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.

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.

Heroes Takes Priority

This will be a quick post, I think. But I have a really good excuse. Even as I type this, the second episode of series 2 of Heroes is downloading... and I really want to watch it. Yeah, it's not a great reason, but it's good enough for me.

I'm watching it through Veoh, the actual application, whatever it's called. The website and confirmation email call it the VeohTV Beta whereas the program itself is just called the Veoh Player when running. Maybe the Player is the software and VeohTV is the service it accesses. Who knows. Anyway, I've been happy to watch such videos in a little browser window so far, but Skippy recommended the software, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Fairly impressive, so far, going on download speed alone.


I really need to do more reading. I'm a huge Terry Pratchett fan but I've got the latest Discworld book, Making Money, and it's just been sitting on my desk for the past couple of days. I guess I'll try just sitting down at the weekend and reading through what I keep meaning to read through for a few hours.

When I really push myself, I've learned, I can read a surprising amount in a short space of time. Admittedly, pushing myself generally means “suddenly realising on the last day of the holidays that my English teacher wanted me to read a novel over the holidays and then madly scrambling to read it all before giving up sometime around 4 o'clock”.

Actually, besides reading, there's a lot of non-work-related stuff I want to get done. And by “work-related”, I'm including all the Corbett's Fiction and MacTake stuff that, while technically a hobby and usually enjoyable, still takes a lot of effort. Complete Super Paper Mario is fairly near the top of the list. I still haven't even played Dragon Quest, despite picking it up weeks ago. I've fallen out of the habit of using my DS a lot, though I imagine I'll be carrying it everywhere when Phantom Hourglass comes out. Won't help me get back on track with Final Fantasy III, though.

Then there's that PC I keep meaning to build, the stuff I want to sell on eBay, the big video game design books that I got from Amazon and that I'm slowly working my way through. Some day soon, I'm going to make a big to-do list, prioritise everything on it and then create some kind of elaborate scoring system. I will then use the scoring system to work out the total “to-do value” of the list and then try to ensure that I get tasks corresponding to at least half of that value done before the end of the October holiday.

Maybe I'll do that tomorrow in a study period, instead of studying for my next Maths test. Or maybe I'll just play Crash Team Racing, if Sam Stafford remembers to bring along his semi-mythical copy of the game. Someone brought in an original PlayStation today along with some classics like Spyro. I never had a PlayStation back in the day, so I feel a little left out while everyone reminisces about it. Still, they can keep their Crash Team Racing and their multitaps. I had Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie... Although I still maintain that my entire future is a direct result of hours spent playing Super Mario Bros on the NES.


Anyway, Heroes finished downloading some minutes ago, so I'm going to go watch that for a while then go to bed. I apologise if you didn't follow any of today's post but I'll be damned if I'm linking to the Wikipedia page of every game I mention here. You don't like it, Google it.

There's still just under an hour in which something interesting could happen.

I really need to get my glasses adjusted. The paint on the nose bridge has actually been worn away by the number of times I've pushed it up.


Today was one of those days that can only be described as "normal". 50 years from now, when I look back on my life (from atop my golden throne in my giant mansion), I will not remember today. I might recall that I didn't really do much during the summer of 2007 but I won't remember what I did on this day. If I were to recall that my "not doing very much" involved an awful lot of browsing the web and playing Fire Emblem, then I certainly wouldn't remember what sites I browsed or what chapters I beat today.

Should I ever do something famous enough to justify a book about my life, any would-be biographers will ignore today, possibly touching slightly on my teenage years, sandwiched in a single chapter between my early childhood and university days.

Normality is often a concept that people say doesn't exist. Everything and everyone is unique, with many properties, none of which are "normality", they say. There is no such thing as a "normal" person, doing "normal" things. But I look back on my day, filled with familiar things and re-enacted tasks, and I can thing of no better word to sum it up than that non-existent quality of "normal".

And it's such a human thing, too. It's a concept we created, something that I can't imagine an animal understanding. All any other form of life understands is their own life, it is what it is and if it changes, it changes. They must simply adapt and survive, striving for something better but never defining what it has.

But human beings, we look at what others do. We see if they enjoy it and if they do then we try our hardest to follow suit. We make a concious effort to do things differently from time to time and in doing so we define our own normality as simply being what we do when we're not doing "something else".

