Life

Things that have happened in my life

Accommodation Offerings

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Bradford have offered me some accommodation, and ironically it’s in the same block that my dad stayed in when he was an undergraduate (Revis Barber Hall). What comes around comes around, I guess.

What I’m slightly annoyed about is that the restrictions on internet access in the rooms – it is supposedly only for academic use. The items listed as being disallowed didn’t include weblogging or general surfing (just chat and high bandwidth activities), though I’ll need to take a look at the full list first. And ironically, to be able to access the list on the intranet site I need to have a user name and password from the university, which I won’t get until I sign up with the scheme. Oh the irony.

The phone charges also seem a little steep. Specifically, 8p a minute for calling home is a bit harsh – hopefully my rhubarb card will sort that out though.

Not done much at home today, other than tidy up and do some ironing (that great masculine activity…). Next door are having their new fence extended, so we now have a shiny new (and reasonably stable) fence down one side of the garden. Now if only our other neighbours would get new fences too.

Tonight is Ventures – we haven’t planned anything specific though.

See ya tomorrow

Reading the bumpf

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Friday

Bradford sent me the welcome pack, with a huge pile of leaflets and brochures that I need to read and digest before I go. I also filled out a form to update my status with reference to my student loan – I doubt there’ll be any changes in the amount of money I’m entitled to, but at least they know where to send the cheque.

My auntie and uncle also came over – they’re based down in Norfolk but are doing a ‘northern tour’, visiting friends and relatives, and wanted to stop over for a night and see how we were doing. The weather was awful, so we wound up going to the designer outlet after lunch, and spent the evening watching Dad’s slides from when we went to France a few weeks ago.

Saturday

My auntie and uncle moved on across the Pennines, so we went out to the twice-monthly farmers’ market at Murton (note to self: must ask if they want a website…) and then went into town to do some shopping. Since I’d hardly been near a computer for the past 24 hours, I spent the rest of yesterday catching up with what I’d missed in terms of emails and ODP stuff.

Sunday

Another quiet day, mostly spent editing. Now you can see why I haven’t updated much.

You may, however, been interested to know that Trillian is vulnerable to security attacks. This was reported earlier in the month, but as yet there has been nothing done about it. Hmmm…

Mind you, today I downloaded no less than 4 security updates from Windows Update.

Releasing the pressure

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Well, I rang UMIST, and have now been ‘released’. I’ll probably get confirmation from Bradford on Monday. I’ll also need to let the bank and the Student Loans Company know that I’ve changed university. Fun, eh?

Been to Driffield today – my mum buys her bread flour from the nearby Bell Mills Garden Centre and she was about to run out, so she dragged me over there and bought 12Kg of the stuff. But it does make really nice loaves of bread…

Anyway, we didn’t spend long in Driffield (it’s a typical northern market town so there isn’t all that much there), but we did have lunch at The Bell Hotel, which I can thoroughly recommend; the staff were very friendly, the food was made to order in front of you and you can choose what to have in your sandwiches (including what extras), and they served real ale to boot. It’s a 3 star hotel in the Best Western chain – if you’re in the area, consider staying there.

Me = Not going to Manchester

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The letter from UMIST came today – I definitely don’t have the place, due to my A-level grades. I’ll ring them up later today – they have offered me alternative courses, but in something completely different (Textiles). Erm… what? I applied to do Computer Science. All of the other degrees on my UCAS form were Computer Science (or related). Why do I want to study Textile technology? Talk about adding insult to injury…

So, I’m going to Bradford in 4 weeks. Okay, so Manchester is a nicer city, and the accommodation at UMIST was better. But Bradford isn’t bad, and at least I’ll have free internet access in my room (albeit on 56k dial-up). And it’s closer to home.

Last night, we went out for a meal as a kind-of ‘getting into university’ celebration. Okay, we only went to the local pub, but we had a nice meal nonetheless (and I was absolutely stuffed afterwards).

