Ben Francis

Looks like I may be shortly taking on the role of lugmaster for Lincs LUG. It kind of died and I’ve been offered the job if I want to try and make a go of it. Of course I don’t have time for it right now, but come the end of June when I have time on my hands it could be an excellent project. Going to need help though.

mchicago: fancy hosting the IRC?

of course, if the discussion topics end up like those of ALUG’s…
#alug
[23:29] [tola] the main reason I want to go to uni has nothing to do with education or job prospects
[23:29] [quinophex] tola++++++
[23:29] * tola falls over
[23:30] [quinophex] you want to shag cute girls? (or boys)
[23:30] [stuman] maybe he wants to be drunk for 3 years?
[23:31] [tola] well, not exactly. It's something I want to experience. The student life for a few years. If that happens to entail shagging then so be it. But I'll cross that ridge when I cum to it
[23:31] [tola] :P
[23:31] [quinophex] that almost deserves a quote file entry

My maths test didn’t happen today which means I get to worry about it for a bit longer. Also have a load of integration I’ve just realised I should have done.

Pah.

It seems my brother is dating a girl with the same name as my girlfriend, both forename and surname. I’m assured they’re not the same person.

Can the world really cope with two…? 😉

http://www.uwm.edu/People/srcicero/links.htm <-- why oh why? moving on... Cool night out "pubbing and clubbing" on Friday (you know, that room with the sticky floor the call a nightclub). Managed to con a free half pint of Guinness out of the barmaid in the Angel (I don't want to sound like that was a highlight of my evening or anything). lauperr stopped the night afterwards. I think she may be mentally scarred from the experience as she’s started worrying about the most odd things like “Getting squashed by trains” and “Standing on tropical fish”.

Spent the rest of the weekend researching and pondering over what I should do next year and my choice of Uni. Lots of evil plans.

I’ve now started reading a fourth book and am starting to feel like I should finish one. I’m currently simultaneously reading ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ by Bill Bryson, ‘Windows NT Server Training Guide’ by Tod someone, ‘The Universe in a Nutshell’ by Stephen Hawking and the last book of ‘Schrodinger’s Cat Triology’ by Robert Anton Wilson – but I’ve kind of given up on the last one. I actually literally fell asleep after reading a chapter of the NT Server book, but it’s been sat on my shelf for a long time and after Mr C’s experiments with Server 2003 I felt strangely compelled to read it.

Gah, headache. Time for bed.

bouncykaz: What was that comment about regarding UEA and the people there?

Dear Mr Francis,

Thank you for attending the Department for interview. Adrian Bors was impressed by you and as a consequence I am pleased to make you an offer of a place on our Computer Science programme (G400) subject to the following conditions relating to your forthcoming examinations (any previous examination resutlts having already been taken into account):

Grade A in Mathematics A-level, grade A in either Computing or Design and Technology A-levels, grade B in another A-level (in any subject).

—

Let’s just revisit that key point there. No not the fact that I’ve been given an offer (although quite an achievement in its own right), I’m talking about the maths grade they want. An A in Mathematics. Considering I got a U last year and I’m predicted a C, do they seriously think I can get an A? OK so I’m retaking all the AS modules this summer along with the A2 modules, but putting York down as a firm offer when they want an A seems too much of a risk to me, by any stretch of the imagination. A B I can at least dream of getting, and there’s always a (small) chance I will be let off on a grade below that at most Universities, but an A is just too much stress for me. Maths is going well this year, but nobody can seriously expect me to…

OK, I’m going to stop ranting now and go to school.

Pretty uneventful week, except some progress on job applications and djkoa has contracted mild pneumonia!!! Poor thing.

Grandma and Grandad took me to a visit day and interview at York University yesterday, damn that course is good! They have a great balance of hardware and software with digital electronics modules and other cool stuff in the electronics labs. They program Z80 chips with Assembler and make realtime systems and… cool stuff. In short, the course is probably by far the best I’ve seen so far, but it’s so damned far away compared to the other universities I’ve applied to. About 114 miles, not as far as that Welsh place djkoa likes though 😉 Grandma RAN to a bus stop in York, yes that’s right, RAN. I couldn’t keep up. I don’t think she fancied standing around in the cold for half an hour!

The interview went much better than I was expecting. I had ample chance to explain the reasons for my maths grade last year and they seemed satisfied that I’ve improved enough since then. I was asked some maths questions on a white board which I’m pretty sure I got perfectly right.

mathsbit

Yesterday I hand delivered an application form in Peterborough when we finally found the place. Looked nice enough. The application was complete with a froody cover letter written by Mr C. Helped mum cook a roast dinner and generally chilled. I reckon it’s going to cost me £100 a month to commute to Peterborough every day which is going to have to be a major consideration when thinking about accepting a job. Gah.

