Archive for March, 2006
Hobbies, Games & SilentFlame
SilentFlame has moved over to a new server this week. I got so sick of the old one, with the frequent downtime and disc corruption (and so did the customers), that I decided to move over to one with more stability. Unfortunately, xyrael.net is not functioning at the time of writing, but I am going to get round to fixing this eventually. Getting customer accounts online is a bigger priority, as I don’t want people leaving for other places because of our present lack of stability. Let’s hope things get better. Oh, and I got a new customer today – raptor_bob has joined with the domain matt-shaw.co.uk, so we’re continuing to grow and grow. Sigh, I hope this gets sorted out soon and we can move along smoothly.
Oblivion has arrived! I have finally got my hands on the fourth Elder Scrolls game, but I can’t actually play it yet because my computer is no where near powerful enough to handle it. I really hope that it will still run after we get our eventual upgrades sorted. It would be quite nice. Also, I’m probably going to join Rosie’s church bell ringing group. I can’t wait!
Wish I could write as much as Hannah.
Interesting Week
It’s been a very short week and when I entered it normally on Wednesday I really felt out of sync – I’d totally missed my library duty and lost track of what was happening in a big way. It took me some time to adjust to the normal running of the school! This was all because I had an inset day on Monday and then a school trip on Tuesday. The former passed uneventfully enough, but I was a little bored at some points and was ashamed that I was unable to entertain myself properly. Tuesday was a great trip to Sheffield Hallam University for a look at industrial scale food making equipment. I arrived early, as always, to find Alex and the teacher hovering around the entrance hall. It was then discovered after several ring-rounds that the course was not as Psalter Lane Campus, where we were, but instead at City Campus, all the way smack bang in the middle of the busy town centre! So we waited for everyone else to arrive and then struggled down on the bus, and I only hope that the teacher was able to claim back the bus fare for about twenty children on the school finance system. It was all quite amusing, but things did get sorted out in the end and we were able to enjoy the trip. First we had to get all kitted out in white coats, and we took a look around a microbiology lab. We did a test of our handwashing skills and mine were almost perfect, the only exception being around the nails; by far the best in the class. We then donned a different set of white coats and washed our hands with knee-operated taps and foot-operated bins, plus hair nets (on EVERYONE ^_^). We did some taste-testing, which was interesting because of the rules and randomisation involved. Several people went off to a proper testing room where different coloured lights stopped them from subconciously interpreting the colour of the food in relation to its taste – but I am informed that it doesn’t work very well. After lunch we saw the equipment and some students working, and the demonstrator made some ice cream which we promptly polished off.
Saturday presented another trip offering, the Eleventh Sheffield Popmaths quiz. I arrived extremely early, as before, and was first there from our school. My teacher arrived shortly afterwards and then we had to wait for ages before the rest of the pupils and teachers arrived. Of course the sixth-form team considered themselves so vastly superior that they didn’t meet with us and instead spent the time in a café. When Mr Christopher came around later and asked for a spare calculator (I’d brought two) because none of them had thought to bring one I wasn’t best pleased, as you can probably imagine. The quiz was fun, but we only scored 60%. We did have a team member missing (down to five from six), but it was still annoying because we really felt that we’d have done better. Surprisingly, I did best with the geometry questions. Tactics were very important – questions were fired off every three minutes and so we had to divide our resources to get ones that we had missed done. Afterwards, it was time for the maths lecture. I wandered across the complex to the Adsetts Centre, and found a seat. It was most interesting: using an old credit card and an upside-down bicycle, the lecturer developed a system for working out the notes in a musical scale mathematically. It was all very interesting, and by the passing of notes I introduced raptor_bob to the idea of ‘Brown Noise’, which he found most sickening, especially the fact that it was recently broadcast across the nation. They projected a graphics calculator up on a screen during the second half, with different lecturers, it was a TI-83+ SE. There were some interesting things going on but only the sixth formers were probably grasping it, and I was getting a rough idea of most of it. It wasn’t really aimed very well, but it was still very interesting. Then I went and grabbed a panini for my lunch, bought some books and caught the bus home.
