Exams have finished
Well, that’s the end of exams for this year. Some minutes ago I completed my final exam, the second food paper, and so that’s it! I am proud of how I broke the mould with my final answer, turning a six mark, half a side answer into a two and a half side essay by going onto extra paper on “the implications of health and safety legislation for manufacturers and consumers”. Overall, my exams have gone well. The only ones where I’m more iffy about not getting an A* are English (lack of skill), History (lack of time) and Food (really hard to get it – high boundaries etc.). However I remain confident that it is quite possible to get the straight A*s I have been aiming for. It is strange now knowing that so much of what I have learnt I will never use again. I do not like the attitude of learning so much and then not putting it to use beyond these exams, but I have probably complained about it before on here at some point.
I now have the question of what to do with my long summer holiday. I have a number of things to do and I would actually like to complete some projects that really should be done. I suppose it is the last really free bit of time I will ever have until retirement with the career I have in mind, so we shall see. I would like to get a job for two, three or four days a week, because I would like the money for University (bah capitalist education systems are evil) and also it is experience and an alternative activity. However, at the same time I do want a number of days off for my online work and other things: I intend to do a lot for Wikimedia and freenode (see the last post for something that I will be developing and coaxing along, as it’s excellent it’s landed just before this break). The downside of this is that I have several hundred e-mails to read that I no longer have an excuse not to, but I will get to it. Hopefully I can do some really useful stuff in mediation, OTRS and ComProj as my usual work, perhaps with other things on the side.
Ringing is the other thing that I intend to push, as I have said in previous posts. I have moved on to ringing the “tenor behind”. This means ringing steadily at the end of other bells which are changing around in a odd-numbered method. There are two reasons for doing this, the first simply being that for odd-bell methods you generally need someone doing it in order to maintain a pleasant sound (and it’s easier to ring a method when learning with someone always at the end to lead off I believe) and as an exercise it helps to develop ropesight, which is very important for method ringing. This is a concept of being able to ’see’ all the ropes at once and being able to judge who is going to come down before you as you change speed is something that must be developed. I’m told some ringers never do get it very well and thus their ringing suffers, but I hope to not be in that group. If you were a perfect striker who could change speed etc. without following another bell it would be completely useless because you wouldn’t need to confirm you had your rhythm right, but it’s a pretty standard way of ringing. There is an alternative of doing it by numbers (using coursing order, a concept which I am struggling to understand) but this is not reliable on more complex methods.
Fnord.