Ben Francis

Went to lauperr‘s after school which was luuuuurvely, we even got some school work done… kind of. As laura pointed out, I’ve left my bike at school which means that I’ve got to get up very early so I have time to have a shower AND walk to school 🙁 We watched a film called Punch-Drunk Love which is truly bizarre but not quite as obscure as reubs and mum made out.

I got a Guinness T-shirt in the post this morning, w00t! Another late birthday present from mum, although I’m assured this one is the last, thank goodness. Starting to feel really really guilty about the amount of money spent.

The library annexe got broken into last night at school. I have a feeling I saw the guys who did it earlier at about 5pm hanging around school, but if Mr Cookson doesn’t take me seriously then nobody will.

It’s about time reubs went on the dole.

Quite a few very interesting days to catch up on. You know my life has been interesting when I don’t have time to do something on the computer for 5 days!

Thursday
Pfft, too long ago to remember.

Friday
After basically 5 periods of maths I was pretty exhausted and feeling dispondent but this was soon cured by a trip to the pub with lauperr, djkoa and ruthy. djkoa managed to break a computer chip in his car and had to call out the AA. lauperr bought me a Guinness glass from the pub. This would have been fine but she stood next to me at the bar, put her hand over my mouth and said “please don’t think I’m crazy, but…” at which point the bar maid thought it was a stick up :D. Anyway, got home in a tipsy state and mum and reubs had a good laugh at my ramblings.

Saturday
My birthday. Got up at about 9:30am, had a shower and got dressed. Then I was presented with a few very cool pressies (including two more Guinness glasses), had a visit from Nick (who has a birthday the same day as me) and was whisked off to the cinema with lauperr. She wouldn’t let me pay for the bus, the taxi, Macdonalds or the cinema so it was an all expenses paid trip. The film was Lord of the Rings: Return of the King which was a very good film although I thought it was too long, seemed to end about 5 times. A pair of numb bums then got a lift back in the direction of Bourne, stopping off in Baston to pick people up and Dyke to collect something. At this point I was getting very suspicious, not about picking people and things up, but about what was going to happen when I got home.

I walked through the front door as was confronted with a kitchen full of Chinese food, balloons and booze and a lounge full to the brim with a collection of some of the most fantastic people I have had the pleasure of knowing during my lifetime. Unfortunately Adam, KT and Kimbles couldn’t make it but mchicago and bouncykaz had come all the way from Naarch. I was given a whole load more pressies including a USB memory stick (yey wez ‘n ruth!) and two more pint glasses… Attendees included Me, lauperr, mchicago, bouncykaz, djkoa, ruthy, keri, shell, lucy, reubs’ gf, family… if I’ve forgotten anyone they’re going to kill me, but I was drinking a lot at the time. The prize for the best card goes to Lucy, closely followed by Nick – but lucy made hers herself and it included nudity.

The partying went on for some time! I was a bit concerned that people would get bored with nothing to do but we all packed into my bedroom and loud music and video clips seemed to put the icing on the party. Talking of icing, mum made me a cake and decorated it to look like a Guinness glass, w00t! After laughing at the health warning on the Drinking Games box that Adam bought me at Christmas we seemed to make up our own games. For example, how many people can do the Saturday Night dance at the same time in Ben’s bedroom and a who has the nicest arse competition and the grand final, how many noodles and Guinness can we fit into Ben’s belly button. I was not amused.

People eventually started to disappear towards midnight and I walked ruthy home at about 2:30am which despite the circumstances was reasonably pleasant (she’d had a bit of a bad end to the evening, but I’ll let djkoa explain that one). lauperr stopped the night.

There was probably other stuff that happened on this day but I’m damned if I can remember. BIG thanks to lauperr for helping organise the suprise party!!!

Sunday
Woke up, had a shower, watched two films back to back (Anger Management, The Man who Sued God), ate Chinese left overs and… went back to bed to get some proper sleep.

Monday
Erm, can’t remember. Oh yes I can, we studied pornographic stereograms in General Studies.

Tuesday
Today I woke up to a delivery. A luuurvely card from KT and a late birthday pressie from mum, 4 more DVDs! This takes the total number of birthday DVDs to 7 with… AI, Dead Poet’s Society, Hunted, Sneakers, Enemy of the State, Punch-Drunk Love. Swordfish.

