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.

On prelim results and some other stuff too

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

End of the Prelims

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

Or maybe not. Who knows?

Have a nice day.

Almost There...

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

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

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

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

To round things off, here are a few links.

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

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

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

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

Wish me luck.

Two Down, One to Go

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

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

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

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

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

Like in my Maths prelim.


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

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


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






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

Maths Make Brain Hurt

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


That'll do for now.







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

Mostly Nonsense

Well, I shaved off my proto-beard.

...

Now my chin is cold.


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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

I really think I'm addicted to Mass Effect now

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

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


Well, that was frightening.


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

I refuse to delay it again.

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

Actually, I probably will do that.

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

I'm going to bed.

Have a nice day.

Revision, Assassins and Miscellaneous

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

Seriously. They're filthy.


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

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

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

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


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

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

Turns out I was wrong.


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


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

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


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

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

Have a nice day.

I forgot to mention that I finally played Mass Effect tonight

Back on the Eee again, just for a laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Have a nice day.






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

This is basically just an update on yesterday's post

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

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

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

Did rather distract me from my Maths revision though.

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

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

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


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

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

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

Another Look at Another Day

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

And that's it for tonight.

Something a bit lighter

I have some good news and some bad news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


That's it for tonight then.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

More whining but now with mildly amusing videos to follow

Another day, another hour and forty five minutes after I get out of bed before I can properly start it.

Actually, that's not technically true. It's been longer.

The nurse today, who had never seen my wound until yesterday, decided to put a smaller dressing on over it, in addition to about five times as much packing as the regular nurses do. As soon as I left the room and sat down, I realised that it was a lot less flexible than the usual one, resulting in pain when I sat down or walked.

It wasn't exactly agony but, since I like tend to spend most of my time either moving or not moving, I could tell that it was going to be a problem. I didn't say anything because I figured it would just loosen up a bit over a while, like the tape they sometimes have to put on does.

Well, it didn't. After an uncomfortable car journey, I got home to find that I couldn't sit at my desk and type, exactly as I'm doing now, without being in pain. When I went to have a look at this new bandage, I discovered that it had more or less fallen off already. Fortunately, I had a spare proper dressing that I managed to put on, losing a significant chunk of the overabundant wound packing in the process.


I probably shouldn't be complaining so much. The end is in sight but it's still infuriating when I'm in pain not because of my surgery but because someone screwed up.

I've spent most of the day, once I managed to get it started, poking around with my Computing project, trying to get it to work. I've made some progress but so far I've just been working around the fundamental problem, trying to build something that will at least work in theory. Sort of a proof of concept thing.

With any luck, I've made enough progress to satisfy my teacher until I can get some more work on this done.

Of course, with my birthday and another big Maths test coming up this week, plus my usual laziness, that may take some time.

It's not so much a lack of free time thing. I'm not really planning on doing anything on my birthday, it's just that I happen to include “work” under the heading of anything. The Maths test, however, I will have to revise for. I managed to do fairly well on the lower difficulty test for this unit (the pass or fail one) but those always come in a fairly standard form – one question of this type, then one of this, then one on these, etc. – so they're never too hard if you just practice.

Where was I going with this?

Oh, yeah. Busy week ahead. Nothing much else going on.

In lieu of having anything interesting to say, I'll link you to a couple of videos.

First, here's EXPENDABLE, a short film by David Malki! (yes, the exclamation point is part of his name; he's just that awesome) and Todd Croak-Falen, who I'd never heard of before. I know of Malki! from references to his comic and from his previous short film, where he battled Comicon for some reason. Anyway, EXPENDABLE is about a day in the life of a temp working for the world's fifth largest evil organisation, A.R.A.C.H.N.I.D. That should be all you need to know.

The second video is just a silly little song by the guy who played Biff in the Back to the Future films. He's a funny guy, apparently. I'll have to see what else he does.

Anyway, that's it for today. I actually ended up linking to three movies, so you should be extra grateful and thus willing to sit through tomorrow's post, which will no doubt be more whining.

Have a nice day.

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.

Sleeping on the Weekend

I'm leaving this very late again (thirty minutes to randomly self-imposed midnight deadline) but I'm not really bothered because I'm in such a good mood. Why am I in such a good mood, you ask?

Simple. Tomorrow, for the first time in pretty much eight solid weeks, I will get to lie in bed past eight o'clock.

Other than that, the weekend doesn't hold huge amounts to look forward to – I have an awful lot of homework and nothing much else to do. I still need to finish my Computing project, preferably quickly, and I have some Maths that I need to practice. And five Physics topics to revise.

On the bright side (well, the other bright side, since the sleeping late thing probably counts as a bright side of its own), I have managed to make some progress with my Physics project. I was having some trouble determining what parts I would need for the experiments that I haven't actually devised yet.

All I'd been able to discern from my research on the internet was that large amounts of wire were necessary. I told one of my Physics teachers this and he agreed – in fact, he said I wouldn't really need much else, other than some wood and sticky tape to hold it all together. Thus, the problem was solved.


I'm not sure if this is good news or bad but I was told this morning, after a ten second appointment with a consultant for which I waited forty minutes, that I may only need to have my dressing changed for another week, possibly two. If viewed optimistically, this could mean I'll be done with this crap before my birthday, which would be good. Even if I'm not, at least I know the end is in sight.

I've not really got much else to write about and I want to get to bed so I'll stop writing and... go to bed. Obviously.

Well, once I post this. Which may take a few minutes since Firefox has decided to freeze. Again.

...

Have a nice – wait, it's working again, huzzah! – day.

I think this might just be the first notes post of the new year

Okay, twenty-five minutes to my self-imposed midnight deadline. Probably ought to get on with this post.


First of all, I mentioned yesterday that I thought I would have a bit of trouble finding my Physics class this morning. I was right – nobody knew where they'd been redirected to and the labs don't even appear on the redirection timetable on the bulletin board. Eventually, after exhausting all my other options, I managed to wander past my class and get in for the last ten minutes of the lesson.

I suppose I'll have to do some reading to catch up on what I missed but that might be tricky since we apparently covered several different things and I've no idea what stuff it was I missed.

Oh, well.


In other news that affects me and pretty much no one else, my wound has been hurting a bit more than usual lately. I'm not sure if that's a good sign, implying that it's healing closer to the surface or something, or bad because, you know, it hurts more.

I'm seeing the consultant who did the operation again tomorrow and, while I don't expect him to sign off on it just yet, he'll hopefully be able to give me some more definite information. Unfortunately, this means that I'll be in even later than normal (and that I'll have to kill at least half an hour of time on top of the usual wait in the morning) so that I miss Computing.

Not a huge problem usually since most of what we do there is practical work that I can just catch up on at home but we have a test tomorrow so I'll need to do that at some point.


This is turning into a notes post, isn't it? Haven't done one of them in ages. What else have I got...


Well, my birthday's coming up and I've been thinking about asking for an Asus Eee PC, or at least some money towards one. I'm not sure what use I'll have for it exactly but I'm something of a gadget junky and I've decided that I want one. Maybe, the little rationalising voice in my head says, just maybe I'll use a simple computer that powers on quickly to write more, stopping me from being distracted or from getting bored while waiting for the old laptop to boot up.

Yeah, it sounds silly to me too.


I've just remembered that I assured my Physics teacher that I would decide what materials I needed for my project by the end of tomorrow and I've barely even looked anything up. As I believe I've said before, all the information online seems to be hobbyists stringing huge antennas up between trees. Not really what I'm after...


I might do a bit of that tonight but right now my arm is starting to hurt. I think it's the way I hold the mouse on this crappy desk that's getting to me. Maybe I'll move my computer at the weekend. It's either that or do work or writing or something similarly entirely unproductive.


Speaking of the weekend, I'm going into hospital late on Saturday, probably after lunch, so I'll get to have my first proper lie in in almost two months. Absolutely glorious. Maybe I'll set my alarm for the normal time just so that I can be awake to enjoy not having to get up.


Hey, this actually turned out to be pretty long. I blame the double line spacing and my inability to get to the point of anything quickly.

I'm off to either get some sleep or do some Physics research. With any luck I'll get something more coherent written earlier in the day tomorrow.

I'm trying to thing of some suitable way of concluding this but, now that I think about it, I never really had a proper beginning or middle so no one will mind if it doesn't have a proper end.

Bye.

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.

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.

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.

Let the holidays begin

Eep. It's half past eleven at night and I haven't done the post for tonight. So, mini-post then.

Today was, as I have mentioned before, the last day of term. This essentially involved hanging around at school, getting on a bus, hanging around in a church (while playing hangman on the programme) and then listening to some hymns, some prayers and something about a box. Okay, so maybe “listening” is a bit of an exaggeration there.

Walked away with some rather neat doodles though, alongside various hangman solutions. These included “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (my friend Joss's), “Remembrance of the Daleks” (mine) and “I have a girlfriend and you do not” (my former friend Sam's). After that everybody eventually got past the crowd and out of the church, some heading home like myself and others to go and get lunch in town. I believe Sam was going to hang around for a first date with the aforementioned girlfriend.*


I just got a message from Jimerson saying “well im off to bed, cya in 10 days”, reminding me that he's heading off to India on a school trip, along with many others. I opted out at the time, partly because of the potential for price and error (they're due to come back the day before Christmas – delays would not be well received, I suspect) but mostly because I just don't like such things. Later needs to get vaccinations and warnings about not touching damned near everything haven't made me regret this decision.

Still, I wish them the best of luck. They may be up early tomorrow, but at least they have the chance to sleep on the plane.

Unlike me, who still has to get up before eight in the morning for the next week at least to head into hospital. As such, I probably ought to head off to bed. Have a nice day.







*Note to self: remember to find out how disastrously wrong this inevitably went.

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.

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.

Badly Bandaged Boy

Worst superhero ever.



CSI: NY just declared that since someone passed a lie detector test, they're not lying. Don't even get me started on the idiocy of that statement.


There are certain games that never lose their appeal, no matter how many times I play them. Either because of great design and plenty of options in the single player mode or because of a brilliant and balanced multiplayer mode, these are games that I will gladly take out and play at any time.

Among these games is Advance Wars, in all its shapes and forms. Thus it is that I am held up from writing this post by a desperate need to carry out a carefully planned strategy involving about eight transport copters and the same numbers of mech units before I go to bed.

Gimme a couple of minutes.


Okay, that's that done. Now, about tonight's post... I've really left it too late again, though I have a slightly better excuse than usual. I think I've complained before about the inconsistencies in how my wound is dressed by the various different nurses at the hospital and how some methods seem to work better than others.

Today's method didn't work out so well. It had practically fallen apart by the time I got home from school. This necessitated a trip back to the hospital where we think we've finally discovered a bandage that stays in place well enough.

We also had the foresight to find out what it's called for future reference and the nurse made a note to say I was to have this kind from now on, so that's hopefully that minor problem sorted.


Other than that, today has been pretty uneventful. My Maths test and homework, both originally set for Wednesday, have been put back to Thursday and Friday, respectively, which is very lucky, considering I'd done no revision and I wouldn't have had time tonight.

My Computing project continues to progress, though it looks like it may run past the deadline into the Christmas holidays. I'll have to do more of it at home, since I don't want that looming over me, especially since I'll likely have finished the interesting part, the problem solving and the programming, by then and it'll just be documentation and testing, the boring parts.


And that's about all I've got today. Somewhat diary like but I've not had any fascinating thoughts occur to me lately. I think I've been spending too much time watching, and subsequently complaining about, CSI: NY. Really, some of the plot holes and twists in that show... I don't know if all this is a result of bad writing, natural cynicism or too much time spent over at the TV Tropes wiki.

Probably some combination of all three.

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.

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.

Trade Fairs and Toothbrushes

I've seen CSI get a lot of stuff wrong but I don't quite know how the visual effects guys managed to screw up how contrast works.


My wound is definitely healing a bit now. I'm finding it easier to walk and the new bandage isn't nearly as complex or as large as the previous one. I'm still in bad enough shape to get out of doing any kind of heavy lifting in preparation for the school's Christmas trade fair. Actually, I don't think I even have to help out at all; I'm certainly not hanging around after school until it starts like the rest of my class.

My mum and my sister are heading along anyway so I figure I'll go along (in my own clothes rather than school uniform, so that I can just blend into the crowd if I see any teachers looking like they want helpers) and give a hand to my friends who are running the video games room. They've apparently had a lot of “volunteers” for that section but since they are trying to make money, they're going to have to turn most of them away. Still, they actually asked me to help out so I figure I should do what I can.