Got some quite decent work on Computing coursework done at school and after school today and my maths lesson went suprisingly well considered I missed last lesson because of the olympiad. I think mechanics may be one of my stronger areas.

Mum had her first day at her new job today and despite being 15 minutes late it seems to have gone very well, thank goodness!

I have an evil masterplan involving pseudo code and cooking which will probably never be pulled off, but it’s amusing none the less.

15 new artists’ albums got added to magnatune today and I’m loving Grayson Wray – Picassos Dream and Falling You – Touch is pretty good too.

Yey, kazzy is online!

A four day week back at school with Ofsted inspectors everywhere. In DT one of them talked to me about my coursework and seemed very impressed, in Computing we think the inspector missed the significance of Mr M’s “Advanced Response System for Education” (yellow pieces of card with insulting remarks we hold up in lessons when we don’t understand something). I sat in on the second half of an inspector asking Sixth Form students about the maths department. Everyone they spoke to sucked up to the inspectors in a way I couldn’t believe and with the direct questions asked and the time constraints I didn’t feel there was ample opportunity for me to explain what I really thought!

The tracksuit hasn’t had as much use as I was hoping, just don’t know when I’m supposed to go jogging. I had considered getting up early in the morning to do it, but that’s more awkward than I had thought – and I’m not sure if it’d be particularly good for me. I went to our fortnightly games lesson though, played badminton and Mr C attempted to refine my grip on the racket… “attempted” being the operative word.

Friday morning was the British Informatics Olympiad which I always find interesting, even when I can’t do it. In three hours I only managed to answer all the parts of one of the three sections – still enough to get me a pass. It’s a shame really because I’m sure I could have got a lot further if it wasn’t for being side tracked by an interesting bug I was experiencing in VB. I probably should have chosen to program in PHP because I’ve been using it a lot recently – but last year I felt it put me at a disadvantage. The bug btw was to do with multiplying 5 by 7200 causing a buffer overflow error when 4 multiplied by 14,400 didn’t… still haven’t figured that one out (had Mr M and Mr C stumped).

Friday Lunchtime I met Mum, Brother, Grandparents and Aunty in Smiths for a meal (well actually I was only there in time for dessert, coffee and a pint of Guinness) then nipped over to the Masons to beat Reubs at a game of pool and a half pint before being whisked off to Dyke by lauperr. After tea we went into town to the Angel, then Smiths then onto Leicesters (or however you spell it). Met up with Rachel, Keri, Lou!, Siobhan, Tasha, Jenny, Wez, JJ (and probably others) in Smiths.

Got back to mine at 3am (with three drunk couples trailing behind us!) after a bit of a problem retrieving Laura’s bag from the cloakroom. Upon being handed two coats I said “There was a bag too”. “No there wasn’t” said a bald tough looking bloke at the door “Erm, yes there was” I said with raised eyebrows. “Well if you think there was bag, you’re going to have to wait at the end of the queue”. So we did. “About this bag…” I said when the queue finally filtered through. “You mean this one?” said the bald bloke taking it from under the desk. Argh!

Anyway, as I was saying we wandered home in the snow with three drunken couples trailing behind us, Siobhan and her boyfriend, Tasha and some Welsh bloke and Mr M’s daughter and some guy. I was locked out because Reubs had taken my keys earlier so I rang him to let me in (at 3am) and apparently I now owe him lots of beer(?) Laura stopped the night and I spent most of today feeling ill, probably an illness commonly known as a hangover. Spent some damned good time with lauperr.

I made another meal today under lauperr‘s supervision. If she tries to tell you that I dropped a tray of 10 sausages and boiling hot fat on the floor which she lovingly wiped up while I rinsed the sausages under the tap hoping nobody would notice, I deny all knowledge.

Got up, jogged round the block dragging the dog behind me (she’s even less fit than me), cut down 16 trees, cooked a fine meal for me and mum, won the quiz (Henry VIII and his football boots, oh yeah), cooked a pizza in the oven, updated my live journal.

Life doesn’t get much more exciting than this…

Today I bought a tracksuit. This tracksuit cost me a tenner from a discount shop and this fact is quite obvious to look at it. “Why?” you ask. Well who knows? Hormones? I got it home and had to try it out by jogging round the block, much to my parents bemusement driving in the other direction. The basic idea is for me to get some exercise and get out of the house more, I feel a need to be more healthy – now is the time to start good habits, before it’s too late.