The waiting is over

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The waiting is over – I now know my A-level results. But to be honest they weren’t really worth waiting for – I didn’t do nearly as well as I had thought I had done.

The best result was a ‘C’ in Geography, but I only managed dismal ‘D’ grades in Maths and French (of which I achieved ‘A’ and ‘A*’ respectively at GCSE only two years ago), and a ‘D’ in Computing AS.

What was really annoying was the fact that I would have got a good ‘C’ in computing, if it weren’t for the coursework – that didn’t even make ‘E’ grade. And apparently, my coursework was one of the best in the group. Doesn’t give you much faith in the York College computing department, does it?

But every cloud has a silver lining – I was still able to get a place at Bradford University on the course I applied for. I’m still waiting for a response from UMIST, but I doubt I’ll get in – by my calculations I was at least 60 points short of the 300 they were asking for. There is the opportunity of internal clearing at UMIST, but I’m unsure whether I really want to do the other courses that are still on offer in the Computing area. One is based around electronics – not good because I’m more of a software junkie – and the other was Computing with Geography, which might be worth it considering I did well in Geography, but do I actually want to do it?

The reason why I’m still waiting for confirmation is down to the fact that the UCAS website appears to have gone down, probably due to the huge numbers of people trying to access it. Fortunately I got in early while it was still working, which is why I know that Bradford accepted me.

Still, I’d find it incredibly annoying if I was trying to find information about clearing, or to get my results, only to find that the server isn’t working.

It’s getting ever closer

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It’s less than 24 hours to go now until I get my A-level results. I’ve already starting getting the ‘good luck’ text messages from some of my friends. What’s mildly annoying is that the universities that I’ve applied for already know how well I’ve done, and have done since Monday. Though I suppose that does mean I can get a reasonably prompt answer…

The bank also sent along my PIN number for my new bank account. Despite what it says on the letter I haven’t destroyed the number yet because I need to be able to remember it first. I know I can change it, but I don’t want it to be anything too obvious, or anything that is the same as my existing passwords (I use alphanumeric passwords since some places require them).

Officially an adult

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It’s my 18th birthday!!!

Yup, I’ve turned the big 1-8 today. Marissa (my new laptop) is now up and running, though admittedly not under Windows. I decided to go ahead and install Mandrake 8.2, and I’m very impressed. The CD autoran in Windows, and gave me the option of either booting from the CD (didn’t work) or creating a boot disk and using that. Although the boot disk creation was a little difficult (I had to read the documentation to find out what to do), it was done quickly and I was able to boot into the installer.

The installer was great – the ‘express’ option take about 30 minutes and was nice and easy to understand – there was plenty of help available and no confusing dialogs. The partition manager was excellent, though I did have to say goodbye to Windows XP due to the fact that Samsung had chosen to use NTFS, which, although it is recognised by Linux, isn’t supported. But it is a new system so I wasn’t going to lose anything.
I’m using KDE as my desktop – not KDE3, since this isn’t yet included – but 2.2.2 (I think). It also comes with a full office suite, more web browsers than you can shake a stick at (including Mozilla, which loads much more quickly than its Win32 counterpart) and various other tools.

There are down sides – I couldn’t get the sound to work, and I won’t be able to use the internet for a couple of days until NTL get their act together (I’m on Marianna, the old machine), but on the whole, I’m pleased with what the Open Source community has done here.

My other presents included a laptop backpack – or rather the money for it, though I got one today from PC World. It’s great – not only will it carry the laptop but the transformer, extra mouse (which also works in Linux, despite the fact that it is USB and has a wheel) and Ethernet lead, and a great deal else. I also got a wallet (to complement my proof of age card, which arrived this morning – nice one, Portman Group) and more money. The rest of my presents will be here tomorrow when my grandparents and cousins come over for dinner.
Anyway, I’m off out for my birthday party. See you later!

Back online

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Woo! I’m back online at home! The new 17” monitor is great – it is digitally controlled (as most are nowadays) and has a very sharp display. It looks good too. It’s made by Relisys – I don’t know if it is a good make or not but York Computer Clinic, who sold it to us, say it is a very good brand.

