Thursday, March 31, 2005

¬_¬

I hate the British weather. I don't just not like it, I despise it. I had my driving test again today. Everything was going well until half way through when it got stopped due to the fog making it too dificult to see anything.

As I said, I hate the British weather.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

\o/ Linux \o/

Recently I have been playing around with Linux. I had an old PC that wasn't being used (Pentium 3, 196Mb RAM, 6GB HDD and the almighty Voodoo 2 *cough*), so nothing too special, but it's been running Mandrake 10.0 nicely since before Christmas now.

Went into town earlier today to pick up some stuff, got Timesplitters: Future Perfect (which I have yet to play), and a network card for my Linux box. Yep, I'm posting this from my Linux computer! The installation itself was painfully easy. It was literally a case of opening up the comp, putting the card in, closing it up and turning it on. Linux detected it straight away, asked me a few questions and loaded the appropriate modules. Then all i did was log into my user account, fire up Mozilla, and I was browsing the interweb! Never has the front page of Google lookes so sweet than from Linux. I've now picked up Mozilla Firefox 1.0.2, and the latest release of Gaim, both of which were very easy to install using the GUI. I will tell any of you now, if someone tells you that Linux is complicated - do not listen to them. It is in fact frightfully simple, once you get to grip with the basics.

As fun as all this is however, it still doesn't change the fact that I'm bloody starving. I'm going now to scare me up some pizza.

:-D

Saturday, March 26, 2005

New blog...

..of sorts.

It's called In A Broken Dream, and can be found by clicking here. The idea is that since we're meant to have dreams every night, I thought I'd write down what happens. For the record, I'm not turning into a new age hippy, but I thought it woulf be an interesting little thing to fill the time, if only for my sake. It's more of an experiment than anything else, so if I get bored of it I may very well axe it.

I've been recovering from my cold, and enjoying the holidays thus far. Haven't really been doing much, but this is fine by me! I'd be perfectly happy to laze about for 2 weeks. :-)

The weather really has gotten a lot nicer recently. I always used to prefer the cold of winter, but I'm quite looking forward to summer this year. Quite enjoyed summer last year too. Ack, I'm turning into a sun lover. :-P

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Woo, changed the template again, because I decided I liked this one better after all.

Not much to say here really, came down with the flu on Monday so was off yesterday, and am again today. It doesn't seem to be lasting very long though, so with any luck I won't be ill throughout the easter holdiay's, which start today, so i think that is fully deserving of a \o/.

I got all the repsonses from my University choices back from UCAS the other day. My applications were succesful to everywhere but Edinburgh (damned Scots ¬_¬), but that doesn't really matter since I'm now going to Aberystwyth as I have unconditional offer there. :-D

Until next time...

Monday, March 14, 2005

I R teh failz0rz :-\

Just got back from driving test, and if you have already read the title of this post then you would know the result. If you haven't read the title then I suggest that a) You go back and read it to find out what happened and b) Get some glasses because you are quite clearly blind, I mean it's written in big letters.

The most infuriating thing is I failed by 1 minor. You're allowed to get 15 before you fail; I got 16. Now if I'm going to fail, I want to fail it properly, by a decent margin, say 20 errors or something, none of this "ohhh so close" rubbish.

So yeah, just rebooked another one, 4 weeks until I can try again. I was hoping I'd be driving by Easter, but with any luck I'll be driving just after Easter. The advantage of having the test then is that I will be able to drink coffee again. Perhaps I'll be more alert. \o/

Anyhoo, I've been thinking about what sort of car I'll be wanting when I do finally pass. And I've decided I'd quite like something like this:

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For those of you who don't know, that's the car you get in the rather nifty game called Grim Fandango, the car itself is rather fetchingly entitled "The Bonewagon", and has a top sped of very very fast. I tried searching for a better picture but that was the best I could find. And I'll be damned if I'm reinstalling the game just for a screenshot. ¬_¬

Apart from my test today has been rather non-existent. Yesterday I networked together some computers, with assistance of course, which was pretty cool. Well cool if you're a geek. Which I think I have strong leanings towards.

Anyhoo, I have nothing of any relevance to say now so I think I'll go eat some chocolate. \o/

Edit: Arse, I broke the formatting with my picture. Fixed now.

Saturday, March 12, 2005

Woo and a yay and another woo with some more yay. Did I mention woo and yay?

Well, there's been a lot happening recently, but I haven't gotten round to updating so you can read about it all at once.

Our story starts approximately exactly 3 days ago. The location - London, the event - an all day A-Level politics revision conference, method of transport - South Eastern Trains. I'll be brutally honest, it wasn't terribly exciting. It was about as exciting as a terribly un-exciting thing doing something monumentally not very exciting, whilst not very exciting people watched and said not very exciting things about their not very exciting performance. However, it was well worth it which is what counts. Lunch was fun also, where I partook in one of my favorite hobbies - the consumption of edible foodstuffs.