I’ve written another letter with an attached C.V. seeing as I still haven’t heard back from the last one I sent. I’m starting to get an idea of how successful these things are. What astonishes me the most is that companies don’t even bother writing to you to say they don’t want you. The number of jobs mum has applied to and not even had a reply back from is phenominal. Nobody has any common courtesy.

I had a quick play with xscreensaver on tralk a moment ago. Managed to get it grabbing the latest livejournal entries from an RSS feed and putting them up on the screen like mchicago showed me in Naarch. Pretty cool if you ask me, there’s something rather humbling about watching the thoughts of people from all over the world pretty much as they write them. Maybe I’m just odd… Unfortunately it looks crap on tralk’s screen and I’ll wait until I have Linux running on Frell again before I set it up properly.

So basically my day wasn’t particularly productive, but not awful.

Tomorrow is another day. I’m trying to think of ways to push back the tide of gradually building stress.

The fact that it’s been quite a while since the last update suggests my life got interesting for a bit again. i.e. I had other things to do other than sitting at my computer writing this 😛

Going back as far as I can remember… Friday, broke up for half term. Took lauperr to the theatre to watch a play. (OK so it was a regional college but Kes was in it and we wanted to give her some support). I was really impressed with the play (Metamorphisis) which was pretty abstract and very off the wall. kind of made me miss my theatre days

It was physical drama which means (as far as I can tell) that it’s all about movement, shapes you make with your body and things. The main character was very good at this (both people who played him!) and the dancing bits were good although not spectacularly choreographed. Unfortunately we missed the first bit of the play because a) we were told by kes that is started at 7:30 and it started at 7:15 and b) we couldn’t find the hall at the college! Kes’ parents gave us a lift back into Bourne where we drank in Smiths until closing time with a load of people from school. It’s soooooooo expensive in there!

Saturday afternoon (Valentines Day) was spent at lauperr‘s and she COOKED ME A MEAL! Lurvely it was too, although I managed to get it all over the table cloth (spaghetti bolegnese (can never spell that.)) OK, I’ll stop my overuse of brackets (now).

Stopped over for the night and spent all of Sunday there too which was much fun and relaxing but at the same time tiring. Got home pretty late and went to bed.

I can only think that nothing happened on Monday or Tuesday because I can’t remember anything, but if it did can someone tell me so I at least know that we didn’t slip into a time warp or anything?

Wednesday I got into djkoa‘s pop’s car (thank you) and went off to Naarch, stopping off at a greasy spoon converted bus on the way for a bacon butty and a coffee. Yummmm.

Got to UEA and asked if I could join in on the visit day despite being invited to one the previous week and not turning up. They were very accomodating but once I’d started on the talks I couldn’t escape and didn’t get to meet mchicago or bouncykaz until around 4pm when they’d finished (apart from a quick visit during my free lunch!) (I said I’d stop using brackets didn’t I?) The talks were quite good though, I’m much happier about putting UEA as my insurance choice now.

Sat in bouncykaz‘s room for a while and chatted before getting the bus into Norwich to buy fish for tea. I bought tartare sauce to go with it, can’t have fish without mayo and bogie formula. Got back to mchicago‘s froody new flat and he cooked for us, after bouncykaz and I nipped round the corner to get extra ingredients.

After the meal we went off to a public house until closing time with some interesting conversation and picked up a pizza on the way back to the flat. Chatted to bouncykaz for a long time while mchicago got some work done, then he joined in the talking until quite late before bed. Got up, had a fry up in a roll on the market, yummmm. Stopped off in a shop to see if they sold Kumquat Tea which they didn’t, disappointingly. I bought a ticket and was seen on to the train safely and off I went home.

The train journey was nice and by this time I was feeling happy and relaxed in an almost surreal way, I’d really enjoyed the past couple of days and was feeling more chilled out than I think I’ve been for months, even over Christmas. Catching up with bouncykaz was good, been missing her sooooooo much.

Got home and things started getting stressful again when I came back down to earth from floating on my puffy white cloud and realised just how much I have to do. The next few months may be hell.

Went to The Angel with lauperr and asherfrancis until closing time last night then went to bed. Got up this morning feeling extremely apathetic, just had no interest in anything at all. Luckily I was rescued by lauperr who came bearing home baked cookies and Guinness! Woohoo!

Just about brings up to the present time, although I feel I’ve milked it somewhat, very long post now which is a little boring.

Let’s see if I can do something productive over the weekend.