Month: December 2003

Let’s give this a try. Logjam – just apt-get installed it. Not sure quite why having a separate app to update my journal with is particularly useful, but let’s suck it and see. Might try a command line one later or maybe even try to get one to run on my phone… except I really don’t have time.

The good news is that I got an offer today for CS at Nottingham. The bad news is that they want AAB. From a U to a B in maths. Hmm. So. Do I slog my guts out for even a remote chance of getting there, or do I relax a bit and put UEA as my first choice. May even find out that I wouldn’t like Nottingham anyway.

My current thinking is to put Nottingham as a first choice and UEA as my insurance offer – but I know I’ll still be disappointed if I don’t make my first choice. I haven’t even told them I’m thinking of shifting my year of entry yet! Well we’ll see how all the other offers come through – wonder what will happen with “Philosophy and Computer Science” at Warwick (don’t ask). I’m not even sure if Computer Science is what I want to be doing – still worrying I should have chosen something more engineering or even design. Sheesh, what a lot of uncertainty.

After the stress of all that I went to a games lesson last period and played badminton for about an hour and a half. Not content with the battering my body had taken from that (hey, I’m not used to all this exercise) I went and amused a load of year sevens by joining in their dance practice in the hall for a laugh. Loud music, lights, strobe, smoke – what more could you ask for? Oh I do miss stage crew. Yup you guessed it, time wasting again.

I’ve just about organised sitting in on some lower sixth stats lessons after christmas, so I’ll be doing even more maths. To be honest maths is making quite a lot of sense recently – it’s just there’s so much of it to remember. I’ve just got to learn not to blank out when it comes to an exam.

I’ve just watched Swordfish again, excellent film, although not quite as gripping as I remember. Certainly doesn’t have the re-watchability of the Matrix Triology. I finally found out why all three books in the Schrodinger’s Cat Triology all say Part One.

Got stuck on some SQL again today, but J is coming to the rescue with a book.

Quadruple free in the morning, think I’m going to get out of bed? Think again.

Well OK I got up at 10, tried to fix the stylesheets on hippygeek but not doing too brilliantly and still won’t validate. I don’t think I can do much about the stylesheet on livejournal without a paid account. I’ve picked the template I like but the fonts are too damned small 😛 and conflict with my hippygeek stylesheet.

I spent a large amount of time today discussing the bus timetabling system for my computing coursework with Mr M. mchicago got me a bit further on track but there are still things I don’t know how to do in SQL, think I may need to read up a bit. My entity relationships are getting nearer to vaguely correct now – the data entry for this thing is going to be phenomenal.

I got a conditional offer from UEA for computing science on Saturday, 280 points – with my physics AS I reckon that translates to BBE! Not sure they’d accept an E in maths though 😉 Hopefully more offers soon.

Wez brought his new disco speakers into school today to try out in the hall, niiiiice. Pranced around the hall to the sound of ghostbusters and bohemian rhapsody… Hopefully the school should be getting its new PA by Christmas, not that I’ll have time to play with it.

dev was being exceptionally slow earlier, but I think mchicago may have fixed it.

Right, maths.

So here it is, my first LiVEJOURNAL post.

I’ve been keeping a web log by various ugly methods for a couple of years at http://hippygeek.co.uk (hmm, wonder how you do hyperlinks on this thing), but hopefully now posts are easier there will be more of them.

I’ve always thought web logs are an interesting concept. We have this huge computer network called the Internet with terabytes of free space so we have to find something to fill it all with. Perhaps keeping your diary online is a little… extrovert – or perhaps it just means you think people might actually be interested in the mundane things you do on a daily basis. Maybe we want to tell the world what we think of it, or maybe it’s to keep our friends from far and wide up to date with what we’re up to and hope they won’t forget us. Who cares tola, just type.

Thank you mchicago for the code I shamelessly stole from you to put this livejournal on my web page and thanks for the access code I needed to create an account. And bouncykaz, I still love you whether you like it or not, so deal with it.

Let us blog our way into the future together.

Oops, long time no post. So what’s been happening for the past couple of months? Well in summary…

• Went to Lucy’s 18th Birthday which was great, live bands and Guinness. We also played pass the parcel (!). Photos to follow.
• Worked at the Royal Albert Hall again as a sound engineer, this time for two days. Long old slog. Left Peterborough on the Friday afternoon, stopped off at a church in London on the way to help with a recording. Got to the hotel at 11pm after a pizza in Pizza Hut, in central London, on Halloween night. Got up at 6am the following morning, went to the Albert Hall. Recorded two brass bands and a 2000 person choir. The multitrack hard disk recorder (which runs on BeOS) crashed for the first time, ever in the middle of the recording! Didn’t leave the hall until 1am the following morning after loading up the lorry. Also photos to follow.
• Went to see Matrix Revolutions at the Broadway in Peterborough. Amazing. I will say no more.
• Had a dinner with the Round Table who are organising the Beer Festival for this coming summer. Had an argument over the date, it clashes with GCSE and A-level exams! They’re going to have to find three new sound engineers I think. Lovely evening other than that though, free Guinness 🙂
• With Mr C. (trivia king) on our team, we won the pub quiz in dyke, twice. More free Guinness.
• Saw Sigh, Lou, Paul et. al in Smiths, no Kaz though 🙁 Lou and Paul have dropped out of Uni! Both working at the leisure centre.
• Been litter picking in the park a fair few times with some great girls from school. Gained some press attention which was nice – doing our bit to keep out town tidy. Me, in paper, in wellies 🙂
• Played with NetOp and the open source VNC at school. Mr C gets carried away with being able to control desktops remotely :S But have some interesting ideas for spreading Linux around a bit more.
• Played with Damn Small Linux, a 48Mb Live! CD derived from Knoppix, amazing!
• Installed Debian (Potato) on my 486 laptop with 8Mb RAM and 160Mb HDD (which according to the documentation isn’t possible). It’s now connected to the internet! Only took me six hours…
• Spoke to J and Kaz on the phone! Yey!
• Got quoted nearly £90 for 16Mb of RAM for the laptop!! That’s including £15 for postage for something twice the size of a postage stamp…
• tralk (tralk.hippygeek.co.uk) has now been running for 115 days, rock solid. Just waiting for a power cut!
• Bought a Siemens SL45i on ebay. Bit disappointed with condition, but brilliant phone.
• Fixed my Nokia 5210. Had to order a screwdriver especially (t6) and buy a new microphone on ebay.
• Got dad’s credit card bill which I had to pay…
• Spent the past three nights drinking in town. Smiths are charging £2.60 for a pint of Guinness now! I’m going to have to change my drinking habits.
• Spent a lot of time worrying about things I haven’t done for school, and trying to prove, by contradiction, that root three is an irrational number

That’s about it I think 🙂