I'm also kind of screwed in that I haven't done a rather large chunk of Physics homework. In my defence, I didn't actually have the necessary sheet but I feel like I probably should have noticed that before tonight.

Not much I can do now.


I've got something I'd like to show you tonight. What do you reckon this is?


That's right, it's a toothbrush. Above it is the Apple Remote that I couldn't be bothered moving off my desk, but that isn't really important for the matter at hand.

Now, what do you reckon this is?


It, too, is a toothbrush. My new electric toothbrush, to be precise.

As you can see, it comes with a wide assortment of gadgets and gizmos, some of which wouldn't look out of place on the Starship Enterprise. In the centre are the various heads that can be attached – the ones on the right look semi-sensible, aside from the one in the top left-hand corner, which seems to be for people with... I have no idea. Probably useful for the Enterprise's dental hygienist to have all the same, given the number of different species onboard.

The heads to the left seem to be required for either flossing, scraping or detecting the tachyon signatures of cloaked Romulan ships. Then to the right, past the first set of heads, is some kind of strange and tiny comb that looks a bit like a stylised Blooper from the Mario games.

My personal favourite part is the “number pad” on the far left. Each of those numbers is a sticker which, as the diagram shows, you are meant to affix to the front of the holder. You should pick the number that represents the month three months from now, which is the time after which you're supposed to choose a new head. Never mind that those things last way longer than that and that such a system couldn't possibly work for more than a year with the stickers provided. You get free stickers!

Woo!


Anyway, I need to get up early tomorrow to pack some gaming gear as well as do my usual morning wound washing routine, so I'm off to bed.

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...

Lots of boring ranting

You know, for weeks, maybe months, I thought that this sore bit on my butt was a result of sitting down too much. I figured it'd go away once the school term started (this was back in the summer holidays) and I moved around a bit more. Then, not only did it not go away, it burst and started... well, doing what such things do when they burst. I thought that maybe that was the end of it – the spot or boil or whatever was burst, it would go away now.

But it didn't. It go steadily worse until I eventually talked to my parents about it and got a doctor's appointment. I thought the first round of antibiotics would get rid of it. The fact that that was the “first” round should make it clear that this was not to be. The second, stronger bunch of pills didn't help either.

So then I went into hospital and I was told that I could have it cut out in a minor surgical procedure, that could probably be done under a local anaesthetic and meant at most a one night stay in hospital. I'm not sure if I was being lied to, being dismissed as a fool or if it really was that easy and something went horrifically astray as I lay on the operating table, but none of this “ease” was to ever come about.


I'm not sure where I'm going with this exactly but my point is that a few months back, I had a sore bottom. Now, I'm sitting here being told to take my painkillers and go to bed early so that I can have a salt bath in the morning before having my dressings changed in hospital and showing up an hour late to school.

And I've just had to delete another chunk of text that was just me ranting and raging about people telling me what to do and not accepting yes for an answer.

Fortunately, that was a few minutes ago and I think I've since calmed down. Unfortunately, those few minutes have led me up to the arbitrary half-past ten deadline, meaning that I may well have another infuriating visit in just a few moments.


So anyway, I went into school today for the full day, complete with my little pillow (though I managed to get away with not using it) and a quickly worn down willingness to put up with jokes about my ass and the grey joggers I had to wear for comfort. All the teachers knew about it and most of my classmates quickly got bored and carried on as usual. I got a couple of funny looks as I walked from class to class as well as the odd smart-ass (no pun intended) comment from pupils in the years below.

Of course, unanimous opinion and, more importantly, my personal opinion, is that most of that lot are idiots anyway, so I didn't really pay much attention to them.

The whole thing may get worse tomorrow as I have more classes and thus more walking around, which is bad for both my wound and my patience with getting funny looks but I suppose I'll just have to put up with it.


Skimming back over it, this post has been fairly incoherent and disjointed. That's probably due to constant interruptions as well as tiredness. I do need to get some sleep, I just don't need to have that fact yelled at me for five minutes or more. Thus, I'm going to head off to bed. I'll end by linking you to this story from Worse Than Failure, which is still providing me with much amusement as I trawl through the archives.

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...

Herein lies a big long rant about homework, with a surprise twist ending

I'm at that really annoying point in a cold where the problem is less about an occasionally dripping or blocked up nose and more about the fact that said nose hurts like hell because you've been rubbing it with a tissue every five minutes for days on end.


Hmmm. I got distracted by Worse Than Failure again, as well as checking TV Tropes. Which means it's now half past eleven and I've got practically nothing written. Also, I've not done my Computing homework. On the bright side, I have an excuse. I mentioned a while back a sheet that pretty much everyone had lost, in our class of four. By some mad panicking and scannicking, we managed to get copies and more or less get it done.

Well, we got the bit we needed to do done, anyway. There were some more questions that were due for today for half the class and tomorrow for Sam and I (who don't have Computing on Mondays, due to a scheduling problem), that came from the same set of sheets.

Picture the scene. Most of my Physics class is sitting in the study room, madly scrambling to get a piece of homework finished. All the non-Physics people are alternating between laughing at us and having stuff thrown at them. Potter and Jimerson, the other half of the AH Computing quartet, were among them. Then Sam casually asked Potter if he had done the Computing homework that we both knew we would have to do for Tuesday. Jimerson, standing nearby, overheard.

Is it possible to get two priceless looks for the price of one?

Someone, somehow, dug out a copy of the sheets, with ten minutes to go. Those ten minutes were spent in two ways – either doing the newly discovered homework or playing with a toy drum McDonalds toy as near to those in the former camp's ears as possible.

I chose to help with the homework and Sam had to give up on his choice after a while, when Potter broke the electronic drumstick in half. They ended up with some half-assed answers and I shall greatly enjoy watching them both squirm even more when we get that homework back.

Well, I would except for the fact that I haven't even done any of the work. I didn't realise until I got back home that I still didn't have the sheets and neither did my only reliable contact, Sam. I'd normally be able to do them in the morning but there's some kind of school trip going on at precisely the time of my free periods, so that's out of the question.

I suppose I can take solace in the fact that the trip is to the town hall of my home town, meaning that I get to sleep in and meet the school bus party when they arrive. Oh, and I get to wear casual clothes on the trip and for the remainder of the day.


Well, I apologise for that big long rant, which I presume made little or no sense, but I can't be bothered proof-reading it. Partly due to time, partly due to tiredness but also due to the fact that I've just realised something rather depressing. This coming Friday is a non-uniform day at school, which is always good fun.

This coming Friday is also the day I have some minor surgery, meaning that I'm barely in at school at all.

Crap.

...

I wonder if this means I can get away with paying only £1 instead of the usual £2....

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.

Corbett's guide to arranging tables

Super Mario Galaxy comes out on Friday. I can't believe that. A true new Mario game for the first time in years. With any luck, it'll be just the little push I need to get me into playing more games. Cause there's no way I'm not playing this one. No freaking way. If I stop for several days part way through, you have my full permission to hit me with any blunt instrument you may choose until I start playing again.


Today was a rather interesting day at school, which I'm going to talk about because I have nothing better. I've been meaning for a while now to rearrange some of the consoles and so on in the common room, since they were pretty much just stuck wherever as they were brought in. I've also been meaning to recover a table that went missing (no idea how) a few weeks back, since we kind of needed the surface area.

Since today was the day I have only one lesson (or, as I prefer to call it, part three of my three day weekend) and that was done with by second, I took the opportunity to put the plan into action. With a bit of assistance from some friends (mostly in the area of actually carrying the stuff we needed to move), I managed to get all the consoles plugged in alongside two TVs on the one table. We now have a fully functioning and well planned gaming alcove. I love sixth year.

Someone also told us where we could steal a table from, so we immediately went and got that. It's slightly smaller than the original one but it still serves its purpose well enough. All the room needs now is a bit of dusting and a going over with an industrial strength vacuum cleaner and it will no longer be classified as a slum.

My iPhone, which I just love to talk about, proved pretty popular at school. By the end of the day, the battery was pretty much dead from people toying with it. And that was with about 2/3rds of the year away at some Young Enterprise conference.

Young Enterprise is basically this scheme whereby those who want to can form a “company”, decide on and produce a product, sell shares, create a marketing campaign, etc. Basically, it serves as an introduction to the world of business. The world of business apparently involves a lot of complaining about what your idiot team-mates have chosen as a product, blaming delays on your project leader crying a lot and staying behind after school occasionally. Also, spreadsheets. Lots of spreadsheets.

I'm extremely glad that I didn't decide to do it.


Well, it's getting kind of cold in here and I want to go to bed, so I'm just going to finish this up with a link to something funny... how about a web page dealing with annoyingly common mistakes that people make about the Zelda series? Yeah, that'd do. Here it is.

I have an iPhone. That is all.

The worst part about getting a brand new iPhone? People insisting on calling you on the home phone from downstairs.


Of course, that's more than balanced out by the various great things about it. As it turns out, only abut five or six people were actually queuing up outside the O2 shop in Ayr so there wasn't too much hanging around. I basically just met up with mum after school and then we passed the time by getting something to eat and walking around shops until they started to shut at around half five. Then we just stood around outside the shop in the little crowd that had formed and talked to the people there. Well, my mum talked. I read Doctor Who Magazine.

But, you're not interested in how I got the iPhone. You're interested in what it's like. Well, maybe you're not, considering it's been out elsewhere for ages, but I'll assume that you are only so I can disappoint you by saying that I'm not going to tell you. I will tell you that, so far, it's an excellent little device but I'll save the full write-up/fanboy gushings for a MacTake article some time tomorrow.


On an different topic completely, today was photo day at school. I dislike photo day, in kind of the same way that dodongo dislikes smoke*. Now that I'm in Sixth Year, I got drafted in on all my free periods to either stand in the hall and wait around or be sent off to some classroom to locate some small child whose smaller sibling was having their photo taken.

It also meant that I had to get my photo taken at some point. Now, I'm not exactly photogenic, partly because I can't just sit there and smile. It always seems really forced. If I laugh or I'm genuinely happy, I'll smile slightly. I can't say that sitting on a stool getting my photo taken is much of an enjoyable experience. But, I got it over with and that's the end of it. Well, until they need to take a photo of the whole Sixth Year as they are apparently planning to do. “They” being the school. Did I make that clear? Doesn't matter, really.

That's pretty much it for today. I had some other stuff to mention which I may talk about tomorrow. For now, I've got to go memorise a new phone number then get some sleep. It might be a busy day tomorrow, depending on what I decide to do.






*This is an obscure gaming reference. Don't worry if you don't get it. Actually, you might want to start worrying if you do get it.

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.

Not much to say

You remember yesterday that I wrote about my “weird day” and all the stuff that happened in it? That originally came about because I wanted to write about the strangely ironic situation of trying to choose new glasses while your old ones are getting mended – you can't see the frames you're meant to be looking at. Even if you have your actual glasses, it's still impossible to see what you look like with the new pair without leaning in ridiculously close to a mirror. Assuming you're near-sighted, as I am.


I haven't much to say today. I'm feeling slightly more up to writing some of The Grey Line and maybe a few sketches, since my homework load has lightened a bit and university applications are almost behind me, just a few technicalities to sort out. I've also been working on designing a small puzzle game in Game Maker, which I started fiddling around with when only a couple of people turned up to Computing club. If it happens again next week, we're just installing some game demos (it's been done before) and playing them instead.

I'll see if I can get some of that done tomorrow, in between working on a couple of school projects and preparing for a fireworks thingy my parents are having. That could be amusing, hypothetically. Oh, and I've also got to play Phantom Hourglass, Metroid Prime 3, Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal. I've really fallen behind on my gaming, damn it.

Like I said, not much for today. School was fairly uninteresting, on the whole. It wasn't bad, I just can't remember there being much to talk about. Well, I can remember a couple of things but it's late and night and my hands hurt for some reason so I'm just going to quit now.


But one final note. Nobody ever really leaves comments here but I've been having some trouble with spam comments on a few posts. To save me some effort, the comments are now being moderated, so if yours doesn't appear instantly, don't give up hope. I'll get to it eventually. Or dismiss it as spam. Whatever.

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.

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.

