Ben Francis

tipschy, we won the quiz.

Friday morning was pretty crappy. For some reason I started to get very down about my schoolwork. I decided I was fed up of jumping through hoops all the time and considering whether doing so would have any lasting damaging effects on my thinking ability. In my DT coursework I have a serious (and interesting) problem to solve, albeit a little hazy because of incomprehensible requests. But instead of actually solving the problem I have to dumb it down into discrete little chunks that will allow me to tick the boxes on the list of things the examiners want me to write so that I can get a good mark. Computing is pretty much the same, and there seems to be no end to the amount of work I need to do on my maths to attempt to get it straight in my head.

mchicago had a bit of a go at me today apparently without provocation (I’m sure he had his reasons). Instead of letting him piss me off (which probably wasn’t his intention anyway) I tried to look at it constructively. I’ve decided that I should make a couple of late new years resolutions. I think the abuse my body clock gets from my late nights is having a detremental effect on my learning ability, so I’m going to make a serious effort to go to bed earlier and get up earlier. The other thing is my time management. I have a talent for letting 7 hour chunks of time disappearing without me noticing. The amount of work I actually spend on schoolwork outside of school is a lot smaller than it should be, and as this term is crunch time for my A-levels, if I’m going to change that, now is the time to do it.

Anyway, where was I? Friday afternoon was slightly more interesting. I found out that Bourne United Charities actually sent a letter to the headmaster of my school requesting that I, and three girls stop picking up litter from the park. I’m not kidding. The letter basically says that the Charity, who allegedly look after the park area in question have not given us their permission to pick up litter and had they been asked, they would not have given permission. We are doing it without supervision and it’s not safe for us to do so. There are times in life when I wonder if I’m awake or dreaming. This is one of those times.

The letter was sent in November following an article in the local newspaper about us doing it and I’ve only just found out about the letter. The Bourne Forum are going to have a field day with this one, but that’s not all I have in store. Watch this space.

Last night I was invited to a meal with lauperr‘s family in the local pub which was really lovely. I had a great time, lost at pool, missed the dart board and drank Guinness. I’m not sure WHY I was invited but hey. I was a bit upset that I didn’t get to thank them properly though as I had to shoot off to catch my lift and they hadn’t got back to laura’s house from the pub before I left.

I got an information pack from Warwick University yesterday with a letter saying I will get a letter telling me whether they’ve actually given me an offer shortly. Riiiigght. So what’s the point in sending me an information pack if you’re going to turn me down?! I also got a cheque from b+h for the Albert Hall job and a matching credit card bill of dad’s that I have to pay. Oh well, you win some you lose some.

I finally found out today who made my Pocket mStation mp3 juekbox, it was SSI America, but they call it a Neo Jukebox or something. Anyway, it turns out they’ve made the firmware for some of their players open source! W00t! The bad news is that the hardware limitations mean that it is impossible to add ogg vorbis support to it 🙁 – Now that there seems some life left in the old thing and I’m no longer getting a new mp3 player for my birthday, I may eventually buy a new battery and a bigger hard disk for it.

Now that I’ve made and eaten some porridge and wasted time writing this I’m getting late for bed again and already breaking one of my resolutions. Good start.

Does anyone know what exanimate means?

This morning Mr C showed us all the goodies he brought back from the trade show yesterday. Included Xandros in a pretty little case which we installed on Mr Baker’s computer… ahem. There was a Microsoft T-shirt too (mwahaha).

Then came news that the school’s new £3000 PA system had arrived as detailed in http://www.livejournal.com/users/djkoa/1331.html . It was like christmas all over again, lots of yummy equipment to play with 😀

wonchop came to take an exam and visit which was highly amusing. Ah the good old days… Stayed too long after school but it was worth it for the valuable time spent with lauperr.

Hope I don’t get as sopping wet tomorrow morning as I did this morning, I hate being damp. Biking is good exercise though…

I’m sooooo tired.

Yesterday I spent the day at Nottingham University with mum and brother.

Arrived at the Uni and started in the arts centre where we had a coffee and a bite to eat. Mum bought some expensive greetings cards and the nice lady on the desk let me use the internal phone to get in touch with Computer Science to see if they were expecting me. They were very relaxed about the whole thing and said spaces weren’t limited anyway so it didn’t matter. So at that we wandered around the main campus which is a gorgeous place surrounding a large lake with boats and wildfoul. The January sun came out for us which was nice.

We had a very good look round the Student Union building which is where I found the single best reason I’ve yet found for going to a University. They have a Guinness Society!!! The society apparently has trips to Dublin and discounted prices locally. Wow! Other societes that caught my eye were the Computer Society, Philosophy, Thai Chi, Science Fiction, Sound… there were loads! We stopped off at the bookshop which was a mistake as mum never leaves a bookshop without spending money. I did manage to get Douglas Adams’ Biography and a small book on Voltaire though.

