Ain't rock and roll to you

2005-09-16T23:05:00.000+01:00

This blog is now closed. It has been moved to here

Final Post.

2005-09-16T23:04:00.000+01:00

Sigh, blog from mobile doesn’t seem to be working amazingly well at all – the phone loses its WAP connection (timeout) long before I’ve finished writing any message whatsoever (though I was apparently lucky with the Day 2 one). After I realised this, my urge to mobile blog somewhat fell away, and therefore I have somewhat neglected this blog for the best part of a month. And what a month it’s been as well! With lots of highs… and some of the lowest of lows.

I’m working on developing a new site, though the code is really messing up for no apparent reason (especially when I try to load it locally in school). I want to make it an interesting, dynamic, vibrant site. I think that it won’t have a chance in working in anything M$ made earlier than IE7, because of some of the CSS that IE6 doesn’t have a clue about. As part of this, sometime in the next month or so, this blog will be moved from its present location to a completely different provider altogether. One that supports proper RSS / Atom feeds that don’t give me a xtmls attribute to my div tags. Lots of hassle just for such a relatively small, inconsequential detail that will allow my source to validate as XHTML, but it’s just one of the many… infexibilities of Blogger.

Update: My blog has now officially moved to here. Please update all of your trackers and feeds etc.

Day 2

2005-08-01T23:10:00.001+01:00

Time for my second daily report of York summer school. Truth be told, I'm not sure if yesterdays came through or not. I hope it did. 850 characters don't write themselves. The level of security and supervision remains ridiculously high. Regardless of age, people are not allowed to leave the sight or company of an RA for more than 5 seconds, only then if they are catching up with another and all parties have been informed via. Walkie talkies. It's such a ridiculous stage where noone is allowed to brush their teeth after breakfast because those in authority simply can't be bothered to arrange our escort.
The lesson today wasn't especially inspiring either, though I reserve judgement for now. We are also the 3rd year to fill in the infamous york log books. I spose they're effective negative feedback forms. Better sleep. Nite

Test from mobile

2005-07-25T09:31:00.000+01:00

I just tried to set up a mail-to-blogger address. In order that i don't have to remember the address, I've set up a forward from my gmail that will forward emails from my phone.Ar it is, this is being written (slowly) from my mobile, whilst preparing breakfast. Better go. Ciao

Not much

2005-06-23T23:26:00.000+01:00

Has happened. Regret one of these posts, perhaps.
Added a statcounter, just for curiosity. I'm also *going* to build Gentoo tonight (I didnt have DNS details, so rsync didn't work).
Been offered Adminship at Wiki ehow. Wooh!! :)
Incidentally, theres a great extension to Firefox that lets me browse indefineitely. Given me some great sites so far. Link tomorrow.
Night! :)

Listening: The sound of traffic near the swimming pool

2005-06-20T23:12:00.000+01:00

Yeh, Gentoo is still emergeing. I now estimate that it'll be done by 6 AM. I *hate* text based browsers (though they're not as disfunctonal as they could be)

Arguing

2005-06-20T23:05:00.000+01:00

Aren't morals exceptionally strange, odd and peculiar things and ideals? There are an indescipable feeling, urge that people have - but neither are they ever constant; different people will hold true to different morals, even to the extent that they will appear to some people to have none whatsoever, whereas they may actually feel themselves that they are the only people in the world that are sticking true rigidly the *the* correct beliefs and attitudes.

It's strange how you can have what may be immediately percieved as the "moral upper hand", whilst the opposing side has a narrow, confined social view, but it actually transpires that the narrow perspective on society is no more than an ill-percieved bench-mark that has been set upon the foundation of some (possibly dubious) philosophical thinking.
It was I that, during an arguement regarding society (I think it might have been whether a jury system is good or not, but that might have been earlier) that started off with the narrower view. Oh no it wasn't! It was about whether people are equal or not; and whether some are more important that others (I was saying that the death of some people is more important than the death of others - not on a personal level where the death of anyone is an immense tragedy - but on a wider scale of the world where the death of someone such as JFK or Archduke Franz-Ferdinand will have much more implications to the world - and will affect a greater number of people - that a murder of someone... that isn't so highly regarded in the world). Becca was arguing that their death is no more important, because every person is equal.
I realised that I had the morally lower arguement here, but I stayed on with it; however worried that I was that I might have become tainted and affected by lowly tabloid worries and petty concerns of the world - and I knew exactly where her arguement was coming from - the correct religious view that all souls are equal in God's eyes. And I agree with it - people on an individual level, taken out of their worldly social interactions and position are utterly equal; and noone should themselves claim overlordship over any others. Hajj is a good example of this, where the pilgrims all wear identical white garments in order to symbolise that they are not bound by the petty constraints of the world; by material wealth or social standing. Leaders of a state are principally more important than any of its people, but are elected by the people as an equal that can express, represent and act upon the peoples' views. When there are many views, they should be representively presented to the leader, who then has the great responsibility of choosing which course to follow. This course should be the one that the majority of equals support.
I was saying that some people are more important than others - and I finally realised where this was coming from.
We live in a world that is not the idealistic moral highs and certainties of devout religion - nor of a wholy unified world where people are truly equal - without an elected leader (no leaders in a society will always result in either anarchy, or leaders (see Communism)). This world is one of uncertainty - where everyone does not see everyone else as an equal to themselves, but rather as either an insuperior (prejudice) or an example (see George Bush... *cough*). There are some people in the world who's feelings, deeds and most importantly opinions matter more to that others. Consequently, they must be said to be percieved by society as a whole as more important because of their influence over others. I was answering that some people are more important because in the world in which we live, they are. And I do not see that we can ever live in a world where there are not people who are, by this definition, more important than others.

From the Oxford (Little) Dictionary:

Important: of great consequence; momentous; (of person) having position of rank or authority; pompous

Counter arguement encouraged - I'm up for a debate.

2005-06-20T20:07:00.000+01:00

Still emergeing. It takes f-ing ages!
Needs to download each package of source, and then it builds it according to my needs. I think it's nearly on 20 out of 92 after about 2 hours....

Gentoo...

2005-06-20T16:46:00.000+01:00

Just decided to install Gentoo as a third OS. Don't know for the life of me why. I'm booting into it, and I'm just waiting for it to download the stage2 tarball so that I can continue installation.

Pleased to see that unlike many other sites, Blogger has got first class support for text based browsers (such as Links) and doesn't lock me out (because of SSL stuff). I'll see if I can get it installed (just a test boot really, btw. Won't take over as primary OS from Ubuntu).

Last night

2005-06-19T12:20:00.000+01:00

Omfg! I just went online again after talking to Becca on the phone, and who should have just connected but *Moriel*. That was definitely the biggest blast from the past that I've had for absolutely ages. I haven't heard from her via. email for 6 months, talked online for at least a year. Two years ago she was probably one of the people that I talked to the very most. Hell, she was the one person I could really talk to. I'd confide in her, talk to her just like I could talk to noone else at the time. A weird conincidence: I'd only just started revisiting ToRN often a couple of days ago, and here she was connecting for the first time in months. Unbelievably weird.

How times change :(

Great to see how well she's getting on though. Got married a few months ago and is really happy. Weird as heck to think that someone's married though. Such a big step as I am completely unable to imagine.

Bed now, write more in morning.

Ok, morning. I couldn't get to sleep anyway (it was just far too hot last night) so I was being very... nostalgic. Thinking of times on ToRN that were 3, even 4 years ago. The fun we had, the thinks that we talked about - the loose (and close) friendships that were formed. This was before I even knew Becca (other than OCE in main) and would arse around with Fing, p1, Moriel, skyking. I was remembering a time when I didn't really worry about anything else - becuase of the (relative) unimportance of everything in my entire existance.
It's hard to remember what half of what we talked about was (it's a shame that I don't have any logs dating back until then). I remember first talking to Moriel, and immediately being made a slave to her, and I had to do whatever she wanted me too :s. Slightly odd (this was in main - a 'G' rated heavily moderated room). Sometimes, despite all of the things that have happened since, all of the great, truely happy things, I want just to go back a few years (it was probably 3 years...) and live one more evening when I go online, talk to those great personalities, aquantancies and friends, partake in throwing people in the ToRN-pool, do a quiz, have fun.
It will never happen again
That saddens me.

Listening: My Generation - The Who

Grr..

2005-06-18T13:02:00.000+01:00

Upgrading from Hoary to Breezy Badger is a real, real pain. They say that it is ill-advisable that you do it atm (there's some serious X breakages and they've just come out of a transition to GC++ 4.0) but I... did it anyway.
X was broken because it was looking in utterly the wrong location for fonts, a few packages (most notably Blender) are missing), and the keyboard is currently setup for US-English. Other than that, it's been fine. All of my settings etc. have been utterly preserved. Except for when I overwrote gdm.conf with some of that's settings.
Nice to have some *new* software at last though.

Listening: (Don't go back to) Rockville - R.E.M.

Pagerank

2005-06-17T17:09:00.000+01:00

Looks like I've finally cracked Google. My pagerank has just improved somewhat :D. I'm also on the second page... Think I've found inspiration to keep working on that Wikihow thing. If nothing else, they seem to not know tonnes about how Mediawiki works. I don't either, so they have a false advisor atm.

I'm upgrading Hoary atm. I got fed up of the prospect of 6 months of redundant packages and have changed my repos to Breezy. It's going to devour my bandwidth for th next hour or so.

Listening: David Bowie: 1984

A dark time draws

2005-06-16T20:21:00.000+01:00

I've clicked on "make new blog post" about four or five times in recent days, but despite not doing *anything*, I haven't actually written a single word, squib or character in this box. Not a thing.

Anyhow, I'm now firmly enconsed in Linux, except for those times when I use CS:S, a newly purchsed Half Life, or any other games ;). As of yesterday, whilst I should have been doing more Chemistry revision, I used the wonderful Synaptic to download and install Apache, PHP and MySQL locally in order that I can use them for a testing server. Some of the GUI MySQL apps are utterly faulty, so I need to add phpmyadmin as well. Bah.
The reason for that being that I want a testing server (duh) where I can add some site's I'm planning on making. Well, the one site where I want to experiment with new ideas etc, before migrating them to a webserver. I've just been encouraged and spurred into web development recently for no apparent reason - and I started a new project today, though in the previous hour all that I've suceeded in doing has been to add two empty div tags to an otherwise blank HTML document. I don't know what to do, though the site of a NAGTY member (he's a main programmer for the rather sucessful CMS OCP) offers a couple of ideas. I'll certainly try to tie in as many buttons as possible ;). I'll also be looking for some bleeding edge web technologies that could be worth experimenting with. I need to learn PHP properly as well, or else I'll get absolutely nowhere.

Need music.
*Plays a nice OGG stream on XMMS*
Better; now I'm listening to Beatles - Come Together.

Oh yeh, I got an xfire account, mainly for keeping track of how long I spend gaming. I'll add it to my site somewhere, but here's a nice image that will update continually to show you just how long...

Speaking of images, Philip has kindly pointed out to me that the images on this blog are now utterly broken. This is a result of me moving this blog back to this URL, and deleting the folder on my server, thinking that it had all been transferred over. Never mind though, I'll try to find all the posts that should but don't have images, and then upload those images more perminantly (ourmedia is a good place ;)) and create direct hyperlinks in new posts that replace those old ones.

Listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd - Free Bird. An absolutely amazing song.
I've gone and listened to a lot of Pink Floyd recently, though I don't know why. Went to town and brought the Wall. I've now had lots of time in which to listen to it, and I think that it's an absolutely outstanding album. Calm and mellow in all the right places, but fleshing out into something slightly more rocky as and when seems appropiate. Some of the tracks on disk 2 are particularly good (I often seem to find longer, mellower ones with lots of use of a sole piano player to be quite good). In particular, Nobody Home is a smashing song. A gentle melody guides you through the majority of it, but the rising notes of the chorus reach a nice cresendo, without being too melodramatic. My only "qualm" with it is the end. Where the song simply... stops in the most peculiar way. We were discussing it the other day, and we came to the conclusion that a Pink Floyd studio album is a ground-breaking concept album for other groups.
Melodramatic is definitely what the album's penultimate track is - but it is in a very... OTT way. It's very much a more orchestral piece that one would almost expect to encounter in a musical, but with some exceptionally weird twists. The style of music fits, but any examination of the lyrics reveals the most curious satire. For example: (this song is called "The Trial" btw, and lives up to its namesake)

The way you made them suffer
Your exquisite wife and mother
Fills me with the urge to defecate!

