, it was excellent. The game somehow managed to make me laugh and chill me to the bone at the same time, all while providing mind-bending but logical puzzles on a proper difficulty curve. Like seemingly every other person on the planet who's played it, I can't praise this game enough.

Oh, and if I ever have to fake my death or pretend that an assassination attempt was successful, I'm sending my enemies or would-be killers a link to the ending on YouTube. You'll know what I'm talking about if you've completed it.

My next goal is to complete Half Life 2: Episode 2 so that I can re-immerse myself in the stories and rumours sites surrounding the HL mythos without fear of spoilers.

That likely won't be done tomorrow though, since Sam's coming round and we'll hopefully be working on getting various old consoles sorted and made ready for sale on eBay. Theoretically. Or we may just end up watching Planet of Evil. Who knows.


Nothing much else going on today. Got my new issue of NGamer with a full update on upcoming games in 2008 – some real gems by the looks of things. I'll go into more detail once I've looked over some of the reviews and I'm maybe doing some sort of general “looking forward” post. It also came with a glow in the dark Wii remote sleeve, by the way, which I just found lying on my bed, covered underneath all the other stuff I tend to heap on there in the morning.

I really need to tidy my room.

But that's at the lower end of my list of priorities. Currently at the top is going to bed and getting some sleep because I apparently need to get up even earlier tomorrow. Not sure why but more yelling will doubtless ensue if I don't.

First, though, I think I'll go and put an mp3 of that song from Portal on my iPhone. Just in case I ever need to amuse myself or scare small children.

Have a nice day.

All these long posts can't be a coincidence

Coincidences are strange things. On the one hand, we cannot be too quick to assume that something is a coincidence or else we may miss some vital clue that links events and results. But we must accept that sometime they exist for otherwise we would waste time trying to solve mysteries that simply don't exist.

A couple of coincidences occurred recently, both of which, unfortunately, have to do with my pilonidal sinus and the operation I had to remove it. I'll start with the one that occurred today – my brother's diagnosis with the exact same problem. A couple of days ago, he began to feel a great deal of pain in the appropriate area but we dismissed this as “coincidence” and assumed he must have something else, largely because he was in immediate and near constant pain, as opposed to my (relatively) mild pain and irritation, caused by a single spot.

He started taking antibiotics and some painkillers but today, after more consultation with doctors and the same specialist that I saw, it was found to indeed be an unusual presentation of a pilonidal sinus.*

In some ways, this is a coincidence, in others it isn't. While it's not infectious, related individuals have a greater chance of both experiencing it. This isn't due to a genetic disposition towards it directly but factors such as hair colour and type, which are decided genetically and are likely to be close in siblings, do contribute to the likelihood. So do the facts that we are both male, in the right age bracket and lead, let's say, “sedentary” lifestyles.

The timing, however, is entirely random. While the appearance of each of our ailments can perhaps be tied into our own pasts (mine came on during a long, rainy holiday which I spent much of sitting indoors and one nurse suggested that my brother's new gym regime may have contributed to his), nothing medically relevant links the two.

Thus, we are forced to accept this as a coincidence, though not a hugely unlikely one.


The second coincidence is more unlikely and pretty much entirely timing based. I've no doubt mentioned over the past few weeks that I've been having to sit on a cushion in most environments. These include all but the comfy chairs in the common room, the chairs in classrooms, car seats and even the chair I'm sitting on now. As such, my binary covered pillow has been my constant companion for about a month now.

But why do I even have a binary covered cushion? More than a few people at school have asked me that and I've wondered it myself. The truth is that I just wanted a pillow that said “pillow” in 0s and 1s. It was an impulse buy when ordering various other items from ThinkGeek in early November.

Note that early November is before I knew that I would need a pillow after the surgery. In fact, I'm not even sure that I knew about the surgery then – I may still have been hoping that antibiotics were the answer when I placed the order. And I've mentioned before that, even as I went in for the surgery, I had no idea that I was going to need quite so much care and appropriate seating afterwards.

So my need for a cushion so soon after I had randomly decided to buy one was a coincidence. I think it odd when really it's just a quirk of timing. And of course, I had no need for this specific cushion, beyond my addiction to geek paraphernalia. If I hadn't had it, I would just have grabbed one from a cupboard somewhere and likely not have had quite such a hard time from people who don't understand binary. And those who do.

Therefore, my purchase of the cushion is just another coincidence, though without any of the contributing factors of the first. I saw what I thought was a curious pattern but I knew straight away that there was no connection of any sort.


That's enough rambling about coincidence and happenstance for now, I think. I'm going to head off to bed because I need to get up even earlier tomorrow morning. My brother now requires the same early morning wound-disinfecting salt bath as I do and there's only one bath in the house. With any luck, there'll only be about a week's overlap, given the way mine's healing up.

Probably won't be better for Christmas though, which is a shame, but it could be worse.


Oh, and also, that one bath in the house? It leaks.






*I've been told that mine was a “textbook case”. Go me, I guess.

Too Late for Coherency

Another late night post. A brief update on my day, first, I think.

[insert random news program intro theme here – preferably somewhere between the two versions presented here]

In the headlines today...

No, I can't keep this up. It was really just an excuse to link to that Bill Bailey video. That man is incredibly hilarious, as Never Mind the Buzzcocks will not let me forget. Also, watch that show.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. Things I did today. The rest of my deliveries arrived and I worked out who was getting what and wrapped most of it up. Since it was basically just two things to wrap around (one big thing and one little for each of my two little cousins) this should not have been a difficult task.

And yet, somehow, it was. There seems to be some kind of knack to wrapping up presents that always escapes me. I suppose it's one of those things that people thing everyone knows how to do and is just common sense but I don't think I've ever actually paid attention to anyone else wrapping presents so I have no idea.

The rest of the human race seems to have formed some sort of present wrapping hive mind to which they won't allow me access. As such, I have never been able to satisfactorily perform this basic task to the same level as... well, whoever's wrapped all the other presents I see everywhere. I suspect that the conspiracy also extends to tying balloons and clicking my fingers.


But enough of that. I must have something else to say. Hmmm...

I've been thinking about the future of this blog lately, trying to plan ahead a bit and get some solid topics ready. I think that towards the end of the year, I'm going to just relax a bit and look back at the year behind me, seeing what's happened and what's changed. One of the original purposes of TWToday was just to give me somewhere to muse on the happenings of my life... I can't decide whether that's changed or stayed the same.

I might also come up with some New Years Resolutions. And Christmas should give me something to talk about for a while. Sort of already has, come to think of it.

I'll try to think of something better for tomorrow. I've instructed my sister not to stop bugging me until I write some kind of fiction or comedy or anything that isn't this, really. And I'll try to write this earlier in the day.


Bah. I can't be bothered proof-reading it but I worry that this has come across a bit complainy. It's too late to change it now, I suppose. Got to take my painkillers (yup, still on them) and get to bed. On the bright side, I'm seeing a hospital consultant tomorrow instead of just the regular dressing change, so the appointment's a bit later, meaning I can lie in in the morning.

Well, when I say “a bit”, I mean “half an hour” but I still don't have to get up until eight instead of half seven.

Except I'll probably get up earlier anyway, since the traffic's always a pain around that time and we were almost late this morning.


Hey, if I add this paragraph here, then this post goes on to a second page in size 12 font on NeoOffice. Awesome. These things are getting longer again. Shame about the lack of actual content.

A Good Day

There is nothing quite like the feeling you get when you finally rip apart someone's testimony in Phoenix Wright. And there's nothing more infuriating than knowing where the contradiction is but not knowing what exact combination of evidence the game thinks will prove it.


Today's been a damned good day, actually. I'm hugely enjoying playing Phoenix Wright (we'll go with that title now, for the sake of simplicity) and I'd recommend it to any fool who hasn't tried the series yet. I'll undoubtedly play more tomorrow and I'll have to try to pick up another game with which to pass the time.

Most of the gifts I ordered for Christmas were delivered today. I'm still waiting on a book and some action figures for my little cousin but among the things that did arrive were the Master's laser screwdriver and the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. I was planning to give the laser screwdriver to the elder of my two little cousins and the sonic one to the younger, but it occurred to me that, since this model of sonic screwdriver doubles as a UV pen, it might make more sense to give it to the one that can write.

Doesn't matter much in the long run – I'm sure they'll share whatever they get anyway. Assuming I don't give in to temptation and keep the toys for myself... I've been trying my hardest not to rip open the packages and run around shoving the psychic paper wallet in people's faces before ageing them until they look like a house elf.

...What?


Further brightening my day was the fact that I received another confirmation of an unconditional university place. This time, it was Computer Science at St Andrews, the course I was really hoping for. That's me got all my offers back save for the Comp. Sci. and Physics joint course at St Andrews, which will presumably take longer as it has to pass through two departments.

And that's more or less been my day, apart from the usual humdrum existence and the daily morning trip to the hospital. That's become ridiculously routine now, so much so that I can be halfway to the hospital before I properly wake up. As inconvenient as the whole thing has been, it does get me up a lot earlier in the holidays, which makes me feel better, given my usual tendency to sleep in annoyingly late.

That said, once it's all over, the first thing I'm going to do the next morning is lie in until it's the afternoon.


Oh, a couple of other things. It looks like Duke Nukem is still alive, as are his “unique” brand of humour and his liberal interpretation of the word “deadline”. This isn't the first time a trailer for the game has been released so it's not worth anyone getting their hopes up. To be brutally honest, I'm hoping it's never released, just so I can keep making jokes about it.

And while we're on the subject, here's The Duke Nukem Forever List again. Always worth a look and a laugh.

This, as with all such stories about politicians not doing their research before jumping on the video game hatred bandwagon, both depresses and amuses me.

I bought some USB rechargeable batteries in the same order as all my Christmas presents and they just finished charging, so I'll give them a go tomorrow and then report on that.

Yes, reviewing batteries. I really can stoop so low.

On desktops, Christmas and fictional legal proceedings

I've finally managed to clean up all the files that have been clogging up my desktop for months. Only took me about 10 minutes, not including the time I spent listening to and watching some of the stuff I came across. A lot of it was just dragged into other folders but none of them were quite as bad as the desktop to begin with so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Now I just need to try the same thing with my thousands of bookmarks.


I can't quite believe that it's only a week until Christmas. Doesn't feel that way at all.

I've been finding myself somewhat bored recently, mostly because I've finished all the DVDs I was watching and won't be getting any more until Christmas. I've still got some books to finish, as well as various games, but none of them are really helping shake the monotony.

Though Ace Attorney: Justice For All (or maybe Phoenix Wright: Justice For All... or Ace Attorney: Phoenix Wright: Justice for All... or about half a dozen other combinations) is doing its best. I got pretty well hooked on the first game but I haven't picked up the second since my sister got it... I can't even remember when. Months ago anyway, maybe for her birthday in October. It's shaping up to be as good as the first, at least.

My problem seems to be less about actually playing the games once I get going and more about breaking out of my little rut of just watching TV and reading websites. The fact that I've now seen most of the TV shows and movies available to me along with my running out of good websites to browse where I haven't seen all but the latest content means that I'll probably be forced into doing something else I enjoy.

Curses.

That might also help me start writing or maybe it'll just give me another excuse not to but we shall see. It's only twenty to eleven now, so I suppose that if I end this now, I can actually get to bed relatively early which should hopefully lead to more sleep and fewer late night headaches. Which is good.


Damn. I was just looking through my bookmarks and I realised that I completely forgot to watch that Segway polo match on Sunday. The video will hopefully be up for download somewhere. And with that minor disappointment, I say farewell and have a nice day. I'm off to bed.

So much of what I do involves Doctor Who...

Trying to write a bit earlier tonight – it's around seven o'clock.

I've noticed I've been doing a lot of diary style entries recently, probably because they're easy to do and I've been leaving everything very late. I've also noticed that I'm using the word “probably” a lot. It'll have something to do with my deep personal insecurity and low self esteem, probably. Damn.

Oh, and by the way, it's ten to eleven now.