We eventually made our way over the the Jubilee Campus on the free hopper bus service. I got to show mum the campus and she liked it a lot, although she pointed out that it was starting to look a bit scruffy considering how new it is, pfft. We had a look around then had some lunch.

Then there was the actual point in the visit, the talks. Mum and Brother were allowed in to the talks as there were hardly any people there. Unfortunately BOTH the people who were supposed to be doing the talks had been called away at short notice and others were drafted in to take their places. The talks didn’t really tell me much about the Uni I didn’t know already but I did have the opportunity to have a long, one on one discussion with Colin Higgins, a Senior Lecturer which was brilliant. He also showed us round the department personally which was good of him.

After that we sneaked to have a peak in the lecture theatres which luckily were empty, then it was back on the hopper to head home.

I really do love Nottingham and the talk with the lecturer went some way to easing my worries about the course. I still have worries about the value of a Computer Science degree though. Another thing that was put slightly into question was whether or not I should take a gap year. Mum now thinks I shouldn’t but I think I may HAVE to financially. More thinking to do on this.

Moving onto today, I woke up to find out both my Mum and reubs had written letters of resignation for their jobs!! Mum is fed up of doing the work of three people I think and I think reubs got sick of the people he was working with. Mum has applied for about 7 jobs already including a trainee signwriter which I actually think she’d really enjoy. Reubs plans to get a job until September then go to Stamford College to do a diploma in art, then a foundation course hopefull leading to a degree course.

I dashed into school to get to my first Stats lesson with the lower sixth group. Despite having been going to the school for coming on seven years I thought the lesson started 10 minutes earlier than it did and was in a panic to get there on time. When I got there it turned out that they weren’t even doing stats today! Man. Had double Computing where I found out that I can’t actually run subqueries on the version of mysql installed on tralk, GRR! Went to a maths revision session at lunch, then a maths lesson doing Mechanics with differentiation and integration then a free.

After school djkoa and I dashed off to his to pick up a pressie then went over to bouncykaz‘s place for a visit yey! Spent ages playing with Kaz’s christmas pressies and watching cut scenes from Bruce Almighty. Lots of talking until gone 9 O’Clock! It was brilliant to see Kaz properly and hopefully I’ll get to see her within the next few MONTHS! Wez and I went back to Bourne and dashed to the chippie before it closed with a swift U-turn on a main road, grr, they were mopping the floor around us while we were eating.

For some reason Wez wanted to nip into school to see what the stage crew had been doing in their three hours of ***supervised*** work after school. The caretaker asked what the bloody hell we were doing there that time of night so we explained we thought he might be lonely and had come to visit. Wez complained about the stupid things the stage crew had done, Mr Austin complained that they’d better not move the 300 chairs it had taken him 5 hours to place and then we went home. I biked in the rain.

Good morning Laura, as you’ll probably be reading this.

I was hoping that it being the first day of term I would have some motivation to get my ass in gear and do some work, I even considered trying to enjoy it. It didn’t happen. I won’t be beaten though, it’s crunch time this term.

Finally started learning some theory in Computing and maths wasn’t too bad. DT is slipping behind at about the same level as Computing coursework, joy.

Nottingham visit tomorrow although they’re not expecting me which could be interesting. This evening I spoke to a first year, second year, third year and PhD student from Nottingham’s Computer Science department, and none of them seemed to have a very high opinion of the BSc :S – it’s still my current favourite though.

Nothing happened today. If anyone claims it did, I simply deny all knowledge.

lauperr PASSED! w00t!

Last night (Friday) I went to lauperr‘s to watch LOTR Two Towers so she could see it before we go watch the new one at the cinema. Because of bouncykaz all I could think about all the way through was gay hobbits. Thanks for that. Also watched 2001: Space Odysey which was brilliant but I think it may have bored Laura senseless…

Stopped the night at lauperr‘s 😀 luurvely.

And today I… well I fell asleep for three hours… and… well nothing really.

Tomorrow I get to worry myself silly about going back to *that place* and all the things I have to do this term like coursework, learning my times tables 😉 and getting a job for next year. Tuesday I visit Nottingham University with my parents.

Yesterday I… wait was that yesterday or the day before? I think it was yesterday. I geeked in the morning and in the afternoon lauperr came to watch a film . Then it was down to Smiths with Adam and Shell for the both of us. From Smiths we went to the Balti King where djkoa used to work and was subjected to some unusual waitering :S – watching.