Wtf! What sane song writer adds the word "defecate" to a song? That's on par with Monty Python when Eric Idle decided to add the word "jurisdiction" to a jaunty little tune (Oliver Cromwell) - but at least "Monty Python Sings" had no pretentions of being serious rock album.

Waaahhh!

2005-06-10T18:15:00.000+01:00

My trial period for this CPP version of Windows is going to expire in 30 days time! No fair, because I don't know what I'm going to do to remedy the problem.
I think that I'll have to download the Evaluation software of the full OEM version (this is RC2) which will last for another 120 days. After that I'll have to buy Windows, of a sort. I want to stay on x64 but that will involve a £100 investment. I will have to if I want x32 as well, because I don't want to go illegal *shudder*.
ATI Catalyst Drivers are out at last! Wooh!

Funny!

2005-06-06T18:30:00.000+01:00

I saw this in Private Eye, and thought it was absolutely hilarious ;)

"My client claims that he was drunk when he created a disturbance at Weymouth Bay Caravan Park," defending solicitor Roger Maxwell told Weymouth Magistrates Court. "He admites that he used threatening words and behaviour, he admits to shouting and banging on caravan doors, and he admits to swearing at the Police when they handcuffed him. It is also true that he is already the subject of a two-year anti-social behaviour order. But in mitigation, I should point out that, due to an administrative error, the wording on the Asbo specifically states that he is 'prohibited from not being drunk in a public place'."
After consultation with his fellow magistrates, Chairman of the bench Colin Weston passed judgement on thirty-eight-year-old Stephen Winstone. "It is fortunate for you that the Asbo has been badly written, because otherwise we would have been looking to sentence you to prison for up to a couple of years. However, you were technically fulfilling the terms of your Asbo by being drunk in public, so the court will show leniency to you. You are fined £100."
(Dorset Echo, 17/03/05. Spotter: Sue Webb)

The end of all things

2005-05-20T22:12:00.000+01:00

So here it is, at the end of all things. After 13 years of education, I am no longer legally obliged to attend school. The last week or two have been filled with 'lasts' of some form or another. Last History lesson, last ever Maths lesson with venerable Mensians next to me etc. The last German lesson was particularly good because because it involved a party with bountiful quantities of food. I brought some popcorn, our teacher some cake etc. I got stuffed.
Oddly, the last day was one of the most serious (for me) of the entire week. I had a careers interview immediately after the German party with a well-intentioned but slightly blustering Conexxions person. She gave me the total of one new career / future plans idea - namely Forensics person dude type thing. After that meeting I had to handwrite one of my English pieces; a media coursework examining the morals and ideals behind The Truman Show. It didn't only take me all of English, but also all the way through my last ever Lunchtime as a Year 11 (not that I was hungry...) and about half an hour into our last ever lesson (Biology). I don't think I've handwritten that much for years.
Our Biology teacher and (more applicably,) head of Sixth Form is leaving as well, for a job in a school in the exotic city of Cardiff. Which is truely a real shame :(. In fact, most of the teaching staff seem to be leaving this year including about half the Maths department (my eternal tutor is moving down to Devon) and many other people who obviously didn't want to leave before the amazing Class of 2000.
The Leaver's assembly was quite hugely emotional for lots of people as well. Nicci blamed me for making her cry by getting Pat to play Queen's Friends Will be Friends but it wasn't me - because he was going to play it anyway.
However... most of the people that I know and like and find... erm... interesting (not in some sick perverted way =P) aren't leaving. Besides, we were all coming back in on Monday and Tuesday and for lots of exams anyway. When I never will see any of them again (say, at the prom - or on the day of the last main exam (Physics)) it may be a lot more emotional - I cannot say.
Oh yeh, that corset really suits Nicci as well.

There is some philosophical thought that spawned from all of this... finality; but at the moment it is eluding me.

Alton Towers, and notcotics

As a final 'treat', the school offered to give the whole of Year 11 a special trip to Alton Towers. A random half of the year went yesterday - and the other half is going today... coming back as I type infact. Anywayy, I (for some reason) went around with Nick and a few other people - two of which I barely know at all. N had with him a number of capsules containing some substance (twas an Amino Acid actually) that acted as an anti-anxiety drugs (I'm not sure where the term 'drug' comes into affect - they might not class as a drug.) He took 4 of them in the morning and was fine all day - saying only that he felt happier and more sociable than usual. Two of the other people that I was with took, throughout the day, a total of 8 or 9 of the things - despite Nick's repeatedly telling them not to take any more than 3 or 4. Misguided fools. By the end of the day (well... about 2 or half 2 really), they were feeling more than slightly queasy (though it was only really obvious after we went on Enterprise). Soon they were throwing up.
I'm not sure how teachers found out what made them throw up (we unanimously told them that they were sick after having gone on Enterprise) but after we got back to school, the few teachers that went on the trip with us were having a go at Nick. I heard him explain (rather accurately) what happened - and the 'victims' were backing him up. He explained how he'd told them how much they ought to limit themselves to. I don't know what the outcome of the discussion was (I was wondering around acknoledging that my mum was there) but I heard one of the teachers say (sarcastically) "What a great friend you are then". I also think I saw him hand over his remaining capsules to another teacher.
Now, I don't take drugs, condone doing so or anything like that - but I think that this treatment and judgement was unfair. I don't know fully how they punished him, but I think that given that he took them with him, he was as good a friend as he could have been to them. In their own time, other people may experiment with and take drugs without any knowledge of their effects - or looking at the dosages. Nick will always research extremely thoroughly the effects of anything that he may take, and he will only take drugs that are legal and beneficial in some way. I.e. it was a day out, just before the exams, so he took some subtle anti-anxiety things. With his dosage they had no negative side effects. He shares this with those around him. When the other two people thought that they wanted some more, Nick adamently said that they should not take them - saying that it was too great a dosage. However, he was not going to be dictatorial over them. When they insisted on taking more, Nick probably treated them exactly as he should: by respecting them and acknowledging that they could take the responsibility for their own actions and choices. They definitely will not be ignoring his recomendations in such matters again. Why then was he punished for this?

2005-05-13T23:37:00.000+01:00

Last day of school today. Don't really want to say anymore...
The Rocky Horror Picture Show extract was great! Nicci was wearing the skimpiest costume that I have ever seen in my life.

2005-05-11T17:41:00.000+01:00

I spent some time today adding some buttons - there are a total of four, one of which was already there. But boy, was it time consuming :o

Exam countdown: -12 days until Maths C1 and ICT

2005-05-11T12:55:00.000+01:00

Petition.
Contact your MEP.
Help.

Here's one I made earlier

2005-05-03T16:06:00.000+01:00

In the form of something that I literally spent all (ok - not literally all of it. But most. More than a half of it) of my English lesson just typing into the Login field of the computer whilst the monitor was off.
Because the monitor was off, there is some occasionally poor SPG, but don't blame me ;). I did fix a couple whilst I was going through.

I read the news today oh boy, there was a lucky man who made the grade. And though the news was rather sad, well I just had to laugh-augh. I was the photogra-aph. He blew his mind out in a car. He didn't notice that the lights had changed. I crowd of people turned and stared, they'd seen his face before - nob ody was really sure if he was from the house of Lords. I saw a film today oh boy. The English army had just won the war. A crowd of peopl turned away. Well I just had to look - having read the book. I'd love to turn you on. Woke up, fell out of bed. Dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and had a cup, and looking up, I noticed that I was late. Found my coat, andx grabbed my hat - made the bus in secnd's flat.Found my way upstairs I had a smoke, and somebody spoke and I went into a dream. I saw the news today oh boy - four thousand holes in Blackburn-Lancaster. And though the holes were rather small, they had to count them all. Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. I'd love to turn you on. This spacebar is also quite rubbish because it only has a singular support and is consequently very wobbly. It makes typing long words such as "consequently" much better to type with just a pencil like this. End social commentry which is socially irrelevant. In a hole in a ground there lived a Hobbit. Not a dirty, shabby hole with water running along the ground;nora sweeping shalklow hole. It was a Hobbit hole - and that means comfort. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number 4, Privet Drive, were happy to say that they were perfectly normal thank-you-very-much. They would never be seen doingn anything strange or unusual. Mr. Dursley was th owner of a large firm called Grunnings, which made drills.He had a large, beefy mustache and hardly any neck. I read the news today oh boy, there was a lucky man who made the grade. And though the news was rather sad, well I just had to laugh-augh. I was the photogra-aph. He blew his mind out in a car. He didn't notice that the lights had changed. I crowd of people turned and stared, they'd seen his face before - nob ody was really sure if he was from the house of Lords. I saw a film today oh boy. The English army had just won the war. A crowd of peopl turned away. Well I just had to look - having read the book. I'd love to turn you on. Woke up, fell out of bed. Dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and had a cup, and looking up, I noticed that I was late. Found my coat, andx grabbed my hat - made the bus in secnd's flat.Found my way upstairs I had a smoke, and somebody spoke and I went into a dream. I saw the news today oh boy - four thousand holes in Blackburn-Lancaster. And though the holes were rather small, they had to count them all. Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. I'd love to turn you on. This spacebar is also quite rubbish because it only has a singular support and is consequently very wobbly. It makes typing long words such as "consequently" much better to type with just a pencil like this. End social commentry which is socially irrelevant. In a hole in a ground there lived a Hobbit. Not a dirty, shabby hole with water running along the ground;nora sweeping shalklow hole. It was a Hobbit hole - and that means comfort. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number 4, Privet Drive, were happy to say that they were perfectly normal thank-you-very-much. They would never be seen doingn anything strange or unusual. Mr. Dursley was th owner of a large firm called Grunnings, which made drills.He had a large, beefy mustache and hardly any neck. mwah. I have no strings, to hold me down - to make me safe, or make me sound. I have no agility, there are no strings on me.

That's going to really mess up the word wrap for the source of this page.
Tootles.

Black hat, white hat

2005-04-21T13:07:00.000+01:00

Note: This is back posted. I found this saved as a draft - it was originally meant to be posted April 6th 2005 at 1:24 PM.

In a PSE lesson at the moment, and I really ought to be doing some DT at the moment but I don't really have any available with which to do anything. There isn't much of this lesson left either, only ten minutes. If that. I'm really quite bored.
I basically have absolutely bucket loads of coursework at the moment. My DT is due in for Friday, and I still have bucketloads to do (lots of it being mounting, which is a chore that takes many many hours for each small component. This problem is compounded by the fact that I have little or no glue left. I sincerely hope that mum remembered to get some Spraymount in town today.) I also need to finish/start an English essay on Jane Eyre by Monday, and start/finish an entire IT coursework by about 2 weeks time. I was supposed to give it into my teacher today for a bit of a checkover and he was supposed to say how I can improve it. But there is no point, because I quite simply don't have any to check over (my coursework as it stands in about a page long, most of it waffle and worth no marks). The bulk of what I have actually done is a database. I didn't so much because I was trying to learn intermeddiate access skills whilst doing the coursework. I need to work out how to put an Action Query into a more user friendly form.

I have to go now. Check out Ourmedia, which isn't working for me atm. Ciao!

2005-04-20T13:02:00.000+01:00

Yes, that was a blog. It was the results that I got regarding the party that I ought to vote for... were I elegible. Thanks to Alex for pointing me towards it. It's mostly what I expected... though I didn't expect UKIP to feature quite so highly; and I think that it's possible that the answers that I gave may have been influenced by my knowledge of what Lib Dem policies are.
I apologise for the ill fitting, messy formatting of such a ridiculous boilerplate as well, but I haven't got time at the moment to fix it. I posted it whilst at school yesterday, and the bus was about to leave.