So my earlier plan was to do another entry about my day but there's nothing really special to talk about. In fact, I could do it all in this paragraph. I watched the whole current series of Never Mind the Buzzcocks so far on YouTube with my brother and sister (the latter of whom had got hooked when I showed her an episode last night, when she came in wanting to see this Bill Bailey clip).

Actually, stuff the one paragraph thing. I have a rather verbose writing style and it'd just get unwieldy.

The only other thing of note today was that I finally ordered all the various Christmas presents I've been meaning to buy for my little cousins and Sam. I managed to get Sam something roughly equivalent in price and geekiness to what he got me (which was a Doctor Who DVD and a book examining the physics of Who, so the latter proved tricky) and I picked up various bits and bobs for my cousins.

It's mostly either Doctor Who toys or relatively harmless weaponry. I suspect my aunt's going to hate me for the Airzooka... assuming the sound effects from the laser and sonic screwdrivers (one each, with which to do battle through all of space and time) don't drive her insane first. But I'm confident that the little kids will like them, so there you go.


My other point for tonight is something curious I noticed when looking at the Wikipedia article on the portrayal of Mars in fiction. Don't look at me like that, I had a good reason. I just don't want to tell it to you.

Anyway, the whole thing is divided into two sections – before and after the Mariner 4 spacecraft reached Mars and dispelled various myths about its surface and habitability. Notice under the film and television section (secondary references) the Doctor Who examples.

The Ice Warriors were enemies of the Second and Third Doctors who originated on Mars and appeared repeatedly over that era, in the late 60s to early 70s. Mariner 4 sent back its findings beginning it 1965 and the idea of civilisation on Mars started faltering then and there in the minds of even hopeful scientists. By the early 70s, this perception would have filtered down into the public consciousness, making serious stories about Martians harder and harder to pull off.

Thus, despite Doctor Who's relatively lax attitude to scientific fact compared to other shows, the Ice Warriors were slowly phased out and the last adventure set on Mars was Pyramids of Mars, featuring the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith trying to stop Sutekh the Destroyer escaping his prison on Mars – he hadn't come from there originally.

The new series only mentions Mars in passing, as a brief gag. Rumours of the Ice Warriors coming back keep cropping up but it would require either a retcon or a handwave, at least. Or maybe they'll go the The War of the Worlds route – the original book and many early adaptations had the aliens coming from Mars, a dried up and dying world, as the popular theory was at the time. Later versions usually chose to ignore the aliens' origins altogether.


That's it for now. Let's see if I can get to bed before midnight again. I'll have to try and work my way through some of that to do list tomorrow, assuming I get a good night's sleep and my cold clears up a bit.

Did I mention I have a cold?

I have a cold.

And I'm going to bed. Have a nice day.

Things to do

Some day, I'm going to make a computer with an inbuilt cup holder, just to see if people try putting CDs in it.


Well, that'll teach me to spend all day looking at Computer Stupidities instead of... well, anything more productive really. On the bright side, I did manage to figure out what's being done about various Christmas presents and I should be able to order them tomorrow.

Of course, I told myself I'd have them ordered by last Friday at the latest. Ho-hum.

Anyway, I'm hoping that I might be a bit more useful tomorrow. I've been really tired all day today, most likely because, despite my best intentions and average effort, I still went to bed after midnight... yesterday? This morning? Let's go with last night.

I've been meaning to make an informal little to do list for some time now so I may as well do it now. I'm unsure as to how I could make an official to do list but that's beside the point. Here's what I reckon I need to get done over the coming days and weeks, in no particular order. Unless there's some kind of sub-conscious thing going on, determining the order in which they enter my mind.


Write some of The Grey Line

Write some comedy stuff

Get the VersusCOM podcast going again

Sell any retrogaming stuff that I have duplicates of (ie, the 7 NESi)

Tidy my room so that I've got more space and some breathable air

Finish up my Computing project to a respectable standard (should try to do this fairly soon, so I don't forget how everything works)

Complete other schoolwork such as Maths questions and Physics research

Order those Christmas presents

Work on my Linux box, as well as the family computer

Complete various games, inc. HL2: Ep 2, Portal, Phantom Hourglass and about half a dozen others


That's more or less it for now. Surprisingly/depressingly it's not unlike the lists I made at the start of the summer holidays, almost six months ago. And the Easter holidays before them.

Oh, well. I'm going to head off to bed. And I've just realised that I didn't bring up my usual dose of painkillers to have before bed and everyone else is already asleep, so it looks like I'll be going without tonight. I've been cutting back anyway, I guess. Only problem is, it's been slightly worse than normal today since the dressing's been loose and packing's fallen out.

I know, I know. It's disgusting and unpleasant to read about. Trust me, it's worse if you're sitting on it and writing about it.

Another untitled post

I'd like to get a sombre point out of the way first, if I may. Terry Pratchett, a great man and one of my favourite authors, has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, which was apparently responsible for an earlier mysterious stroke. He remains optimistic about his situation and doesn't expect it to impact his work in the foreseeable future.

The whole thing is a big shock but the fact that he's taking it so well is presumably a good sign, for both him and his fans. I like Pratchett for many reasons – his sense of humour, his brilliant writing style, his ability to craft tales and characters so believable that you can forget the whole thing is set on the back of a giant turtle...

If I had to summarise what I liked about Terry Pratchett, it would be that he's the kind of man who describes being diagnosed with Alzheimer's as “An Embuggerance”.


I realised something this morning – I really love lying in in the mornings. On the first day of a normal holiday, I'd normally not be awake before noon but today I had to be up before eight to get ready and go to hospital to have my dressing changed.

Now, I know there are far worse things in life than being forced out of bed earlier than normal but, thankfully, I don't have to really deal with them. In fact, I'm actually fairly lucky, since I'll likely be healed by the New Year at the latest whereas it apparently takes some people several months to fully recover. Though I'm told that the end of the dressing isn't the end of the problem entirely but I won't go into that now.


It's getting kind of late and I want to go to bed early (i.e. before midnight) to compensate for my inability to sleep in so I think I'll try to wrap up this oddly medical and depressing post now. I'll point you in the direction of The Grand List of Console RPG Cliches, a favourite text of mine. Worth browsing through, especially if you're into RPGs and more than a bit cynical.

Also, I'll write this as a reminder to myself. Remember to watch that Segway polo match with Woz in it tomorrow. That is all.

Have a nice day.

The End of Term as We Know it

And that was the last full day I'm going to have at school until January.

Tomorrow I just go in for the Christmas service and then that's the term over and I can do anything I want for the next three weeks, free of schoolwork. Well, except holiday homework. Which is just my Computing project, which I actually enjoy working on somewhat. And my Physics project, which isn't great but doesn't require too much work.

And several Maths exercises and prelims...

Okay, so I've got some schoolwork, but nothing that can't be easily done if I pace myself and just do a little each day. Or maybe I'll leave it right up until the last couple of days then madly scramble to get everything done.


Enough of that for now, I think. School today was another easy day – half an hour of actual Physics work* followed by a couple of Simpsons episodes (classic from series four: Mr Plow and Whacking Day) in the morning then we skipped Computing because the teacher wasn't going to be there. Funny story, actually. My good friend and constant source of amusement, Jimerson, was planning to show up five minutes late for his Accounts class to finish a song on Guitar Hero. But, being Jimerson, he got distracted and ended up not realising the time until his class only had five minutes left.

The interhouse public speaking competition took place in the afternoon. A couple of friends of mine, Sam Potter and Sam Stafford, were speaking for their respective houses. Potter had an interesting talk on intelligent design that won him a prize last year and Stafford had a surprisingly deep look at the idea of free will. Stafford's talk was also completely, unceasingly hilarious.

He didn't really have many planned jokes so most of it was either spontaneous or purely in his delivery. He could easily have got just as many laughs by standing up their and reading the dictionary. Unfortunately, he lost out to some boring talk that managed to confuse body language with medical symptoms. Even those on the winning team agreed that he should probably have got it.

And that was that, aside from the scramble at the end of the day to clear out the common room of all our various bits of electronic junk. I'm fairly sure I got everything but I may yet end up going to church tomorrow with a couple of N64 games stuffed in my pocket.

I've never been quite sure why the school always has to have a church Christmas service. I suspect that it's now more out of tradition than any overriding religious concern.

But it shouldn't take long and it's always a good feeling to walk out at the end of the whole thing knowing that it marks the end of a school term. My last Christmas term, come to think of it. A yearly event in my life for over a decade and tomorrow will be my last one... a strange thought.


Well, I'm going to head off to bed now. Maybe once the holidays come I'll have the time and energy to write posts that don't always end that way...





*By which I mean, moving a microwave probe back and forth along a desk and writing down some readings from a voltmeter.

Near-Midnight Ramblings

Uh-oh. Left the post a bit late again. Well, really late.

So, a mini-post is in order, I think.

Nothing much happening today. Got a couple of Christmas presents from Sam (who was wearing a bow in his hair at the time for some reason; he also wore it to his English class); a Doctor Who DVD and book. I was thinking of getting him something and I guess I probably should now.

That means I need to find something for him and both my cousins still. I'll have to do that over the next couple of days.

Computing today was a lot of fun – all of us have given up hope of getting our projects finished before the end of term so we were a little bit more relaxed than usual. Which is pretty damned relaxed. Our teacher actually yelled “Kaching!” when he managed to beat Sam at something (he thought a function Jimerson was looking for was “Append” but Sam thought it was “Amend”; turned out to be the former).

He also laughed his head off when looking at Sam's iPod Touch. Not because of the music library (which was amusing for different reasons) but because the “desktop” picture that you see when you bring it out of standby was a photo of Sam's new girlfriend in facepaint at the Christmas trade fair. When told this story, she too was fairly embarrassed.

And now I'm telling it to the entire internet. Well, the tiny fraction that reads this blog.


I'm finding it rather hard to believe that the school term ends on Friday... Seems like it was barely a few weeks ago that we first played Street Fighter in the common room. And that means Christmas is right around the corner as well. We've got our tree up now, having built it (it's a fake one, which I hate, but understand the need for) a few days beforehand then run into trouble with the fairy lights.


Tomorrow should be an interesting day. A double period of working on my Physics project in the morning followed by either watching Serenity or helping Sam Potter and Sam Stafford with their respective speeches for the afternoon's interhouse public speaking competition.


And I'll call that it for today. I need to go clear a load of crap of my bed and unpack my bag so that I have enough space to carry home a couple more games consoles tomorrow. I'll also need to bring home a TV. That could be problematic but I'm sure I'll figure something out.


You know, this hasn't really been a mini-post. I'm not too sure what it was really... Meh. I'm sure there's a tag for it somewhere.

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.

I couldn't think of a good enough pun

You know that feeling that you get when you've just cut your fingernails and the tips of your fingers are kind of tingly, but in an annoying way? I hate that feeling.


As always happens with Mondays, today was a fairly easy day. All we did in Physics, my one lesson, was a neat experiment and some simple calculations to predict and confirm its findings. We even got out early, because it was our last lesson of the term where the whole class would be there, so our teacher didn't want to start the next section.

Someone had brought in a 360 for the last week of term and we decided to use it to watch a DVD rather than play games for once. Due to an argument that apparently started a couple of weeks ago, we wound up watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Naturally, I'd heard of the film before but I'd never actually watched it, despite my dad having the whole Dollars trilogy in a boxset.

We spent the first little while, when there were more of us in the room over lunch, making fun of the film, talking over the dialogue. We decided, for instance, that Angel Eyes (the Bad) was not searching for a man who could tell him the location of a huge stash of money, but was actually trying to find his keys.

Despite all the life-threatening situations he got into, we knew that the Man with No Name couldn't die, because he was played by Clint Eastwood. As far as we were concerned, even the doctors in the film knew this and said as much when asked if he was going to die. Hell, the man could attract cannonballs somehow – you don't go through life with that little quirk without being unbelievably badass, or possibly a cross between Magneto and Wolverine.

Tuco's pink parasol was the source of much hilarity.

But as time went by and those who weren't interested went off to do other things, those of us who were hung around. We started complaining, not when people talked over the dialogue, so much as when they distracted us from the brilliant music and the tense and epic scenes. We watched with baited breath as we tried to figure out what the characters would do next. We continued to marvel at the pinnacle of bad-assery that is Clint Eastwood but we also began to like and care for the character.