Not the Title I Wanted

(Note: this was actually my second choice for yesterday's post topic and was partially written last night. I like it and I'm lazy so I've just changed the odd “today” to “yesterday” and gone with it. Also, I wanted to title this post “Yesterday's Enterprise Blog Post” but I can't do formatting on the titles. Truly, a great loss to the world.)


Yesterday was the last day before the school's half-term break. This also means that it was inter-house activities day, a day on which house captains wander around the school, pleading with you to make up the numbers for senior rugby and show pride in the house you were randomly assigned to when you first came to the school. At some point, sports of various different kinds are played.

This is not something that I enjoy. Fortunately, I've worked long and hard at cultivating a reputation as an unsociable and lazy jerk who hates sports in all its forms, so I'm never asked to do anything anymore. All I had to do yesterday, activities-wise, was the inter-house quiz. Which we won and which I provided numerous answers for. While trying to convince various S3-4 brats to shut up so we could here the damn questions.

First period was Computing. Registration in the morning finished a good few minutes early, so I just went up to the common room and played a friend at some variant of Street Fighter II. Managed to KO her right as the bell rang, too.

After that, I had second free and then the quiz. The real fun started after lunch, when the debating was held.

Debating at school is often fairly unbalanced. I always feel sorry for the poor bastard who has to stand up there and champion the right of the government to kick down your door and shoot your dog because you gave a civil servant a funny look. And, of course, we all have to sit on the floor for what is often the better part of two hours.

For some bizarre reason, Sam Potter, a friend of mine, had volunteered to be the questioner for our house and so, when he spilled something on his shirt, he obviously needed a replacement. Since this happened at lunch, right before debating, he needed it fast. He ended up taking mine and I ended up wearing an old t-shirt of his that he happened to have handy.

While I did have a perfectly reasonable and legitimate excuse for wearing it, I didn't particularly want to go out into the school and have to keep explaining it to everybody, so I began to consider simply staying in the common room rather than going to the debating. Skippy (I always say this, but you do remember that Skippy is technically the co-writer of this blog, right?) hadn't wanted to go either and wanted to go into town. I didn't really want to go into town and was a bit apprehensive about dodging the debating but when the time came, we just stayed upstairs when everyone else went to register.

When no one came to get us after ten minutes or so, we realized that no one was really going to and started to relax slightly. And by “relax slightly”, I mean “remember that another friend had brought in his Xbox 360 in anticipation of taking it to a LAN at somebody else's house”. Naturally, we located this fellow's bag, took out the 360, hooked it up to the good TV and played Halo 3 co-op for an hour.

A few people came in during that time but it was only a few members of our class who had done their bit at the debating and decided to take a break to get something to eat. Once it was over and everyone started to filter back in, a few people were surprised that we hadn't gone and most were fairly amused. One person in particular was more annoyed than surprised but, then, we had stolen his Xbox.

Technically, we were supposed to go to our class for last period but no one had there stuff because the debating was supposed to take longer and nobody wanted to go anyway, because we're Sixth Years and it was a class. So we stayed in the common room and had a generally pretty good time, playing Mario Kart and making jokes. One line of mine I feel I must relate, because I'm extremely egotistical. Sam Potter, who was a member of a team and so got a chair at the debating, mockingly asked everyone what it was like sitting on the floor. I replied that I didn't know, since I had been sitting on a sofa.


And that was my day yesterday. I have no idea why I felt the need to write about that. It might have made marginally more sense if I'd actually finished it yesterday, but even then it would have been pretty useless. I guess the point is that I really like days like that, right before the holidays when everyone is relaxed and I can get out of sports, sitting on a wooden floor for an hour and Physics last lesson on a Friday.

A few other notes, before I post this and go to bed at a sensible time so that I don't end up getting out of bed at noon again.

I haven't managed to post a woodle so far today. I may resort to a Stick Guys later or tomorrow, if I can't find the images I need to do a little edited thing.

Another day goes by without an update to Corbett's Fiction. I definitely intend to build up a buffer tomorrow and try to have regular updates starting from Monday. I know, I know, I said that last week. But this is a holiday, at least, so I should have the time.

I finally got round to playing MySims today, having been meaning to since last Saturday when Erin got it. It takes you a little while to get used to the building and design controls, but once you do, you realise just how powerful they can be. I also like how the character creation stuff has been greatly simplified. There's still room for variation, you just don't have to worry about the exact angle at which your Sim's chin meets their neck. I may even post a review of it on here.

Or do a review of it on the VersusCOM podcast, which shall rise from the grave at some point during these holidays. I have declared it, so it must be so.


That's all folks. I'm off to bed. Right after I read some more of the Agony Booth recap of Hudson Hawk.

Too hurried to think of a decent title

There's something deeply satisfying about going into my Blogger Dashboard and seeing Corbett's Fiction, a little tag saying “4 posts” underneath it, at the top of the list, the latest of my blogs to be updated. The MacTake has been on the bottom for a while now. I'll get round to that sometime soon.

But not tonight. I said I'd be online to play some friends at Halo 3 but didn't manage it, partly because I left some homework too late (some of which I still have to do) and partly because I was watching the fourth season première of Stargate Atlantis. It was a good episode and it's fun to have something to watch once a week again. I can do this with the 'Gate series because they start showing in the UK just a few weeks after the US and that means we catch up and surpass the Americans while they're hanging around at that mid-season hiatus thing.

I remember when SG-1 ended and various geek sites on the internet were hyping it and lamenting it. During all the buzz about the final episode, I was just thinking that I really should get round to watching it. It had been saved on the DVR for weeks.

Anyway, I've just been reminded of some other homework that I need to go and do, so I'm cutting this short. I'll probably still end up having to do half of it at school tomorrow, which will be difficult for various reasons. One, someone is bringing in a 360 for a Halo 3 marathon (technically, just to play Halo 3, but you know it'll never even be switched off) and two, the table I usually work at in the study room has been stolen.

We really don't know where it's gone. Someone took it for some school function and it never showed up again. Since one table is covered with games console stuff, that really limits the working space in the study room. And I don't have time tomorrow to lead a crusade to recover it because I'll be too busy stealing a little patch of table and scribbling down answers for Computing homework.

I really need to stop being so damned lazy about schoolwork. And I really need to get that fracking table back.

False Statement

Today has been another busy day. As it draws to a close, I still have several things I planned to do left undone. I managed to finish my personal statement, something that I really needed to do for university applications and to stop a number of teachers from killing me on Monday. I got some Physics revision done but by the time I got to that, I was already kind of worn out, so I may do some more before I go to bed and in the morning.

I've noticed recently that I have a bit of a reduced work ethic towards school. It's probably because I'm doing less work, compared to last year, so I feel less motivation to do the work I do have, if that makes any sense. Which I suspect it doesn't. Basically, since no one is forcing me to do lots of work, I feel compelled to do very little.

This has worked well enough so far, but I really need to get it together over the next few weeks for the various tests I have coming up and the projects that I have to begin for Physics and Computing. Not to mention the fact that I need to do some more stuff outside of school, particularly Corbett's Fiction and finally learning some C++ and building my own PC.

Just so you know, I claimed to be doing those things on my personal statement. Which is kind of true, I guess. I certainly intend to have them done by the time I start university, so what difference does it make?

And, just so you know even more, I didn't mention TWToday on the statement. I can justify it by saying that it has no real relevance or something like that, which it really doesn't, but it's also something that I don't tend to like telling people about. Plus I've not liked it so much recently, since I seem to be becoming a bit more whiny. No idea if that's true, but it feels that way. Plus, I'm putting more energy into Corbett's Fiction and generally stretching myself a bit thin and this site is kind of low on my priorities list right now.

But I'm still updating once a day, every day.

Actually, I've thought of a better reason not to mention TWToday on my application. I've admitted here that I made up half the stuff on my statement and that I consider most of the “teamwork” and “qualities” stuff to be utter bullshit.

Yeah, don't want any admissions people reading that.


Just realised, another week goes by without a woodle. I'll try to think of something for next week. By next Saturday, I also hope to have The Grey Line updating again and I really need to write some stuff for the MacTake. Since I mentioned that on my statement.

Well, maybe it'll get cut when the teacher in charge reads over the first draft. You never know.

Actually, I could live with a lot of stuff getting cut from that statement. Like the on-hiatus podcast. It'll come back by mid-October, I promise. With some new comedy sketches that I claim to have written.

Holy crap, I really hate talking about myself and the stuff I do when I know it'll actually affect anything. Or when it'll affect nothing. I really have no idea why I talk about myself so much on here. It's probably because I'm exceptionally arrogant and self-centred.

Workload

It seems like I've got a load of work coming up in the next couple of weeks. I have several Maths tests (tests for several sections of a unit and two levels of tests for the whole thing), a Physics test (everything we've done so far), a Computing test (again, pretty much everything so far) and my university applications to write up. Plus all the usual work and homework that I need to do for school.

As such, I'm putting The Grey Line on hold temporarily. While I obviously have a clear idea of the path of the story, I want to take some time and work up a larger written buffer as well as put the details together at a smaller scale. While I'm doing that, I will try to keep Corbett's Fiction updating at least once a week. Think of it as a warm-up period.

I should have some time to work on it at the weekend, though I expect I'll also be doing revision and I really do need to get that application done.

Oh, and I'll be spending a fair chunk of Saturday in Edinburgh, at the eponymous university's open day. I'll be seeing a lecture and possibly touring the facilities along with several friends. The fact that university now seems so close is actually very, very scary. It seems like it was barely yesterday that I was in an S2 Careers lesson, pretending I wanted to be a lawyer just so the teacher would stop asking me questions.

It also means that I have to write a personal statement that will have a large effect on whether or not I get accepted into my courses of choice. It's another one of those things where I have to pretend that I have interesting hobbies and then make up nonsense about learning “skills” and “qualities” from them.

I've said this many time before, I know, but I just find that very hard to do. On some level, I guess I consider it lying. I don't find that my hobbies and activities have any deep profound effect on me. If anything, I do the things that I do because of my personality, rather than the other way around. My brain just doesn't like dealing with such abstract and intangible qualities, that are pretty much nothing more than a matter of opinion.

Which, incidentally, was why I always hated English. As evidenced by my A in the prelim and my C in the actual exam, getting the questions right (and getting the right questions) is largely a matter of luck. Admittedly, a lot of people fell down on the English exam and it's caused a few rumbles in the education community. Even the English teacher handling the appeals for my school said she wasn't happy with how the whole process was going. I was lucky enough to get back up to a B on appeal.

Still, that's neither here nor there. I've got to go and post some stuff on Corbett's Fiction. Nothing much, just mentioning the hiatus and then maybe doing some work on the characters bios and so on.

Have a nice day.

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 Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess in a couple of weeks.

All this gaming in a confined space has brought to light a few things about a few people. It has re-affirmed my belief that the vast majority of people who greatly enjoy FIFA games are assholes. It's fine if they like something else but, like I said, nobody else can get on the Xbox. And they're using my controllers. Liking FIFA games doesn't automatically make you an ass, there just seems to be a very large overlap, enough to make it indicative.

Another thing I've learned is that graphics in a game really don't matter. I've always known that, too be honest, but playing Street Fighter and Goldeneye and all that again has just brought it to the fore of my mind. But something that really bugs me is people who dismiss games based on being them being old. There's one guy who always comes in and if we're playing anything other than Timesplitters or F-Zero (both, admittedly, good games), he declares it “shite”. Ocarina of Time, regularly voted one of the greatest gaming experiences of all time, should not be played because it is “obsolete”.

I'm serious. Every time he comes in he says he doesn't understand why something's good “just because it's old”. And then we patiently explain that it's not like that, it's good because it's good, age doesn't change that. Then we impatiently explain it to him again and he goes away for another while, to great relief.

On the other hand, this guy dislikes Monty Python for the same reason and once said that it was irrelevant because it was “like, 80 years old”. Yeah, he's in touch with reality.

Actually, I've also found that there are people in the world who haven't seen any Monty Python films at all. I've seen them all and keep meaning to buy the show but I don't think it's out on a full series box-set yet. I intend to show them the error of their ways using a DVD player, a couple of free periods and a lunch break. Also, a TV that accepts SCART input would probably help as well.


And that's what's been going on in my life recently. Not all of it obviously. I can't tell you all of it or I'll have nothing left for tomorrow. Not that that's likely to happen. I could expand each paragraph here into an entire essay of ranting and raving and reminiscing. I could fill a book about that guy who hates Monty Python.