Linux still is working fine, though I got mad at myself yesterday after spending the best part of 2 and a half hours (on and off) trying to build Blender from CVS - getting all the packages that I might need (libpng-dev) or whatever. But finally when I asked for help about why it wasn't MAKE ing, someone reminded me of the existance of apt-get. The main reason for Debian to exist. Doh! It works though, at least.
PSE now - might have 40 more minutes to waste on the computer.

Who should you vote for?

2005-04-19T16:15:00.000+01:00

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

	Labour 1
Conservative -10
	Liberal Democrat 32
	UK Independence Party 6
	Green 28

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Blog blog

2005-04-18T22:36:00.000+01:00

School has just started an odd blog, to coincide with an "amazing" mock election here. To date, I'm the only logged in user to have posted - but there have been lots of strange posts by Year 8 ish people. I don't know who most of them are, but I'm argueing with people that form i) coherent arguements that ii) I disagree with.
Nice place to try out some NAGTY Debates fun...
The only annoying thing is that posting Comments to posts in much insuperior to posting a blog thing - they don't have the "recover post" feature that I could have done with today when... something was playing up (I kept getting Error 500 from the Blogger server).
< And yes, I am typing this on Ubuntu, which is great :). At the moment, I'm prefering it for word processing etc, going into Windows for Games. Which is quite a bit of the time.

And I just got it then as well, trying to post this. Thank god for the new "Recover post" function.

2005-04-16T15:58:00.000+01:00

OK, I am very, very glad to say that in that respect, I was utterly wrong :). I tried Ubuntu (Hoary Hedgehog... I think) and it has installed without a single hitch. I'm writing from it now - I only need to check to see if Windows is working properly.

Linux

2005-04-16T15:21:00.000+01:00

If you want to ever, ever try and run Linux; then I beg of you to never consider buying an SN95G5V2 and load it with a SATA Hard drive. It just won't work... as far as I know. Regardless of any installation that you may try to use etc. Anyway, I'm downloading Gentoo atm and am just about to try and install Ubuntu in order to see if that will have a nice, working driver. The graphics are annoying and turquoise anyway, I have to wait for my Gentoo download to finish...

Time

2005-04-13T13:19:00.000+01:00

Is waiting in the wings
He speaks of senseless things.
His trick is you and me,
Boy

Ok, I have some Time now - this is a PSE lesson again, and I don't really have anything better to do at the moment. I could be doing some IT work (which i ought to) or English work (but I can't really, because the most recent version that I have is on my home computer).
But I'm not going to do IT because it's pretty much a dead cert that by the time these rather crappy, slow computers manage to open up MS word and start editing this document (assuming that they're able to read my USB flash drive in the first place (God bless the creator of the flash drive...)) it will be the end of the lesson, so I've decided to write into my much deprived blog instead. I have even taken the novelty to the extent of putting this keyboard on my lap - but it's also a rubbish keyboard with sticky keys (not that stupid software thing =P) that don't press half of the time.

It is annoying me recently - really, really annoying me how some educations systems attempt to run themselves like a business. In particular at the moment, I know that my school, John Cabot CTC is bowing to pressure from the DfES to drop the title of being a CTC (City Technology College) and instead become an Academy. This is really, really odd because Academies are schools that are supposed to be build in urban areas with students are generally underachieving in academic areas. Though Bristol may be a pretty remarkably underachieving LEA, surely it would be more worth the Government's while to build a (much needed) new school, not too far from the centre of the city, that people can attend. I think that the DfES wants CTCs (all CTCs are located in urban areas) to convert to Academies so that the DfES can claim that there is actually a good spread of Academies across the country that are accessible for admissions to 99% of the populace. They can also say that there are now high achieving Academies - but only because they have changed the name of already highly achieving CTCs into Academies.
Perhaps it isn't mainly the fact that the Governers have given the "illustrious" Principal, Mr. Carter permission for our school to express interest in conversion to an Academy (without, to date, any consultation with parents or students); but more what I have heard another rumour as. (It's notable that the interest about conversion isn't a rumour). Which is that it is to be an Academy of the Preforming Arts. No Way! (Note the extra capitals). This is currently a City Technology College which, no offence whatsoever meant towards the hard working Drama department, isn't particularly reknown for its prowess in the Arts. Compared to only one other CTC facility that I saw on film, the facilities that we have are not all that amazing. The majority of the students both involved in, and who have watched, the various recent productions have not highly acclaimed them at all. The music department recently had a refit, but is nothing special and dance has only been introduced to the curriculum within the last year.

Work

2005-04-11T21:58:00.000+01:00

Still lots of coursework - DT done at last! :D. English due in this week, and IT next week. Planet AMD64 Wiki is one of my latest endeavours...

2005-03-29T14:55:00.000+01:00

And what I forgot to say was that it was Tolkien Reading Day 2005 on Friday (March 25). I read a couple of words. Write more later.

2005-03-24T23:22:00.001Z

St. Peter's Square (arty photo ;))

2005-03-24T23:22:00.000Z

All of us in the epic scope that is St. Peter's Basilica

nb

2005-03-24T23:11:00.000Z

Important things!
Rome was great! One of the better, more interesting and civil holidays that we've had - though what really made it for me was the sheer... romantic... awe of the 2000 year old buildings crumbing into ruin, the epic tragedy of the plundering of Rome in the Middle ages for building material. The scope of St. Peter's Basilica.

Going to see Becca in Nottingham tomorrow! :D.
Though it's also highly significant that tomorrow is Ben's birthday - happy birthday :D.
Pleh - school work is overpowering atm.
Oweing to my absense - contact with me through MSN, Gmail, school, wikipedia etc. will be severely hampered. I'll leave you with a picture.

Ain't rock and roll to you

2005-03-15T10:43:00.000Z

Like the new name? I didn't like the last one, so I decided. So I heard that lyric briefly on the radio (I've taken to listening to the Webcast of Virgin Radio Classic Rock) and thought it would do. It certainly is a lot less vain that "It's about me". Somehow, I need to promote this blog to search engines, which have ignored every one of my websites to date. I'm going off to Rome today as well! We're leaving here at about a quarter to 2. And the plane is due to take off at quarter past four. As long as it isn't delayed, which quite a few (most) planes are. Mum's telling us all to be exceptionally careful with the things we bring, because of the way in which Rome is reknown for all of its pickpocketers. So I proposed putting some barbed wire in the top of my bag whilst we're wondering around. She didn't respond. Perhaps she'd already had that idea? ;) Anyhow, we're coming back on Friday - though very late on Friday. I doubt I'll be able to blog between now and then ;). Though a photo blog wouldn't be bad... When in Rome, do as the Romans do - in this case for me, I shall be quoting Monty Python's Life of Brian quite a bit. Because there's Romans in there ;)

This man, commands a cwack legion! He wanks very highly in Rome!

Ahem, Have a good siesta!

Siesta! Little sleep? Ahh, is the same in Spanish as well!

2005-03-07T21:29:00.000Z

A single shot of my whole computer setup

2005-03-07T21:25:00.000Z

My Shuttle XPC Box

2005-03-07T21:24:00.000Z

Inside of computer, focusing on Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600XT

2005-03-07T19:50:00.000Z

Well, today was really quite boring in that I didn't really do much, though it will probably transpire to equal more than I will do in most, if not all other days this week. After waking, having a brief breakfast of Bran Flakes (as ever) I then departed upstairs to try to prod Rome: Total War to install via a number of underhand techniques including copying all three CD's to the hard drive and try an install from there. After this failed, I went on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (a truly enrapturing game) for a while, and had fun playing a couple of hands of Pazaack (I lost both matches and 40 credits).

Then at half 12, I had to go into town with Ben (dad gave us a lift in, for reasons unknown) and I wondered around, buying two books, wishing I could be lazing around at home. But the two books were certainly a (cheap) consolation. One was the World Book Day book by Garth Nix, which I purchased with Ben's WBD voucher (brothers do come in handy then!) from Waterstones, and the other was a nice edition of "Restaurant at th End of the Universe" which I thought I'd never find, because the edition that the ever kind Joe Scaife purchased for me for my birthday last year seems a rather hard to come by print. But I have the second one at last! It only cost £3 at a music shop that Sanjay pointed me towards that's half-way up Park Street. There's some really cheap music in there as well, never before have I seen pretty much all of the better Bowie albums, as well as every Queen album ever for only £5 as their apparent permanent selling price – that's about a third the price of HMV and Virgin Megastores.

Got back at around 4 this afternoon. Spent a while half heartedly doing a bit of homework, but mainly procrastinating, wondering around and... I don't really know where the day went. Tea was nice though =). A nice vegetable lasagna... Oh well, have a nice morrow.

Nathan

64 bit heaven and hell

2005-03-07T19:22:00.000Z

Warning: Techie blog

Well, my computer came on the Thursday, as was predicted by Scan, which I can now fully recommend from my one order, as I didn't have a single problem with them. They even gave me a free mouse which is better than my old one... but that doesn't take too much these days to better a two button ball-mouse. Dad was unfortunately going out within less than an hour, but he just about managed to (thankfully) fit in time to put the processor and RAM into the computer, and then I was given the option of constructing the rest of the system... which I (gladly) took up. Though it did prove moderately challenging, there were a few problems. So if you (yes, I mean you ever wish to consider building your own system, specifically a Shuttle (SN95G5) you may wish to look out for this.
The CPU did go in fine, and the ICE system needed only a shove to successfully attach itself to the rest of the chassis. The first thing that I had to do was remove the rack (not a Monty Python throwback) and put the Hard Drive, then floppy drive and finally the optical drive in it. The first was easy, once I worked out how to use the screwdriver. And the fact that it was SATA made the cable a lot easier to affix. My main problem was with the FDD and CDD, which I had to remove from my old computer, which was dusty and over grown. It didn't help that I tried to pull the FDD backwards through the inside of the computer rather than push it out the other way. I think that I managed to lose several screws along the way somewhere. Fortunately after a bit of shoving and pushing they all went in the rack properly, which I then fixed into the chassis. My only problem with the cabling (besides the angles that were called from my wrist and elbow,) was then FDD power cable, which was flimsy and continued to fall out whenever I did anything with the machine afterwards.
This left me with only one hardware addition: the ATI Radeon 9600XT graphics card. Once I realised that not only the back plate, but also the aluminium panel above it had to be removed in order to fix it, it all went in without a hitch. I put the cover back on, and had a minor panic fit as I realised that the plug that was provided was a 2 pin continental/American plug, not a good 3 pin British standard. Following my dodgy logic, I then wondered if the supplied power supply unit was also American/Continental, and would therefore only take some silly voltage or else... blow up or something. After a bit of Internet research and seeing references to the PSU being 110/240V I decided to take the plunge and use the power cable that I had been using with my old computer. To my shock (consider that this was the first computer that I had built...) the computer actually booted first time! And after poking around the BIOS for a bit, I discovered that it had even detected all of the installed hardware (even all 160GB of hard disk space, which dad had said he thought might not be all detected (something to do with the big drive space limit on older BIOSs or something...)). I tidied up the living room, transplanting the computer onto my desk, and booted onto the Win XP x64 installation CDROM that I had downloaded (a 360 day free trial). I made a 100GB partition for Win XP and installed... within something around an hour. I admit though, that I didn't really notice any speed difference between this machine and Ben's Win XP pro installation when he got a new (Athlon 2600+) machine.