At least, I did. I really like that film. So much so that I think I'm going to watch it again, probably in conjunction with its prequels and hopefully with some friends, since the experience was much enhanced by the running commentary at times.

You know what? My first purchases from the iTunes store were made tonight, more than a month after setting up my account for my iPhone. It was the two main soundtrack themes for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

I rarely buy songs. I rarely watch a movie, or even a TV series, twice through, especially in quick succession. But I truly love this film. Maybe it was just the atmosphere in the common room that helped me have fun with it, but during the later scenes, I was on the edge of my seat.

It's a truly great film and if you haven't seen it, I can do nothing but highly recommend it to you.


As for me, I'm going to think up some kind of pun as a title for this post and then retire to bed. It's been a busy day, somehow. Tomorrow should be nice and easy, seeing as how I have first two lessons off (during which time we fully intend to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and then a couple of lessons, followed by lunch and the infant/junior department nativity play in the afternoon.

Have a nice day. I did.

Christmas is Coming

Still not much closer to finding Christmas presents for my cousins. Narrowed it down a bit, I suppose, but considering that my sister has managed to acquire what seems to be several dozen presents for her friends in a matter of days, I'm having a surprising amount of trouble choosing something.


I think I've managed to get most of my Maths homework out of the way over the course of the evening. There are still a couple of questions that I'm struggling with but I don't have Maths till Tuesday, so I can take some time tomorrow to ask either my teacher or a classmate for some extra help. Of course, half of them seemed not to know how to do it either, so that's okay then.

I've no idea why I'm finding all this stuff so hard – I look at it and I know that I should be able to do it, I just have trouble concentrating. I'm fairly lazy at the best of times, it just seems worse now. Maybe it's a combination of pressure from other subjects and the approach of the holidays making me want to either focus elsewhere or wind down a bit.

Which reminds me, tomorrow is the first day of the last week of the school term. My school gets early, and long, holidays, partly due to the fact that we don't take bank holidays and the like off during term time and partly just because... well, because it's a private school and there's nothing that says they can't. I guess.

The Christmas service is on Friday morning, after which we break up until sometime in early January. I'm not sure if I'll be able to go or not. The initial concern was that I'd have a hard time sitting on the pews, which aren't exactly designed for luxury, but I reckon I could probably handle them for a couple of hours. I may still have a problem getting from the hospital to school by the time the buses leave for the church, though.

As much as I dislike the long-winded church services and the religious attitude of the school in general, I would quite like to be able to go. It, along with the other term ending ceremonies, always provides a nice way to round things off and start the holidays, in my opinion.

Still, I'll just have to wait and see what happens and how I'm feeling on the day. Until then, provided I can make some progress with both my Advanced Higher projects, the remaining days until the end of term should be fairly relaxed and fun.


I suppose I probably ought to get off to bed now. Top Gear was on late tonight, so Erin and I watched it in my bedrom, and James in his, because our parents wanted to get to bed early because they've both been ill over the weekend. That's kind of thrown off my timing a bit, as has the fact that I was meant to be in bed immediately after it finished. Over an hour ago. Thus, I'm paranoid that every single little creak outside my door is someone coming to yell at me and threaten to switch off my computer because I'm not in bed.

The argument that, technically speaking, they aren't either, probably won't work, so I'm going to very quietly type this last sentence, put this online and then get some sleep.

I'm rather proud of this one

I've been poking around gadget websites and toy magazines all day, trying to find something to get my little cousins for their Christmas. I normally get them something, ever since the year that Hamish, the elder of the two little boys, bought me a notebook and presented it to me as soon as he arrived on Christmas morning. My aunt said I was the only person that he insisted on buying something for.

A few weeks later, I spotted a Gamecube going cheap and, knowing how much he enjoyed playing ours whenever he came over, I bought one, along with a secondhand copy of Mario Kart: Double Dash. Ended up costing me about £40 but the look on his face when he unwrapped it, as well as the way he picked up the box that must have been half his height and ran to tell his mum what big cousin Alasdair had got him, made it worth every penny.

For reasons I am completely at a loss to explain, I'm pretty good with children and, for equally unknown reasons, Hamish and his little brother, Tristan, idolise me. A few weeks ago, my mum somehow ended up speaking to Tristan over the phone and, after he immediately asked if I was there, she told him I was at school but mentioned that I'd be getting him a Christmas present. She said later that she could hear his face light up over the phone.

I would have got them something anyway, but from then on there was no turning back and there had to be no chance of disappointment.

Thus, I return to my original point – I've spent the day idly trawling websites and catalogues trying to locate a gift for each of them. It's been fairly hard, not because they're hard to shop for, but because the kind of gadgetry they'd like, I also like. My Christmas list has doubled in size, probably too late for anything to be done about it.

Other than the stuff I would love to have now, it's amazing how much stuff for them I'd have liked when I was their age. Tristan can't get enough Power Rangers and Hamish loves LEGO; both are big fans of Star Wars, Transformers and anything Doctor Who. With the obvious exception of Torchwood. I don't know if either of them are really big fans of it, but Action Man is still proving as popular as ever, judging from the pages he gets in the Argos Christmas catalogue. Fewer guns and jeeps and more X-Treme!TM sports than I can recall but, hey, welcome to the era of political correctness and sheltering your children.

Come to think of it, the only things on that list that I've “grown out of” are Power Rangers and Action Man. And that's mostly because Power Rangers totally sucked after Billy, the original and greatest ever Blue Ranger, left.

Anyway, I'm slowly narrowing down the list based on what I think they'd really like and what I think I can afford. Thus, despite the sheer awesomeness (and road legal-ness) of the custom-built paintball tank, the fact that it costs £8000 puts it a little outside of my price range. I'll have to figure something out by the end of tomorrow, so that I can get everything ordered with enough time to spare.

Well, that's eleven o'clock now and I have to get up before eight o'clock tomorrow. It doesn't sound so bad, but I'm normally asleep until noon on Sundays and I haven't had a lie-in in... well over a fortnight now. How does the saying go? Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

I suppose the whole hospital thing is designed to make me healthier and I'm already fairly wise, so all I need is the wealth. Which I intend to squander on paintball tanks and arcade tables, not to mention all kinds of other, smaller things, that I can bring home from the shops on my own personal hovercraft.

Neutral Overall

It's funny how a couple of bad experiences towards the end can turn a good day into a crap one so remarkably rapidly.


I don't really want to go into details since it would probably be boring and that would annoy me further. Suffice it to say that I stuffed up some stuff, mostly schoolwork, which isn't so bad in itself but which has combined with getting a lot of crap from various people and the general inconvenience and annoyance brought on by my surgery to really get on my nerves.

I could make a pun about the surgery and the difficulty of taking (a) crap afterwards, but that would be beneath me. Still annoying though.


On the bright side, I got to talk to my old Physics teacher, Mr Cook, at school today. He's a great guy and always fun to talk with. He had been in school handing around some Christmas cards to former colleagues because he'd be going away on holiday for a while and didn't want to miss some members of staff who were leaving after the end of term.

He was apparently going to Portugal to play golf for a week, having been asked by a friend who had had someone drop out of their group at the last moment. Such is the life of a retired old man, apparently. Sounds pretty cool, to be honest. If you like golf.

So it was nice to see him and chat for a while about school and life in general.


I think I'm in a better mood now. Seems like it was a smart thing to do to focus on the positive aspects of the day rather than the negative. It might all be ruined by the nightly shouting match in a few minutes but I'm hoping to avoid that by going to bed early.

I also get to get up late tomorrow morning – I have an appointment to see a consultant at the hospital just after ten o'clock, so there's no point in going in for just one lesson before leaving again. It means I miss Computing, which is annoying, but not that I miss Maths, which is equally annoying. Because I haven't done a large chunk of Maths homework and there's no way I'll be able to get it done tomorrow.

Oh, well. I'll figure something out and do it over the weekend, along with my Computing project and Physics research... I thought the end of term was a time for winding down schoolwork? Meh. I'm off to bed.

One way in which I'm disimilar to Garfield

Well, another near-lessonless Monday, come and gone. I took my old laptop into school today, the one with no battery. Managed to get some Visual BASIC done for my Computing project, in between watching Monty Python DVDs. When I started doing the latter, I said that if anyone asked, I was programming in Python. Rather depressingly, out of the five or so people in the room, Skippy was the only one who got such a geeky joke.

I got a fair bit of actual work done, though I would have liked to get more done. The basic groundwork is certainly in place and I just need some advice from my teacher on how to link together a few parts of it. Assuming I don't come under much more pressure from tests or other projects, I should be able to get it done by the end of term deadline.

Unfortunately, I have utterly failed to do any other homework, including the large amount of Maths that's either overdue or due in very soon. I did manage to rattle through some Physics, but since it's due in tomorrow, I didn't exactly have much choice in the matter.


Beyond that, several people, myself included, got some university places confirmed today. I mentioned before that I had got a couple of unconditional offers for Edinburgh's Computer Science and Physics courses but I hadn't quite realised just how impressive that was until I mentioned it to a girl in my class. She pointed out that only two people from our school got accepted into Edinburgh last year and promptly gave me a large hug.

Then we both got confirmation of places at Aberdeen, which was where she really wanted to go, so that led to much screaming and joyous phone calls while the rest of us just stood around looking somewhat bemused.

What this means for me is that I'm basically just waiting to hear from St Andrews, which is where I really want to go, though I haven't entirely ruled out Edinburgh yet. In turn, this means that I'll probably be using my iPhone a lot more at school, checking my emails once a minute.


Oh, come on, NeoOffice. How can you not have a problem with “email” but think that “emails” isn't a word? Bah, nuts to it.


I think I'm going to sign off now and head to bed. I'll probably have to spend a fair chunk of first two lessons tomorrow trying to do Maths homework and revision.... And I've just remembered that I'm going to be getting in late. Possibly problematic, methinks...

Ah, well. It'll sort itself out. See you tomorrow, when there should hopefully be more information on this whole GameSpot firing incident.

Afternoon and night are becoming very similar

It's half past six and it's pitch dark outside. Has been for the last two hours or so. That's December for you, I guess.

It's certainly starting to feel more and more like Christmas. My normal way of judging when the season begins is the first time I come across a Coca-Cola Christmas advert and I heard one on the radio a couple of days ago.

I know it's an unusual way to judge the start of such a well-defined period but it's proven remarkably accurate over the years – particularly as most other companies seem to kick off their Christmas marketing in late January these days.

There is, of course, also the ever reliable advent calendar* for keeping you up to date with the countdown to Christmas but they don't seem to carry enough significance for some reason. Unless they have chocolate in them


Anyway, it's a fair bit later in the night now and I still have some stuff to clear away and pack for school tomorrow, so I'll try to wrap this up pretty quickly, if you don't mind. Well, I'd do it if you did mind anyway, since I don't know who you are (mostly) and thus I don't care about your opinion. Which reminds me, need to get those visitor numbers from Skippy.


While the days are getting shorter and lights that were hung across streets in early November have had their lighting up ceremonies, I haven't quite got into the Christmas spirit entirely yet, despite that distinct sense that it's there around me. I guess I'll relax a little once the holidays arrive and I can stop worrying about various deadlines (several upcoming tests plus my Computing and Physics projects needing to be finished and started respectively before the end of term on the 14th) and start worrying about what presents I'm not going to get.

And that reminds me of something else; I need to check that my mum has ordered that copy of OS X Leopard. She's something of a technophobe who barely understands what it even is let alone trying to order it off the Apple website, so I doubt it.

But you never know. My brother may have helped her or something.


One final point. As much as I dislike writing about (and hearing about and being asked about and, especially, having) this pilonidal sinus thing, I feel I have to mention a couple of things about it. The first is good news and the second is a minor annoyance. The good news is that it seems to be healing nicely, despite the fact that I'll apparently still be needing fresh dressings every other day until the new year. I've at least been able to go through today without taking painkillers. I suspect I'll need them for bed though.