Does Holly, our family's own little West Highland Terrier, lie in her patch of sunlight on the floor thinking about how great it was last time she was at the beach and thinking that she should go again? I highly doubt it. Though should she, by whim and quirk of events, end up at the beach, if indeed that's somewhere she enjoys, I have no doubt that she shall recognise it and enjoy her time there.

But should I think of the beach all of a sudden, then it is quite within my power to wish to go there. Perhaps I could get there, perhaps I could not. If the beach were not so close or the season not so suitable, I could plan to hop on a plane and arrive at another beach about which I had only heard. And it would be a day at the beach, a holiday, a break from normal life.

Or perhaps I shall remember today. For even if the day itself is nothing special, then the thoughts I make upon it and the analysis I give it may stick with me, dragging along memories of web addresses and character level-ups. By calling it forgettable in such detail, have I made it memorable?

Perhaps normality remains so elusive because by examining it and quantifying it we must make it disappear. We can define it in a dictionary but trying to pin it down via example simply makes the examples inherently abnormal and therefore useless in our human quest to define the absence of certain qualities as a baseline from which to judge those qualities.

Perhaps, should I choose to write that hypothetical book in the far-flung future, I shall focus on today as the perfect example, well-documented as it is, of my life at this time, detailing it more than any other and simply reaffirming that normal day's conclusions.

Or perhaps I'll simply write "Wednesday, 8 August 2007" at the end of the foreword and leave it up to readers to figure out what the hell I'm talking about.

Which, by and large, is my strategy with this blog.

The Train of Thought has left Coherency Station

Next stop, Insanity.


Yeah.

So, I might have got a little bit carried away with trying to run old Amstrad games and playing Advance Wars tonight and run out of time to think of a blogging topic. What can I say, shit happens. Yeah, that's a good thing to say.

Shit happens.

Also, did you know that if you spend an hour typing "run "disk"" on an ancient keyboard from the 80s, a modern keyboard, such as the one I'm using now, feels really soft and doesn't seem to make quite the right sound? I didn't either. So we've both learned something from this. Also, I hate "read error b".



And no, I didn't take that photo just for this post. I took it to use in a presentation for Computing, as an example of a Command Line Interface. My other example is the old Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure. I really want to play that one of these days.

For some reason, whenever summer rolls around I begin to get really into gaming (more than the rest of the year, anyway), and back into retro gaming in particular. I start buying new games that I've been meaning to get for ages. I start going back to playing old games that I never got round to finishing or that I feel I just didn't play enough. As new games start to dry up around now, I log on to eBay and buy bundles of all kinds of crazy crap.

Which reminds me, I have a box full of old Sega Mega Drive games that I need to look through to find ones that I can sell. I also have a box full of Amstrad games (I got the CPC 464, a monochrome monitor and 90 games for £20 when I bought it) that I need to sort through, having only played about half a dozen. To do that, I'll need to find some way of stopping constant read errors, so I may have to look into cleaning the drive heads.

And I need to do some stuff for the network in the house, hopefully hooking up some HomePlug devices (technology that allows the existing wiring in your house to be used for ethernet networking) so that I can hold a stable connection on some devices and finally get my Linux box hooked up to the internet without any faffing about with drivers for WiFi cards.

On an unrelated note, "faffing about" is a great phrase that isn't used nearly enough.

So I've got a lot of stuff that I plan to do. It's kind of daunting but the fact that I'm considering it reminds me that the summer holidays are closing in nice and quickly. To get to them, however, I first have to go through house marching practice (you'll hear more about that in the future I expect, it being the bane of my existence for a week or so every June), Sports Day, Speech Day and the associated rehearsals (in which we rehearse walking up on stage, shaking someone's hand and being handed a fake cup) and no doubt a myriad of other things that school life will throw at me.

Then again, the Sixth Year Revue is usually quite good, a nice little way for the leaving pupils to thank their teachers by mercilessly mocking them in poorly acted comedy sketches. And as the term closes, actual school work takes a sudden drop in importance and regularity.

I ought to forget to come up with a topic more often. I have a certain inexplicable fondness for these train of thought style posts. And it gives me an excuse to just play more games.


This keyboard still feels too soft.