Since then, I've tried to refine the machine. The choice to not install a 32 bit Win XP OS has come back to haunt me, as I have discovered that neither my brand new (unused) TV card, nor webcam currently have 64 bit drivers (32 bit drivers can unfortunately not be emulated -.-). And are consequently... useless. I also had a problem with the latest ATI 64 bit driver (BETA 4) which once installed, seemed to result in none of my software being able to detect that the GPU was Direct 3D compatible. There is very little 64 bit software, in fact I have installed none of my own accord. But I suppose that this was inevitable, and there will probably be none until 64 bit is a lot more mainstream (though a 64bit port of Far Cry is apparently in the works, as well as a 64 bit UT2004. There are rumours of a 64 bit port by MS of... Age of Empires of all creatures... but nm).

The final problem I have had is when it has come to finally trying to install Linux (Debian AMD64 SID to be more precise), and I found that it had exceptional difficulty in detecting my SATA hard drive to the extent that it simply... didn't. (Heheh - OpenOffice didn't have “Debian” in the dictionary, and it's first suggestion was “Lesbian”). I'm scouring mailing lists for a response... but I just can't be arsed at the moment. Far too much work to do just for something that I won't use considering my current need to get Windows working. And my mountain of coursework that needs doing sometime this holiday.

OK - so the software that I put over the course of only a couple of days on the virgin windows install (reading from my “Add and Remove programs list”:

Adobe Reader 7.0 straight from the Adobe site. No problems with installation, and it absolutely necessary to get lots of the serious information that it on the Internet.
AMD CPU Info; Motherboard Monitor 5 both allow me to check on the well-being/statistics of my computer. Especially useful when I've been trying to troubleshoot and will be more useful when submitting information to forums about problems. MBM tells me my core temperature, and is very handy for it (SpeedFan didn't seem to work).
Firstclass Client is necessary for checking emails on my school email system without the ghastly web interface.
Fraps displayed my FPS so that I could optimise my graphics options.
MS Access and Infopath 2003 have been vital to allow me to do my current IT coursework.
Mozilla Firefox 1.0+. Reclaim the web.
MSN Messenger 7.0 I thought I'd give a go, and I needed to replace the built in Windows Messenger.
Node IRC client, which I have since broken by loading a wrong skin – needs to be reinstalled at some convenient time.
OpenOffice.org Beta (1.9.79) has finally left the developer preview stage and is now stable enough that I can rely on it as my stable platform.
Pulse for Project Dolphin counts the number of keystrokes a make, at the time of writing, 930 since my last Pulse.
Various ATI stuff. I installed the latest Catalyst driver but then Direct3D didn't work at all. So I reverted to the supplied Windows one, only ATI control centre is still installed. Also, I added "Ray Adam's ATI Tray Tools" which is an exceptionally powerful, little, useful application.
The GIMP 2.2.4 as the best GNU image editor around. It rivals the likes of Photoshop. Admittedly, I haven't used it yet.
Some games, namely Star Wars: Battlefront and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. They work absolutely fine. I tried to install Rome: Total War as well, however, the ageing CD drive that I have been forced to use was unable to read it... and various other methods haven't succeeded in getting it to work. The CD is a tad scratched mind.

Any changes and developments I'll post on here... if for nothing more than to remind me of them in the future.
I've just discovered that Blogger has a relatively sophisticated HTML validator built in. I'm impressed! Well done...

Wooh

2005-03-01T20:38:00.000Z

Firefox is working again, they patched the nightly quite fast, especially considering the huge number of bugs that entered the CVS with the introduction of Pref Window V (which isn't all that remarkable). Ordered my computer last night! :). It's sitting on dad's credit card at the moment, but somehow I need to withdraw the required amount (some £540) and transfer it to him. Specs:

Shuttle SN95G5 V2 case - Small Form Factor
Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester core
Sapphire ATI 256MB 9600XT GPU
160GB Maxtor Diamond+ 10
512MB DDR PC3200 RAM

And I got a DVI-I cable as well... I hope that it arrives by thursday. Which is when it is scheduled to do so. Alas, running short of time am I. Certainly too short for any social commentaries. OOo 2.0bc is suprisingly stable and... good. Who needs 64 bit?

Some things in life

2005-02-25T20:35:00.000Z

They did it didnt they.
The maniacs. They did it.
They blew it up.
Damn them all! Damn them all to hell!

So endeth that film that I have just watched - the original and by far greater version, Planet of the Apes. It is a truely epic and moving cinematic masterpiece, both vast in scale (taking into account inflation it has actually the largest makeup budget of any film in history (source: IMDB)) and stunning in affect. It is one of those post-apocolyptic films (such as Day after Tomorrow, for example) that makes me stop think and wonder how much of a possibility the events depicted therein actually are. Will humankind annihiate itself and revert to some mute base lifeform in a nuclear war? Though the discrimination was wrong, was the underlying attitude of the Simian race (specifically, those such as the Minister for Science who were "In the know") correct in saying that humankind is inherently evil, determined in their way to conquer all - thereby placing their security, wellbeing and material possessions above those of every other living creature on this planet. Can our souls and our mind shy away from the nature that we may very possibly have; one or both disrespect and ignorance of that around us?
Anyway, enough philosophical jabberings aside - PotA is a truely great film. And despite negative reviews I would dearly love to see the sequels and what forgoes the characters. I haven't watched the remade version, so I cannot pass opinion. Though if I ever were to watch it; my hopes for it are far from high. All such classic films are slaughtered in a remake. I hope that King Kong is able to possibly buck this trend.

I should be getting a new computer sometime next week! Mum and dad agreed that it would be best to order it this weekend so that it could come before dad went away on a ski holiday. The specs that I pretty much drew up for it may be found here. I apologise for the Wiki like nature of that site =P. But I was experimenting at the time with some database systems and CMS on a server that we have. It's certainly suited to the task of a host to a bit of quikly changable online data anyway. The highlights are mainly a 64bit processor and a very nice case (right somewhere). I have to go now anyway. Have a good time all! :)

Today I feel

2005-02-24T08:40:00.000Z

A grim foreboding of a dark day.

Sinking to the depths

2005-02-18T19:53:00.000Z

Of depression is today's occupation. Firstly, I was unable to persuade my parent's to allow me to take this train this evening in order to go up to Birmingham and sleep over at Helen's with (umm... not in a literal sense) her, Katie, Harriet and most importantly Becca. But I couldn't, both because of train times and everything else that my parents decided on. And now today I've managed to lost my phone - which is a real, real pain. Someone nicked it in the changing room - though I wasn't the most careful possible with it (I think it likely that it fell out of my pocket). Even if I didn't lose it in there - I'm pretty certain that someone has nicked it seeing as the phone has been turned off now - and I'm not responsible for having turned it off... I don't think. Just been researching train times and fares. Perhaps I'm better off not being at Helen's with four other girls (Javid couldn't come) where they're all being... feminine. I felt all lonesome even on the phone talking to Becca. Anyhow. Goodbye.

A Flu

2005-02-17T20:56:00.000Z

Though not of the bird variety (a fortunate case for all those in contact with me over the last while), has plagued me over the past dozen days - to the extent that I took two days off of school last week (more than I ever have in in week before, ever. I've been poking CMS systems on a webserver, to see what I could do with them, and the answer seems to be quite a bit. It's struck me how much teachers work and must know as well - it struck me as I passed a teacher that I vaguely know talking to a year 8's parents (it was parent's evening) about how he could be better behave. A teacher must know all about the actions, friendships and attitudes of all of the members of all of the classes that they teach or else not be able to... keep up with them. Anyhow, only a quick blog. Ten gigabytes of music in nasty MP3 format has appeared on my PC that I'm currently sifting through. My ass hurts. Need to go off now and argue to go to Birmingham tomorrow, and then get an early night (I've needed them a lot more over the past week - it's quite annoying. Hmm... closing WMP didn't just hide it into Foxytunes then! :o. Just... closed it *prods*.

Ughhfff

2005-02-05T20:23:00.000Z

Me have stomach ache - stomach acho not good.
I also have very little time to write anything in, as I have to go. Got a couple of books the other day: "The truce at Bakura" and "Angels and Demons". Consequently my current read is the former, which I'm reading concurrently to Two Towers, which I must admit is better than I remember it (and I remember it in a very good light). I've set up Ben's computer with dual screen - and it's very nice with so so much screen space. It's quite restricting when I go down to 1024*768 from the heady heights of 2560*1024. New computer. Better go - fate calls.

I think I saw you in an icecream parlour, drinking milkshake cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine
Don't think you knew, you were in my song

Changes

2005-01-24T22:37:00.000Z

Just a few changes - I have an updated quote (see right) and have updated my blogger profile with more recent stuff. Better go to bed now - am on the phone (guess who to) Loves,

Amateur dramatics

2005-01-24T21:12:00.000Z

Oh, that pantomime was "Dick Wittington" and consisted of two members of a family in my aquaintance dressing up in silly costumes/some semblence of drag. Quite why Dick needed to wear a skirt that barely qualified for the role, being so short, is beyond me. And her father was madly enough dressed as the village (London in this case) idiot, that he may as well have had red hair and called Bob.
I truly did find it a sad reflection on society, how people flocked in what must have totally (throughout the whole 'season') been thousands, to see an amateur dramatics group make complete arses of themselves in such a... dull way. They'd even sunk to the depths of doing as many as 4 or 5 direct Little Britain references. What can this world be coming too when cross dressing, and jokes that are repeated every single year in places all over the country are forms of entertainment. An amateaur dramatics society should be cultural in their preformances, focuses on the likes of Miller or Shakespeare, which I would much rather see. Heheh, I found James Taylor's (of NAGTY Staff fame) own blog. Will read with interest.

I try once again.

2005-01-24T14:27:00.000Z

*sigh*. This is my third attempt at writing this blog entry. I first tried yesterday lunchtime, but unfortunately (I was writing it... slowly) Firefox decided to crash for... the first time in living memory and I completely lost all of the waffle that I had written to that time... I couldn't be bothered to write it again, and after spending more time than could possibly be healthy talking to Helen and going out with Javid, I gave up on making sense of Physics results that simply don't say the slightest thing that they are supposed to say and went and played on Killzone. Which I managed to summarily finish, to my lasting happiness, as it joins a very short list of finished games (even if I only did it on easy difficulty with one of the four playable characters). It is however, truly a great game, with an immersive atmosphere and exceptionally... realistic environments and AI. Unlike other games where it is easy to simply run into the midst of the an enemy and pound them to pulp with fear of only recieving a scratch, Killzone's AI will be able to kill you much more easily when you engage with them. Particularly irritating is when they come fully equipped with Grenade launchers, or even worse, grenade missile things - which are able to easily kill you from a great range before you are even aware that there are any opponents in the area. Even once you know they are there, it can often take as long as 5 or 10 minutes to locate quite where they are, and you often find yourself depending on the battle instincts of your compatriots who will be attempting to shoot at an enemy that is cowering behind a nearby rock group. Of course, the AI isn't perfect, and you may sometimes find an enemy just standing in a room facing a wall, whilst you're shooting at the other rubber-fetish-naziesque Helghast.

He sang all night, long...

Hmm... that was merely a little line from "Lady Stardust" by David Bowie, as part of "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars". Sorry... Anyhooww... where was I?... Ah yes, the second occasion when I tried to write this blog was last night, on the computer in my room, running Konqueror and on Debian. I'd only written a paragraph or so when I pressed a key combination (I'd done it once before on Saturday) that meant the key presses were for functions rather than typing... so when I pressed a button such as W it navigated back to my home page. Can anyone help and tell me what I managed to do? As it was, I pressed a button that naviagated me back, and on going forward again, I had lost all of my blog that I had typed up to that time. Can anyone help and explain this for me? Ahh, I am in eternal debt to helen, who on reading this blog, offered me some resources to help with learning the Kana, for which I thank her - though I must profess to doubting my own personal self motivation in that respect. I'm writing this now in an IT class - and I can feel the pent up fustration in people at impending GCSEs as they sprint around the table behind me. I've just had to come up with some random IT project that I can do as my second coursework and 40% of my GCSE. I've decided to make a database for a library computerised system... I need to incorporate Excel somehow, and that is something that I haven't quite worked out. Mr. Singh (national prize winning teacher) wants us to include VB Macros as well :S. There was a bad reflection on society in some pantomime I saw on Saturday... no more... OK - maybe a bit more... than you'd expect. But I'll have to write about that later. I escaped the risk of a big crash in IE by typing that in Notepad. Old faithful.

