New wallpaper ordered

The new Snazzy Goshwow Redesign^TM is taking place, and I was going to upload a test page today from school until I discovered that the limitations of the school's awful network system had foiled me again. (Should that be 'thwarted'?)

1. CSS is apparently not a valid file extension (since it's not associated with any program).
2. I can't create an association since they've disabled Windows Explorer -> View -> Options and I don't know any other way of getting to it.
3. This means you have to open all CSS files from Notepad, rather than just double-clicking them. Not a big problem, and if that was the only symptom I wouldn't mind. But...
4. You can't view any CSS files in IE by typing the URL since if it's from an internet source it will try to open the file rather than display it, find that there's no program associated with it, and refuse to budge. It doesn't give the option of saving to disk. If the CSS file is from a local hard drive, it will also refuse to open it (the same is true for all local files, not just CSS files) and says "Access to the resource [URL] has been disallowed".

That was my long-winded excuse as to why I haven't blogged since last Thursday (I've been redesigning) and why you can't see the fruits of my labour. I'm annoyed about this.

My driving test is tomorrow morning, timed for just after the rush hour (9.30). "Wear your hair in a ponytail for your test", said my instructor.

Wherefore?

I had my hair in a ponytail for my last driving lesson, and apparently when I was doing my observation for my manuoevres (quickly flicking head from side to side) it was really noticeable. As in, I nearly had my instructor's eye out with the hair swinging pendulum-like back and forth. Apparently this is a sure-fire way to not get a minor fault for observation during manuoevres!

If you have a fairly decent connection speed (possibly even if you don't - I haven't checked) please, please look at The True Story of LOTR (Windows Media Player file, 2.41MB). It's worth it :)

Ostriches

Panicking about what? I hear you ask.[1] Well, let's see...

• My A-level Physics coursework, due in completed next Thursday (or maybe after half term, if we need the time)
• My A-level Statistics coursework, due in completed next Tuesday.[2]
• All my other homework, including two pieces in for Wednesday (which I won't be able to do tomorrow in my study periods, since I'll be taking my driving test) and three A-level Mechanics and Statistics papers (practice) due in next Tuesday.
• My driving test tomorrow, although that is actually the least of my concerns now.
• Oh yes, and my mock A-level Maths P5 exam next Friday. It's before half-term because they couldn't fit in all of our maths exams in the week after half term, when all the rest of my exams are. And it's the hardest unit by far.

The irony of this is that I'll probably get even more internetty stuff done (like redesigning this site) than if I didn't have all this other stuff to do. [cf. what happened with my coursework for Physics.] I mean, I'm even blogging now with my stats coursework on my lap, with a half-written sentence on the page!

I think this is called the Ostrich syndrome. And if it wasn't, it is now.

Mobility

My panic level has fallen a little after having worked on my stats for a few hours yesterday afternoon (in order to complete one hypothesis for a deadline at the end of yesterday afternoon)[1]. I'm starting to think that it might be possible to get this done for the beginning of next week, which is a relief. And I've discovered that my Physics coursework doesn't in fact have to be in until after half-term, so that's off my list of things to worry about, for now anyway.

Redesigning

Connectivity and job offer

The coursework for our statistics modules, it has been pointed out, is only worth about 4% of our Further maths A-level. This means that we can pick a relatively easy, standard, boring project and it doesn't make a significant difference to your grade.[1] So the subject of my Very Dull Project is comparing word length, sentence length, etc. between English and French, and for this purpose I am using 'Pyramids' by Terry Pratchett (my favourite author) and its French translation, which I bought last year when I was doing French at A/S level. I had a selection of words, but I needed to know the total number of words and sentences in the whole book.

So I emailed Terry last week to ask him to do a Word Count on his computer, and I got a [nice] reply two days later.

Now, I am a major Terry Pratchett fan, and I have been for years. I have all the books in paperback (naturally), the last nine in hardback (all signed), a number of the 'spin-off' books, two lovely bookends, one of the three computer games (currently angling for the other two), the last four calendars, the board game... um, there's more, I think, but I can't remember it all at the moment. Anyway, you get my point. This was Exciting!

Don't you just love the internet?

The panic is rising once more - I only have until the beginning of next week to finish this stats coursework. So at the moment that's what I'm completely focused on, which means that I'm ignoring other things until Tuesday, which is when I'll have to do the homeworks that will be set today and tomorrow to be handed in on Wednesday, which leaves me Wednesday to do at least one of the mechanics or statistics practice papers we've been given so that I can have something handed in before half-term, which leaves me Thursday (and half an hour on Friday morning) in which to revise for my pure maths P5 mock A-level exam.

