Again, yet more exams have crept up on me; ready to surprise me in new and possibly unpleasant ways.
Good luck to everyone else taking exams this season.
-Alex
Well today was the day, the first of many many A level mark days; and I think it’s safe to say that I came out of it fairly well.
I’m fairly sure that I’m going to resit Maths C2, because I was really not on form when I did that paper. Otherwise, I’m fairly happy with those grades- especially physics. 
It’s been several months now since I last said anything noteworthy (bar expressing my disgust at the science funding crisis) and it’s probably time that I wrote something. Thanks to AppleCare my ageing iBook miraculously changed into a macbook before Christmas by virtue of some faulty bluetooth chip, my mac mini has since transformed into a powerhouse of an Intel Quad 2 machine running Fedora 8, by virtue of Christmas and has now got two monitors (running fairly happily under compiz, which is as the internet leads me to believe; is a complete miracle or the norm- depending on who you ask). I am currently in the first year of my A level course studying Physics, Chemistry and Math/Further Math and have just taken my first set of module exams back in January and am expecting results imminently, and am just at the stage of looking at Unis and courses. Any University propaganda is welcomed heartily, especially if it discusses the merits of a Computer Science and Physics joint honours course or either of the two as single honours.
I expect to be posting reactions to my AS module 1 grades, the Asia concert tomorrow night and the hopefully upcoming Jonathan Coulton concert sometime this month.
And my driving test. >_< So until then,
Alex.
In other news, Kristopher Tate is rolling out another Zooomr update on Monday, which should be fairly awesome, and should see some concert photos from me.
The STFC have recently massively slashed the budget for Physics in the UK by £80million. It means amongst many other things that the UK will drop out of exceedingly important international research, and many British research programmes will come under threat. It will also make it exceedingly difficult to take up further studies of Physics as a career.
No matter how this is construed, I cannot see anything good coming out of this decision and therefore urge all of you who are eligible to sign this petition and to join this group on facebook, which also plays host to much important information regarding this.
Happy (belated) new years everybody, it’s been a fairly hectic 2007 for me; and things are starting to look up for 2008. However, I am currently snowed in with AS level stuff; so am going to be unable to blog as often as I would like to- and I’ve got some exams around the 10th which need revising for.
Since the iBook’s replacement by Apple, I’ve also built myself a fairly nice Linux box with the individual parts which I got for Christmas from my family. I’m happy to say that I’m running Fedora 8, although I did try out ubuntu and didn’t like it. [This advice is indispensable] With an upcoming Windows HDD for playing games [mainly in case they don’t want to run under wine] so within the next month or so I’ll try and post some thoughts on both Linux and the Orange Box :D, and maybe several posts on the virtues of not randomly editing system config files. Using Linux is not without some caveats unfortunately, although from the limited recent experience (I used to use SuSE back at version 8.2) it does seem to have the most to offer in terms of features alone.
Well, a prosperous new year to you all- for I must go now. I hope to update with some more frequency this year.
Edit:
I also have some play-asia vouchers for $5 off of $50 which I won’t be able to use in time, so if anyone especially wants them; just leave a comment.
Merry Christmas and a happy new year to all.
-Alex.
Recently, my iBook’s bluetooth module and Sleep LED assembly decided that actually functioning was not worth the endeavour- so I took it along to the Apple store in Southampton. Unfortunately, the problems with my iBook were irreparable and as it was under Apple care; they gave me a new MacBook.
Moral of the story: get AppleCare whenever you buy an Apple computer.
The k800i is, all-in-all a very nice phone. One of it’s main fairly innovate features is that it can run firmware updates from the menu and download them over the air. This would be fairly useful as a first diagnostic against a software problem with the phone as the occasional 20mb download wouldn’t really hurt the networks here, however it has been unsanctimoniously disabled.
This is an even worse shame when you get to discover that the official PC based updater is a complete bastard to get working. Let alone it needing a PC to run it on. To get this tool (gratefully necessitated by the good folks at three) you should firstly download a reasonably recent version then you should install flash player with this exact link, because installing it in Firefox is fine for most functional uses of flash, but this requires an ActiveX installation of Flash- which unsurprisingly almost no-one will tell you.
Pity it didn’t fix the problems with my phone though.
Bugger.
Ugh.
On updating iTunes and Quicktime my mac froze and upon rebooting I discovered that something went wrong.
Very wrong in fact, with the “Welcome to Leopard” wizard appearing on logon and refusing to let me log in.
One full time machine restore later and my mac is working again, unfortunately it’s now refusing to back up.
But now I’m looking to replace my mac with something home grown again…
It seems that Joss Whedon has been granted a new series to write with Tim Minear. From what’s been said it looks like it should be brilliant- but it’s being made by Americas FOX network. Hopefully it should only be a matter of time before a British channel expresses interest (although I’m still waiting for BBC to play firefly sometime).
But as television here goes, all I’m finding myself watching is Heroes, Spooks and QI. Without the iPlayer as the BBC have yet to release a version for OSX (or preferably an open platform based on Dirac).
Digg