There's a mumma pappa calling for you

2005-01-20T22:32:00.000Z

Hello there... 今日は if you want to be topical... because in the midst of all this GCSE revision I'm trying to be really harsh on myself and learn Japanese! I haven't really got very far, only reading on the Wikibooks about basic language structure and pronunciation: most of which I have forgotten. I'm just moving onto lesson one of the Hiragana (that's one of the two Kana 'alphabets' that are used. Other than that there are the literally thousands of borrowed Kanji that are used to represent ideas. But then, you knew that anyway. Right? =P). I'm busy typing this out quietly on a Sarge Debian distro in my room. Not half an hour ago I managed to get in my 1000th edit on Wikipedia! :). Made my day that did. Someday I'm going to write a critical blog on Wikipedia, but it being as late as it is, today is not that day. I've installed Mozilla Thunderbird; and combined with a new email address I set up with out ADSL ISP, it's proven to be one of the most useful pieces of software that I have. It's ability to read RSS and Atom feeds (such as this blog) is also very useful, and I've moved my subscriptions out of a cluttered Firefox bookmarks toolbar, and into a world of its own :). Also, I got the latest Openoffice preview release earlier. I don't think that it's quite the Beta, but it certainly looks (people say as well) much nicer and more stable that my previous (november build) snapshot. New icons make it for me ;). There's also a section called OOo "Base" that manages DBs that I shall have to look at. Loads of books. I finally got Star Wars: Krytos Trap from somewhere. It came to me from Cirencester via. Sweden and America. No wonder P&P was 2x the book cost. Still, it only totalled £4. Which was very good value. Shame, however that it is an american print and the spine is all different :(. Need to read the (from what I've seen) amazing Da Vinci code as well (Dan Brown). Looks to be a bang. Go Bowie.

I have no strings

2005-01-02T15:47:00.000Z

Google Search: GIMP 2.2: "Slashdot | GIMP 2.2 Released" Heheh, that's a great title - and by following the instructions in the thing at the top (this blog's title) you should be able to see. Because now, if you do a search for either GIMP 2.2 or wongn on Slashdot, I come out on top - for my article submission to Slashdot about this software's release was accepted - even if some of the details - as well as the category was wrong. That really put me on a high a couple of days ago. Well.. a very temporary one. Many weeks later. Now at Becca's house! Yippee! :D. I've found out though, that she's in a stable relationship with half of her "acquaintances" (sp.) :(. Which is a bummer, because I've just been dumped. And she says that she isn't a polygamist mormon. Good week though :D. Saw His Dark Materials at the National Theatre - which was a great waste of 6 hours. *snigger* Not really. It was a very good play - and I could even hear what the actors were saying! *gasp*. Then on Thursday we met Katie who I met once before, but I unfortunately had to be dragged around every single clothes shop in Oxford Street. And I still didn't find the book that I wanted! :o. Though I found it online and I've emailed Dad in order to force him to order it online - I'm tempted to say that he won't :(. But I will make him -.-. Becca just corrected my spelling of "emailled".

Hello. Does this pretty little box work?

OK - I'll write more when I get back. Christmas was very good though :D. Though to my eternal disgust, no ROTK EE Gift box set DVD was forthcoming. Nor Star Wars. Nor Live Aid. Did however get.

LCD monitor
A... thing

Happy 2005 to you all! :) Becca says: I didn't dump him, I'm not a mormon, I'm not a lesbian, we didn't go to even nearly half the shops in Oxford street and besides he chose to come.

I didn't like that title

2004-11-26T21:14:00.000Z

"For example, let f(n) be the number of distinct subsets of the integers in the interval [1,n] that do not contain two consecutive integers; thus for example, with n = 4, we have {}, {1}, {2}, {3}, {4}, {1,3}, {1,4}, {2,4}, so f(4) = 8. It turns out that f(n) is the n+2 Fibonacci number, which can be expressed in closed form as: f(n) = \frac{\phi^{n+2}}{\sqrt{5}} - \frac{(1-\phi)^{n+2}}{\sqrt{5}} where φ = (1 + √5) / 2, the Golden mean. However, given that we are looking at sets of integers, the presence of the √5 in the result may be considered as "unaesthetic" from a combinatoric viewpoint."
Blah blah blah. Hello there. I've been using Wikipedia too much recently... I really ought to snap out of it. Though I've learnt a small amount, I haven't yet... erm... I moved away from the window and I'm not sure how it got there. I've been doing some vandal deletion but I'm trying to work. It's been mock exams this week, and will be for more than half of next week - I did absoloutely rubbishly in DT (62/125) which was crap. That's less than 50% for heavens sake. The main problem was that I didn't organise my time well enough and ended up spending what must have been 40 minutes doing lots of pictures and descriptions of "how I'd make" a certain project. But I did it all wrong and got about 6/24 for that section when I could have done some of the much easier writing bits. Gah!
Nice day tomorrow though, I hope. No reason for it not to be. It's the NAGTY student council meeting. And Becca's going! :D and then after we get to meet up with Helen and Khyle as well. Which should be.... interesting to say the least.
Exams next week:

Mathematics (Calulator) - will skive
Religious Studies - will fail
History
German Listening
English Literature

I wish that there was a "Preview" button on this page. Firefox 1.0 (final) is out! :D. According to the roadmap - 1.1 should be out by March, and 2.0 out by this time next year. Not that that isn't looking to far ahead... ;). In other software news, even though I don't use it too much at the moment, GIMP 2.2 should be coming out any day now; and as soon as I get a new computer in my room I need to install some random (good) Linux distro on it as a secondary operating system. Probably not Debian. I got a Gold and Best in School for the Senior Maths Challenge. Which suprised me as well as the other Sixth Formers in the school that were most disgruntled about me getting a higher score than them. I apparently got about 93... I think. Which is most unfortunately just above the threshhold for admittance to the BMO1 (British Mathmatical Olympiad) which is an extremely hard, three hour long test on exceptionally complicated mathematical ideas where a further maths year 14 student/staff member (Leigh Chilcott) didn't even know what most of the words in the example questions meant! I need to learn lots of crap. That's why I put that quote from Wikipedia at the top that I was reading to try and learn about Permutations and Combinatronics. Whatever they are ;). Still, I've got a good... four and a half days to learn the majority of the A-level further maths, STEP and Cambridge degree level syllabus. It can't be that hard surely!? ;). Still, I should be able to do it next year. I hope(ish). Bye! :)

LucasArts Game Discussion Forums

2004-11-04T19:54:00.000Z

LucasArts Game Discussion Forums: "We are excited to let everyone know that the PC update is DONE" Hmm... that looks interesting. I'm just trying out the new Blogging extension that I've got for Firefox (now at 1.0RC2! - Available here). Um... lots of very good stuff has happened - but I haven't had time to write about it ;). Cheerio! :) Loving you all.

Oh dear...

2004-10-24T20:58:00.000+01:00

It appears that I don't have the willpower to often post on here at the moment... not since September 9th apparently. Lots of things have changed. Lots still remain the same. For example, I'm going to be seeing Becca in just two days :). When we're going to be seeing Mary Poppins at the Hippodrome. I just spent... the best part of two days at Katys house, along with her, Nathan, Khyle and Joe. Lots of techie convos and me using Katy's laptop until about 5 this morning. At which time I (wisely, I feel), decided to get to sleep... I was very tired. Speaking of "techie", my phone isn't working at all well today. Phone calls don't start and texts don't send. Does anyone (of the countless hoards of you that read this) know a solution/reason? It is a *very* old phone. I've installed an Apache (2.0) web server, along with PHP 5.0 support and a MySQL database server. These now allow me to test PHP scripts that access databases, consequently (once I learn PHP of course :S) enableing me to make much more... dynamic websites. Though I'm mainly fiddling at the moment. Chapter 12: Variables... It's going to be a long road. Star Wars Battlefront is an exceptionally good game - but I must concede to the reviews that say it certainly lacks "long-term" appeal. There's absolutely no depth to it whatsoever. But it's good... a great blast really. Can shoot people I've been looking for Half Life as well... but I can't find it :(. Just got a handful of Firefox extensions... I can't find Tabbrowser Extensions. Only Preferences. Which is a bummer Better go play on SWBF. I love you all :) (Simon)

We had five years, left to cry in.

2004-09-09T20:06:00.000+01:00

Hello there, once again folks. I seem to have mislaid the keys to this blog, but for the moment I am more than pretty determined to keep it up and running for as long as possible. So far it has lasted significantly longer than any other attempts at such a thing, though over the summer holidays I seem to have... obvious reasons taken, missed out lots of oppotune blogging moments. Dad's researching broadband! He spent a lot of time on the Internet last night looking at various reviews of lots and lots of different web providers. I'd quite like something simple like BT... but I haven't looked at all (or indeed any) of the amazing features that some other broadband providers no doubt actually... supply. It ought to be a good idea to go for a more mainstream one that isn't so likely to go bust though... Anyway... 512kbps here we come! :). In about 6 months or so... Started school last week. Back to the same, dull, repetitive routine. Precisely the same teachers in every single subject, with about 2 and a half exceptions. We now have Bez for PSE, rather than Dr. Stone (I think this was because of timetable clashes) and (much more importantly) Mr. Williams instead of Ms. Kaur for maths. This change was brought about because she was crap ;). Soo now we have a teacher who actually teaches the A level sylabbus (well... Ms. Kaur taught Discrete - but that was only one Year 13 module whereas it's P1 and P2 (which we have just started) that really matter). The half a change is that we have Ms. Knight for DT all of the time, whereas last year we had Mr. Jenkin's for half of our lessons. He was much more of a... perfectionist. Damn - I've just realised that I forgot (again) to get some blank A3 paper. Was a half day today - finished at 1, got home at 3:20. This slight time lag was due to hanging around McDonalds and Hengrove play area for an hour, waiting for Ben and Aaron's film (Dodgeball) to start. It was fun on the big climbing thing ;). Today was quite a good day really - helped immeasurably by the fact that there was only half of it ;). I did the best in the class on the Bleep test (fitness test measuring aeorbic (sp.) ability. I got up to level 10.9... I thought it was 11 and a nice round numebr but I had to run one more to get to 11. Which is annoying because I think that I could have kept running for a couple more minutes. Second (Josh and Fleur) got 10. Ross only got 9.4. Hahaha! :). Did maths - relished in the posession of a P1/P2 book. Worked on INdex Notation. It's just an extension of the GCSE coverage of it. Not toooo hard. But then... we only did the first not-too-many questions. I looked at it on the bus and the second page looked a lot more challenging. Admittedly though - Pussey and Leigh say that P1 is laughably easy. Apparently, some of the work I did at summer school (though the bit reffered to was just the "Working out Simultaneous Equations in Matrix form") that Chris told me as extra) is P6 (C4) level. Which is quite worrying. At least I've forgotten what he did ;). The double tech. I'm annoyed that I didn't do anything. But then I didn't actually see too much that needed doing. I'm downloading SP2 at the moment. Apparently is doesn't include WMP10 so I'll have to download that seperately. I hadn't realise that the Gamma had been released until I looked at the website this morning at school. Grr... SP2 is a 95MB download that looks as though it'll take an eternity to download. I'm not sure if I can shut down during the download either. It's a worryingly intractable looking window. Well... I've nearly reached the 10MB mark anyway. Got the Exeter video. There are bits that make me cringe... muchly. Taken to playing Star Trek Armada recently, and I've just watched ST 5(The final frontier) and 6 (The Undiscovered Country). I'm going to watch Generations and... the othe NGO ones after. I need to find Generations though. I'm pondering whether they have the new TOS series 1 DVDs in Blockbuster - might try to rent it. There's 8 disks of it! :o I'm checking online if it tells you if they're available. Need to shop for Becca's birthday present soon. I think I know what to get, but there's no way I'm going to post it on here :P Better scarper now - I need to allow time to talk. I'm also thinking of redesigning my website. I've gone to the lengths of opening Dreamweaver. Though it was open yesterday as well. Song: Queen Bitch Book: The Fifth Elephant (nothing to do with an elephant yet) Clothing: Black

Hello

2004-08-29T19:50:00.000+01:00

"You say High, I say low, you say" etc. etc. (Beatles Hello, Goodbye) Seems adequate for this blog as I was going to write a large amount about all the stuff that I've been up to this holiday, such as the amazing greatness that was Exeter Summer School (cheers to the Bo Rap gang indeed), the even amazinger greatness of a whole week (!) with Becca, and the moderate interestingness (resplendent with a bit of sun burn) that is a week and a half in the south of France. Strange how one week of the latter seemed to fill up more time than the three weeks prior to it. As France is the most recent, I'll say it was windy, nice and hot, expensive food, and I did do a couple of interesting things. Scuba diving was great, as well as clinging on behind a speed boat on a little inflatable thing, and going on a Jet Ski. We didn't see High Grant though, who came to a little village about 6 days after we were there. School looms. Homework peeves. Back to old routines of talking. Mainly to Becca. And perhaps Helen if she's on. Like now. I'm playing with my new toy - a Chess online thing. On a nice note of techy-ness. We now have broadband enabled in this area! Woo-hoo! Now I need to say to my parents "If I get an A*, do you promise to get broadband asap?" Chow all!