So then there will be half-term, during which I have to catch up on sleep, write up just about all of my physics coursework, and... oh yes, revise for the other eight mock A-level exams which happen the week we come back from half-term. So much work to do...which, the astute reader will notice, is why I'm currently blogging instead of doing work. I think this is the Ostrich Syndrome rearing its head again...[2]

In other news, eep! I just checked my quota information for my subdomain with Portland and it seems that I've already used almost a third of my total storage space. I've only been blogging for two months!

I think I'll have to move my archives somewhere else, which should free up some space. Oh, and actually put up an archive html page, rather than just letting people look at the directory index.

Ooh, and, and, and... (I totally forgot about this - shows how much it's been weighing on my mind!) the company where I went for a job interview offered me the job yesterday, which was nice.[3] Unfortunately, in the two and a half weeks since the interview, I've decided not to accept, the main reasons for which decision are that:

1. There's no chance of sponsorship through university (or, by extension, a job at the end of uni, or in the holidays)
2. I'd have to get up at just gone six ay-emm every day
3. The travel costs would be about £3000 for the time that I'd be working there.

Snazzy goshwow-ism

An improvement, no?

Testing

Working again

Bibliophile

I went shopping on Saturday and managed to buy no less than eight books in about 100 minutes. Eight! Granted, three of them were for other people[1], but still! I did manage to resist buying two books though, so I count that as a partial triumph. I am now the proud owner of:

• Minority Report, by Philip K. Dick
• Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
• The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul, by Douglas Adams
• Don't Panic!, by Neil Gaiman (about Douglas Adams)[2]
• Dune Messiah, by Frank Herbert

And now that I'm driving to school, in a car without a CD player, I am rediscovering the redundant and formerly-believed-to-be-obselete format of cassette tapes. Yesterday I recorded three cassettes just for the car, and I have about another five to do. They take quite a bit longer than 90 minutes to record though, since the recording process consists of:

• Deciding which albums will fit onto the cassette
• Selecting the relevant songs in Winamp, and adding more or trimming as required until the playlist is 90 minutes in length
• Shuffling them into random order, and then reordering to make sure that it's unlikely to be a song I particularly like being cut off halfway through when the tape changes sides
• Burning the MP3s as audio files onto a CD-RW (so that I can reuse it) which takes about 20 minutes for a full CD, since my CD rewriter has a nasty tendency to crash if asked to write at anything above 4x (although it says it can do 12x)
• Taking the CD-RW and cassette downstairs to the only music system in the house that can read CD-RWs, and starting to record
• Keeping a watch on the CD player since, when writing audio files to a CD-RW, about 1 in 8 songs will stick, so I then need to skip that track
• Erase the CD-RW and put more tracks on it to fill the 90 minute cassette
• Repeat

Talk back

And I forgot to mention; I've reinstalled the comments, despite not being able to see them when using my home computer. There's some sort of problem with displaying Javascript text as a link, I think. Javascript is definitely turned on, because I can see 'Comment' links on other people's sites, just not my own. And I'm not entirely sure what to do about it, except to reinstall something (isn't that the M$ troubleshooter? Restart, reboot, reinstall?)

Stone age technology

And having had the first play in the car of my compilation cassette tapes, I have now remembered why we all switched from cassettes to CDs and MDs. Nasty background hissing! And that muffled bass is dreadful... of course, it's possible that it's just the quality of my particular cassettes that is in question, but... *shudder*

I don't suppose anyone wants to buy me a nice car with a CD player? (Do E-type Jags come with CD players?)

We are not fooled

Saddam Enrages Bush With Full Compliance
WASHINGTON, DC?President Bush expressed frustration and anger Monday over a U.N. report stating that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is now fully complying with weapons inspections. "Enough is enough," a determined Bush told reporters. "We are not fooled by Saddam's devious attempts to sway world opinion by doing everything the U.N. asked him to do. We will not be intimidated into backing down and, if we have any say in the matter, neither will Saddam." Bush added that any further Iraqi attempt to meet the demands of the U.N. or U.S. will be regarded as "an act of war."

Playground tactics on all sides

I think my cynicism levels are a little shocking for someone my age. But not extreme! There was a quote a few weeks ago from someone implementing the scheme, and she was promoting it, listing all the benefits and so on - she said that "traffic levels will be down to summer holiday levels in six months". Six months from February 17th. Which is the middle of August. Which is in the middle of the summer holidays.

