19-08-03

A quick update, erm where do I start? I just got back from a week long 830 mile journey in the hippymobile! We were brave and headed for Scotland as the first trip in “Sunny” the camper, and we got there, just 🙂

Stopped off for two nights in the Lake District near Lake Windemere. If you ever happen to be in that area, don’t go and see Lake Windemere there are too many people there and it’s terribly commercialised. Nip down the road to Coniston Water, it’s wonderfully peaceful and beautiful… is it dangerous to say that kind of thing on the internet? We went up to Scotland and stopped on a camp site in the grounds of Calzean Castle (is that the correct spelling) before heading east for Moffat where the camp site is run like a prison! 😛 Then on the way back we stopped at Grin Lo just outside Buxton on a campsite in a disused quarry which was really lovely, especially the walk up to Solomons Temple on a hill where you can see for miles and miles around – until were chased off by a bullock.

Whilst on holiday in bonnie wee Scotland both sis and I got our exam results. After a small panic sis got her place at UEA to study biological and medicinal chemistry (I REALLY hope I got that right!) by getting three Bs and a C. Yey! Go sis! Then came my AS results, A in General Studies, A in DT: Product Design, A in Computing (the only A in the year), a C in Physics and a U in Maths. The maths result I was expecting and I was one of 27 people in my year to fail, but the Physics result threw me a little, I was expecting at least a B.

But I won’t be beaten, I’m just going to put it down to being a bad year last year, partly due to health. It turned out when I got back and had chance to examine the results in detail that two of my physics modules were a B and one was a D, so the current plan is to retake that one Physics module and bump the grade up to a B and retake ALL of my Maths modules and start a fresh. The only problem is that I will be dropping DT which I got 295/300 in and carring on Physics (C) and Maths (U)! What’s worse is that the results make choosing my degree even harder.

Other news, I finally have my own web server with a static IP. “tralk” is sitting on the end of my ADSL line and can currently be viewed at http://tralk.hippygeek.co.uk. Tralk is a stable Debian install running Apache, mySQL and PHP (If you could just ignore the fact that J came round my house tonight and broke mySQL I would really appreciate it).

It looks very much like FFDesign is being closed down for at least a year as neither J or I will have time to run things this coming academic year. However, the servers will run as before and iMen is still developing at a speed never seen before! I can’t keep up with the site engine version numbers and there’s some debate as to whether it forked a while back. There are also sick sick things going on in the background that I don’t even pretend to fully understand but I’m pretty sure they’re legal 😉 – I get shaky when the word Rovac pops up.

Scotland is being treated to a double dose of torture because about the same time my family came back in the hippymobile sis and family headed up to Edinburgh. So no more bike rides or Sky Film channel for a week. Which reminds me, I still can’t get my lovely DVB-t TV card to run under Linux, grr…