I normally say around now that I'm going to go to bed, but I still need to update Corbett's Fiction, pack some more games for tomorrow (Mario Kart 64 = Win), finish watching a stand-up comedy DVD (Jack Dee, very funny man) and then read another chapter of a book on game design.

I quite like having this thing done early. Early-ish. I don't know why, but I haven't been enjoying this very much lately. Just pouring this kind of stuff out of my brain seems to make me relax. The things that make me need to relax... well, they're a different story altogether. I'm going to post this now. It's so long and incoherent that I doubt I can be bothered spellchecking it, just in case you find any errors.

A heapin' helpin' of unbridled rage

I know, I haven't updated Corbett's Fiction. I've been busy with Super Paper Mario, which I'll discuss at greater length once I've played it more. I'll probably do it on Monday, since I have some stuff planned for the weekend. Which don't include a woodle, I've just realised.


Have I mentioned that I'm doing Maths mentoring at school? I think I might have, but it basically involves heading along to a class with younger pupils and giving some particular ones help whenever they need it. I help out with S2 Maths once a week and other people in my year do something similar for their respective classes.

I have a funny story about this, actually. I, along with the rest of my class, got asked to help during the first week of term. Pretty much all of the class volunteered (my Maths teacher turned one guy down on the basis that it would be “like the blind leading the blind”) and we've been going along ever since.

Then, a few days ago, the whole year got told to stay behind after assembly so that they could sort out the rota stuff for other classes. I was already doing Maths but I had to go along anyway and I thought I might do something else as well, like Computing or Physics. Well, I like to keep my Monday fairly bare (one lesson, allowing for what is pretty much a three-day weekend with one day spent playing video games in the common room) and I didn't want to have fewer than two study periods any other day. So anything after Tuesday was out.

All the good stuff for Tuesday got taken and I had to stay sitting there while they spent ages going over each lesson of every day. Colossal waste of time.

Actually, assemblies in general tend to be a colossal waste of time. They thankfully reduced the number of them this year (two a week instead of four) but this means they have to cram more nonsense than ever before into each one. Today was the day they decided to have every single office-bearer in the school (Head Boy and Girl, Art/Sports/Music/House Captains, their respective deputies, all prefects, etc.) come up to get a badge and a handshake from the headmaster.

This, along with two long announcements and several other awards, ended up taking about half an hour. Half an hour. With most of the school sitting on the hard wooden floor of the gym hall, squished up against each other, bored out of their skulls. Half of first lesson missed just so that some Sixth Years could walk slowly up to the front, get some half-hearted applause and a badge and then walk slowly back again.

If it was just the Captains and the Heads of School then maybe it would be tolerable. It might be good for the school to know who those people are. But all 40-odd prefects? Nobody wants to or needs to know who we are. That's why they give us the freaking badges! No little primary 7 kid who's lost blood flow to his legs cares that I'm a prefect. I barely care that I'm a prefect. Maybe if every single person in the year wasn't a prefect or a captain of something, it would be more feasible. Maybe then the positions and badges would actually mean something, instead of representing easily shirked, part-time duties that you can lie about on your university applications.

Every one knows the Heads already. Anyone who needs to know who holds any other positions would presumably know now already, if they've been paying the slightest bit of attention. Nobody cares about the prefects. They could have just left a bag of the identical badges sitting on a table at form time for people to take.

But no, everything has to be overly ceremonial, time-consuming and meaningless. I hate stuff like that. In theory, disliking stuff that wastes my time is a good thing. In practice, I just get angry at an awful lot of things that I'm largely powerless to change. And that makes me even angrier.


This rant has gone off at a complete tangent. But I like letting off some steam like this now and again and that's kind of what TWToday is for. I hope it made you think or at the very least made you laugh, either with me or at me.

I'm gonna post this now and I'm not sure I can even be bothered spell-checking it. I'll probably read it over tomorrow morning and either laugh at myself for getting so worked up or just get angry again. I think “anger” is my default mood.

I might write more about what I'd intended to write about tonight, tomorrow. Until then, have a nice day.

The Other Great Divide

Just watching a video of Tabula Rasa. I've never been hugely interested in MMOs but this has actually piqued my interest. I'm also disappointed by the official cancellation of Metroid Dread, at least in 2D form.


I've been having some trouble coming up with post topics lately, even with things going on at school, which was my hope for picking things up after the holidays. Sure, interesting stuff does happen to me at school and at home, I just rarely think of it as something to write about. And sometimes I will think it's worth remembering at the time and in hindsight, it doesn't seem so good.

That hindsight tends to occur when I get home from school. Even with homework (which I still have to do some of tonight), I seem to draw a very clear mental line between home and school. At school, I'm compelled to work. I talk to various different people in my peer group and get annoyed at many others. Computers at school are for working and for complaining about when the filter blocks almost every damned website worth a damn.* If I'm going to play a game, it's very often a multiplayer one so that others can enjoy it.

At home, I have a much greater degree of control over what I do. I don't need to be annoyed by other people's music* since I can listen to my own, or watch a DVD. I can do anything I want to do on the computer, reading my comics, watching videos and using Google Image Search without having to use Klingon Google. If I talk to people at all, it'll be closer friends over some kind of IM or Skype, rather than the extended social group with whom I can hold a casual conversation at school.

For these reasons and others, I occasionally feel like school and home are two different lives. Obviously linked and deeply intertwined but nevertheless distinguished from one another by the way that I act and the things that I do.


Another thing that separates the two is the way that school drags on and on and time at home seems so very short in comparison. I swear I shall get some more of my Visual BASIC homework done tonight and some fiction written tomorrow. I have a plan to launch a blog-style thing where I update with short chunks of prose several times a week (possibly on the semi-traditional Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule) and maybe some other stuff on weekends.

Forcing myself to stick to a daily schedule here seems to have worked out well enough so I figure it's worth a try.

Now. I have to go do some work... and possibly read some comics and think up comedy sketch ideas. But mostly work.

And curses, I forgot to write that article for the MacTake that I meant to do. Meh. I'll just blame it on Skippy.






*Even some of the sites that teachers access for educational purposes are getting blocked. And I don't necessarily consider it “worth a damn”, but the MacTake is seemingly blocked as well.

**For reasons that you can probably surmise on your own, S Club 7 are now on my list of people whose parents I'm going to kill if and when I figure out time travel.

Even More Philosophical Dolphin Genocide

You remember that question I posed yesterday? Just in case you didn't, here it is again:

"If you had to, would you kill 10,000 dolphins to save a single human child?

If you think that's a bit extreme, then consider this: how many animals of a given species would you be willing to sacrifice to save a single human life?"

I can't really attempt to give a neat, precise answer (which is probably an indicator of either a very deep or very ridiculous question, possibly both) but the discussion it provoked made me think a bit. Particular answers given by different people were rather interesting.

For example, Sam Potter. A highly rational (and, it has to be said, cynical) individual who considers intelligent design a pet peeve and Richard Dawkins a personal hero. He reasoned that, to a human, a human life should come above all else. This is especially the case when the life in question is that of a child, even more so if that hypothetical child is one's own.

Sam Stafford, on the other hand, felt that all life was precious. While he would obviously allow some level of animal death to save a human life, he argued vehemently against the “10,000 dolphins” scenario. He took a similar stance when ideas such as battery farming came up, I think. If I'm wrong, I'm sure he'll correct me in the comments.

For my part, I refused to take a side. As I said above, there's no way to give an exact answer to a question such as this and I feel that there isn't much use trying. Would I kill an animal - be it a dolphin, a gorilla, a platypus, whatever - to save a person? Yes, I would. Would I wipe out a species? No, almost certainly not.* Anything in between is very much a grey area. I'd have to analyse the situation and come to my own conclusions.

It's rather odd that the only absolute I hold to be true is that there are no absolutes. There are obvious extremes of right and wrong, morality and immorality, but those are just the ends of a long and complicated scale that you have to judge, and maybe even invent, for yourself.


Today's drive-by philosophy aside, I have a few other things to mention. I'm still kind of overwhelmed with Computing stuff. I really wish I'd made a note that I had to do that Visual BASIC during the holidays. Oh well. Might get a bit more done tonight.

And speaking of Computing, today was Wellington's first ever Computing Club meeting! Okay, so it doesn't really deserve an exclamation mark, ironic or not, but it was surprisingly fun nonetheless. Basically, the aforementioned Sams and I (plus Jimerson, the other Advanced Higher Computing student who was away today) go along to the Computing labs at lunch and walk a bunch of First Years through creating simple web pages and Flash animations.

Today was the first meeting and a whole bunch of wee folk came along and chose what they wanted to do and we explained it to them, with the help of textbooks, the occasional assistance of a teacher and our own vast stores of intellect and experience.

Next week, Sam Stafford's going to give a little presentation on Flash animation (he showed off some stick men this afternoon but didn't have time to get much done) and I think I'm meant to help in some way. I figure I'll flick through Flash for Dummies and then show 'em a Homestar Runner 'toon. We also need to get some video recorded that they can fiddle around with in Windows Movie Maker. If it was good enough for Resident Amarillo, it's good enough for... whatever they're gonna do with it.

I'll probably have more to say about that as work and plans progress. I'll admit that I'm starting to feel some pressure to pad out my extra-curricular stuff for university applications but I would have done this anyway. I just enjoy working with kids and showing them new stuff, hence why I'm also doing Maths mentoring on Fridays. It helps that I get the two funniest kids in S2 to work with but, again, I would have done it anyway. I think I might want to be a teacher some day. Computer engineering and then teaching. It worked well enough for Woz.

Anyway, I have to go and do some coding stuff. Or maybe just go to bed and tell my teacher that I did some coding stuff tomorrow... no, I feel like getting it done. Another ten pages maybe. Also, I've just realised that I probably ought to go and write something at the MacTake on the new iPods and various other recently released tidbits of Apple news.

Philosophical Dolphin Genocide

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the majority of my classmates?


No, I'm not going to elaborate on that. I'm too busy doing other things. Currently, those other things consist of reading web pages but any second now I'm going to go and do more Visual BASIC. Last night my excuse for leaving it so late was Maths homework (which it turns out I only did half of anyway... and most of the class was away on a trip, the remainder hadn't done it either and we ended up not handing it in).

Tonight, I have an inexplicably sore arm, something which has not been aided by having to work on a Computing presentation for tomorrow, in addition to the code I still have to write. I figure I'll do another 10 or so pages from my VB sheets and then maybe do a little more during a study period tomorrow, after putting the finishing touches on that presentation and in between bouts of Street Fighter II.

Not that anyone will play me at Street Fighter any more. I'm just too damn good (comparatively speaking). Ever seen a grown LAN gamer cry? It's a highly amusing sight.


Due to both my rush to get this done and the rather hectic day I've had, I've not got much to say here. What I will do is pose a question, one that I shall discuss at greater length tomorrow, in the vain hope that I'll have got some answers by tomorrow. A friend of mine was wondering about this in the common room today and it sparked a surprisingly deep discussion.

If you had to, would you kill 10,000 dolphins to save a single human child?

If you think that's a bit extreme, then consider this: how many animals of a given species would you be willing to sacrifice to save a single human life?

Think on that for a while and get back to me. I have to go either code stuff or come up with a plausible rationalisation for not coding stuff.

I Even Hate Potential Change

Today at school, we sat through a talk on applying to university, which must be done by early October. Long-term readers (there must be one of you out there) will know that I have only a very vague idea of what I want to do in life. I'm aware that it should involve computers and I hope to be involved in the video game industry somehow, probably in a game design aspect. I also hope to do a lot of writing, which could easily just be a hobby once I gather some momentum, and I have more than a passing interest in physics, astronomy and robotics.

I have yet to find a university course that combines all these things.

It might help if I was actually looking at prospectuses and so on, something I probably should have done before now and will have to be doing over the weekend. Of course, that's only the start of the whole process and the problems involved.

My resume extra-curricular-wise isn't exactly stunning and such things are apparently very important. Seems like I have just over one month to turn myself into a well-rounded human being with a diverse range of interests and skills. Cue 24-esque countdown starting.... now!

...

Or not.

I figure I can do the C++ for Dummies book I've had lying around for ages and claim that as a skill. I've come up with a challenge to build my own PC (or Linux box as it may well end up) for under £100, not counting various parts I can scavenge from here and there. Playing some sort of sport or musical instrument is apparently helpful but I'm supremely untalented at both and now is no time to start.