The other didn't have a title

2004-07-22T20:35:00.000+01:00

I apologise for the atrocious use of language in that message ;).

2004-07-22T20:28:00.000+01:00

Snip snip

I need food, there were a tube of Starburst hanging around somewhere that I may be tempted to pinch on occasion. Ohh! I've nearly downloaded MSWLogo now, I found it yesterday when we were using the computers in maths and spent the whole lesson immersed in childhood memories of using WinLOGO at primary school and me and Jason were amazing at all, and drew all of these cool and fancy patterns. And there was that bicycle that we found in the examples – that was pretty amazing. I always remember being intimidated by it thinking “Cool! How does that work?”
I'm a lot less annoyed now, which is certainly good. I think all of that talking to Becca that I have done so far must have some beneficial, relaxing, therapeutic properties that are working their wonders on me :). I'm even less hungry. Might pop downstairs for a drink and something to eat though. Got MSWLogo installed! Though I don't have to time at the second to tinker with it, it certainly gives me something fun to do whilst I'm not allowed online. Such as when I'm doing homework for example.
Only half a day left of school! :D. Must go...

Into the West...

2004-07-18T21:21:00.000+01:00

I've done absolutely nothing more than simply mow the lawn and do some typing up and inventing of History homework today. Still, only one week left until summer school :). Went shopping yesterday, brought "Monty Python Sings" and all three Lord of the Rings soundtracks, they're all very good, only one funny. I also got the penultimate Star Wars NJO book and the latest issue of Private Eye. I was tempted by a number of things in HMV as well, such as a Wurzles album; I was looking for Weird Al but he weren't there :(. Tom Clatworthy was however. Must dash, get on the phone to Becca before school tomorrow; one of the 1000 people in school, and 100 so much luckier people on Warwick SS. It'd be really interesting to be there. Current Music: Into the West (Annie Lennox)

2004-07-16T20:40:00.000+01:00

I profess to being very scardified by this posh WYSIWIG editor for Blogger rather than the good old HTML one. As a result I am very definitely doing this in the HTML view. I have discovered to my disgust that the Ctrl+B shortcuts on WYSIWIG add silly SPAN tags rather than a simple B one, or I one. What a waste of space. Went to RAF Fairford for the Armed Forces Youth Day today. It was OK; and would have been infinitely better had it not been absolutely tipping it down for most of the day, which also entailed there being much less flying :(. It was mostly delayed by 4 hours if it flew at all, though there were some nice loud things like a B1 Lancer that took off and... didn't return. And the usualy displaying tornados, harriers and what I think was an F-17. Watch some pop-star person with a name beginning with "J" today. She was singing on the stage. There were people behind me cheering for her to take her top off, and we were all trying to encourage people to throw hats and frisbee things onto the stage in order to try and hit her. They all missed however :(. Had lots of nice food though, including a Crepe (with apple and cinnamon,) some chips (yum :D) and a cornetto thing. Me eat more ;). But I'm done for now, at least until I go downstairs to eat more. Listening to: Day-in. Day-out.

An apology

2004-07-15T20:48:00.000+01:00

Additionally, I apologies profusely for the way this blog has rendered that copying and pasteing, I seek to revamp it, immediately.

The return of the thin white duke

2004-07-15T19:45:00.000+01:00

Throwing darts in other's eyes Just needed to start with a lyric because... yes! I'm back! After far too many (three) internet-less days, I am back and alive and kicking, hoping to write as many endless reams into this humble blog as take my fancy to. It's not 1955 and I have a whole hour left alone with the computer, during which I can preform ny usual rituals involving webcams, NAGTY forums and talking to Becca, Khyle and Helen, and its always Becca ;). Well... it's been a long and a short week, starting immediately after my previous blog with a thursday evening spent packing and looking for things, specifically my Playstation case for holding CDs in. I spent an hour looking for it before mum pointed out that it was on the desk in the study -.-. Umm... woke up on Friday morning at about the normal time for waking up on a Friday morning. After Ben had vanished into school (ner-ner) me and dad left to go to Katy's house, got there about when we expected to get there really. Looked at her dad's DVD collection for a short time (I muse attest to the fact that it is huge) before whizzing off with her dad up to Coventry. We got there about 40 minutes before the earliest time as well, which provided me with ample opportunity to snatch a three satchets of vinegar, ketchup and brown sauce when we stopped at the Tesco cafe just over the road from the science park (where NAGTY HQ is) in order to get a drink. I still have them as well. In my room... We arrived there at the same time as Katie, and not too long after Azure. Talked briefly before the people arrived from the train (being, as ever, late.) A few people there that I'd never met before as well (it was a shame that a few people couldn't make it,) there was Katie, Sarah (my child), Dani, Esther and Steven. It was a very good council meeting actually. We actually raised (I think,) a number of points that it appeared the staff hadn't really thought about, and there was a pretty amazing idea raised by Esther regarding some intricate and complicated project by which we could aid third world countries and those that are not so advantaged as us generally. I might be able to post the minutes on here if that we really necessary, they are simply in a small word file at the moment. After the meeting itself (of which there isn't much point writing much about on here,) we all went (after lunch, naturally,) out bowling to the Coventry megabowl, which was a suprising distance away. After we had eventually got the barriers up, I didn't do too badly, though not too well either. In total, five academy staff somehow managed to blag the afternoon off in order to "look after us" whilst there ;). They even started some speed stakes which I believe Jim won with about 20.59 miles per hour or some similar number. Where was I? Afterwards it was Helen's sleepover and we all boarded a couple of trains (after Khyle exploded at Coventry station,) and got there. It was quite good fun, though it would have been so infinitely better had Becca been there :). I felt a bit on my lonesome occasionally. We played Twister, and apparently it occasionally looked "so wrong" at times, from certain angles. I fortunately had left by the time they played it a second time, and it was absolutely awful in how it looked... I want to get those videos ;). On Saturday we all went to town and watched Shrek 2 in a huge cinema (though not a mulitplex - it had 2 screens) that Helen had led us to believe had only about a dozen seats in it, rather than many hundred as there actually were. It was a very good film, though it was perhaps not as funny as the original - the makers seemed to be trying to get some serious message across and as a result a little of the humour was sacrificed. After that, and with a little of Blackadder, Monty Python and Donnie Darko interspersed, me and Katy had to go home, leaveing a round half dozen people left to stay at the kind host of Helen's hosue for another night. In the week since I have done not particularly much at all. Looked for my dinner card is the only thing that I can think of - which I coincidentially found last night loitering (for reasons that are beyond my comprehension,) between a couple of pages in my copy of Animal farm that has been resting on my shelf for some time. I'm not sure what pocessed me to look there - it was about the second book that I checked, so it was pure coincidence that I got it (I only actually found it this morning before going to school.) I need to write something about the mile that we were labourously forced to run yesterday -.- to my disgust, being one of about two people that didn't have PE kit in the entire year - though in the eyes of my english teacher this made my achievement in running it all all the greater (full school uniform and shoes.) Admittedly, I felt more knackered that after running the moon run. Which is odd. To save me typing any out, I'll copy from an email. (The recepient of said email can look away now should they wish,) "We were told this morning to the majority of the schools amazing DISGUST that we had to run the Sport Relief one mile today -.-. Until now it was only the whole of Key Stage 3, GCSE PE students and anyone who wanted to that had to run it. I didn't. But Mr. Carter (principal) insisted that we did only this morning. Just did it - I was very silly and decided to run the whole way, bad mistake ;). As it was, I didn't do tooo bad. Don't know what position I came but I can work it out soon. I came about 5 seconds behind the third placed girl. I think that the person that was giving out the little form things may have thought that I had only finished the first lap when I got round to finishing (it was a course that went around the school - and you had to run it twice) so I might have been cheated out of a place depending on how many people came ahead if me. Grr ;)" "I think I did the run in about... 9 minutes or so, can't be sure. I think I was one of about... 3 or 4 max people in the whole year group to be wearing full school uniform whilst running. Half the year had PE at the time anyway, and most of everyone else had their kit in because they were planning on doing it - or have their kit in school every day anyway. Alex was in uniform though ;). But he cheated and walked the whole way. JL and a few other people did the whole thing as a conga all the way around." OK, that's it from me, it's Fairford tomorrow. p.s. lanky wasn't in today, perhaps he was ill - heheh **// Edited 2057, the quoted email actually doesn't stagger all the way down the page //**