After the meal we went back to Adam’s to sing the new year in with his drunken parents and aunty. People decided it was bed time at 3am but sleep started at about 7am. Got up a few hours later, lauperr went and Adam, Shell and I watched Evolution, The Weakest Link and The Sound of Music (mwahaha).

Got home, fell asleep in the lounge.

lauperr has her driving theory test tomorrow, best of luck to her, she’s so worried bless her. I got very worried about her earlier but I think she calmed down a little after FINDING her driving license and me pursuading her to try and get some sleep.

All in all, had a brill time with lauperr over the past couple of days, relaxed a lot but got nothing else useful done. I think the world may have stood still, I’ve recieved the exact same tech news from vnunet for four days running now. My binary clock has sprung into action thanks to Maplin, but I think I need a different transformer caus this one means the clock can’t actually stand up! Oh and I got DVDs in mplayer sorted thanks to ALUG, I just needed to use the ATI driver properly for my graphics card (I actually cheated and copied parts of the XF86Config-4 file from a Knoppix Live! CD).

MUST SLEEP NOW.

Today I got up early caus lauperr was coming round. She turned up bearing gifts of dognuts, creme eggs and Guinness which made me feel very guilty caus I don’t have an income with which to buy her things 🙁 – wish she’d stop spending all her money on me 😛 On the plus side I now have some Guinness to last me through to new year, yey! Had a wonderful time with laura and we’re meeting up again tomorrow afternoon to watch a film before New Year goings on.

My debian installation is definately starting to take shape and I’m very pleased I took the plunge because I’ve learnt a hell of a lot over the past couple of days through setting it up.

Note to self:
* Still need to install gaim, xcdroast and grip and probably quanta and amaya
* Get USB working with hub, external hard disk and possibly web cam and infra-red port for phone
* Get TV card working and possibly infra-red remote setup and dvbstream server over network
* Find out if anyone’s written a driver for Live! drive yet
* Install GKrellM plugins
* Pursuade mplayer to get a more decent picture from DVDs
* Sort the openoffice.org dictionary
* Copy rest of files from backup and sort fstab and symlinks
* Find out how to add a powerdown command to fluxbox menu
* Get a life

Freeserve have realised I’m not paying them any money and cut off my email again :S bar stewards.

School isn’t really something I want to think about at the minute, but I’m going to have to get back into it all soon or I’m doomed to failure. Well, failure in someone’s eyes anyway.

mchicago had calmed down today after his unfortunate day yesterday and was discussing future plans which I find pretty exciting, but don’t tell him that. There’s a kind of romance in not having a clue what I’m doing next year… and it’s also frelling scary. Someone give me a job, please? Just for one year, that’s all I ask.

DeepDown is coming along quite well considering certain… setbacks and I’m still wishing I could be more involved. I’m trying to convince myself that doing some PHP/MySQL work for DeepDown would be good practice for my Coursework, but time is a little short for that I think.

This small text is starting to hurt my eyes now because I’ve been supping whisky. Goodnight.

Sunday I was supposed to see lauperr at around 2pm but when I got up in the morning I texted to delay it until 4pm so I could get my debian installation finished and out of the way. First big mistake of the day.

bouncykaz had a go at me for having my priorities wrong so I logged out of IRC, picked up my coat and got on my bike. Had a lovely time with lauperr and watched AntiTrust as well as having my second big meal that day. We then went off to the pub quiz as planned, had a game of pool first. Mr C turned up (yey!) so we won free drinks. djkoa couldn’t make it because of interesting theatre work he’d been doing.

Anyway, when laura realised I was planning on biking back to Bourne at 11:30pm she said it was too dangerous and asked her mum if I could stop the night. That made me feel awkward as I wasn’t really properly invited and I sensed the sleeping arrangements might cause friction. Anyway, when we got back to her house, laura was desperate for the loo and while she was distracted I grabbed my bike and set off into the night. Second big mistake of the day. It honestly seemed like a good idea at the time, but looking back it was very rude and stupid.

A two and a half hour phone call later and lauperr no longer wanted to cause me physical harm and we were chatting happily again. Phew. (can’t wait for the phone bill!)

Today (Monday) was mainly spent breaking Linux installations but I did leave the house twice, shock horror! Once was to go to the opticians to get a free eye test while I still can. Apparently I have pretty much perfect vision. Possibly very very slightly long sighted. Considering I was expecting to come out needing glasses, I was pretty pleased when I could read most of the bottom line of letters in the smallest print.

Watched The Green Mile with the family and did more Linux hacking, this time with a bit more patience which means I’m getting on quite well witha debian installation (mark III).

Tomorrow lauperr is coming round so I’d better get some sleep.