I guess I'll just have to see how it goes and try to lie my way out of it. I've always been very bad at this whole “I performed task X outside of school, proving Y and teaching me that Z”. As far as my cynical and logical mind can see, doing X proves only that I can do X. People can draw from that what they will.

So I'm going to do a to-do list. Here goes.


Go through C++ for Dummies

Complete Visual BASIC stuff (technically homework which I'll have to do anyway)

Research building a computer

Continue writing fiction and sketches, turning it into a regular thing

Write more for the MacTake

Revive the VersusCOM podcast

Get back into Game Maker (I'm supposed to be helping little kids learn it in Computing club anyway, so why not?)

Look into university courses, particularly what I would need for a career in video game design, with other options available (I can't believe this came so far down the list)

Do something about the VersusCOM website

Stop writing these blog posts when people can come into my room and annoy me

Stop adding irrelevant items to lists without giving them proper context

Sell more stuff on eBay, particularly the NESi and spare retro consoles (nothing to do with the future, I just need some cash and my brother asked me to sell some stuff of his too)

Become more proficient with Linux and declare it a skill


I think that about covers it for now. I really need to get some hobbies that can be summed up in one word like “archery”, “photography” or “paintballing”. Video games don't seem to count as a hobby, I don't like telling people about my writing, such as it is, and everything else I do sounds very geeky and academic. Maybe I could invent a sport based on retro gaming and claim commitment for having done it for years.

But I don't want to get started on a rant about that. I fear I may already have done so elsewhere and elsewhen. Which really ought to be a word. I think I'm going to try writing something tonight. Or practising Street Fighter II some more.

No! I must focus on shiny things my future! My future hopefully involves getting some sleep soon. My body still hasn't adjusted to the school routine of being awake in the morning.

School and Stupidity

Nothing quite says “Sixth Year” like a 96-match, winner-stays-on, 4-hour continuous game of Street Fighter II. People are bringing in more advanced consoles (note avoidance of the word “better”) than the SNES tomorrow, along with plenty of TVs.

You may remember that a few days ago, I mentioned I had fallen out of the habit of playing video games over the summer. I also speculated that this was because I consider gaming very much a social activity and that I'd probably get back into it once I got back to school.

As you may have guessed, I was right. After having been humiliated by failing miserably at SNES Tetris (the principles are remarkably different from Tetris DS, particularly screen width, drop rate and the lack of a hold ability) and holding my own in Street Fighter, I came home determined to practice all night if I had to. Which I did, more or less. I still intend to play some Final Fantasy III tonight, since a girl is beating me at it. That may sound ridiculously juvenile, but this is the internet. Everything sounds like that.

So, with all this gaming and schoolwork and such, I haven't actually had much of a chance to think about TWToday and what to write for it. I may try to get something written tomorrow, though what I could really do with is some easier access to a computer. The only one currently available at school, without trekking round classrooms begging, is stuck in the corner of the Sixth Year kitchen, its speakers having been appropriated for various iPods.

Still, I might be able to get it done if we can get into the quieter room (read: room without blaring crappy pop music). It would be even quieter still if we could shut the door. Well, we can technically do that already but we just can't get it open again, owing to a distinct lack of handle.

I know I seem to be doing a lot of complaining (which may be why you read this, whoever you are, but I don't like it being why I write) about the Common Room and school but there are a significant number of people in it whom I despise. Why, you ask? Simple. Many of them are imbeciles with juvenile senses of humour and no perception of reality.

How can I prove this? Why, a tale by firelight, of course. Monitor backlights also work.

A bit of background. The school I go to has a house system. The four houses are Nightingale, Montgomery, Churchill and Curie. Obviously, these are all named after various famous people.

When my friends and I were sitting playing Street Fighter today, we clearly overheard a rather (unintentionally) amusing conversation going on behind us. A girl we'll call “K” (later edit: not that I'll ever actually call her that again) comes in, squeeling merrily in the fashion that girls such as her do when they encounter others of their kind. She then states, in a clear and loud voice, completely unaware of the stupidity of it:

“I just found out that Montgomery isn't named after Colin Montgomerie!”

...

That sound you can hear is one of Britain's greatest military officers spinning in his grave.

What makes it even worse is the fact that several other piped up to not knowing that either. They then struggled to recall who it was actually named for (they got as far as some guy named “Montgomery”). This isn't even getting to the fact that the two men spell their names differently.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of shit that we have to put up with until we finally rise up and establish a ruling council of intellectual elites.

Unless you just went to Wikipedia to look up “Montgomery”, in which case you'll be cleaning toilets.

Standard Back to School Complaining

You know it's the first day back from summer when you take a dozen tries to do your tie.


Ah, first day back at school. It's weird. I can get back into the routine very quickly, it's only another variation on something I've been doing decades, I suppose, but it seems like most of the knowledge I gained last term has left my head.

Well, maybe not so much left as “temporarily hidden away beneath a thick coating of dust”. The odd prod in the right direction seems to be helping me get through things. Our Physics teacher, sensible man that he is, has decided to run through the previous terms stuff for a couple of days rather than spending the rest of the term answering questions about the first topic. Computing should be a matter of flicking through some PowerPoints I had to make last term. Maths is... Maths. I'll deal with it as it comes.

The biggest advantage of Sixth Year is always supposed to be the Common Room, to which we now have access during free periods. For the younger children in the school, this is undoubtedly the holy grail, a place where video games can be played and TV watched while in school. Once you get further up it still sounds like a nice idea. Once you reach Sixth Year and step inside, you discover that it looks crap, is cramped and that the hallowed TVs have a single SCART plug and look like they were pulled off a rubbish heap in the early 90s.

It's nice enough though, and I'm sure I'll learn to live with it until some asshole gets the whole year chucked out by trying to destroy everyone's eardrums with some horrible pop song.

I really can be depressing if I try, can't I? But like I keep saying, I need to stop doing these things late at night. It's not that I get tired, it's more to do with the constant stream of people in and out of my door telling me that I should get to bed, peering out my window at garage doors before declaring that they can't see anything and then asking if I've brushed my teeth. Repeat ad nauseam.

Those three things all quite literally happened immediately after I'd finished typing that.

But away from such topics. I haven't had any time to write more of the fiction that I started last week. I currently need some kind of title for it, as well, since it has long since evolved past what the original title implied. Suggestions on a postcard or in the comments.

I may write more about school tomorrow when I feel I can be bothered and if I don't have too much homework to do.

I have no idea why anyone thought it would be a good idea to do a Joust movie. I'd barely heard of the thing and, reading up on it, it's hardly plot heavy.

For now, I'm going to bed. Because I'm tired. I find that that's a far better reason to go to bed than “because somebody yelled at me”.

Have a nice day.

What happens when TWToday and MacTake get fused in a transporter accident:

You know what's weird? I got my exams results this morning and I'm way more interested in writing about all the new Mac gear that's just been announced.

Or maybe I just don't want to write at all, since I'm apparently rubbish at English, judging from my C in that particular subject. Not that I'm hugely concerned since I got all the other grades I expected (all As, I'm very arrogant) and, as long-term readers will know, I have nothing but contempt for that section of the syllabus. And I'll bump it up with an appeal, anyway.

What I would like to know is where exactly I screwed up. English has never been my best subject but I didn't think I did that badly in the exam. I was kind of in a rush to go and buy Pokemon Diamond afterwards but that couldn't possibly have been the reason...

Despite literally minutes of trying, neither Sam nor I can figure out what on Earth the "points" (or maybe "credits" or even "credit points") on our certificates mean. There are a lot of sixes, which is either good, bad or Satanic. No one's really sure.


Still, on to more interesting topics.

I don't think of myself as a Mac fanboy (I base this on the fact that I don't threaten to kill people who find security flaws in OS X) but I have to admit to reading reports of the recent Apple press conference with great excitement.

While I have no intention of buying one, the new iMacs look very impressive, with nothing below a 20-inch screen and a whole lot of complicated acronyms and numbers mentioned in the same sentence as them, including "ATI" and "DX10". Though I expect that we'll have an even newer version by the time I'm next looking to upgrade.

I might consider buying one of the new keyboards, however. They look very impressive and the current one is certainly nothing brilliant. It may look fit slightly better with the look of the current iMac but that transparent bit really can be a pain. For example, I got my iMac last Christmas, at which time I also got a large bar of chocolate. As is prone to happen when one is eating chocolate, some small crumbs came off and fell on the desk. Ordinarily, this would be know problem. But I'm looking through the "Magic Mac Keyboard Window" right now and I can still see pieces of that chocolate.

Depending on the price, it might be worth upgrading iLife, primarily for the new versions of iPhoto and iMovie. I guess I'll find out the price in a little while as the Apple UK store is currently down, indicating that we're getting all the new stuff at the same time as the US. I hope.

[Added later: it's back up now and you can see all the prices and such on the store. I'll have to check that out]


A few other notes. Skippy posted a big long rant about something-or-other down below. Or down under, since I can't stop mocking his nationality.

Spore is apparently going to be playable at the Game Convention in Leipzig. There's no particular reason for this to interest me except that I'm very interested by the game as a whole. One of these days, I'm going to go to one of these conventions. And then they'll pay, they'll all pay!!!! Muhahahaha!!!

Since I'm being all evil and such, now seems like a good time to abuse my power for personal gain by linking to the Axim X3 I'm selling on eBay. One of my readers must be looking for a used PDA with a spare battery and a folding keyboard? Come on, you know you want it. One of you must... neither of you? Seriously?

I haven't done one of those meaningless, self-referential titles in a while, have I?

Remember all those weeks of posts that I did before and during May talking about my exams and various things related to my exams that I can't really recall at the moment?

No? Fair enough, I barely remember it. Seems like it was ages ago.

Which is what makes it all the more surprising that I'm getting the results tomorrow, barring their interception by an evil cabal of Royal Mail employees hell bent on mildly inconveniencing me a postal strike.

I know some people (including Skippy, remember him? The other half of this blogging team? Also writes for MacTake, hypothetically? You know, the guy who never updates and hasn't come out from underneath a small rock in the middle of the Australian outback since his iMac died? Yeah, that Skippy.) who already have their results, having managed to successfully sign up for online results the day before certificates are due to come out.

They seem to have been among the lucky ones, judging by all the reports of massive screwups. Admittedly, it seems to have been a little out of proportion considering that people only have to wait for 24 hours, maximum, to get their results. One person shown on the news said they had been trying for ten hours to get the site to work. I'm not sure if this was actually ten solid hours of clicking "Refresh" but it seems like they need to get a bit of perspective.

That said, the whole thing has been a bit of a fiasco. Fortunately, I don't have to deal with the crushing disappointment of having to wait slightly longer than expected to receive my results at the same time as everyone else, since I never bothered to sign up. I was going to, but when I got the note from the SQA it required some kind of security thing that I didn't have. The school might have given it to me before then, but damned if I could remember.


Oh, well, enough about that. Today has been another day of watching Yu-Gi-Oh - The Abridged Series (again) and fiddling around with ancient consoles. We tested everything from that big retro bundle which we could test, given the cables available to us, and we're fairly satisfied with it. All three Mega Drives work, as do the NES, SNES, Amstrad CPC 464 and the PSone (near as we can tell without the video cables).

A few strange things became apparent while we were investigating the consoles. Both Mega Drive Is have an odd port on the back that we couldn't quite pin down. Turns out it was only ever used for the Meganet network, where it connected to a Megamodem that allowed for some fairly primitive online play and that (as with all cool peripherals) was never released in Europe, or anywhere other than Japan and Brazil. Brazil, in case you're wondering, was something of a strong-hold for the Mega Drive and more Meganet games were released there than in Japan.

These early models also had the text "High Definition Graphics · Stereo Sound" written behind the cartridge slot. These were presumably removed due to the sheer weight of irony crushing the consoles.

The PlayStation was also an early model which included a port at the back which was removed from later iterations because it's sole use was for connecting the PS1 up to computers for piracy and cheating.

And one final oddity before I close: the small LCD screen on the top of our old photo printer can be taken off and the cable on it fits perfectly into the back of a Mega Drive II. It doesn't show anything since the Mega Drive doesn't send enough power through its video-out but it's kind of neat nevertheless. Emphasis on "kind of".