Pronounceing gross diversion as the label for the darkness

2004-07-01T20:05:00.000+01:00

Pleh. Why's Becca so unhappy? :(. I wish on her all of the friends in the world to keep her the happiest that she can ever be, but she isn't. And whether or not she has those friends (and I'm more than willing to bet she does,) the fact that she is unhappy makes me sadder than anything else :(. Anyhoow... I realised that I haven't written anything on here for a good week now - and realised that I ought to blog as much as possible tonight so that I do get to blog before saturday. Meh - I'll run through day by day, if I can remember anything. Thursday: Covered in my last blog. Friday: Went Kayaking, that was reasonably fun. Got a bit less far than we did the week before upstream (we probably go about 100 metres upstream in all, as we're supposed to keep together in a group. Darren was with us as well, kayaking along behind trying to splash Patrick as much as possible. Afterwards we had to load all of the Kayaks and associated equipment into the trailer that we had brought along for the trip so that they could all woosh off to the Year 8 residential that is... somewhere in south Wales. It was extremely good when I went :). It'd be good to try and steal a trip "helping out" next year or something, claiming that experience as a Scout may be beneficial ;). Anyhoow... On Friday evening I packed up and went off to the Sun Run! After being shouted at by mum that is, because I should "Never do this to her again". I presume she was reffering to the rush job of organising transport and packing etc. Never mind now eh? Anyhow, me and Mark, Simon and Jamie all went off, got to the site and parked up, dragging our bags along with us etc. We then hit the first problem of the evening, that being that we didn't have the slightest clue where we should go where we could put down our bags. We searched for quite a long time trying to find Axel (he's our leader) but he was quite literally nowhere to be seen -the problem compounded by the fact that it was a campsite with probably about 1000 people on it at the time, and that we weren't even sure if he had arrived on the site yet or not. However, after looking at a tent for a small amount of time, wondering if it was his, and seeing Trident's camping area, he eventually emerged from the tent that we had spent some time studying. We set up our tents, after Axel wondered briefly quite why Mark was there in the first place, and generally settled in and wandered around getting used to the layout. About one of the first things that we did was wonder over to the Trident area and see one of our leaders who is currently not helping at all (he's got a broken ankle or something,) and be offered a pint of whatever we wanted at the bar at half 8 (he was probably so far gone that he probably hadn't realised that it was already gone 9 ;)). He even offered it to me - despite not recogniseing me and reffering to me for sometime as "Random Kid," which I thought was oddly apt... Anyhoow... went down to the bar and disco, they had a band called the Chip Shop Boys there that played a number of covers for some really quite good songs. There was a really good atmosphere as well, though I just kept wishing that Becca was there so that we could just stand and dance together as close as possible. Meh. Somehow I got pulled, near the end, into dancing in some loose circle by a few girls, which was annoying - being dragged around like that. Apparently because I was standing all alone. "You don't get asked by 7 girls to dance and then not do so" is what was said... Anyhow, that was Friday, other than the incident where I nearly burnt the whole campsite down by paniking slightly when a bit of split meths around the burner bit of the trangia caught fire, and then I spilt it, and the ground was alight, and the meths on the ground and... ahh! I don't know how I got it out, had something to do with a saucepan methinks. Saturady there were an number of activity things, all for free! I went on the theme park spinny ride thing that they had there about 3 or 4 times. Fleur went on it 10! That was mad, I thought, but... meh. Yes - Fleur and James Isbell were there, though we were all shocked to discover that we all knew Simon... I cut my kneww open on the "bungee run" thing that they had there as well, which I thought odd on the basis that its a big, inflatable soft thing. I won ;). THe main bit was the actual Sun run itself, though we were wimps and did the 13 mile Moon run rather than it's 26 mile big brother. It was quite fun really, kept eating, kept up, kept chatting. We talked to this little old woman for a while and... just walked. We managed to run about the last mile or so though, just when it was getting dark :). We completed it in a grand time of 3 hours 4 minutes, though it was officially 8 minutes, but the computers broke. Finished it at about half 10, got offered another pint, though this time rather than straight declineing, me and Simon asked for a Coke instead. Went to bed... not much mroe to tell. We werea botu 75/6/7 to finish the Moon Run. James and Fleur did rather amazingly in finishing the Sun Run in about the same position, with a time of 7 and a half hours (me and Simon stayed up till then for some reason, lying by a bin in a field in our sleeping bags keeping warm, waiting for them). Well done them. I'd say stomehthing more, but nothing happened. NAGTY Student Council meeting tomorrow! Wooh! Have a nice weekend all :)

I didn't post

2004-06-30T15:19:00.000+01:00

Yesterday. So I'm posting this now in Maths with sabrina next to me. And I have to go very soon... like now. Nicci just threw a thing at me I have a Gmail invite! Want an account? :P

Answering back

2004-06-28T20:56:00.000+01:00

Wow! I'm going to see how amazingly short this is, seeing as I've done absolutely nothing today. I was extremely annoyed at my mum and dad earlier. They are so amazingly irritating. I was told off repeatedly for "being smart". Isn't that such an amazingly sad reflection on our universe that it is now some sort of telling off when you say "Are you being smart?" as if its wrong for the answer to be yes? Or that you aren't allowed to "answer back". Isn't that what the whole of modern democratic society is based on? "Answering back"? Just a thought.

2004-06-27T23:15:00.000+01:00

OK - a sorta enhanced blog - being written now on the fascinating computer in my room, on the greatly amazing program that is "Notepad". I'm using it because it's stable, fast, and greatly suited to this simple task that is just writing a little text that needs to be copied into the blogger site; perhaps complete with the odd bold or italic tag. This is a jaunty little bug-ridden PC, with lots and lots of crashes and far too much software. I've tried uninstalling some of it, but there has been no noticeable affect :(. It doesn't even seem to run Freespace 2 anymore... Today I've done... not much. Watched a little Matrix reloaded this morning, messed around on the PC. The highlight of the day - until the evening anyway - was my amazing bi-weekly activity of mowing my nan's lawn. Despite the obvious benefit of a £6 weekly income, this activity is becoming more and more tedious; to the point that I nearly actively dread it every week. The dull monotony was alleviated slightly this week by the fact that it started raining - and I had to rush around and put the lawnmower away (I had finished with it, fortunately) and trim the edges really fast. I got really wet :( - especially running home. Well... that was all of my day - its dullness shown in the shortness of this log - and the fact that its main feature was about the weather. Hey! I am British! ;)

Quick blog

2004-06-27T20:45:00.000+01:00

I can't believe myself! I nearly forgot to blog at all today! Curse myself *shoots*. Actually, that's conter-productive because then I wouldn't be able to blog at all. Some strange person has contacted me through my site, I'm becoming more and more scared of numerous people finding it. Why would they? :S. It's scary. There's nothing on there at all. But for some reason, I was persuaded by him... well... reminded to update it in someway, so I've finally got a nice background image for it. I could have used one of the World Wide Wong ones, but I made a new one that also says "Nathan's site" on it. I've cut writing this far too short. I might have to add something later or something similar, write it on the other computer. Actually, I'll come on later. Chow for now!

The show must go on!

2004-06-26T18:25:00.000+01:00

I didn't say (me don't think) but I finished a book yesterday - yes, after much great hard work and hardship, yesterday I finished Animal Farm for the second time ever! After a whole one day of reading! It's actually quite a sad book, showing and detailing in great depth the way that a truely Socialist society is impossible because it is in the very nature of nearly every single conscious being to take over and have control over those beneath them, and to subjugate as many people to be beneath them as possible. It's really sad that human nature seems to be purely the quest for as much power as possible. The pigs, having called themselves "the leaders" of the rebellion changed all of the principles of the animals living and working together and perverted anything that took place - it would be much more... bearable as a reflection on society if it were not a direct parody of something that actually took place - its almost an unbearable part of modern history, and one all too overlooked by history classes, that there was such mass-murders in Soviet Russia, and such terrible travesties of any form of justice whatsoever. I've moved onto (nearly) 1984 - which is also a good book with many elements of Animal Farm in it. Today has been extremely boring really. I've done absolutely nothing at all other than watch a little of Schindlers List (yet another really sad story about mass murders and dictators... I seem to be having a lot to do with that recently - albeit not actually to do with it :$. And I had a big breakfast and and bigger lunch. I'm now online talking to Becca :) and browsing the NAGTY forums. This is something that I pretty much do absolutely all of the time that I have access to the computer - the forums are informative and amusing, and contain a good and varied source of debate that covers all manner of subjects - of course there are quite a few intelligent people on there as well that share a number of really similar interests. Even better, Becca's now a member of it as well :). So I can enjoy the wonder of her posts... :P. But, unless YOU happen to be a member of NAGTY, you wouldn't have the slightest clue what I'm on about. It's a wonderful way to procrastinate I suppose (I'm really glad that I discovered the meaning of that word ;)). A chance to use argumentative skills like I have had loads of fun using recently anyway. Like on the way to Oxford on Thursday, I was going: "Charlie! Are you any good at arguing?" "Yes, I'm amazing at arguing." "No you aren't." "I am." "Aren't." etc. ;). It's all really fun really - just getting into an argument like that. It's got the ability to really make people mad at you. Seeing as I have really nothing to write about today I'm going to sit here and write a brief review of Firefox 0.9. This is the latest release of the entirely open source and extensible web browser. It's created by a group of developers to be essentially the smallest and most basic thing that it can possibly be. I've certainly been using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer for a few months since I got it. (I just checked - the download date is the first of May this year - I've been using it since then.) One of the best advantages (I think,) is that it is simply... different. After a whole life of being surrounded continually by Microsoft products, Firefox and various other open source applications offer a much needed break from the norm. But in itself, this is by no means reason to use a different software package. Firefox needs to offer something that's different and better than IE – and it does. The main advantage that I make the most use of is the tabbed-browsing. Though this is not at all a feature that is unique to Firefox, it makes browsing the Internet much easier, because multiple web pages can be open at the same time but still be in the same actual Window. There are simply a row of “tabs” near the top of the window that each represent a currently “open” window. Clicking on them brings that web page to the visible part of the window, allowing you to keep track of any number of web pages at once. Also, Firefox supports extensions. These are (usually) small pieces of third party software that over an extremely large range of extra features that can be used. I currently have two extensions that I downloaded and installed. One is a “Web developer” toolbar. This is simply a new toolbar that appears with a range of options, many of which are available in the browser itself, but it makes them more easily accessed. There are buttons for disabling various types of web things to try and de-bug websites, links for website validation etc. It does come in very useful. I also have another simple extension that simply remembers the tags that I have open after I close them - seeing as I visit the same sites every day, this is a time-saving measure every time I connect to the Internet. Firefox also allows various themes with which you can customise the appearance of the browser window. Unfortunately, the default theme that comes with Firefox is rather rubbish – and it is highly advisable to anyone to download another – with perhaps Qute being the best one. This was the default theme until Firefox 0.8 – but the theme's creator didn't want to allow the theme to go under the GNU public license; so the Firefox creators had to create there own, which was unfortunately released whilst still pretty crappy looking. Overall, Firefox is an extremely well rounded browser that is streamlined, fast and highly extensible. It allows you to do what you want with it when you want to. The only possible problem is that it still hasn't had its 1.0 release – and there are probably a couple more bugs than you might expect; however, admittedly, I have yet to encounter any problems or bugs at all with 0.9; other than when I first installed it, the themes did not properly install. Becca's just gone, I've spent the last half hour on the phone, writing this offline. Need to go have a crappily dull evening now. Post this first though ;) Song of the moment: Bohemian Rhapsody Book of the moment: 1984 - George Orwell and The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien

It's a small world..