The annoying thing is a sub-annoyance of the whole “having to go into hospital every morning” thing. While it never came up last week, when I went in both today and yesterday, the nurses were under the impression that I was to have a bath before the dressings were changed. I told the one yesterday that I had one at home and I figured that'd be the end of it but no, it happened again this morning. Twice, with two different nurses.

The second part of this is that I've never had the same kind of dressing twice, and half of them have been useless. Either they don't cover enough area or they simply don't stick on and require some emergency use of some old surgical tape that my mum had in a cupboard somewhere.

What I can gather from all this is that, filed somewhere in my local hospital, is a little note that says I need a bath at the hospital, which I don't, but not what kind of dressing I should have on the wound. Not exactly inspiring stuff.


Enough about that now. I still need to do those things I mentioned needing to do a few paragraphs of complaining ago, so I'm gonna go do them and then I'm going to take some painkillers and get to bed.

Have a nice day.






*My current one is a semi-3D sled thing with a cut-out of Santa in the middle. Don't look at me like that.

Time, Crocodiles and Journalistic Integrity

I thought this post was going to be rushed but I've actually been able to take my time on it. Incredible.


I got up an awful lot earlier than I normally do on weekends today because I had a hospital appointment. That, and the fact that it's getting dark around here before five o'clock, has really screwed by natural body clock. As opposed to my unnatural body clock, which I had surgically implanted several years ago so that I would always know the time. It's really useful but it makes me seem kind of like that crocodile from Peter Pan.

As such, the day has gone by really slowly for me. Not slowly enough for me to actually bother to do any kind of work or anything, but I feel that it's taken noticeably longer for me to go from waking up to writing this.

If the same thing happens again tomorrow, and I don't get distracted by practice Maths prelims and Visual BASIC programming, I might find the time to sit down and write a bit more of The Grey Line. Some interesting plot points have been coming together in my head recently, I just need to figure out where to incorporate them. I also need to focus a bit more on ideas for the beginning since it's the part I'm actually writing.


I've been watching this story (work your way up from the bottom to see it progress) with great interest. Essentially, a reviewer (Jeff Gerstmann) over at GameSpot gave a mediocre review of the game Kane & Lynch at the same time that the publisher of said game was running a huge advertising campaign on GameSpot.

Not long after, Gerstmann was fired and rumours started flying. See the link above for all the details and rumours, some of which are just silly (the suggestion that he didn't play the PS3/Xbox 360 game the full way through simply because his Xbox Live account doesn't have enough achievements) and some are a bit more grounded (the obvious implication that either the publisher or the GameSpot higher-ups didn't like the negative review of a big game).

What I will say is that, if corporate pressure was indeed the cause, then it reflects very badly on video game journalists and the industry upon which they report. I'll keep my eye on it for now and maybe voice a more definitive opinion once more is known (i.e. once all the relevant parties stop saying “no comment” to every question).


Well, I'm off to bed because my eyes are starting to hurt and I'm getting too tired to type. See you all tomorrow. Whoever you may be. That reminds me, I need to ask Skippy for the visitor numbers for the last few months...

Slightly rushed due to pain and yelling

So I actually did end up going back to school for that Christmas trade fair thing, having spent most of last lesson dashing around (likely to the detriment of my health) setting up consoles in the Maths room.

It was quite a lot of fun and I would have liked to stay for longer but I don't think I could have actually handled much more walking and standing around. There were a few of us in charge of the video games room, minus the people who just came in there to skive off from doing actual work. We had three 360s running, two system-linked for Halo 3 competitions and one for Guitar Hero, a Gamecube connected to the smartboard's projector (when it wasn't overheating) and a Wii with various titles going as well.

I was mostly responsible for getting money from people (50p for whatever constituted one “go” on the game of their choice) but I ended up being the one who dealt with a lot of the younger kids as well. They all seemed to be having great fun.

There was one kid in particular, probably wasn't more than about 5, that wanted to have a shot on the Halo multiplayer setup. I sat next to him, coaching him through the controls and occasionally giving him a hand while a friends sat at the other Xbox, taking note of when I was talking and when the kid was trying to aim, letting him do some damage, even a few kills, while making a show of taking some potshots at me.

I'd go into more detail, and I might do so tomorrow, but I'm getting into deeper and deeper shit every night trying to stay up beyond my recommended bedtime. I get it bad enough normally but this wound has just made getting to bed early that much more sacred.

The funniest part is all the reminders about how serious this is, how bad it will be if I don't ge it fixed, etc., etc. I have no idea why my parents feel the need to tell me this when I'm the one who can't bend down or take a seat without a cushion thanks %£@*&^$! giant incision in my ass.

Anyway, I'm going to take my painkillers and go to bed before this turns into another whiny post and I get yelled at some more. Have a nice day.

The Good, the Bad and the Bloody Painful

It's been a long day so I'm going to keep this short.

First of all, my wound seems to be healing up a bit. The pain seems to be a bit milder, which means I've been able to cut back on painkillers, which is good in itself because I generally dislike taking painkillers, as much as they help in this particular situation. Also, one of the side-effects of these painkillers is constipation, which also makes cutting back a nice prospect.

Today was another largely mediocre day at school – there's still the occasional joke (in good taste from my friends and bad from the assholes in the school, also known as “nearly everybody else”) about my joggers and my surgery and trekking around my classes has proven to be a bit of a hassle. Still, I got my Computing project more or less working, simply by overcoming a silly mistake that I should have noticed days ago.

In other news, Billie Piper and her character of Rose Tyler are apparently making a comeback (more here) in the next series of Doctor Who. This should be quite good because, unlike a lot of other characters, Rose and her family had plenty of time and effort put in to develop them and I quite like each of them. And, of course, if the Doctor can finally get some closure then maybe he can quit whining about everything that isn't Rose and start saving the universe in his inimitable happy-go-lucky style again.

It'll be tricky to do, since there was so much emotional investment put into her final scenes and the whole arc was wrapped up so well and tidily that I have a hard time believing that they can pull it off again. Not to mention that with three female companions, at least two of whom are explicitly in love with the Doctor, in the TARDIS at once, there are going to be a lot of ridiculously emotional scenes going on and I don't much like them. I'm not against them as such, it's just that they often seem to jar with the rest of the show.

Still, all I can do is keep an eye out for new information and hope that they manage to pull it off properly.

But this “short” post has, thanks to various angry interruptions, taken almost half an hour, so I reckon that I probably ought to end it now. My final point for today, and one that rather cheered me up, is that I have had an unconditional offer to study Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh next year, not more than a couple of weeks after sending my application away.

Of course, I also got an email telling me that UCAS had just set up a new web tool that let you compare information and ratings for different establishments to help you before you apply. Thanks a load, guys...

An improvement on yesterday's post, at the very least

I left this a bit late again, considering it's eleven o'clock now. And I "promised" (translation: "was told that") I would be in bed by half past. This makes some sense, since I have to be up early tomorrow in order to have a bath, complete with salt, to loosen up my wound padding before it's removed and to have the first shower I've had since Thursday night.

On the bright side, the combination of some strong painkillers and a binary covered cushion that I never thought I'd have a use for is seemingly enough to let me sit here and surf through my favourite locations on the interwebs without too much trouble.

It should also mean that I can get into school tomorrow, though I'll probably be taking both painkillers and cushion with me as well as wearing some old joggers instead of the school's mandated dark grey trousers. To be fair, joggers are a kind of trousers and these particular ones are light grey, so I get by on two out of three points, which isn't bad.

I may also not go in for the whole day. I'll definitely be missing first lesson since I need to go and get the dressing changed again, as I did this morning and will be doing daily until Wednesday and probably every other day for a few days after that. Regular readers will know that I enjoy Mondays because I only have one lesson, Physics, second period, so I can spend most of the day in the common room messing around.

My mother thinks that sitting around there may be a bad idea, but on the basis that the alternative is just sitting around at home instead, I've convinced her that I'll go in and phone if things get unbearable. So we'll see how that goes.

Anyway, I've taken a large number of breaks from writing this post so it's now almost half past. Thus, I need to wrap this up, finish reading some random internet trivia and then get to bed.

I'll leave you with one final point, from the perspective of someone who's spend the larger (I would normally have said "better" there, but it seemed inaccurate somehow) part of the last three days with a large bandage covering much of his buttocks.

That point is this. Despite the ridiculous number of synonyms for “evacuating your bowels” that exist in the English language, very, very few are appropriate for discussion with your doctor.

Have a nice day.

Surgery, Scrolling and Schoolwork

Would you believe that there were people playing chess in the common room at school today? I barely believe it, and I was there.


Anyway, it's now 11 o'clock, I'm going into hospital tomorrow and I need to write two blog posts as well as fiddle around with some other stuff. Such as converting some AVIs to iPod format so I can watch them on my iPhone tomorrow while waiting before and after my surgery. Don't worry, I'll put it in aeroplane mode so it doesn't send any signals and screw up some life-saving equipment.

I've had to pack a bag for heading off, since it's possible that, as I've said many times before, I'll have to stay in overnight, meaning I need pyjamas and my toothbrush and so on. I really hope I don't have to since it just adds to the inconvenience, not to mention the fact that I'm not particularly fond of hospitals or the food and beds they have their.

I don't have some irrational phobia stemming from childhood trauma in a hospital or anything, I just have no reason to like them. By necessity and design, they're very clinical and sparse. And, as everyone knows, I very much dislike being away from my stuff for any length of time.


I think that's enough of that for now, though I could continue. Actually, I still might since I'll have to mention it in about 15 minutes when I'm writing tomorrow's blog post...

An idea has just occurred to me. I'm going to be awake past midnight anyway, in all likelihood. So why not just write the post now and post it at 00:01 or something similar? I've actually considered doing this before now, particularly if I wanted a day off. Yeah, I reckon I'll do that. It means I don't have to worry about it going up properly tomorrow and I don't have to rely on Skippy to do something requiring a small degree of competence and timing. Always a good combination.


On an unrelated note, my mouse scroll ball is still acting up. I guess I'll just have to give it a good clean with a damp cloth then turn it upside down and hope that this somehow solves the problem. It might have worked in the past, but I can't be sure.


On yet another unrelated note, my Advanced Higher projects are both coming along quite nicely. I'm definitely getting somewhere with the programming for my Computing project. It's not exactly pretty and it only works in theory right now, but I reckon I can have it finished before the deadline. Unless I get really tied up in all the documentation and testing stuff, which is never nearly as fun as the programming.

I think I've finally figured out what I need to do for my Physics project on antennas. I just need to get a bit more information and then I can make a start on my first experiment. The advantage to my chosen topic, how the strength of a wave varies according to the distance from different types of transmitters, is that I can essentially just repeat the same experiment multiple times for the different antennas and have it still count as separate experiments.

I will get different results that I can use for the theory part, it saves some time and effort in the practical part and the calculation of various tedious but necessary things like uncertainties. I'll still have to do it but since all the data will be the same type, I can essentially just repeat the same method again and again once I figure it out.


That's about it. I think I have time to watch another episode of Numb3rs now as I slowly write my second post of the night and wait for downloads to finish and conversions to stop running. And pack my bag...

My mouse isn't scrolling properly. Again.

Another day passing by far too quickly. I'm fairly sure that I stuffed up at least part of a Maths test but I did manage to get my Computing homework done as well as getting a significant (not exactly large, but significant) chunk of my Computing project completed.

Now all I need to worry about is my Physics project. I'm meant to be doing something on wavelengths and dipole antennas but I really have no idea how or where to go from the basic notes I've got so far. I guess I'll just have to figure it out as I go along.


I really have nothing to say. I just deleted two big paragraphs that I wasn't happy with and I can't be bothered reattempting them. All they said was that, due to a chance that I may be in hospital overnight on Friday, I'll need to write two posts tomorrow and have Skippy upload the second if it looks like I won't be getting out. Also, I'm annoyed that I have to miss school, especially non-uniform day, for the surgery. Just my luck, I guess.


I'll leave with one final thought. Depending on how eloquent and interesting I find it after I've written it, I'll call this either a crappy post or a mini-post.