Well, I'm off to bed since I want to get up early tomorrow and play video games. Oh, and wait for the post to arrive... I'm expecting stuff from eBay.

When all else fails, counting ceiling tiles can sometimes work.

My left arm is currently almost numb. Why, you ask? Well, as my friend Garrie carried out his new/old Performa, I was laden with a printer under each arm until we reached his car. At that point, I put one in the boot and took the other for myself. I think he got the better deal, since he took the one with the power cable.


There's something wonderfully ironic about the fact that prizewinners at school are rewarded by having to sit through a three hours of the mind-numbing boredom known as a "Speech Day rehearsal". During this "rehearsal", those that have been chosen as the most talented pupils in the school who haven't gone on holiday already practice "sitting down for a long time" before a brief interlude of "walking" followed by more "sitting down".

This is normally an exceptionally dull affair, made worse by the fact that everyone else just gets to goof off, but I was fortunate this year. Several of my friends managed, by a combination of flukes, bribery and freak accidents, to get prizes this year and, by yet more flukes, I ended up sitting next to Sam during the proceedings.

Thus, a running commentary was kept on the bowing and curtsying abilities of the primary school pupils, jokes were made about a certain overachiever simply going up on the stage with a bag marked "swag" and, when we grew tired of mocking the proceedings, we simply discussed all manner of topics from Doctor Who (an obvious favourite) to the problems and wonders of old computers (another obvious favourite).

For some reason, nobody clapped during the practice and they weren't overly strict about us talking during it, so the whole thing seemed to pass much faster. The moral of the story is that, even in a boring situation, a good conversationalist can make all the difference. A book to read and something to play games on can also help. But the best defence against boredom is, according to the educational system, to be an underachiever or to be on holiday.


On a vaguely related note, something else which helps time fly is comedy sketches on YouTube (I'm not linking it; you shuld know what it is). I've just discovered the Reduced Shakespeare Company and become addicted to the Robot Hell song from Futurama, which I looked up on a whim.

Today is a good day to loot!

I spent several hours today fiddling around in the Physics lab with a bunch of friends diagnosing the problem on one old Macintosh (an LC 475, for those interested) and playing SimCity 2000 on another (an old Performa, now the property of one of those friends).

Since we had nothing better to do, four of us (Sam, Skippy, myself and a guy called Garrie), went in there in the morning armed with naught but our wits, an old screwdriver that Sam carries at all times, whatever we could Google on some nearby, working, PCs and far, far too much free time. We tried different monitors, scavenged from near and far, we poked DIP switches, we connected and disconnected hard drives, we argued over different methods of repair, we played Scalextric when we got bored.

In the end, someone searched for it online and we discovered someone with the exact same problem. Turns out, searching again now, that it's a relatively common problem; no battery, no video. I've just found the Apple page on the problem and they recommend that, having tried various things (we tried different monitors and nothing else), you should bring the thing into an authorised Apple repair centre to have the motherboard battery checked and replaced.

Well, we didn't do that. We found out that the battery could be the problem, borrowed a multimeter (an advantage of working in a Physics lab), discovered we were only getting a few fractions of a volt from the little thing and promptly went on eBay to buy a new one. With any luck, it should arrive by Monday along with some CD caddies so that I can finally get the thing working.

All present at the time of our discovery agreed that there was something wonderful about solving an elusive technical problem. Sure, it turned out to be nothing tricky, but it had been annoying us no end and the thing had been declared dead by the school. We found a way to give it life. Of course, in true techie fashion, we didn't want to just leave the matter there, but the lack of a soldering iron prevented the hooking up of several AAs we had.

No one else we talked to could understand our fascination with getting this old piece of junk to work. I'd be lying if I said that I fully understood it. Perhaps it was the thrill of doing something that others had said couldn't be done. Maybe, once we had started, we spent so long on it that finally finding a solution was like getting to the end of a long journey. It's possible that it was just a way to prove the geek credentials of which we are all so proud. Either way, we had set ourselves a challenge and we had completed it. And it felt good.

The rest of the day went by in a blur of half-understood card games played with Advanced Higher Chemistry students and conversations on Time Lords while games of rounders, which we may have been outside to watch, were played in the background. The day ended with my friends and I carrying out yet more bundles of old computer equipment. All in all, it was a good day.

The Art of Looting

I love summer. I love the weather, the atmosphere, the weeks of possibilities stretching out before me, the end of school, the excuse to buy stuff on eBay because no good games come out. But, and I may change this opinion once the holidays start, the best thing is quite possibly the last few days of school.

Those few short days, punctuated by sports activities and rehearsals and all manner of events, when everything is winding down. I love the feeling of having nothing to do, I love just being able to spend time with friends, I love relaxing and doing all the fun things I've wanted to do all term like playing that The Simpsons Scalextric track in the Physics lab or discovering why there has always been a copy of SimCity 2000 in the Computing room. But most of all, I love the looting.

You see, it's over the summer that any renovations are done to most schools and my school is no different. Having systematically been upgrading the computers systems into the 21st century, Wellington is now completely redoing the computer labs, seperating the rooms out and adding more computers to both. Naturally, this requires that the rooms as they are now be cleared. This in turn requires the removal of all the miscellaneous crap that builds up on shelves over the years.

Sam made it out of the lesson with many hours worth of early 90s educational videos, a bunch of old Mac software, a copy of Windows 95 (again, all floppy disks) and the motherboard for an early Macintosh. Jimerson, another friend, picked up a heatsink, a hard drive and the keyboard to a BBC Microcomputer. I wrestled the keyboard off him (thwarting his plans to use it for his 360 on the grounds that he couldn't break it any further) adding it to the long-defunct husk of a Microcomputer that I had already acquired.

I also came away with a couple of years worth of magazine demo discs, several textbooks including ones on Pascal and COMAL coding which I may actually use, what I think might be RAM expansion for either the BBC or a Mac, a Lego Technic kit, 3 hard drives, a copy of SuSE linux 8.1, an animation package for Macs (the school used a lot of Macs, back in the day) and a Hewlett-Packard cassette drive.

Tomorrow, I intend to add the aforementioned SimCity game to my bag o' swag along with some other games. Hopefully, I'll also get my hands on a Mac that's been sitting in the Physics lab for years. Sam, Skippy and I spent Physics examining it, in between bouts of Scalextric (marred by a jackass in my class whom I shall refer to only as "Piddle"), and we hope to get it working tomorrow. Between us, we're taking every piece of 20th century IT that isn't nailed down or plugged in.

All in all, a good days haul. I love sifting through old rubbish like that, trying to find hidden gems that are perhaps still useful or that perhaps simply provide comedy and nostalgia value. The mad scramble for the best obsolete parts merely heightens the adrenalin rush that one gets when one carries a "Hewlett-Packard SureStore T20" out of school under one's arm, with one's friends and sister trailing behind, equally laden with glorious, useless tat.

That, my friends, is the art of looting.

Things that Bug Alasdair #156

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

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

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

Boring as hell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Who I am

It was shorts and T-shirt weather a couple of days ago and now I'm freezing. Stupid fluctuations in the fabric of space-time weather.


I am bored. Really, really bored. I've got nothing to do.

Well, that's not strictly true. I have things that I could do and things that I probably should do, I just don't want to do any of them, and the things I do want to do are unavailable to me.

Well, that problem was solved by a nice, long game of Advance Wars: Dual Strike. Which took up way too much of my time and now I'm left without a topic and in a rush to get this post done.

So I'll talk about me.

A rather interesting thing happened to me today, which I believe shows much about my true personality (ye gods, it's English personal writing all over again). I've probably mentioned the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) before, since they're the body in charge of regulating my exams and school curriculum. Complicated-looking graphs that Skippy briefly showed me indicate that there must be some people reading this who know what I'm talking about.

Results for the exams I sat in May are coming out in August and the SQA has rolled out a new scheme whereby, if you register now, you can go online to get your results the day before the letter arrives. Since this has to do with time and getting stuff early and since the new series has made Doctor Who references crop up everywhere, the SQA put a picture of the TARDIS and a caption saying "JUST WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED" on the postcard informing me of the scheme.

Some people might think this was a rubbish attempt to seem trendy (though I happen to think it's quite clever, as this sort of thing goes). They would dismiss the front of the card and just flip over to the back to find the url of the website where they can register.

Not me.

I took one look at the card and started wondering what model of TARDIS prop it was. It has the proportions of the new series one (the original series, which had several versions over the years, tended to have TARDISes that were thinner than actual police boxes) but has a lot of scuffs and marks that I don't think should be there. Add that to the background, which has the right style but not the official graphical look, and I suspect that they just used an old police box and hoped nobody would notice.

But I did.

I also wonder if they got full permission before using it. Even if it isn't said to be the TARDIS and Doctor Who isn't directly mentioned, the BBC owns the rights to the police box design. The SQA may be getting a call from some BBC lawyers, methinks.

Normal people might wonder why they didn't say "Doctor Who" anywhere. I'm glad they didn't, since I would never have forgiven them if they'd referred to The Doctor as "Doctor Who". That is not his freaking name!!!!

It was only used a few times by accident and the character has sometimes been credited as "Doctor Who". This was the case in the new series until David Tennant specifically requested that he be credited as "The Doctor". It was used in the non-canon Dalekmania-era films starring Peter Cushing as a human inventor with a time ship called "Tardis".

Incidentally, I used Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (one of the two films) in a game of hangman today. After a little bit of nudging, a friend of mine got it without guessing any letters at all.

So, what does this whole episode (and this blog post) tell me about myself? The same thing it tells you.

I am Alasdair Corbett. I am a geek.

Perception is a funny thing

It's very odd moving from a normal thing to a good thing because all of a sudden the normal thing seems like a bad thing.

My best example of this comes from years ago; before I had seen every episode of The Simpsons half a dozen times, I used to watch it every night on Sky One. It used to be just one episode a night at 7 o'clock which my brother, my sister and I would watch on our old TV. At some point they switched to two episodes a night and it was the coolest thing ever.

Then, all of a sudden, it was back to one episode a night. It was exactly the same as it had been probably no more than a few months beforehand but it was terrible. It was just a short term thing and The Simpsons is really the only thing worth watching on Sky One these days, as they regularly show four episodes a night.

In the grand scheme of things and even in the far smaller scheme of my life, it was an insignificant blip but the strange idea that something, once perfectly adequate, could be bad once something better had been tried stuck with me.

I bring this up because I noticed a funny thing about my school timetable today. I had Computing first lesson in the morning and then three periods off (which would have been far more enjoyable if my DS hadn't run out of batteries during the first of them) and then, after lunch, a period of Maths and a period of Physics. Just a couple of weeks ago, I wouldn't have minded all that much. Sure, I wouldn't have wanted to do Maths and Physics to any great extent, but it was a Friday afternoon; I wouldn't have wanted to do anything.

And yet, what was previously just “Friday afternoon” looked like a huge inconvenience to me, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom. I'm sure I'll get used to it but I get the distinct impression that once the old Sixth year get their lazy asses out of the Common Room and we get access to it and the chance to play Mario Kart between lessons, I'll wonder, as I hurry down the stairs with two textbooks and a pen weighing down my bag, how on Earth I ever survived S5.

Exam recap

Lying beside my cereal bowl this morning when I stumbled wearily and blearily downstairs at 10:30am, was a newspaper section, the front page of which dealt with teacher's and pupil's comments on the Higher exams so far. You already know my thoughts on exam preparation supplements so I wasn't really expecting much of the article.

It covered the three big Higher level exams so far, English, Maths and Physics, all of which I actually did, with comments on the difficulty and fairness from both teachers and pupils. I agreed with the bulk of the article but the section on the English exam was rather odd. The pupils, in their comments, mentioned several times that the drama questions were well suited to Othello, apparently a popular text for Higher English classes. I agree with them on that point but the main text focused on the poetry questions and how they were apparently too specific. There were indeed a couple out of the four questions available that seemed to be written for a single poem in particular but here's the question that I did:

Choose a poem in which there is effective use of one or more of the following: verse form, rhythm, rhyme, repetition, sound.
Show how the poet effectively uses the feature(s) to enhance your appreciation of the poem as a whole.

Now, other than that annoying bit about "enhancing your appreciation" which is added on to questions purely so that I can show "personal engagement" with the text (no, I don't know what it means either and yes, it does sound vaguely naughty), the question is a godsend. You just try to think of a poem that doesn't use at least one of those.