Made me grin, anyway :)

The Empire Strikes First

Good god. More repulsive than the Guernica news story of last week, here's another article (from the New York Sun) that truly disgusted me, written about the New York peace march that was due to be taking place on Saturday:

Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly are doing the people of New York and the people of Iraq a great service by delaying and obstructing the anti-war protest planned for February 15. The longer they delay in granting the protesters a permit, the less time the organizers have to get their turnout organized, and the smaller the crowd is likely to be. And we wouldn?t want to overstate the matter, but, at some level, the smaller the crowd, the more likely that President Bush will proceed with his plans to liberate Iraq. And the more likely, in that case, that the Iraqi people will be freed and the citizens of New York will be rescued from the threat of an Iraqi-aided terrorist attack.

[ . . . ]

So the New York City police could do worse, in the end, than to allow the protest and send two witnesses along for each participant, with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution.

On a similarly disturbing note, and same topic: "US lawmakers are threatening to take retaliatory action against France, Belgium and Germany for their opposition to US policy towards Iraq."

Anger with the French and German stand has led some US congressmen to call for a trade boycott of French products and the withdrawal of some US troops from Germany.

[ . . . ]

[Donald Hunter] said that the House would now strongly back the plans by the Bush administration to reduce the number of US troops in Germany from the current level of 71,000. "Anything we can do to hurt them without hurting us, I will support," said Republican congressman Peter King.

[ . . . ]

Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, J Dennis Hastert, has asked Congress to consider banning French exports of wine and bottled water on health grounds. He says that some French wine is clarified using bovine blood, so that Americans could be at risk of getting BSE or "mad cow" disease.

[ . . . ]

Orders at the French cheese website, fromages.com, which gets 80% of its business from the US, have dropped as the site as received many e-mails from angry customers. "Because of the current position your government is taking on not supporting the U.S. at this time regarding Iraq, we are not going to support France in any way," one e-mail said.

All of this has completely stunned me. Just how much of these fucking playground tactics do they think they can get away with?

The answer to which, of course, is all of them. Because they are who they are, the popular kids with a vindictive streak, they can throw tantrums and bully everyone else into doing exactly what they want.

Sorry for all that - I've tried to stay off this topic so far, but I really got angry about it. To make up for making you read through all that (see, I'm considerate really ;) here's some light relief (although, in deference to the whole of this post, it's on the same subject) :

If You're Happy And You Know It Bomb Iraq
by John Robbins

If you cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq.
If the markets are a drama, bomb Iraq.
If the terrorists are frisky,
Pakistan is looking shifty,
North Korea is too risky,
Bomb Iraq.

If we have no allies with us, bomb Iraq.
If we think that someone's dissed us, bomb Iraq.
So to hell with the inspections,
Let's look tough for the elections,
Close your mind and take directions,
Bomb Iraq.

It's pre-emptive non-aggression, bomb Iraq.
To prevent this mass destruction, bomb Iraq.
They've got weapons we can't see,
And that's all the proof we need,
If they're not there, they must be,
Bomb Iraq.

If you never were elected, bomb Iraq.
If your mood is quite dejected, bomb Iraq.
If you think Saddam's gone mad,
With the weapons that he had,
And he tried to kill your dad,
Bomb Iraq.

If corporate fraud is growin', bomb Iraq.
If your ties to it are showin', bomb Iraq.
If your politics are sleazy,
And hiding that ain't easy,
And your manhood's getting queasy,
Bomb Iraq.

Fall in line and follow orders, bomb Iraq.
For our might knows not our borders, bomb Iraq.
Disagree? We'll call it treason,
Let's make war not love this season,
Even if we have no reason,
Bomb Iraq.

Hasn't it grown?

In other news...(I would have included this in the last post, but the filk seemed like a pithy sign-off ;)

NASA have generated some baby photos of the early universe:

Everybody say, "ahh..."

Explosive situation

Police have arrested a man carrying a live hand grenade at Gatwick Airport and evacuated one terminal. All flights out of the north terminal were suspended after the man - thought to be a 37-year-old Venezuelan - was detained under anti-terrorism laws.

I've been feeling a bit subdued and deep-down worried all day really - probably something to do with the fact that I'm going to fail my P5 mock exam tomorrow - and getting more appalled and sickened by the whole US/Iraq situation (as evidenced below) and I happened to read Wil's latest blog entry which sounds like it was written in the same mood that I'm in at the moment. I love that I can just go and read through the blogs on my regular blogroll and find something that really resonates with how I'm feeling, something that cheers me up, and something that leaves me glowering in mock-hurt national pride.