I've been watching a few crime mystery shows lately, Numb3rs and CSI: New York in particular and, while I like both of these shows, they do sometimes have rather formulaic plots*. Roger Ebert once said (referenced here) that you can often tell who a murderer is in a mystery fiction simply because they have no other reason to be there.

For example, in an early episode of Numb3rs that I watched tonight, I could tell instantly that a character was significant, probably behind it all, because all they did was drop in once or twice to tell their boss, who was being interviewed by the FBI, that they were late for a meeting or needed to sign something.

That may seem fairly insignificant but consider that this role could simply have been ignored. The viewer doesn't need to know what documents need signed. If the boss were late for his meeting, he could simply have looked at his watch before excusing himself. But the writers created this character and the production team hired and paid an actor instead, implying that they had a solid reason to do so.

Sure enough, she was paying for hired hits and had committed some rather nasty (and potentially dangerous) fraud.


Anyway, I'll end this here. And I think it's actually long enough to count as a proper post. Hurray. Now, I could go and watch another episode of Numb3rs or I could go to bed... where's that Rapidshare link?






*Come to think of it, you could say that the whole concept of Numb3rs relies on formulas, if you were really into puns.

I had no idea how geeky this entire post was until I re-read it

So, I'm sitting here watching Children in Need while Super Mario Galaxy is sitting downstairs. Why? Simple. A short sketch that may be on sometime in the next hour or two involving both Peter Davison and David Tennant in their roles as their respective Doctors.

Since I don't give a toss about the rest of the Children in Need* and they've just started a segment featuring the Spice Girls, I figure I'll talk a little about my brief experience with Galaxy. So far, I've played it for maybe an hour and a half, tops. And I'm hooked.

It's the first game I've played in a long while when I decide that I'm going to stop, glance at the clock and then do everything in my power to rationalise my decision to grab just one more star. I love this game. It puts a wonderful twist on every trope and formula you've come to expect from the platforming genre, in much the same way as Super Mario 64 did 10 years before it.

I don't know if it'll leave quite as large a stamp on the genre as SM64 did, though. It's not quite that big of a leap from what came before it as that famous wall-jump from 2D to 3D was. It's still an incredible game though and I'd recommend it to anyone who can get their hands on a Wii.

I expect I'll have more to say on the game as a whole once I've played it more. And when I don't have B-list Celebrity Pillock No. 12 crooning away in the background. I don't care about singing or celebrity chefs or dancing news-readers! I want Doctor Who!!!


Okay, just watched Time Crash. Not entirely serious and a few flaws that means that it might be tricky to fit into canon but, hey, timey wimey balls in action.


It's now a few hours later. You know, one of the first things I did after watching Time Crash was discuss it with Sam, one of the few people I know with a knowledge of Doctor Who that's as good as mine, possibly even better.... All right, the only person. Anyway, we were discussing fascinating things, such as how shorting out the time differential between the two incarnations also helps explain Patrick Troughton's aged appearance in The Two Doctors, assuming you don't want to accept the Season 6B theory.

And all the other multi-Doctor specials involved direct intervention by Time Lords, implying that they have a way of circumventing this little anomlay.

Every day, something happens to me to reaffirm my geekiness. It's actually Sam's birthday tomorrow, so I picked up an “I void warranties” t-shirt and some Zelda: Twilight Princess figurines from ThinkGeek and presented them to him at school, where Jimerson also provided him with a Twilight Princess wall-scroll. He seemed to greatly enjoy both and had much fun putting together the figures while he was meant to be doing... well, probably something more school-related.

Every day, something happens to me to reaffirm my friends' geekiness. There are some fairly distinct divides in my year group at school and the lines are drawn roughly along the walls of the common room. The “other” room contains an Xbox and a whole load of people playing FIFA. “My” room contains four consoles from a variety of different decades along with two TVs fitting the same criteria and a whole load of people alternating between Mario Kart, Donkey Kong 64 and co-op Probotector.

There's no real point to any of this ranting. I just find it mildly amusing.

Anyway, my throat's starting to hurt again, as is my head, so that's probably time for me to go to bed. Tomorrow, I'll... wait, I still haven't done last week's woodle, have I? Oh, well. No big deal. It just means I can use the same little Post-It note to remind me.





*Just to clarify, I care about needy children. I just don't like watching celebrities butcher perfectly good songs.

Today was good, tomorrow should be even better

You know what I've decided the best thing about the iPhone is? The internet capability. Sure, it's a great phone and does all kinds of other neat phone-like things (except games, which is the one place that I feel it lets me down), the ability to just pull up any website I want and browse without restriction is incredible.

Take an example from today. I was walking down to the corner shop near the school, as we're allowed to do, with a bunch of my friends. One started talking about his WoW guild* and how everyone hated one particular person, who had recently posted a hilarious photo of themselves on the forums which he wanted to show us so we could mock it.

Ordinarily, this would mean going through the arduous task of waiting until we were back at school with our junk food, going into the common room kitchen, plugging in my USB flash drive, running the browser that lets us get past the filters and then waiting while the page loaded.

Ordinarily.

But, as soon as he started mentioning this possibility, I simply took out my iPhone, punched in the URL and bingo, we were laughing our heads off at some fat and angry-looking Canadian guy that one of us knew from an MMO. If you can think of a better use for instant internet access, then I tip my hat to you, good sir.


So that's my day, so far. There's only half an hour of it left and I intend to spend that doing several things. These are, in rough order of descending importance, Computing revision, Maths homework and Physics homework. The first is the most important simply because Computing is first lesson tomorrow. The latter two are a bit more flexible, though perhaps more important to me personally, since if I can get them done, then I have the whole of tomorrow afternoon off.

And then I come home to play Super Mario Galaxy and watch a multi-Doctor mini-episode of Doctor Who (in the name of charity and all, too).

Tomorrow's going to be awesome. And it starts in 25 minutes... I'm going to post this now, apologies for the brevity.






*Note: anytime I say “a bunch of my friends” you can pretty much just substitute it with “a bunch of geeks” and it still means the same thing.

Nothing Much

So, right now, I'm looking up possible Christmas presents. Is it really that time of year again?


You know, I think I truly have nothing to say. Today was just an average day. We tidied the common room only because failing to do so would result in [insert dramatic music here] consequences. I did a Maths test. We accidentally discovered that the Street Fight EX 2 Plus character Sharon can use a gun. Almost nothing happened in computer club, other than me slightly tweaking a Game Maker game I've been working on each week.

Nothing particularly profound or even particularly interesting happened, as far as I can recall. It was just an ordinary day.

I like ordinary days.

Other people might prefer to do something special or go on a holiday every once in a while to get away from ordinary days, finding them boring. My view on this is that if you find your ordinary days boring, you should change what you do on an ordinary day.

Like most philosophies, it might not hold up brilliantly under close inspection but it works well enough for me.

I'm really just rambling now, making short statements that seem impressive until you think about them. Well, maybe they do. I wouldn't know since I'm not really thinking of them. I'm also trying a little trick of adding a small, single sentence paragraph after some of my longer ramblings in order to add weight to the final statement.

I learned that from Higher English.


So anyway, the throbbing in the back of my head seems to be trying to tell me that I should go to bed. I'll see what I can do about having something more to show for tomorrow's post. Maybe I'll do some more fiction writing. You'll just have to wait and see.

Have a nice day.

I wonder if I could study procrastination at university...

My computer keeps bleeping at random intervals. What is it trying to tell me? That some unknown download is finished? That there's an error somewhere? That someone's stuck down a well? Who knows.


Well, it's twenty five to eleven now and I still have some Maths revision to do... for a test I have second lesson tomorrow... and I don't have first period free... So I really need to wrap this up pretty quickly. What should I do... how about little whining, possibly with some whinging and a touch of complaining and self-doubt?

Okay, so that'd be a bit much. But I would like to apologise to both my readers for the rather lousy updates recently. I seem to go through these periodical cycles where I just go into a slump and can't produce anything. I was hoping that it might have let up after I finally dealt with my university applications but a series of tests as well as an awareness that I'm falling behind on some school projects (Physics in particular, though I'm actually a bit ahead of schedule in Computing) has meant that I'm still feeling pressure.

And pressure, for some reason, leads to procrastination. On a rather random side note, I put up a poster in the common room today that dealt with procrastination. I got it from ThinkGeek along with a recent order of t-shirts (I got three, effectively doubling my extremely limited wardrobe). It was that quite well known one about procrastination; “Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.” I think it's been adopted as a kind of motto.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh, yes. My procrastinating and lack of effort on various fronts. I need to do more on The Grey Line and the MacTake as well as getting the VersusCOM podcast back up and running. Then I've got half a dozen other little side projects to carry on with. It seems like I've not only bitten off more than I can chew but I've also realised it and now I'm just not bothering to eat at all.

That was a terrible metaphor but it hopefully gets the point across.

Now, I've just had a rather unpleasant conversation (as tends to happen at this time of night, for some reason) and I still need to do that Maths revision so I'm going to call it quits here just as soon as I find a funny link.

Hmm... the treatment of video games in this TV show clip is hilarious. Note towards the end how they load Excel spreadsheets on an apparently unmodified Xbox.

It's like a commentary track for my life

11:02 Woke up late, annoyingly, and can't be bothered doing much. I've still got to do all that homework and other stuff that I mentioned yesterday, so to free up some time, I'm going to do one of these “blogging throughout the day” posts. Haven't done one of these in a while.

11:52 I've just been looking at the Apple website to try and find some sort of cover for my iPhone, since I'm paranoid about scratches on the screen. One case I found said it offered “full protection” for your phone but apparently left the screen entirely open. So I guess “full protection” means “everything but the most important two fifths of the surface area.

13:13 Looking at university courses right now. I need one more as a back-up in case I don't get into the courses I actually want to do. Problem is, I'm having to go solely by their websites and those are... well, pretty useless. The UCAS course searching system doesn't give a huge amount of detail either. Meh. I'll probably just end up choosing one at random.

14:08 Doing these really reminds me how little I actually do in any given day. I'm doing some Physics revision right now, if anyone cares.

14:46 Decided on my final course choices and tried to send away my application form but the UCAS sites is apparently having some sort of internal error. No idea what that means but it isn't exactly reassuring. I'll try again later. For now, I still haven't done much of my Physics stuff.

16:33 UCAS is still having problems of some kind. I'm basically just sitting here doing nothing while my brother plays Halo 3. I've recently become a little disillusioned with Halo. The first game was excellent and the second added some nice touches and the oh-so-important online multiplayer. But the third... I don't know. Good, but a little samey. Maybe that's why I don't find myself playing it a lot.

Anyway, I still need to do some of that Physics, don't I?

16:43 Just had to unplug one of my precious 6-socket power strips so that I could take it into school tomorrow for the consoles in the common room. Kind of annoying but I can live with it for a while, I guess. Haven't done any Physics yet.

19:25 There was a question on the Wii's Everybody Votes channel that asked which futuristic thing you'd like to have – flying cars or robots. Robots already exist. I voted for flying cars. Based on a different spelling of a slight variation on a typo I just made, I'd also like to point out that I wouldn't be averse to flaying Tsars.

19:43 I can't find my slippers.

19:44 I found my slippers.

21:08 Top Gear just finished a few minutes ago. They were racing from one side of London to another by various methods this week, as well as all the other usual stuff. One of these days, I'm determined to do some crazy stunt like those guys do every week. Schemes may well already be forming.

Also, I have just now discovered that the extendible shaving mirror doohickey in the bathroom next door has two differents modes, accessed by rotating it along the central axis. The one on the other side is all crazy and fun-mirrory. And I still need to do more Physics. And try sending off my UCAS stuff.

21:31 UCAS system is apparently back up and running. So that's my university applications dealt with then. Now, I guess all I can do is wait.

22:52 Well, I reckon that's my day pretty much complete. I'm just going to paste this into Blogger, agonise over the formatting for a couple of minutes and then... do my Physics revision... yeah. Not good. You know what's kind of ironic about this unit? I can understand all the quantum mechanics, but “simple” harmonic motion annoys the hell out of me.

Not about the iPhone. Mostly.