Although I won’t be allowed to use my laptop (when it arrives) until my birthday (darn parents), I have a new gadget for it – a USB->Ethernet adaptor. It means I can use one of its USB ports to hook up to the broadband connection, or, if I end up at UMIST, their internet system. It’s made by Linksys (who I gather are a good firm when it comes to connectivity products). So why didn’t I just get an Ethernet PCMCIA card? Well, although Computer Prices UK (the service I used to find my laptop) lists such cards at prices as low as £23.85, PC World were selling LinkSys cards for a hefty £69.99. This was only £39.99, and has the added bonus that it’ll work on any machine, whether it happens to be a laptop or not. Maybe what I read in the UK PC Magazine about the demise of PCMCIA was true…

The laptop, by the way, is due to arrive on Monday or Tuesday – Comet made a cock-up so they had no delivery address or time. Fortunately, a quick phone call sorted everything out. Buying online is great, when it works, and I think this is perhaps an example where it hasn’t quite worked. Incidently my mother’s credit card company actually rang her up to ask if her card had been stolen, since she bought both the laptop and our holiday (in July) on it, and thus was out of sync of her general buying profile. So a thumbs up to the Halifax Bank for keeping an eye on credit card fraud, even if it was a false alarm.

The computing project eventually got handed in on time; in fact the network server came back up shortly after I’d posted. So now all I have to do is revise for the exam on Monday, which hopefully shouldn’t be too difficult.

In case you’re interested, I’m using a new browser – Crazy Browser. It’s actually just another front-end for the IE HTML rendering engine, but offers many more features, and is very efficient – it doesn’t take ages to load or render pages, unlike Mozilla. Though I may take a look at version 1.0 when the final release is available and the debug code has been removed – and I still have RC1 installed.

In preparation for my laptop, I’m downloading the ISOs for Mandrake Linux 8.2 – after pressure from some of the people in , I’ve finally decided to venture into the world of Linux. Mandrake is supposedly the easiest to use (or at least to set up), and from experience I know that it can co-exist with Windows, so it’s worth a try. The first CD (the installation CD) has already been downloaded and burnt to CD, and I have 57% of CD2 (the supplementary CD). I’ll probably also get CD3 too, so that I actually have some programs to run; it includes StarOffice, which, along with Open Office, may be the program that pulls me away from the MS suites. Even with a student discount, £110 is still too much for Office XP.

Sorry for the long post – a week without blogging has given me too many ideas to post about 🙂 . See you later!

Okay, so here’s the explanation

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Okay, so here’s the explanation for the lack of updates: I’ve been busy. And here’s what I’ve been doing:

Tuesday

Not much to report, though I did stay back at college a little later than usual to get some help from the Maths department, about a rather nasty piece of homework. The afternoon was then spent working on the help file for X-Setup 6.2 (the latest beta uses the 6.0 help file I wrote over a year ago), and although I did type out a blog entry, a system crash wiped it.

Yes, briefly, my computer returned to its pre-fixed stage, whereby it would randomly crash if left on standby and thus require a reboot. I do believe it had something to do with Optimizer XP which uses the Inno Setup routine to optimise your system settings. However, I fear it may have tripped a setting, so I did a system restore and everything appears to be okay now. Despite what people say about System Restore hogging resources, it really is a life saver.