I'll admit that the prose questions were a little bit too subjective but those were hardly touched upon. Again, I agree with the overall assessment of the close reading as being fair, but I can't stand it when there are complaints that it's "not interesting to teenagers" or some such nonsense. There must be hundreds of thousands of teenagers in Britain and I always resent being pandered to as part of some demographic. And I actually found the passages quite interesting. But that's just my opinion.

Moving on, their take on the Maths exam was, by and large, the same as mine and that of my class. There were a few too many questions that ended in strange fractions which often threw me off a bit but there you go.

At the time, I thought that the Physics exam was easier than the past papers we'd been doing though I put it down more to extra practice than reduced difficulty. It seems, however, that there have been accusations of the heinous crime of "dumbing down" in the past few years as the number of pupils taking Physics has been dropping. This is what really surprised me the most as in our year of about fifty pupils (not counting those who will leave after the exams) there will be ten doing Advanced Higher Physics, an annoyingly large number for my Physics teacher but a surprisingly large one given this national reduction.

Anyway, I have to find new ways of starting paragraphs, instead of "word/short phrase comma topic". And the interesting thing about this little article wasn't really the actual opinions and thoughts expressed but just how close those thoughts were to those of my own and those of my friends. It serves to remind you (oops, that should be "me" if I'm going for the whole "personal engagement" malarkey) that, even if you feel very isolated in the exam room and all you're concerned about when you come out are what your friends got for question 10, there are thousands of people up and down the country in the exact same situation. Which is scary and reassuring at the same time.

On a completely unrelated topic, I've done a post for the MacTake (I have to call it "the" MacTake or Skippy will beat me) and may well start writing there regularly.

Not-so-distant, not-so-difficult mornings

It's strange how things can appear much more difficult while you're worried. Take my Maths exam, for example, the first paper, non-calculator, as it was the easier of the two. But, of course, while I'm sitting there looking it over for the first time, there were several questions that looked nigh-on impossible. I would panic for a minute then move on to the next question. Maybe a couple of questions later, I'd come to the next tricky one and leave that.

There were eleven questions in all, some divided into (a), (b), etc. By the time I reached the end of the paper, I thought I'd have to go back and do more than half the questions over again. As it turned out, there were just three. One which I knew how to do but couldn't be bothered doing at the time, one that was simple enough upon closer inspection and one which, having gone through the working along a different route, turned out to be right, just with an odd answer.

The same went for the second paper, which I felt was harder but I'm not getting into that until August.

Things are very rarely as bad as they seem. They may sometimes be worse than they appear, but the advantage of pessimism is that they tend to be better than you first assume.

Curiously, after the exam, I could distinctly recall most of my answers, which I recounted to other people, whose answers were often far from similar, in order to come to some democratic consensus on what was the right answer.

Now, less than twelve hours later, and the whole experience is like a half-remembered dream. The same applies to exams I sat last year, and the prelims earlier in this one, albeit on a greater level. I cannot for the life of me remember any questions from my Standard Grade Physics exam, but I can clearly recall wandering down to GameStation with two friends in order to buy a T-shirt and a copy of Retro Gamer in-between the General and Credit papers.

If you asked me to summarise May of last year, all I would know about school was that I had exams but I could easily speak of time spent at the little playpark along the seafront, watching friends try to run on that odd, tilted spinning disc. I think it may have been after my German exam that I went into Seafield Stores to buy about twenty tubes of Smarties.

As important as they may be, it seems that exams aren't actually interesting enough for my mind to keep track of them.

So little time, equally little to say

22:30, the night before my Higher Maths exam.

Now the bleeding worrying sets in.

Of course, I prefer to look on the bright side. Once the Maths is done, it's just the Physics then a nice long gap before Chemistry and Computing. During that gap, I intend to watch Survival, the last Doctor Who serial ever made. Not the last episode, since the revival, but the last serial, the format of the original series. After I'm done with Chemistry and Computing, I hope to spend a day playing Vendetta Online, a game which Skippy praises highly, having quickly expended his 8-hour trial.

Well, he expended it in 8 hours but you know what I mean.

That's the trick, I've found, to not getting to stressed over exams. Focus not on the effects it'll have when you fail, don't assume you'll succeed, just do the work and concentrate on the finish line. Tell yourself you're going to do something fun afterwards. Even if you don't end up doing it, it'll keep you going. Or, at least, I hope it'll keep me going. Ask me if it's working on Wednesday, after 5 hours of exams in 2 days.

Nothing much else to say, except that I have about a half dozen Ponyta eggs sitting around, if any Pokemon players fancy them.

Don't expect much out of me tomorrow. Or the next day. Or ever. That way, every so often, when I do put some effort into this, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Gotta quote 'em all!

One exam down, four to go.

Just FYI, English went pretty well, certainly better than I'd expected. The close reading was fairly easy and I'm happy with both of my essays. And you know the funny thing? I can no longer remember a single bloody quote!

After the exams, a couple of friends and I trooped into Ayr to buy imported copies of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. We walked there, got the games and started to walk back when the heavens opened, having been merely wedged at a crack beforehand. Suffice it to say that by the time we had contacted my Mum and she arrived to pick us up, we were thoroughly soaked to the skin.

So, we sat an English exam, walked into town, got completely soaked and frozen, were bored out of our minds and then discovered that it was raining practically nowhere else but on top of us, just to acquire a game a couple of months early. Worth it?

Hell, yes.

I've long loved the Pokemon games, ever since an old friend lent me a copy of the then-new Pokemon Red. It was enough to get me hooked and I've remained so ever since. The sheer variety of moves and strategies available blows every other RPG clean out of the water, and I say that when RPGs are amongst my favourite games.

I'll probably have more to say tomorrow, and I may even scrounge together an idea I've had for a woodle, once I've had some sleep. Or beaten the next Gym Leader. The latter will probably take priority.

Unto the breach

Well, tomorrow morning, I will do what is likely to be my last ever English close reading, as I sit my first Higher exam. I can remember answering questions on mind-numbingly dull passages all the way back to Primary 3. And now I'll never do it again, in all likelihood, since I have never thought of a practical application for close reading skills, though I've been trying since the aforementioned Primary school days.

Yesterday was also the day I had my last Maths lesson with the Maths class I've had for five years. I've had some hugely fun times in that Maths class, laughing, joking, derailing conversations on topics ranging from life after death to songs about chihuahuas. Curiously little mathematics, but that probably just enhanced the experience.

I also rounded off my chemistry knowledge yesterday and I'll be done with that by the 29th. Choosing subjects for Sixth Year is the first time I've had to give up something that I've really enjoyed. When Standard Grade first rolled around, I relished in dropping Music and Art, Geography and Latin, the loss of French almost causing me to break out into song and dance. Highers pruned off German and History, which, while I wasn't too bad at them, were hardly my favourite subjects. Now, S6 has allowed me the chance to finally rid myself of English, but Chemistry has also had to be sacrificed in order to save my sanity and increase the time available for playing Mario Kart in the common room.

I've spent much of today reading and rereading quotations and old essays, checking I know themes and structures of some of the finest literature in the world and some of the most boring I've ever read. Fifteen minute snatches of Final Fantasy III and Elebits were all that kept me sane as I laboriously memorised Chris Guthrie's feelings when she loses her umpteenth family member to a falling rhinoceros... or something... I'm not really planning to write either of my essays on Sunset Song.

Still, as befits the mood, I shall round off with a quote from William Shakespeare which has been stuck in my head of late. Sadly, it's not one of the ones I'm supposed to get stuck in my head.



"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!"

-William Shakespeare, Henry V

Bloggin' from School

It seems like the school filtering software doesn't ban Blogger and so, to free up some time later in the day, I'm doing today's post in the Computing lab. During my Computing lesson. It's either that or revise and I honestly can't be bothered doing that. Plus, our revision notes and questions aren't too hot. I give you an example question:


Sam, sitting beside me, has drawn my attention to the lack of a question mark but if you can't spot the overwhelming mistake in the order of the answers, then get the hell off my blog.

Indeed, the whole Scholar system that we're supposed to use for revision of various subjects on the computers can get a bit wacky from time to time. For example, ever heard of the game Towers of Hanoi? It's an ancient puzzle that crops up from time to time in various video game puzzles nowadays. The basic idea is that you have a number of discs of varying sizes and a number of posts. You must move the discs from the first post to the last so that they end up as they start, in a sort of triangular shape. For three posts and four discs, the minimum number of moves possible is 15. This is the result Sam got on a Scholar version yesterday:

Yeah... I eventually figured out it was a programming error that let the user move a disc out from beneath another one that Sam had unknowingly exploited. Still, running out of time now. Even when I do these things in the afternoon I'm rushed for time.

Titles are even harder to think of when you're pissed off

School used to be so much simpler back in the days of Primary, and I'm not referring just to the workload either. Back then, if you were good at the work sheets, you were ruler of the classroom. Football gained you prime position in the playground and any musical talent was fostered and praised by your parents and doting relatives.

Somewhere since then, everything's become kind of muddled. Now, we have to think about all those extra talents in order to plan a written statement full of buzzwords to impress universities. If you played football on a local team for a year, it shows determination and enthusiasm. If you gave it up because you were bored, you can say it was because you wanted to focus on your studies and claim time management skills with an ability to prioritise.

Whenever I get something like this, and they do come up a fair bit over the years, though it's only recently they've begun to count for much, I'm reminded of a short story we once read in English. I don't recall the details, but it involved a man sending away a job application and complaining about the fact that it required his school grades, which were by then well out of date. He complained in thought throughout the story about the ridiculousness of being given a job based on who he was and what he did umpteen years ago.

The man was presented as saying these things because he knew that his grades were bad and that he wasn't going to get the job because of other reasons as well. He was using them as a scapegoat.

Now, the similarities aren't perfect but the principle of the thing is what I worry about. Do I dismiss these extra-curricular activities simply because I haven't done them, when perhaps I should have? Is my subconcious hiding my own inadequacies and turning them into failings in the admissions system? Is your concious mind trying to tell me that I'm overthinking this, getting whiny and that I should shut up?

On all counts but the last one, the answer's probably a distinct "no". But that little niggle keeps coming up no matter how many times I dismiss it.

I really wish I had the time to wrap this up with an adequate conclusion and to provide a balance to what is doubtless nonsense above but I don't. I'm being rushed to bed for reasons that escape all logic and so I have to leave it here. I may come back to it tomorrow unless something interesting happens.

Suffice it to say that I have never understood, nor will I ever understand, the workings of a mind that gives everything I've ever done a list of "Skills and Qualities", attaching to it huge significance and trying to extrapolate from it my entire personality, as it relates to university level Comp. Sci.

What purpose does a title serve in the grand blog of things?

The future is like a bus. You wait for ages and then three of them come along at once.

...

No, that's not right. Let me try again.

The future is a like... a charging hippopotamus. It sounds funny when it's a long way off but it's scary as hell when it's fifty meters away and closing.

Given that I have Higher exams coming up in a little over a week, I've given a surprising amount of thought to the far flung future (that's “next year” in young-people speak, I believe) today. It all came about because during PSE (Personal and Social Education, the most dreadfully dull and useless subject on the face of the planet), instead of the usual drivel about why it's a bad idea to try to direct large lumps of metal around a populated area at high velocities while inebriated, we had to look over “Skills and Qualities” sheets.

Now, these things come up about once every year, more often as university applications approach, and I've hated them since we started doing them. It varies a little time but the gist of it is, you write down the various extracurricular activities that you do, making sure to note all the awards you kick-boxing horse has one you and so on, and try to evaluate what you've learned from the experience. You're skill at kicking a ball around a muddy pitch while yelling at people is then translated into words like “teamwork” and “communication” and people are impressed.

But I don't do anything like that. I don't spend my free time doing sports or playing a musical instrument or doing work experience. I sit around and I watch DVDs and I fiddle around on the computer. That's not to say that I don't do anything; I write this blog, I do the VCOM podcast, I write the occasional comic strip, I do all kinds of things which, while I feel good about them, can't really be measured and quantified and turned into a good thing.

Maybe it could and I'm just far too cynical to see it that way. I've never liked the idea of summarising hobbies and activities into buzzwords and relying on them for your future. The whole process is just too random and, while I'm all for a bit of chance and luck, randomness in such important things has always bugged me.