I love the internet. But I'd better go and start revising now for that exam...

We are being lied to

Google expands the empire

I imagine that this will be a huge boost for Blogger (Bloogle? Glogger?) and for users of Blogger Pro, who will probably (eventually) get a whole load of new features courtesy of Google. Google, presumably, will get a great index of all the Blogger and Blog*spot supported blogs, but who knows what they plan to do with regards to non-Blogger weblogs. I also have a vague idea that even the non-Blog*spot free users (such as me) will slowly become more restricted in the features we have access to, or could have Google-style text ads imposed on our blogs. There's an interesting discussion going on at Burningbird.net, if you want to follow it more closely. Evan Williams (head of Pyra) says it will mean "great things" for all Blogger users (and non-Blogger users alike). In any case, it'll be interesting to watch.

And I can always move to Movable Type.

In meta-news[1], and rather unexpectedly, it seems I was the first person to submit the Opera borks MSN story to Boing Boing, who have credited me with it :)

Traffic down

Lire en francais

What am I reading?

Why? Um.

For various reasons, more carefully explained here, and which I'm not going to go into now because I'm tired, but which I will elaborate upon tomorrow, hopefully.

G'night :)

Introverts Anonymous

Too much Buffy

In meetings yesterday with senior officials in Moscow, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton told the Russian government that "we're going ahead," whether the council agrees or not, a senior administration official said. "The council's unity is at stake here."

A senior diplomat from another council member said his government had heard a similar message and was told not to anguish over whether to vote for war. "You are not going to decide whether there is war in Iraq or not," the diplomat said U.S. officials told him. "That decision is ours, and we have already made it. It is already final. The only question now is whether the council will go along with it or not."

Nothing much has happened since last week - oh, except for me watching the whole of Buffy season 4 in six days, as I was trying to avoid revising for my mocks (which are this week). It worked, I can tell you that! And maybe in a couple of months (thanks to my friend who's lending me all the tapes) I'll have actually caught up with Buffy and Angel and I'll be able to, y'know, have conversations with people about them. Which will be strange. And I predict getting very irritated when I have caught up and I watch the latest season on BBC2 and it takes six months to complete, with a whole week in between episodes.

[For those who don't know, I only very belatedly discovered Buffy about five months ago[1], with the second half of season 2 being repeated on BBC2. I have since watched the rest of that series, and also seasons 1, 3, 4 and Angel season 1, all with borrowed boxsets. Buffy good.]

Oh, and by the way, I'm making an effort to avoid spoilers (so don't spoiler in my comments if you know what's good for you). However, I already know the two big things that happen at the end of series 5, so this effort may be a bit wasted.

I'm not going to say anything about how my mocks are going until they're over - tempting fate, and all that. On which subject, I discovered on Monday that I have another exam superstition, in addition to 'the difference between a paper being easy and being challenging is partly due to which fountain pen I choose to write with'. I have switched pens in the middle of an exam before because of this, although I'm normally not superstitious - I'm a scientist, for heaven's sake, I'm doing maths, further maths and physics A-levels, and physics with computer science at university![2] However, my new one is that I will not turn off my calculator before the end of an exam even if I've finished it 20 minutes early, ditto collecting all my papers together. It's clearly tempting fate to be metaphorically shouting, "I've FINISHED!" when you might, in fact, before the end of the exam suddenly realise a mistake that you've made.

Actually (I've just remembered) I tell a lie about nothing happening this week - I received an email from IBM telling me that they will call me for interview about their pre-university employment scheme which I applied for 4 months ago. And due to their stupid choice of subject line I almost deleted the email without reading it - the From: address was student_{something} AT uk.ib... (trailed off because the column wasn't wide enough to display it) and the subject line was: 'Your application'. This is IBM, they must know what typical junk mail looks like. And what with my email addy being a hotmail one, I get around 30 junk mails per day in my inbox.

I received one last week from YinI that was worse - the From: address read 'South admin' and the subject line was 'email address', all lowercase. I did delete that one before I read it, but I looked at it because I was curious. Lucky I did... I hope I haven't deleted any other important emails. Time will tell.

By the way, if you want to email me you can click on my name at the bottom of each post - it sends mail to a suespammers.org account, which is a valid email address.