Wednesday

Today was the last of my university open days – this time it was the turn of Bradford. My dad decided to accompany me – probably because mum and dad came with me to Manchester on Sunday and mum became all nostalgic, and with dad being a Bradford graduate he obviously wanted to see how things had changed (or not). All in all it was a good day – it is now my second choice (since Newcastle is out of the running due to my potentially disappointing Maths results) and was better than Northumbria. The accommodation left a little to be desired, but there were good computing facilities – all rooms have phone sockets and dial-up net access is £40 a year unlimited (to put it into context, that’s how much you pay monthly for broadband at home), which also includes free internal phone calls. Okay, so UMIST has ethernet, but this isn’t bad. Better than Newcastle anyway, which is supposed to be one of the best Computing places in the country…

Wednesday night is Ventures night, and so we went swimming at Archbishop Holgate’s school. We got plenty of time in the pool, and I enjoyed myself quite a lot – I’m still recovering from tiredness though – I really did exert myself. Unfortunately yesterday I missed the Student union elections at college, so I couldn’t vote. I couldn’t nominate myself since I’m in the upper sixth (and therefore not around next year), but would have liked to have voted given the chance. Darn open days.

Thursday

So, today. It was my last day at college before the Easter break (wahey!), and Computing was cancelled so I only had two lessons. Though I did have to drop buy Tesco to buy a French stick for lunch – we were out of bread, though it smells like mum has made some more. Yes, we have a breadmaker, and yes, it’s great. It makes really nice loaves, actually, and it works out cheaper for making specialist breads. And it’s healthier since you don’t need to add preservatives. Other than being at college, I’ve spent the day working on Blankbusters at the ODP – it’s a project to rid the directory of web sites with blank descriptions, by adding them. I seem to have ended up with a load of education websites from Walsall (a lot of the UK education sites are without descriptions, I think because they were added in bulk and never sorted) – although I realise it is making a positive difference it can get a little repetitive. And I was amazed at how many schools have sites that are under construction – some haven’t been finished in 3 years or more. In fact, one personal home page hadn’t been updated in nearly 4 years, and was offering audio to stream in… wait for it… RealAudio 3.0! How times change… though at least back then it wouldn’t have had all of the spyware in it. I’m sticking with 8 – I’m in no hurry to upgrade to RealOne.

The Vorbis Petition is now at a whopping 752 signatures… the only way is up :). And if you’re wondering, my French coursework went in on Tuesday – I was just over the target of 700 words, and I think it was a reasonable attempt in the end. Let’s just hope my French teacher and the exam board agrees :).

Anyway, since I’m still recovering from Wednesday, I’d better sign off for the night – see you tomorrow morning, the first day of the Easter Hols! Woo!

Reviewing Newcastle

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Whew! What a day! College was interesting – since I was going onto Newcastle later on I had to was forced by mum to wear my suit… you wouldn’t believe the number of funny looks I got. Especially since I was more smartly dressed than most of the teachers…

After I finished Maths I jumped on a Park & Ride bus – this is York’s 10 minute shuttle bus between car parks on the edge of the city and the city centre – not cheap (£1.50 for a single – £1.60 for return) but generally quite reliable, especially off-peak. And one of the termini (?) is just next to college, and it stops at the railway station too.

Once at the railway station I walked over to platform 9 where the train was due – as I did a Doncaster test train pulled in, hauled by one of the Royal class 47s (named “Waverley”). It then departed, and a Virgin HST pulled in. Originally it was going to be 6 minutes late, then 3 minutes, then on-time, and finally 2 minutes late. But considering it had come from Bristol it was doing okay for time. Ask anyone about the reliability of Virgin Trains and you’ll get some kind of negative response…

I was in Newcastle by 12:20pm, so I had time to do a spot of shopping, though I didn’t actually buy anything. The advantage of Newcastle University, and in particular the building that I was due to meet in, was that it is right next to the main shopping area (next to Haymarket Metro station, if that means anything to anyone).

The course I’m applying for there, BSc Joint Honours in Mathematics and Computing Science looks like a good course, and the university itself isn’t bad either; the accommodation certainly looked better than Northumbria. Verdict: probably my second choice behind UMIST, but since I have yet to visit UMIST that may change. Though on paper at least, UMIST looks the better all-round university. I also got my AS6R letter from UCAS – this is the final form that I use for confirming my university choices, though fortunately the deadline isn’t until 26th April, so I have plenty of time. It also confirmed my declination from Edinburgh.

Oh well, it’s off to Ventures I go. See you later!

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