2004-06-25T21:46:00.000+01:00

Bah f-ing mint humbug. For doubly reason. The first being that I've been banned from using the computer today by the all high and mighty “I'm exercising all of the powers I have over my children Dad”. It all started with me refusing to allow my bother to play on my game of Knights of the Old Republic this evening, which for some reason after ages of going on Sims and GTA Vice City, he suddenly wanted to go on tonight. In a calm and collected voice I told him that I wouldn't let him go on it, because of the way he annoyed me on Monday. It was the night of the football match (obviously ;)) and he wanted to go on the Sims before the match started at about half past. The problem was that I also wanted to go on the computer before about that time so that I could talk to Becca for as long as possible, because she was going out at that time to go and babysit Megan, or someone like that. I (understandably me still feels) thought that my cause was much greater, (we have Sims for PS2 as well for some reason.) But I was forcibly removed from talking by Ben after having only talked for her for about three quarters of an hour. Anyhow, Ben ungracefully kicked up (rather predictably,) a great fuss about me not allowing him to go on it, and shouted and screamed etc. Duly drawing dad's unneeded attention - “What's going on up there?” “Don't worry!” “Tough. What's going on?” Is it perhaps one of the failings of our entire society as a whole that we seem to relish in not minding our own business? The whole of western society seems to persistently enjoy nosing into affairs that are not its own, people go out of their way to see if foreign and ulterior ways and motives do not live up to the high “morals” that we ourselves have, and inflict onto absolutely everyone else that we encounter. Should a group not be what the most powerful expects and wants it to be, it is changed. Whether or not that that group's personal morals be acceptable to itself and all those around it – causing no harm whatsoever to anyone – if we do not agree, we change it. This is almost totalitarian nonsense where, even in this modern day and age, we are unable to accept that there are people that live in ways other than our own. We feel that our way of life is the only true and correct way of life that there is, and that we must inflict it on all others, even though they themselves may now, and always see theirs as correct? As I see it, the best choice for absolutely everyone, is that they should be permitted simple choice. If there is a regime or ideal that is contrary to our own, them perhaps rather than destroy and detest it – making it, in essence, our own – we should show it the fair way that we think is better, and act peacefully and friendly in most circumstances. Leading by the example of a mostly good and free society, rather than pouring down with overwhelming force, and obliterating what it is that is difference. This is the one point from which every single bit of prejudice and discrimination springs from in the world – difference. As it was, dad stuck his nose in, as my parents so continually do. Often in situations regarding the computer: “If I have to come up here one more time to tell you to get off of here.” “Mum, you never need to come up here and tell me – you can save both you and me a lot of stress by leaving me be, and no harm shall come to either of us from it.” Ben explained that I wasn't letting him play on it, as though it were the most important thing in the world. Dad then took the amazing... (I just read the introduction to nineteen eighty-four)... route of preventing both of us from using a computer at all (due to the fact that he let it annoy him,) and then the rather childish and immature route of taking every (one) of his possessions that I have in my room. Namely a CD of Space Oddity – which he never listens to anyway. I feel that this is an extreme act of “Moral capitulation”, because he condoned us greatly for not allowing each other to use our own possessions, then, as “punishment”, does exactly the same thing to us. “One cannot fight an oppressor using an oppressors own means” would do well as a maxim for any hopeful communist states. Perhaps I was the oppressor – and certainly I was from my dad's point of view. But it wasn't an extreme. This household operates under strange rules. Should I question a single thing that either my mother or my father say, then they will both get exceedingly annoyed with me and accuse me of answering back. Of course I am, but should I try to argue the point that any society whereby “answering back” is punishable is a society with a dictator, they simply laugh. Or ignore me. Virtually all points that they make they are unable to back up with any evidence or any viewpoints other than “because we said so.” which isn't an adequate answer by any means. Should I try to push the point and ask for where their logic comes from – in whichever way I word it, I am told off for being cheeky. I was once told off for “treating your mother in a condescending manner.” Of course I would, if she is unable to answer a single question I put to her. She shouted for at least ten minutes on one occasion when I simply asked “how the window works” because I “always have an answer for everything” (I never knew that to be bad?) and being cheeky. There certainly is more, but by no means can I remember it all. As it was this evening, I've spend a good hour and a half(ish) on the phone to Becca, and I'm going to phone again (hopefully) at 10. I'm on here because I'm going work. Before I had a blank CSS sheet in notepad open. Blank other than a small comment at the top. Now I have a piece of work from two years ago that I typed up. I'm on the computer in my room you see... The other reason that I'm really annoyed is that when I had first written half a page of this, and went to save it for the first time, it crashed. So I lost it all :(. Today was OK. Found out this morning that instead of doing Pure maths 1 for our first module (that is, Core 2,) we're instead going to do Core 3 – the discrete maths 1. Which is a bit easier I think. All about nodes, maps and algorithms. Counting corners etc. Had English, did my speaking and listening assessment. A little speech on crop circles and aliens possibly forming them. It wasn't so bad actually – I was very nervous for some reason, but I made it up as I went along and didn't forget anything – other than my description of some circles was rather... lacking. Got a very high B :). Did another presentation in biology, though this one was in a group and not exactly formal at all. It was informal enough that a powerpoint slide had a Blackadder quote along the lines of “and now for your pendi-gestatary interlubial”. Did kayaking as well. It was OK, albeit wet. For some reason, Jade wouldn't leave the room that we were changing in either :S. And the SAS may come into existence sometime... Utulie'n aur! Aiya Eldalie ar Atanatari, utulie'n Aure!

Short blog...

2004-06-24T20:51:00.000+01:00

Like my new quote thing on the right? England are winning! Wooh! This is going to be as much as I can write in about 5 minutes whilst talking to Becca. I really should have done lots of English tonight - I'm pretty much regretting that I haven't been. Went to Oxford today - ok. The canteen was really good - cheap, good quality and high quantity. I recommend that the school caterers take more than a FEW leaves from their book -.-. The journeys were fun as well - it's AMAZINg how much commotion a simple Gameboy with pokemon can stir. "Oh, it's really sad that you've got that! So sad! Can I have a go?" And then later... "No! That's a pshycic type! You need to attack it with another one like that. Use Mr. Mime. Wait, he's too low a level - he'll get slaughtered. Use a flying type." "But he doesn't have any flying type moves." "So?" Etc. It was very amusing. On the way back we were singing lots of queen as well ("Bicycle! Bicylce!") and some more traditional songs. We had a talk about university admissions in general as well as "what Oxford could do for us" and the advantages of going there. Quite interesting I suppose. After the fabulous lunch in a very posh hall, we had some legal arguement. I started it by saying "I'd just like to let you know, that we believe our client to be completely and utterly, guilty." Then there was a trip to the University museum of natural history - which was quite interesting. Then home - which consisted of trying to strangle Sabrina, Jack and Josh. Amusing ;). As well as eating.

Thousands of years of evolution washed away by a couple of bottles of beer...

2004-06-23T17:33:00.000+01:00

Wow! What another amazingly medicore day! I've spent a large amount of it doing not too much... Hmm... From the top - went to school - for some reason I was wearing my posh mac-in-a-sac. It served its purpose for all of about 1 minute in between my being sheltered by something or other. Chemistry was certainly one of the more interesting though - we watched one of the best science videos ever - something about how alcohol brings out the "primitive" brain in us - but it had a story! There was like this bloke on the pull, drinking some beer and somehow erm... attracting a woman - and then because the alcohol had stopped his "higher" brain from working out how to escape the toilet cubicle that he was trapped in - causing him to lose his date("The chance for reproduction now lost, he returns to the only source of pleasure that he has - alcohol"). It does explain why people like alcohol though... Meh. Then there was a biology lesson which involved aggravating Kay by being on her server and browseing the C: that she shouldnt have access to - but did because of some security lapse when it was loading up. Meh - our actual work was a fascinating presentation on "Bioaccumulation" (which is when large amounts of pesticides and herbicides get into the food chain, becoming more and more concentrated further and further up it,). But then it was the engineering trip - had an early lunch with KS3. Didn't realise how amazingly crowded the canteen is on their break. I wrote an email about the bad management of the canteen by the school to "What's it all about?" student conference, I think most people agree (it was a rant,). But apparently, Mr. Jones said last night to parents that "No student had complained". Hey! I did! But having an early lunch pass I flashed through the queue ;). Think I convinced my brother at one stage that all 40 of the year 10s in there were there because they were being internally isolated after a large pile-up on the field the day before... ;) The engineering thing was ok-y fun. A free coach trip to get there - and then there were... about 5 or 6 schools. A play group did an abysmally appalling play (the acting wasn't bad) about stereotypical teenagers finally realising exactly WHY they wanted a career (in engineering,) looking around, about half of the crowd (they were from North Bristol... ;)) fulfilled that stereotype very nicely... Then we had to take 4 tires off of a car, move them around onto a different wheel, and put them back on again - with a tightness rateing of 50Nm. Which we didn't understand. What didn't help is that we didnt know that the really long crank thing had a measurer to work out how tightly it was on -.-. So we had 10 of our 16 nuts not on on the correct tightness. Which lost us 1 minute 40 seconds. Grrr... At least we beat the reall... "'ard nut" team. What a git Ben Nolan is... After that we had to list "qualities that we think are required of an engineer". I persuaded them not to put "Strength" ;). There were two groups of us (our group of 17 divided into two), and we had to choose items from the costume box that represent those qualities. It was soo funny! We got Ben Nolan dressed in a police hat, torch, lightsaber and reindeer antlers (he imagines that he's a reindeer.) James got a rally HUGE afro and shiny top! Wow! ;) Anyhow - I have to go skiing. Chow!

You're face, to face, with the man who sold the world

2004-06-22T20:22:00.000+01:00

Another day gone by, without much in the way of interesting things at all. About the most memorable thing of today was being in History and somehow... falling backwards off of my chair :S. I was honestly noy leaning back on it! Swear! :P. Apparently I made a few grasping motions at thin air to try and prevent myself from falling - I think that I did manage to grab sucessfully onto the table but it was only a quarter of a table so that all I did was pull it back with me :$, I managed to gracefully topple over backwards - though gracefully may be my point of view - and land safely sitting on the back of my chair, stareing ahead - whilst the whole room sat around laughing at me ;). I just had to sitting there hugging my chair for a few minutes before moving again - and enjoy the delight of starting to Draft my coursework/essay thing. At least I miss the next lesson on my trip to Oxford on Thursday - so I have an excuse to get it in very late, for some reason, despite the more numberous distractions, I often do better work at home... IT was ok as well - I spend it all finding a way to correctly get my borders to appear on a printout page. In the end I had to adjust their size on Fireworks (I dont know how pixellated they'll turn out :S) and copy them into Freehand and see them properly on an A4 page. The worst bit was trying to save the 5MB file it turned out to be - I had to get rid of last term's minor project (well - put it on email) in order to save it. I just sent it off to Ms. Knight with instructions on how to open it. I'm very picky I suppose. The problem with it was that the pixels/cm were just being really odd and inconvenient, and without using the peril that is Powerpoint (what the DT department want us to present everything in,) which places big borders around the side... Which is why I opted for Freehand to correctly display the stuff as it is going to be Printed - I'll bear that in mind for future meddling in various computer graphics packages - that (esp. with what's available at school anyway,) Freehand is probably the best package to use that print's it out as displayed. They also have Corel draw and other Corel things - but I haven't had enough time to... experiment with them yet. Also today I got an invite to join about 40 other people from our year to go to the Industrial Museum for some engineering thing - I suppose I'll write more about it tomorrow. The best thing about it is that it means I get to miss English! I don't have to do my Speaking and Listening assessment! Thank god... I now have until Friday to do it :p. I've started using some of my gmail account as well, it now has 0.5% of its storage space consumed after I attached that Freehand file through it. I'm looking at the Jaffa Cake cake bar in front of me and wondering when to eat it... mmm... so tempting. I'll eat it later in Bed I suppose... Me and Sabrina (I started it whilst having NOTHING to do in Maths) have spent most of the day since telling everyone Notlob. Which interestingly enough, isn't a palindrome. Nor is Nathan, or Sabrina, however close one of them may be (not Nathan... ;)). However, if I were to say "Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas." then that would very much be a palandromic request :). We didn't have anything to do until the very END of the lesson when Ms. Kaur gave us a London A level Pure maths module 1 book, dated 1994. Which I find very strange considering that we are doing OCR in the year or 2004.... Ahh well... I need to ask Ms. King for the correct book sometime. I hope that we get it, rather than unnecessarily study stuff. Book of the moment: Star Wars NJO: Rebel Dream

Thank you blogger...

2004-06-21T18:26:00.000+01:00

And your entirely random selection of Gmail invites. Despite not having done a thing in another blog that I had on this account for 2 months, and even those four blogs were deleted by me on the day, I still was invited for a nice new gmail account. I'm so happy! :). Admittedly, I'm not even sure if it works, so I'm pretty stuffed there. Gmail homepage works, until I try to log on in which case I get a server error. Which is BAD. I think ;). It says wait a few minutes and then try again... I am continually ;) Did some real work on the website for my ICT coursework today for the first time in ever, it now consists of two pages and two style sheets, one of the stylesheets (print.css) is completely blank at the moment, and the other one is under development. I printed out index.html's source before adding any content whatsoever, and it was just a number of < div > tags. But it looks good, I can show lots of progressive development ;). I'm building a few new features into it that I haven't dared touch before - one is stylesheets for multiple mediums (one sheet for screen/projection and one for printing) and also alternate stylesheets so that (provided they have a compatible browser,) they can change the site's appearance. It's a real shame that IE doesn't support that feature unless I clutter the whole thing up by adding some large javascript button. I hate hayfever - it's prevented me from doing barely any work for the majority of the morning - especially in German. However, I improved in DT enough to design a few nice borders for my major project - I just need to choose between them tomorrow. One I've decided against already because it consists of two sets of coloured boxes - both greys, with a picture fitting awkwardly into one corner - it doesn't have too much connection with the actual product (which, for the record, is a project on making something for a the outdoors - a collapsable stand / worksurface that can be used to put a Trangia on top of and prepare meals etc. Should be... reasonably but not too hard. I upgraded to Firefox 0.9 as of... last Tuesday. It doesn't have many noticeable changes, other than a reduced (currently) number of compatibnle themes. I've altered from the default one (I'll join other blogs in declareing it crap) back to Qute. And my brother gets quite annoying...