Uh-oh. Haven't done a woodle... and I actually have an idea for one, too. I'll go do that. It's a Stick Guys so it'll take me about two minutes. And most of that will be waiting for Comic Life to load. On an unrelated note, I was just about to write “explode” (or possibly “a splode”) there instead of “load”. I have no idea why.


Okay, change of plans. I got distracted so I'm just going to do this first.

Wish I had some idea of what I was going to do.


Okay, I just tried to do something about my iPhone but I just can't seem to talk about it in a way I'm happy with. Maybe I'm tired. That, and it seems a bit boring. If you're interested in it (or you've seen some sort of UK news source in the last few days), you'll probably know all you need to and you don't much care about my experience of it. Which I'll be writing up for the MacTake anyway.

So, another unproductive Saturday has passed. Tomorrow, I'll probably have to do some homework or something. Actually, I'll have to do a lot of Physics revision, since I didn't do too well in the last test. I was still one of the better ones in the class, it's just that nobody in the class did too well. Kind of a long story. I'll also need to catch up on my Physics and Computing projects, mostly just doing some research for the former and a little bit of programming for the latter.

I'll also need to buy a new 8-socket power strip as part of a Nefarious Scheme^TM to rearrange to the games console/study room in the common room.

It's been a while since I took stock and did a to do list, hasn't it? Depressingly little has changed I suppose, but I do feel I'm closer to getting on track with The Grey Line and I've managed to play some of the games I've been meaning to play. Nothing huge. Oh, and if everything goes according to plan, tomorrow should see me finally send off my university applications. That means that the work ends and the waiting begins.

It should be quite a busy day then. I'll just have to see how that turns out. Right now, I'm going to finish up that woodle I mentioned and go to bed. I'm hoping that if I get up early, I'll be more productive. No idea why. I'm just like that.

The Writing on the Wall

Our form class took the assembly at school this morning. Thanks to the suggestion of some imbecile in the year below us, our topic for the assembly was... ABBA. Yeah. I don't know either. I just had to read some sentence about the Eurovision Song Contest then stand on stage looking awkward until it was all over. We hadn't done so much as a full rehearsal and it was widely agreed afterwards that on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being craptastic and 10 being craptacular, we were a solid 5.


A funny thing happened in school today. We have one wall of our room (i.e. the room with all the consoles in it) in the Sixth Year common room that's blank, the others having all been painted on in some way. I came in this morning and, while I was doing my usual tidying up of all the cables that somehow get tangled up every day, I noticed that Skippy had written his timetable on the wall. Actually on the wall. In pen.

Philippa, a friend of mine who normally takes up responsibility for keeping the room tidy, asked me about it, since she had been off school for the previous two days. I had to admit that I had no idea and so we questioned Skippy about it when he came in. Well, maybe questioning is the wrong word. I pointed at the wall and said “WTF, Skippy?”, but the end result is the same.

It transpired that somebody had thought yesterday that, since it was a pain in the neck always having to look up your timetable when you forgot what lesson you were missing the first five minutes of to play just one more lap of Mario Kart, they may as well write their timetable on the wall.

There's now about a dozen of the things up there, mine included.

The strange thing is how we each did our own one in a kind of unique way. Mine, as Sam pointed out, was probably the neatest one up there, clearly marked with more or less straight lines and room numbers in the corners of the boxes. His own was a more or less illegible scrawl with half the lessons filled in by trial-and-error and wild guesswork. Sam Potter's was barely visible but written in large letters and with the rows and columns reversed from everyone else's. Skippy's was fairly organised and in a convenient spot by the door, neatly arranged along with several other people's that I think he had also put up.

Other people that I don't mention so much did their timetables in their own way too. Philippa quickly just wrote up one that, while practical and visible, took up about five times as much space as any of the others. Joss's (I've never mentioned him before and probably won't ever again) was left unfinished and mostly blank until Sam Stafford came along and randomly wrote “Biology” in a few places. I have mentioned Jimerson before and his... well, I didn't get a good look at it, but it was near to Skippy's and some of it was probably wrong.

I'm not entirely sure what all this says about each person and I wouldn't want anyone to draw any conclusions based on how my friends draw their timetables on a wall, but, in context, all of them make some kind of sense for each person. Of course, writing your timetable on a wall might not seem to make much sense to begin with but... somehow, for my little crowd of friends and non-hated acquaintances, it does. Otherwise, I don't think I could count them as friends.

Muppets, Mondays and Musings

Ever find yourself losing track of time whilst singing Muppet tunes in your head? No? Just me then? Fair enough, I suppose that's better for everyone. It has given me an interesting idea for a machinima though. Might explore that in the future.


I don't think that I can really write much tonight since my hand is killing me. I tripped on some stairs this morning and reached out to grab the banister. Unfortunately, I had my hand spread out in just the right way that I only caught one finger on it, which got bent back a bit. It seemed okay for most of the day, but it is the finger I tend to use for typing and scrolling, which may explain why it seems worse now.

I'm also being forced to go to bed slightly earlier than normal since I was once again caught being up at half past midnight by my dad. Curiously, as with my supposedly bloodshot and sore-looking eyes, my parents are the only ones who notice any adverse effect on my health from this behaviour. How curious.

Anyway, enough teenage whining. I don't really have much to say so I'll run through a couple of things and finish with an interesting thought.

I'm now pretty sure that I want an iPhone for Christmas and I'm seriously considering waiting in line for one at midnight outside the Glasgow Apple Store. May or may not happen, but if it does then I expect that Sam and Skippy will want to tag along.

Of course, this means I won't be able to try out a phone with Google's new OS any time soon. Oh, well. I can only have so many gadgets at once. At least until I get super rich somehow.

I've mentioned before that I was having a hospital appointment today to do with my having a pilonidal sinus (don't Google it, seriously). I had the appointment and it seems that I'm going to need minor surgery to excise it. This will be under a general anaesthetic (meaning I'll be unconscious) and I'll have to take a day off school, possibly two if I'm held overnight, unlikely as that may be.

While I don't really have much control over what day it is that I have the surgery, my mum wants to go with a Monday if possible, since that's the day when I only have one lesson. I'd really rather do it some other day because I very much enjoy my easy Mondays, sitting in the common room with Sam, who has a similar scheduling peculiarity, and watching people come and go. While it would obviously take time to catch up on missed work, it wouldn't really be that hard and I'd rather do that than miss some of the bizarre stuff that happens amongst my friends every day.

Basically, I can catch up on lessons but not on life. Which is a very odd thing for me, of all people, to say. I shall have to ponder that some more.

For now, however, I'm going to bed. Not because I'm listening to my parents but because my finger is hurting like hell.

If someone invented chocolate chip video games, my life would be complete

After going through my usual Sunday routine of waking up late, reading my webcomics (only about eight out of a hundred or so update on Sundays, so it's fairly easy), downloading some software updates and having a mug of Ribena and some chocolate chip cookies in lieu of an actual breakfast, I finally got around to playing Portal today.

I haven't finished it yet, but I got very close to the end before failing a challenge and restarting before I'd even done the previous one. That was the only time I disliked anything about the game and the checkpoint system had worked fine until then. Of course, the fact that I got so far in one sitting does highlight just how short the game is and, as with most puzzle-based games, there's very limited replay value unless you want to do some speed-running.

It's brilliantly atmospheric though and you'll often find that a statement by the slightly creepy computerised voice will make you laugh at the same time as shivers pass down your spine.

You know what I've just realised? I forgot to do a woodle again this week. I'll try to remember for next week, but I really need to just get into a routine, like I have done with my daily posts here. Unfortunately, I seem to have fallen into a subroutine (I'm trying not to make any programming jokes, I really am) where I do them really late at night.

Well, at least I've now pretty much got my university application done. It just needs to get checked over by a teacher tomorrow and then I should have it sent away by the end of Tuesday. I may well spend a whole lot of time worrying about getting information back but I suspect it'll be more like my exams, when I just got them over with and more or less forgot about them until the envelope got tossed on my desk.

I also managed to play a bit more of Half Life 2: Episode 2 today and was hugely impressed by it as well. More than any other game, Half Life's plot always manages to keep me interested and guessing. My only grievance is that so far, at about halfway through this expansion pack, I've fought a lot of ant lions and relatively few enemy soldiers.

It's really a very minor problem and I'm sure I wouldn't even have noticed it if it weren't for Halo 3, where I rapidly tired of fighting the Flood and rarely replay those levels. I prefer having more options when attacking my enemies than “AAAAARGH!!!! Where's the shotgun?! I need another energy sword!!”. Half Life does add a slightly tactical edge with different variations of ant lions, “thumpers” which hit the ground and drive them away, providing a temporary safe haven, and the ability to command the creatures at points. But in Halo, the Flood always disappoint me after I've just found the fifth way to kill the Scarab walker in the previous level.

I wonder if that type of enemy is worth writing up for TV Tropes... Might give it a shot, see if anybody else has some ideas. But that's all from me tonight. I may put up a short-ish post tomorrow before I go for a hospital appointment and then edit it later, just in case. I doubt it'll be a problem, but the appointment's relatively late and it's a bit of a drive... and I've got some homework to do then as well... Yeah, I'll figure it out as I got along.

Have a nice day.

Now that I come to think about it, it's not really all that weird

Today has been a weird day. It started off fairly normally with some meeting about my class arranging part of the school's Christmas trade fair followed by Physics first lesson, part one of a double period.

I guess the weirdness started with an animated character in a short DVD bit we were watching looking and sounding surprisingly like Dr Breen from Half Life 2. Well, the faces look similar – the DVD character was wearing some kind of superhero outfit with a large “Q” on it, which I can only presume stands for quantum, the subject of the short.

The second Physics lesson supposedly consisted of research into our course projects but ended up as more of a discussion on how to break through the firewall (we succeeded, by the way) and what was the best way to get TV programs and movies off the internet. Our teacher tends to use BitTorrent, apparently.

I spent a fair chunk of an afternoon study period not playing Street Fighter, which is weird in and of itself. Instead, my friend Sam Stafford (you'll see why we need to use the Stafford in just a second) was giving out some riddles. One in particular had a few people stumped but, between us, myself and Sam Potter (there you go) managed to crack it. Half of the rest of the year stormed in in quick succession demanding the answer and promptly being given it.

All except one, the first person Stafford had given the riddle to. She agonised over it for an hour or so, eventually drawing a small crowd of those who had beaten the answer out of others. She got closer and closer until someone finally just revealed the answer so we could all go to next lesson. There were no survivors.

Give or take a few survivors.

Also, at some point, several people started to play “the game”. This arcane ritual, spawned somewhere in the depths of the internet, cannot be won except in exceptional circumstances. The only way to lose is to think about the game and loss is generally assumed (by our rules, there may be others out there) to occur if you just hear about the game or see it written down somewhere. Thus, we all spent a great deal of time telling each other about it.

We once used about 20 sheets of paper and managed to get one guy coming into the room (it was on a note held to a dartboard with magnetic darts in front of the door) and when he opened his locker immediately afterwards (this was where another 18 sheets were). The final sheet would have been the clincher, but people aren't polite enough to shut the door behind them, so he didn't see it.

It sounds simple and bizarre (and, really, it is) but it can provide distraction for a surprising amount of time.

The final example of weirdness to occur today, that I can be bothered to remember right now, involves some Computing homework. You see, I had been planning on doing said homework tonight. Then I got home and discovered that I didn't have the sheets that I needed. This, I thought, was strange, since I'd already used the same bundle of sheets to do two previous pieces of homework. I applied my impeccable logic skills and determined that I must have lent it to someone.

There are four people in my class, all of whom are absent-minded and lazy enough to be candidates. I pretty much gave up hope, mostly because I couldn't be bothered, and went on with whatever I was doing at the time until Sam Potter got in touch asking for help with one of the questions. I told him that I hadn't got them so he scanned his sheets in and sent them to me.

While he was doing that, Jimerson got in touch with him to ask if he had the sheets, since Jimer evidently didn't. As both Potter and I laughed at this, I joked that he should ask Sam Stafford if he had them. Turns out he didn't.

The final twist in this little tale? The scanned sheets that got distributed around weren't actually Sam Potter's. They were mine – he was the one who had borrowed them for the last piece of homework.