SilentFlame went down around Thursday/Friday, and it was really annoying. More can be read on the SilentFlame blog here. I’ve also been getting into VisualBasic.NET, and have a new program for SilentFlame clients in the works – contact me if you are a customer or not and you feel like a little beta-testing.
Ho hum. Cya.
Dragon Magazine & Other Fantasy Stuff
As some of you may know, I’ve been subscribed to Dragon Magazine for about a year and a half now. Sometimes I find articles that look extremely boring. Often there are good ideas that are unimplementable due to strict over-dming; this is the most common category. Finally, there are those articles that just blow me away. I read this magazine for the last category, as I find that I like to focus on characters rather than on worlds, which is quite unlike my usual forté. This surprises me. My issue is that I often feel obliged(SP?) to read the entire mag through and this stops it from being as enjoyable. But if I don’t I feel as though I have wasted it. So, to settle my conscience a little, what do you lot do when you read a magazine? Feedback would be greatly appreciated.
There was an advert in this issue for a sci-fi book club, the usual compulsory-buying ones. It was only available in the US, and I had no intention is signing up, but the headline on the page really brought back memories; it went something like this: ‘Stand fast, fight hard’. That just says it all. I recently got an old CD player in my room and have been playing my computer game, gaming, filk and the occasional misc. piece through it. The same thing happens when I play some of those pieces. I’ve also been messing around with some traditional MIDI game music, and it takes me to another world. I don’t like to be affected emotionally by music because it is an illogical process that I try to transcend. But it is still happening. But the music makes the rest of my house angry and frustrated if they get close to it, and such an antynomous (correct word?) situation is beyond my skill to explain.
I need to get reading again. I’ve been off school today because it’s been an inset day and I found myself getting bored. This hasn’t happened for a long time. My usual book consumption levels are dropping and this is not a situation that I wish to continue. I think I’ll set aside a reading time in the evening that I’ll try and stick to pretty rigidly if I can, the eventual conclusion being that I am gradually getting back into the habit. Although my reading skills in school and the like have not degraded, Matt, Peter and Rosie are just about faster than me in things I am actually trying to understand (and I have always considered myself to be a very fast reader), because I am having trouble comprehending on the fly and am re-reading pages a lot more. This is not at all good.
Which brings me on to my next point, in a roundabout fashion: L-Space. Since recently learning the true significance of Einstein’s theory of relativity (correct me if I’m wrong here), that energy and matter are interchangable, I can now properly understand the L-Space equation, which is particularly prevalent in my life because the second and third terms have particularly application to my way of thinking:
Books = Knowledge = Power = Energy = Matter = Mass
I’ve been doing some more research and found the following:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/safeperl/mert1404/simsite.cgi?page=LSPC
This is written for a roleplaying system, but it’s still very interesting.
http://www.lspace.org/about/whatis-lspace.html
A nice, simple definition page. Go read.
The coolest thing about l-space is that it applies to any book, film, game or indeed real life (I’m really getting into italics today). That means that theoretically one could move from Middle-Earth over to Houen (Pokémon). Practically this isn’t possible because you need a huge amount of books to open the portal, and this hasn’t been acheived yet. I would write more – go read the link above! You can see that I’m very excited about all this. After all, I ALWAYS prefer a librarian over a bookseller of any form.
So, it’s time to go off and read The Colour of Magic. Let’s hope it improves.
Knitting Time
Yay, time to get knitting again! ChoChiyo is going to crochet me a scalf in Dr Who style, and I’m going to knit one for her, then we can swap. It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out. I’m not sure how to go about the design, but the stitching will be pretty simple in order to get it finished within a year. I wanted to do moss stitch, but moving the wool back and forth would be too complicated. I’m really looking forward to getting going but I don’t want to rush it and make it not as quality. The design is important! I need to take stock of my wool reserves, taking into account the fact that I am able to get loads from school because I’m one of the few who knits and they have tons of yarn but no needles.
Grr, I wish I had the patience to write more. I’ve decided that I might keep a notebook about me so I can note blog things down. I wish I had an appropriate notebook that I’m not too bothered about taking to school.