Yesterday, things got more fun. MUN had come around again, which is really odd considering it still feels like last year's MUN was only last month. I can only conclude that Time has decided to speed itself up, but for what motive I am currently unaware. This year I was representing India; I had originally wanted Japan but sadly this wasn't to be. The whole day was pretty fun, admittedly a little boring in parts but this was soon alieved by the passing of humorous notes, in particular the notes passed to non-existent countries. Now at this point, anyone who is not familiar with MUN will be looking (well not literally, at least I hope not anyway) at me with a rather quizzical look, possibly with their left eyebrow raised as if they were saying to me "Like, omfg wtf??". Well I shall attempt to clear up any confusion. Or not, as the case may be. MUN stands for "Model United Nations", and what we do is sit around all day and discuss stuff and generally don't really do all that much in particular. Exactly like the real UN, you see? Anyway as I said it was all jolly good fun, especially the disco. I even danced sober for the like the first time in ever (well the first time since that last time anyway). My only regret is that I didn't start going to these things earlier, since I won't be able to do anymore after this year. Ah well.

Today I got some very good news. News so good that it makes all other so-called good news look like not very good news at all. Back in February I sat some scholarship exams for Aberystwyth, and today I got the result in the post. Didn't get a scholarship, but I did get a Merit award! More importantly this means I now have an unconditional offer. To put it mildly, I am rather pleased, and have decided that in celebration I shall tilt my chair and look rather pleased with myself. Then maybe go out and get drunk in celebration.

Still to come is my driving test on Monday. I'll let you know how it went when it happens.

Saturday, March 05, 2005

#Everyone loves, half-arsed blog posts, 'cause the tricks that they do are... erm, well not terribly clever at all really#

Yes, once again it's a post consisting of nothing more than the result I got from one of those internet survey things, you know the ones that go "what kitchen utensil best represents your life?". Today it was "what family guy character are you?" though. Shame really, because I've always wondered about kitchen utensils, but alas I guess we shall never find out. Until someone makes a quiz for them of course. There probabaly is one somewhere, come to think of it. Anyway, on with the pictures.


Which Family Guy character are you?

Shame really, I wanted to be the dog. In fact I don't even know who the hell this one is, it's been ages since I've seen Family Guy.

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Snow = Day Off \o/

This morning I woke up, or rather was rudely startled by the sound of my alarm clock which sounds not quite unlike a pair of rusted cheese-graters being scraped together, right beside my ear. However, as I made the painful transition from sleeping to not-sleeping, something became painfully obvious; it was far too early in the morning for any sane person to have to get up and do such morning like activities as showering and breakfasting, but due to the diabolical state of our education system that insists that the day must begin at 9.00pm, I had little option but to drag myself out of the warm comfort of bed and attempt to re-adjust myself to consciousness. But however painfully obvious this fact was, it was not the most significant thing that happened. This was to occur approximately 3 seconds later when upon drawing my curtains in a vain effort to make the room more light in order to enable me to navigate my way to the door safely without tripping over something, I discovered that overnight some idiot thought it would be terribly funny to break into our garden, the surrounding gardens, and most of the south-east and dump a load of snow over everything. The realistation that the roads had not been gritted, and that I had no desire to risk life and limp for a half day of 6th form resulted in the conclusion of, "sod this for a game of soldiers, I'm staying in today" (Note: I did not actualy say this myself, it was in reality a friend of mine, but I decided to steal his statement). It turns out that the school had been closed anyway, except for the poor unfortunate souls that are currently trapped within the period of much unpleasantness more commonly known as GCSE's. I feel sorry for any who were forced into school on such a day as today, or at least I did feel sorry until I realized that I was once made to go through a similar thing, which of course gives me the ability to laugh.

I suppose that my current state of being trapped indoors is parabola a good thing, as I currently have quite a bit of reading to do for my History coursework. And by a bit I mean a lot, just take a look at the size of these bloody books. There's another one in the post arriving today too.

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Also, since I am currently in the mood for taking pictures of absolutely everything, coupled with the fact that snow is so rare in this country (can't remember it being like this for at least 4 or so years), I decided to take a couple of shots of the view currently outside my room. Clicky here to peruse the photographic wonders.

Blimey, after having said all that the sky is starting to brighten and the ice is starting to melt. The only thing you can be certain of with the British weather is that it will never do anything that is in anyway even remotely predictable.

Well now that was a terribly Britsh post of me, seeing as it revovlved around nothing more than the weather. Since I feel I have spoke for long enough, and to continue would be risking the loss of concentration in any readerhsip I may get then I'm afraid you will have to wait untill next time to hear about all the other things that are currently happening right now. So tune in next time for another thrilling episode of Gary's blog where you will discover the mysteries of time, space, and why there is always a teaspoon left in the bottom of the washing-up bowl.*

*May not be true