Actually, I lied. The final twist in the tale is that I got sidetracked a little and haven't done that homework yet. Or done any revision for the test we have tomorrow. So I'm going to go do that. Seriously.

To Be A Gamer

My iMac just did the weirdest thing. I brought it out of sleep mode and all of a sudden it started making this huge racket. It normally makes a few noises (hard drive, DVD drive, etc. starting up) when I activate it but this was... louder. Like a hoover would sound from a few metres away kind of volume. Same sort of sound as well. It must have been a fan or something but I swear I've never heard anything like it before, at least not from my computer. It took a couple of minutes to die down and now it's stopped.

Really weird.


You know what I've noticed lately? Now is an awesome time to be a gamer.

Think about what's been out in the last couple of months and what's going to be out soon. We've had new entries in the Halo, Half Life, Zelda and Metroid series with a new Mario game, Smash Bros Brawl and Metal Gear Solid 4 all on the horizon (well, some nearer than others but you know what I mean). Then you've got new IPs like Zack and Wiki, Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed all gearing up to make their mark.

And that's just off the top of my head; I'm sure it's far from an exhaustive list but you get the idea. There's no real point to any of this, though maybe I could find one if I had more time and patience, but it's an interesting thought. It's also quite annoying since you can be almost certain that you're missing out on something great if you don't have a solid gold wallet.

I have a whole lot of games that I need to play and a whole lot to say about them but that'll have to wait since, once again, I've left this far too late.

On the bright side this is hilarious, particularly if, like me, you can't stand CSI: Miami. I also came across Flame Warriors, a comprehensive guide to the various types of asshole that you are likely to meet on the interwebz. See how many you can recognise. See how many you are.

That's it for today. Actually, here's another Weebl and Bob cartoon. I'd forgotten how much I loved these things. While I'm at it, this is funny as well, particularly if you are or know people who are afflicted with a Halo 3 addiction.

Overanalyze This!

It's a little after two o'clock right now and I'm home from school, having got out for a doctor's appointment and then not gone back in because all I have is a couple of free periods anyway. It's been bucketing with rain on and off all day, which is kind of miserable, but it does get me out of having to hoover up leaves outside.


It's later now and my thoughts, after a bit of a day off, must now return to getting this post written. I've got a backlog of things that I want to discuss and do but I keep leaving this too late to complete them to my own satisfaction so I'm just going to discuss whatever comes into my head.

As you may well know, I'm a big fan of and occasional contributor to the TV Tropes Wiki, where logically minded individuals come together to point out the similarities in various plots and story telling devices in order to document and (usually) mock them. Of course, the site isn't limited to that and also deals with various fan ideas, meta concepts, Wild Mass Guessing, etc.

One of my favourite pages on the site is the trope called “Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory”, which deals with fans (and professional critics) who feel compelled to attach significance to every little thing in a fictional creation. It doesn't matter if the author disagrees or if they say it has no meaning or if it's a book written for five year olds – there's someone out there who will argue that it's a metaphor for the Cold War.

A lot of the examples are from songs, shows and pieces of literature that has been professionally critiqued and examined, often producing ideas and themes that the author, when questioned later, will say simply aren't there, or were never intended. The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland often have far too much significance attached to them for the children's books that they are. People have viewed The Lord of the Rings as a tale about World War II, despite Tolkien saying that he had much of it planned and written before his supposed “inspiration” had even started. Douglas Adams said repeatedly that 42 was a random number and, yet, it's been tied to everything “from base thirteen to Tibetan monks”. Of course, that last one might say more about Hitchhiker's fans than anything else.

But some of the funniest stories are ones provided by the tropers from their real life experiences. Things that have happened to them in English classes and discussions of art. Encounters with people for whom common sense, at least when it comes to their chosen “art”, is unheard of and likely blasphemous. You should really read that page.

This is really a pet peeve of mine albeit one that I have to deal with far less often since I dropped English at school. No less a man than Isaac Asimov has commented on it, writing a short story entitled “The Immortal Bard” in which Shakespeare, brought forward in time, fails a class on his own plays. In more serious writing, Asimov apparently concluded that the meaning of a story should be left entirely up to the reader. He himself said that he viewed The Lord of the Rings as a warning against industrialisation and didn't mind in the slightest that Tolkien had denied it.


I really need to get my hands on some more Asimov fiction. Ironically, I did my personal study, a big long essay for Higher English, on The Robots of Dawn. I didn't like doing it though, so it's not a problem.

That's it for tonight. I might do some Physics homework now, if I can be bothered. Other than that, I'm off to bed. Have a nice day.

Nothing completes a good day quite like Metroid Prime

I've had quite a good day today. I pretty much put my personal statement behind me. Sam Potter's peer evaluation for his Darthmouth application is all done and checked, I just need to type it up for the final form. That Physics homework I was worried about wasn't mentioned at all. I managed to get out of doing Maths. Mentoring was fun, as usual, and the rest of the day was spent playing (by which I mean “winning at”) Street Fighter.

How I got out of Maths is actually kind of weird. Myself and another guy, Andrew Mackie, miss the main class on Fridays due to separate scheduling conflicts so we go second last lesson, joining in with a Higher class. We're kind of lucky since, rather than being stuck with a roomful of S5s or whatever, it's a small class consisting of people from our year who chose to do Higher Maths over two years.

The homework for today had been to complete the first couple of questions from an exercise consisting of six. We learned by asking around that nobody else had done this except for Andrew who had, in what must have been a gargantuan bout of boredom, elected to do the entire exercise. That morning, all everyone else had done was get a little further on, most barely completing the questions that had been set for homework.

So I decided, I've got nothing better to do, I may as well get on with this exercise and maybe I can get out of class later. So, over two free periods and a bit of lunch, I leisurely worked my way through the exercise in between bouts of Street Fighter EX II Plus, finding the whole thing rather enjoyable. When it came time for class, we went along, copied down a note everyone else had got that showed us who to do the work we had gone ahead and done anyway and then left.

Okay, so it's not a hugely weird story, but the strange thing is that I actually quite enjoyed doing the Maths work. Everyone else seemed to struggle with it a bit but I actually found it quite relaxing, seeing everything slot logically into place as I worked through page after jotter page of powers and derivatives. I wouldn't call it fun exactly, but there was a certain amount of exhilaration every time I peeked at the answers and saw that my ten minutes work hadn't been in vain.

And, of course, there was that great feeling of superiority that comes from doing in three seconds flat the mental sums that an S2 Maths class was struggling over. It's not quite so impressive but it does remind me of just how far I've come in my knowledge and abilities in just a few years.


Well, my finger's bleeding and I want to watch an episode of Heroes before bed, so I'll be off now. As a last note, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is awesome. I intend to play a lot more of it over the weekend, in between catching up on Phantom Hourglass.

Wait, I still need to do some other homework...

If I ever have a child, I'm giving them the middle name of “That”. That way, whenever anybody they want to impress says something, they can say “That's my middle name!” without lying or exaggerating.


One thing I have to say about this peer evaluation thing – I think it's a little bit unfair to have it handwritten in a certain amount of space. At least with a word limit, or character limit as UCAS has for personal statements, you can be sure that everyone is getting an equal amount of text in which to sell themselves. This system seems to favour people who have friends with small handwriting.

I've almost got it done and it's not half bad, even if I say so myself. Like I've said before, pressure seems to make me work better and, since it's for tomorrow, I've managed to produce something that makes Jesus pale in comparison to Samuel Burns Potter. I worried a bit that it would come off sounding a little forced though I think the only problem area is the bit about the first words that come to mind when I think about him.

I truly hate those kinds of questions, because any truly honest answer is not going to be suitable (“World of Warcraft”, “freckles”, “Halo”, etc.) and anything you try to make up sounds fake. I had the same problem with my personal statement and any other writing of this sort, where you have to talk something or someone up. Maybe I'm being a little perfectionist since this could well affect a good friend's whole life. As he pointed out today, with the necessary exams and his SATs out of the way, whether or not he gets accepted is now completely beyond his control and this evaluation is the last little piece of the puzzle. Perhaps not the most important, but nevertheless...

Anyway, like I said, I don't much like doing this stuff but, when push comes to shove, I can doctor spin fairly well. All this reminds me of when I had to do personal writing for English, doubtless the thing that I hated the most about the subject. I used to rage and fume for days at the absurdity of it all, the pointlessness of it and the assumptions that had been made. Several times, when I'd reached the point where I just didn't care any more, I'd write something humorous, something making fun of the whole concept.

I've just looked at some old essays like that. There's the one that's meant to be about “the real me”, where I just compare myself to a Linux distribution and spout some clear nonsense. My favourite is the one where I had to write about a situation from which there was no escape. I ended up writing about my inability to escape from doing the essay itself. Both were handed in, though I suspect neither did all that well.

Not that it matters much. I grabbed a B in English many months ago and now I'm done with it. And I'm also very nearly done with this peer evaluation too, so goodness only knows what I'll be complaining about having to do next week. For now, I need to go and copy my draft on to the practice form, just to check it fits, and then watch the latest episode of Heroes.

Have a nice day.

Silly Faces and Sillier Legal Propositions

So, they've taken down TV Links. That's certainly a shame, it was a very useful site. I admit that maybe, once or twice (give or take), I used it to catch up on shows or to see some stuff that's never been shown over here. I'll have more to say tomorrow, I think, since I can feel a righteously indignant rant swelling up inside me. And I do love my righteuous indignation, not to mention my ranting.

All I'll say for now is read the articles (the link above is to Google News, there should be at least 5 or 6 stories on it) and leave any comments you want. There seems to be some dispute as to what the legal grounds are – has the arrested man (as yet unnamed but presumably the guy in charge of the site) committed any crimes simply by linking to illegal videos? Would such a ruling have greater repercussions on sites such as search engines? Was any warning issued to him first?

That's partly why I'm holding off judgement. I want to get all the facts, though I have no doubt I'll end up on the side of TV Links. That, and it brings up some other interesting points about the progression of technology and distribution (I'm particularly thinking of music piracy and download systems).


In other news, I finally got round to reading some of Star Trek: The Manga. As I imagined, it was unanimously declared geeky. Fortunately, that doesn't bother me and it didn't much seem to bother anybody whose opinion I actually give a toss about. As for what's actually contained between the covers... well, there are the some funny sound effects (helpfully translated from Japanese by Sam), some bizarre facial expressions and the standard Star Trek plot “twists”.

The twists, as indicated by the speech marks, are fairly predictable, at least thus far. The second story had a decent enough one; it could have done with a bit more build-up but it wasn't given much space and it had some cool concepts, so I'll let it get away with it. The first story (I'm only partway through the third of five, by the way) gave away its twist to any Trekkie fairly early on. And let's face it, if you're reading Star Trek: The Manga, chances are good that you're a Trekkie. Or a Trekker. I forget the difference, but I know that one group doesn't like to be called the other.

And the facial expressions. Sulu smirking as he tells the captain that they're exit route has been cut off by a hull breach made me laugh. I even posed a hypothetical scenario to some friends of mine: “Your ship is under attack, one of your crew is dying and you've just learned that the only way to save yourselves is by destroying an evil cyborg. Of course, you need a blood sample from said cyborg to cure your dying crewman and you can't destroy the space station it's on, because then there would be nothing stopping you from falling into a black hole.”

Now, a question. “Would you have this look on your face?”


Hilarious. But it's not a bad little compilation. The second volume came out recently and I can get it for under a fiver on Amazon so I may buy that.


Further news, still sci-fi related. Peter Davidson is, as rumoured, making a comeback as the Fifth Doctor in the Doctor Who Children in Need special. While it may well be played for comedy and obviously couldn't fit in between the cliffhanger-ish ending of last series and the resolution coming in the Christmas special, previous specials have been in canon. This one's penned by Steven Moffat, a veteran Who writer, and I'm really, really hoping that it's being used as a test for the possibility of more multi-Doctor episodes in the future. I'd certainly kill to see Christopher Eccleston back in the role, and some interplay between the post-Time War Ninth and Tenth Doctors and the unaware Eighth (or even, dare I say it, Seventh) Doctor could make for some very nice drama.