I had planned to be very productive and spend my Quardruple free doing some DT. Unfortunately this included taking screenshots of a DVD and it took me most of the morning to get DVDs to play in Linux after I managed to break it. Went to school for DT and Computing (Assembler code, yum) and a slightly interesting conversation after school. Got home, ate sweets, did the geek test at http://www.innergeek.us/geek.html and apparently I’m “36.09467% – Major Geek3” which ranks just above “total geek” and just below “super geek”. Do I get extra points for noticing that the percentage rounds down to be my house number?

Now I’m writing this. Still writing this. Writing about writing this…. I think that just about gets up to date.

So, President Bush wants to send man to Mars eh? Sounds like fun. Can he afford that after bombing the hell out of Iraq? Launching a Mars mission from the Moon? Surely from Earth’s orbit would be a better idea? But then I’m no rocket scientist.

Just found out Warwick have given me an offer for Computer Science, they want AAB including maths. No mention of AS grades though as their “average offer” states, so maybe someone’s being lenient with me. I’m still very annoyed that they cancelled Computer Systems Engineering at Warwick. If they were still running that course I’d probably put them above Nottingham.

A Mr Ivan Fuller (Bourne Town Centre Centre Co-ordinator) came to visit me, Jenny and Hannah at school today after seeing the article in the paper about us litter picking in the park. He wants our suggestions for the development of Bourne Town Centre. I hope something comes of it.

My DT project is finally looking up. I told Mr Richards I was a bit worried that I’d hit a dead end and we sat down and built a project for me, and I like it. Lots of work to do to keep to schedule though. I also had my first Stats lesson today, and considering I’m supposed to have covered all this stuff before it’s scarily new to me. Pace is fast too, already on Chapter 3 of the text book! Mechanics test tomorrow, ick.

lauperr is sounding a lot more positive today which has really cheered me up. I think she finally got up and marched down the tunnel to turn on the light herself 😀

Mr Tucker is giving up smoking, yey! Wish him all the best.

The BPI announced today that they have plans to start sueing their customers for file swapping like the RIAA have been doing. Argh, they just don’t understand what’s going on…

Time for mechanics cramming.

Not much happening at the moment. Done much more schoolwork recently than I had been doing. Computing in particular.

I’ve had to get round the fact that mySQL doesn’t support subqueries until version 4.1 which is still in alpha release and mchicago thinks its a bad idea to install that on tralk. I wanted to do something like:

SELECT * FROM RunStop a WHERE stopid=4 AND EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM RunStop b WHERE b.runid=a.runid and b.stopid=23 AND a.id <> b.id);

but I can’t, so I now have a piece of PHP code which puts the results of the first part of the query into an array and loops through that array, creating a new query based on each result to do the sub part of the query on. (that made sense before it came out of my head). Well anyway, I think it’s messy.

Then there’s the fact that I can’t use INTERVAL with a TIME type, only DATETIME types. so instead of doing:

SELECT * FROM `RunStop` WHERE time BETWEEN ('07:30:00' - INTERVAL 1 HOUR) AND ('07:30:30' + INTERVAL 1 HOUR)

I have to do:

SELECT * FROM `RunStop` WHERE (TIME_TO_SEC(time) - TIME_TO_SEC('07:30:00')) <= 3600 AND (TIME_TO_SEC(time) - TIME_TO_SEC('07:30:00')) >= -3600

which is horridible. I haven’t even started on figuring out whether or not the bus travels on the right day…

I complain about these things, but I’m actually really enjoying the programming. I hadn’t realised how long it is since I’ve done any proper programming I’ve been spending so much time learning how to use Linux.

DT on the other hand is causing me headaches. My project is lacking direction quite terminally at the moment and I’m a bit fed up with it. I’m definately making progress in maths but no where near enough progress to get a B at the end of the year 🙁 – yet.

lauperr is up and down like a yoyo, I really hope she doesn’t quit school. I wish she had a bit more confidence in herself because she’s such a great person with lots of talents.

We had a disco in the IT room in our Computing Lesson/break time as Mr M was away. It involved much dancing to music thanks to djkoa and dognuts and cookies thanks to lauperr and was hilarious.

wonchop has made a new animation, eels on wheels which I love (here) which reminds me, I still haven’t got a flash plugin for Mozilla Firebird.

I think I have my first stats lesson with a lower sixth group tomorrow which will be fun :S

Night night.

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.