Still, I have numerous little projects that I plan to start once the exams are over, though I would be dong them whether or not I felt that I might need them. For example, I've been meaning to read through a few Dummies books I have to raise my technical knowledge. I plan to completely revise and restructure VersusCOM (temporarily out of bandwidth owing to administrator incompetence), as well as getting some more stable arrangement set up with the podcast. I'm still determined to do my long-planned webcomic (it's probably been over a year now since I conceived the groundwork). If I can get my hands on a camcorder, I have a few parody things that I might like to try, along with some audio stuff for another podcast, perhaps.

Still, all that's in the future. Today's post has been a little bit more introspective than usual but since nobody reads this anyway, I feel I can use it to summarise stuff like this for my own benefit. And just so you feel you've walked away with some new and interesting knowledge...

Did you know that the hippo is often cited as the deadliest animal in Africa?

932 words: why can I do that with this crap and not my English essays?

Today was shaping up to be a pretty bad day. I hadn't got that Maths homework I mentioned last night done, and wasn't going to be able to. My study period, which I could have used to catch up on the Maths or other studying, was taken up by an all school photo. It took more than an hour to get all the pupils in the school lined up on the big metal step things (that's a technical term) and get the photos taken.

The day took a turn for the better when they extended our break time, admittedly only to counteract the time lost due to the photo, but we still ended up with a slightly longer break and a slightly shorter English lesson. Definitely a win-win situation.

Yesterday, a plan had gone around amongst several of us in our lunch room, to bring in our DSs and spend lunchtime playing a few rounds of single-cart Bomberman. Between us, Sam and I bringing in our old DSs to up the numbers, we had 7 consoles and this naturally led to much exploding and merry-making. It also led to me winning.

We then shifted to Mario Kart DS and after 5 frantic races, I came in second overall after Sam. I would have been first if it weren't for three Shy Guys coming up behind me a matter of meters from the Cheep Cheep Beach finish line and bombarding me with green shells. The whole thing's going to be repeated on Monday with a few more consoles and Tetris. When one person said they didn't know what Tetris was I broke into maniacal laughter and then challenged them to a match. I've also challenged Sam Potter to a Tetris duel. To the death.

There really is nothing quite like having a bunch of friends in a room playing video games. Sure, online gaming's fun and you can play it with people you know, but it just doesn't quite compare. There's nothing like seeing the look on someone's face when they realise they've trapped themselves in a corner with two bombs. The little rivalries that build up over the course of a game are fascinating to observe, as challenges are set and met with glory or missed with embarrassment. Disconnecting just because you're losing suddenly seems like a much worse idea when the people you're pissing off are sitting next to you.

It all takes me back to the early days of primary school when, every break time, you could see little huddles of us wee children leaning against the wall, Game Boys in our hands and link cables dangling between them, Pokemon flitting back and forth and monkeys trading blows. That said, there were disadvantages to that little system. Immature people could quite easily come along and flick the power switch on those old Game Boys. When the Game Boy colour came along, they moved the power switch to the side but removed the method for locking in carts, leaving them vulnerable to being yanked out. The threat of cables being pulled out mid-battle was always a concern.

Fortunately, modern technology has advanced more than these people have and the DS has a method for locking in the cartridge, a side power switch which needs to be held up before it turns off and wireless multiplayer. I'm not sure if that's exactly the problem these features were meant to solve but it certainly helps.

Single-cart play has also come along, aiding multiplayer gaming on the go immensely. I can remember the first time someone saw a group of us playing a GBA game (still linked by ye olde cables, of course) with only one game between us and couldn't figure out what was going on. People who haven't kept up with the trends are similarly impressed by 7 of us sitting around playing each other wirelessly.

To return to my earlier, though not my original, point, I honestly prefer, and I think most people would agree with me, sitting in the same room with the people I'm racing, or fighting, or trying to shoot and bomb. Online play is an important factor, without a doubt, but it always annoys me when developers forego proper split-screen and smaller maps in favour of catering to the high-speed broadband , “it's no fun if there aren't sixteen players” gamers.

Is that little bit of playground history coming back into fashion? I certainly hope so.

To return, this time, to my original point, the day had another highpoint when, after a discussion with my parents got loud (it wasn't an argument, though Mum was getting as little annoyed that neither Dad nor I knew when her birthday was) my sister came downstairs trying to complain. I went into the kitchen while she was talking to Mum and Dad, I went into the kitchen and a minute later Dad came in to retrieve his wallet. Intrigued, I followed him outside and found out Erin was getting £20 in compensation money for loss of sleep. I ended up with £10. I'm not quite sure why, but I'm not arguing.

If this incident is any indicator, that little girl will go far in this world. And I'll be right behind her, mooching.



In entirely unrelated news, today is the tenth anniversary of development starting on Duke Nukem Forever. Joystiq had an interesting article on it which led me to this page, a list of all the major events which have happened since DNF began development. And it's still not out. Just thought I'd share that with you.

Stress relief

I've already mentioned those ridiculous exam guides that come free with newspapers around this time of year. Today, we received a “leaflet” (lit: 3 sheets of paper, photocopied and stapled together) advising us on how to handle stress. Ways to calm down involve “relaxation” and “breathing”. My personal favourite was the advice that tells you to breathe both in and out. This stuff is truly inspired.

Everybody else got a laugh from this little gem:

“Creating mild pain
Pain effectively overrides all other thoughts and impulses. Even very mild pain – such as lightly pressing your fingernails into your palm – can block feelings of anxiety. Some people find it helpful to place an elastic band around one wrist, and lightly twang it when they are becoming anxious.”

Now, I follow the basic principle of pain acting as a distraction. However, given that I'm trying to concentrate, I seem to have a choice between distraction by anxiety and distraction by pain. I reckon I'll go with the option that doesn't, you know, hurt. Actually, that's pretty much my philosophy in life.

The third piece of hilariously bad advice is also to do with distracting your mind. Specifically, it advises you to, when you can't focus on the paper, take a few minutes and look around the room. Count the number of people with red hair, or see how many desks are in each row. Because looking at other people and their desks during an exam doesn't carry any penalty at all.

I've never been a great sufferer of exam stress, at least not since I sat my first round of exams. That said, I firmly believe that the best exam advice ever given came from Megadodo Publications, the finest publishing house on Ursa Minor Beta, as relayed to us by Douglas Adams.

“Don't panic!”

Another very untidy room

At some point on the 11th of April, in just a few days, I'm going to realise that my Higher exams, those same Higher exams which I have been repeatedly and reliably informed by teachers will influence my university choices, my possible careers and very probably the rest of my life, are one month away. Right now, I should probably be worried, but it seems like a month and a few days is a very long time. Not long ago, a year was a very long time and in a few days, the month will seem like a very long time and so on until I reach the time frame, maybe a fortnight, where every thing seems like a very short time.

I'm tempted to call this “the calm before the storm” but, given that this first week of the holidays is simply a short reprieve between the warnings of wisdom of teachers and the worries of parents, “the eye of the storm” seems far more apt.

I really ought to be worried, I really, really should. My stomach ought to be filled with butterflies every time I twist my neck and glance at the stack of textbooks and sample papers on my floor. All common wisdom, if not common sense, tells me that I should have some kind of plan for what to study and a very definite where in which to study. Those older and more experienced than myself tell me I should be doing all of the above, along with much, much more when my thoughts turn from April to May.

But I'm not worried. Any butterflies are being quite thoroughly digested. Common wisdom goes ignored, as common sense dictates it very often should. Next week goes unplanned and the week after that is irrelevant. The older and more experienced people I talk to are, perhaps unfairly, ignored as my thoughts stay firmly grounded in April; in now.

I'm not entirely sure what those thoughts are. Imagine my head like a room, full of people. In the middle of the room, talking and having fun, are all my normal thoughts. Those day to day thoughts about what I want to eat, what video games I want to play, what's on TV. They're all in the centre of the action.

At the back of the room, locked in a conveniently placed cage, are thoughts about exams and university and so on and so forth. School related thoughts. I know they're plotting something, but I don't know when they'll strike.

Occasionally, one of the smaller revision thoughts will sneak out and get part of a practice paper done before being squashed by my ego, who then returns to leaning against the wall absent-mindedly swinging a set of keys around his finger while giving everyone the uneasy sense that he's in charge in this room.

Creeping around outside the room, poking his head almost invisibly over the windowsill, is a suspicion that the normal thoughts and the hard-working, exam thoughts should really be in opposite positions and that if the my ego doesn't use those keys very soon, he'll find himself severely damaged.

So that's my mind as it stands right now.

Oh, and the part of my mind that can't stand overcomplicated wordplay is banging its head against a metaphysical wall because of that “sneaking suspicion” bit two paragraphs up.

A study in mockery

Earlier today, I was reading one of those newspaper supplements that are responsible for the death of so many trees and brain cells during the run up to exam time. This particular one was from the Sunday Herald “in association with” Leckie and Leckie, “Scotland's leading educational publishers”. As far as I can tell, this means that it was slipped into the middle of a paper and written by people who otherwise simply reprint old exam papers and bind them together to sell to schools.

It opens with various pieces of general advice, for instance not to try studying in an ice crevasse without any textbooks and with a rock concert going on overhead, whilst hanging upside down. It tells me how I should exercise to avoid stress. I tried one that involved pushing back against my own shoulders for 10 seconds. Now my hands, arms and shoulders hurt.

Further advice encourages me to eat healthily and inhale and exhale. The brief summary to the side of the first page wishes me good luck with my “onward journey”.

And so, onward I journey into the more specific pages. I figure Computing, a subject that I'm perfectly happy with, might be a good place to look at, just to judge if this guide is any use.

The first handy-dandy bullet point tells me that I should find out when and where my exam is. An astounding revelation. I had absolutely no intention of doing that. Thank god I read this supplement. I wonder how they can possibly top that with point number two.

Bring in a spare pen or pencil and a calculator. Leave out your mobile phone, since it's against the rules to have one. Wow. That helps. So does the advice to study, to not get stressed and to know what's in the exam.

I could go on and on about these incredibly obvious points that, for the record, appear in all the other subjects as well, and indeed in all other revision guides. Eventually, most of them get to a few example questions and simplified summaries that essentially replicate what can be found in your textbook, but on a smaller and far less useful scale.

I'm not sure exactly what these guides are supposed to accomplish. Well, they're supposed to prepare me for exams, I gathered that much. The problem is that each subject has a different writer and they all go into too many generalities, some more simplistic than others. The question I ask myself is, could I do any better? Let's find out.

Alasdair's exam tips

1. Learn the subject before the exam. Learning it afterwards has proven to be incredibly unhelpful. Indeed, in one study, 100% of 5 year-olds who tried a Higher Maths paper failed, then passed 11 years later. Leading scientists have attributed this massive change to the fact that they simply learned how to do Higher Maths in the meantime.

2. Know how to read and write. These two simple skills can come in very, very useful during exam time. Being able to read makes both studying and examining questions that much easier. Writing is an invaluable skill when answering any question. Don't think that just because you learned them in nursery school, that these core life skills can fall by the wayside with colouring in and how to make a proper sand castle in the pit.

3. Make sure that you know your own name. It's invariably something asked for in every exam paper, often very early on. Without this simple fact, you could lose all of your marks.

4. Don't be on fire. Students, having heard baseless urban legends, have often tried to do their exams while on fire in the hopes that it will make them think faster. In reality, all it does is annoy those around you as you scream in agony. Be considerate and try to imagine what you would think if it were you sitting there, trying to do calculus while the air is filled with the stench of burning flesh.

5. Remember to let blood circulate around your body. In yet another study, 9/10 deceased patients failed to complete the full exam, thus robbing them of vital marks. Further investigation led to the discovery that the one that did complete the exam had in fact faked his own death in order to avoid Danny “Finger Snapper” LeBlanc, an infamous Glaswegian loan shark. Don't let that happen to you.

6. Everything but stationary and calculators are banned from the exam room. So no, you can't bring in your rabbit's foot, your plush doll mascot or your lucky laptop.

7. Cheat, but don't get caught. And don't tell the invigilator that I told you to do it if you do get caught. I have a reputation to maintain.

Well, I hope that helped. Maybe I'll expand that list sometime. And maybe, some day, in the distant future, yesterday's woodle drawing will arrive in my inbox so that I can put it up.

Good luck with not just your onward journeys, but your sideways and backwards ones as well.

Old Habits Die Hard: Vendetta

Never watch half an episode of House on DVD then watch a new one on TV then come b