But that's maybe just wishful thinking. Either way, watch out for the scene on Friday 16th November, during Children in Need night.


I think that's it for today. Still need to play more Phantom Hourglass but that'll have to wait. I need to get some Physics homework done tomorrow, which I probably should have done over the holiday and was planning on doing tonight, except I don't know what questions it was. I'd check my prep diary, but Sam (currently going by the name Thomas, after another discussion with Sam Potter, henceforth known as Burns, over who should get to use their name resulted in each going by their middle names) managed to lose it while searching my bag for a sheet of paper. So it's lying in the common room. I'd use his, but it long ago disappeared into the ether.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, wrapping things up. Before I go, I'll just say that this headline put a rather amusing image in my head. Go figure. Now, I'm gonna go lie in bed and find out how the latest woman to flirt with Captain James Tiberius Kirk is going to kick the bucket. Looks to be alien brain-screwing signals.

Wires Made Of Straw

I had a good day today. Guess why.

Wrong.

It was because someone gave me a box full of useful looking cables.

For complicated reasons (mostly involving it being a total mess), we were tidying out the garage and my dad and brother came across some old cables that had apparently got stashed there at some point when no one could think of anywhere else to put them. Among them was a SCART lead, two AV component cables (I'd been looking for some like them; wish I could remember why), four RF leads (which are always handy for various old consoles or possibly for selling with the NESi), an aerial for some old portable TV which I guess I could use... somehow and an adaptor for running multiple SCART devices into one TV.

There was also a rather useful tray thing to hold them all, which'll come in handy because I can use it to store the various tools and bits of gadgetry that I randomly find myself needing and using.

That, ladies and gents, is how sad my life is. Well, how sad I suppose it must seem. Works for me though so, as I and others have often observed, I really don't care about what people think. They can stand around and talk about sport and parties all they want; I'll be laughing at them from my little corner where I sit, surrounded by miscellaneous unidentified cables, reading my Star Trek manga. And then I'll conquer the world.


Anyhoo, in other news, I was thinking about the phrase “the straw that broke the camel's back” today. I'm sure you're all familiar with the meaning. If not, get out more. It makes you wonder where exactly such a phrase came from – why a camel, why a load of straw, why does anyone care? Interestingly, it also seems to be where the phrase “the last straw” comes from, which is another odd one without its original context.

I've now looked it up and have some understanding about it either coming from an old Arab proverb or from a line in Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son (same difference, really) but at the time, I started to ponder its origins.

I reckon it must have come from a story somewhere, since so many things do. A hypothetical book called 101 Ways to Kill a Camel. Probably brought up in Chapter 4, “If Life Gives You Straw...”, though it probably got famous cause it was the first one mentioned on the blurb, which was all most people read when someone gave it to them for Christmas. Probably the same person who gave them Does Anything Eat Wasps? the year before.


Well, I have to go and read an article on a new Fire Emblem game and then chew up a roll for a few minutes before taking some antibiotics. It's kind of a weird system that my brother recommended to me because my ability to swallow pills is, to put it bluntly, near non-existent. Comes and goes. It's weird. I plan on using it as a metaphor for super powers at some point. Not that the characters in The Grey Line are going to get super powers. That wasn't foreshadowing or a slip of the tongue or anything. Just forget I said that.

Incidentally, if I ever write my autobiography (I suppose it's not really my autobiography if someone else writes it but you know what I mean), I'm calling it “101 Ways to Kill a Camel”. No explanations or anything. Only people who have followed my writing from the early days will get it. And this URL will have expired years ago, so you'll have no way to cite your information for the Wikipedia page! Bwahahahahaha!

Lot of Stuff to Bold Here

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe I've discovered the nerdiest item in all of space and time:


I saw it in a book shop this morning and had to get it, if only to find out what the hell it was all about. I also picked up volume 2 of Bleach and volume 4 of Dragon Ball while I saw them, since I don't think I'll be getting near another Forbidden Planet for a while, which is where I like to get manga. Well, apparently. I've only really bought manga there once, when I went there with Sam, Skippy and Jimerson while we were meant to be at an Edinburgh University open day. But it was an enjoyable experience.

I actually need to read more of Dragon Ball. I got the first volume... last Christmas, I think. Read a bit of it and eventually handed it to Erin, who seems to like them. I think I'll probably end up taking a couple of volumes, either the first two of DB or Bleach and Star Trek, into school on Monday to give me something to do when I get bored of beating people at Street Fighter.

Actually, holy crap. School starts again on Monday. Damn and blast. I need to get a peer review for a friend's university application written. It shouldn't be hard, I've known him for most of my life and he has all the right qualities for his course, I just suck at doing that kind of thing. Well, pressure generally helps me in these situations so I'll probably leave it to Sunday evening or so.

Saturday, as with much of this afternoon, will likely be spent playing The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. I'm about 3-4 hours in and it kicks some serious ass. The controls, once you get used to them (which only takes about 5 minutes), are excellent and while it deviates a little from the standard Zelda formula here and there, it still retains that essential feel of the series perfectly. I'll probably write more tomorrow once I'm further into it.

Also to do tomorrow, is play The Orange Box, which I also picked up this morning along with Zelda and my manga. My brother and I may end up taking a trip to PC world to upgrade the sound card on the gaming PC since it's been in trouble for a while and I don't want to miss any good stuff from Episode 2. It's kind of odd - the sound always had trouble during pre-rendered cutscenes where it cut in and out repeatedly but it never had trouble with Half Life 2 because that was all done in-engine.

Meh. I'll figure something out or just end up putting up with it. And then I can play me some Portal as well. I've read a lot of good things about it. In fact, the only bad thing I've read about it is that it's too short, which seems to imply that it's a damn good gaming experience. May discuss that more tomorrow as well. In the meantime, here's a video of Half Life 2 modded to use the Portal gun.

And since it's now almost 20 to midnight, I'll end tonight's post here. I'll try to get a woodle up for tomorrow, since I just remembered it. I also remembered that I meant to get a podcast done this week with Sam. And I also remembered that I've got to watch the latest episode of Heroes. Busy, busy, busy.

Same Symbolism, Different Day

I am overcome with a sudden urge to point a Brute Shot at someone's feet and say “Dance, Spartan! Dance!”. I think this means I've been playing too much Halo 3 (or reading too much on Halopedia).


So, I managed to do that thing again where I come up with a topic, write about it for a while, look at the clock, realise I'm not going to do it justice and then decide to do something else instead.

And I just did that thing again where I massively and unnecessarily extend a list of my actions.

Anyway, it's a good topic and one that covers video games and my love of them, so you can imagine that it'll be pretty long. Fortunately, I predicted its length early and have plenty of time to come up with something else, like the backup topic I was going to use. Which I'll just get to.... now.


I mentioned I was reading Halopedia before. Almost every page there (maybe I'm exaggerating, but it is very common) points out what relevance the page's topic has to the number 7. For those who don't know, and I suspect that will be many, Bungie, Halo's developer, loves the number 7. It crops up in all kinds of places in their games, often in very sly little hints and neat little maths tricks.

For example, the monitors of the two Halo installations encountered in the game are 343 Gulity Spark and 2401 Penitent Tangent. 343 and 2401 are, respectively, 7^3 and 7^4. That much makes sense.

Then you come across stuff like there being (at the time of Halo 2) seven Covenant vehicles. And some of those vehicles having names with seven letters. And the game being released in September, the 7th month of the Roman calendar. And this glorious little nugget “UNSC Frigate Forward Unto Dawn is FFG-201. 20+1=21, 2+0+1=3, 21÷3=7”.

Fans, once they get started, will see symbolism in more or less anything. And it's funny how often symbolism will unintentionally turn up. Take my own piece of fiction, The Grey Line. Which I am contractually obliged to link to in every blog post. I struggled for ages to come up with a name for it, once it had grown beyond what I had originally planned. I settled on the “The Grey Line” for a few plot related and reasons and then decided to check to make sure that it wasn't taken by anything else.

Turns out it's also a term for the terminator, the line that divides night and day on a planet. Which is some awesome symbolism about something or other. And then Sam, ever the student of English, pointed out the contrast between “grey”, generally implying some middle ground or a blurred area, and “line”, implying a clear and stark division.

There's no real reason for me to be thinking about this. I just wonder sometimes if we read too much into things. I know I certainly do. I practically make a hobby out of it.


In other news, this is a really interesting article about the fall of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. I'll probably write more about it some other time.

I'll try to get some stuff up at Corbett's Fiction for tomorrow. I think I've recovered from the whole “crashing at the start of the holidays” thing, so I should be able to do something.

Of course, I still have other stuff to deal with, such as getting all my homework out of the way before Phantom Hourglass and Half Life 2: Episode 2 come in on Friday. Man, have I ever got my priorities straight.

Universities and so on

It's been a long day. I suspect tomorrow is going to be longer. To be honest, I just want to go to Edinburgh, listen to a lecture about studying Computer Science and then go home. I really don't care about information booths detailing student life and seeing the halls of residence. Actually, I've already seen the accommodation, when my brother lived in it.

I am incredibly apathetic about this whole university. I've basically made my choices already, I just want to get the paperwork out of the way and move on, enjoying my last year of school and getting on with all the other stuff I want to do.

But, no, my parents are insisting that I visit all these open days and collect as much information as I can... I think I've really gone into whiny teenage blogger mode now. At a tangent, and to inject some humour, does anyone else think that Whiny Teenage Mutant Bloggers would be an awesome TV show? Okay, so I don't either. I was just testing you.

Anyway, the whole thing just bugs me on some level... I might try explaining it tomorrow, after I've been, probably with a slightly more balanced view. For tonight, I need to get to bed. I also need to tidy a single small section of my floor for some obscure reason, as decreed by my mother.


I'm doing far too many short posts these days, aren't I?


One final note. You know what's great? When people leave the copyright warnings on videos they've ripped and posted on the net. You just have to love that attitude.

Ah, long rambling posts, how we have missed you

So, I've just come in from school and realised that I need to update Corbett's Fiction sometime today. It's weird having another burden like that. I guess I'll ease into with a buffer for a couple of days, but I need to have Friday's done before Wednesday. Because, you know.

Actually, I've just realised that Halo 3 comes out in America tomorrow. I reckon I'll have to steer clear of the internet for then. Since everyone on it is a spoiler-loving @!%$£^@&!. No offence.

I've proposed an agreement at school, among those of us buying Halo 3 at launch on Wednesday. We do not talk about the plot until Monday. No discussion whatsoever. Most of us will probably have it done by Friday afternoon at the latest but nevertheless, we keep our traps shut, just in case.

Same thing tends to happen with Zelda games as well, like when Twilight Princess and Wind Waker first came out. We actually have three games of Wind Waker being played through right now in the common room on the Gamecube. One guy bought his own Gamecube just so he could keep playing his file at home, in between coming to me and Sam for advice on the second dungeon. Another one is kind of a joint file, where we just take a go at playing it for a while in a free period and get as far as we can before someone else wants on.

There's something similar going on with the N64 I brought in. Between us, we've managed to scrounge up all the requisite cables and some functioning controllers (most well-used N64 controllers have very loose analogue sticks, making play that much harder) and it's now become just as popular as the other consoles.

Well, that's not strictly true. There's still a bunch of tossers through in the other room with the Xbox who seem to play FIFA 200X non-stop. But Goldeneye has become suddenly popular again as everyone remembers just how awesome it was at the time. Then they quickly realise that they've forgotten the controls, get their asses kicked and don't want to play any more.

Sorry, just read back a little bit and realised I didn't elaborate on the “something similar” going on with the N64. We're playing through Ocarina of Time, the authentic way because that's the best way. Well, that's not strictly true either. We wanted to use the Gamecube re-release version, just for convenience, but the TV we're using doesn't support 60Hz. Or one third of component video cables, either.

Playing through Ocarina and Wind Waker again has made me really familiar with each and every bit. Ocarina I knew pretty well since it was a big part of my childhood. Loved it. Never properly completed it though, something I'm rather ashamed of. Wind Waker was an excellent game, still is, and I now know it back-to-front after helping people through it. I think we'll have moved on to