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New Year’s Resolutions 2009
I’m not generally one to make any resolutions at the beginning of every year but whilst sitting at my desk this year I spontaneously decided to set a few in my beautiful notebook that I got as a prize in London and at that point had yet to use. So I now have a few things to try and do for the year ahead.
- Read for at least half an hour a day (school work excluded)
I want to read more than I do but I simply don’t prioritise it and then run out of time every evening and end up reading virtually nothing. So, on days when I can, I am to read every night in some regard. So far I’m generally doing this, with obvious exceptions for when I can’t, such as last night when I was out at the Oxford Union debating competition - Drink some milk and eat some fruit every day
I often forget to drink milk (though I like it) and my fruit intake is close to zero so I thought this might be a good idea - Keep a diary in [beautiful notebook]
This was another spontaneous decision. While I have this blog, there are daily details and moments that I would like to write down that really would be completely dull and routine to anyone reading this blog. While I must admit that the main reason I want to write it is that I love writing in my new purple-inked fountain pen that I got for Christmas, it’s a constructive thing to do. Moleskine notebooks are amazingly nice to work with - Don’t put off until tomorrow something that can be done today
A common phrase but one that I think rings true: if everyone did this, the world would run a lot more smoothly. I’m particularly prone to putting things aside and then not actually getting them done at all due to my poor memory, so I guess I’m trying to remember this more clearly this year - Don’t take on responsibilities I know I won’t fulfill
I have a tendency to get involved in far too much and find myself then unable to keep up with everything. I’ve hopefully learned from this and I aim to notice it when it happens and do something about it: delegate responsibility, recognise my mistake and pull away and prioritise - Don’t worry about taking a long time to do things
There’s no need to rush. It doesn’t matter that I’m slower than those around me. Just work at things at a reasonable pace - Write a blog post at least once a fortnight
I must admit, I’m really not convinced that this one is going to happen. My blog ceases to be interesting and continuous if I wait too long between posts though so I do intend to try and write here more often. Hopefully my third resolution will not detract from this - Improve my mental maths and learn my times tables by the end of the year
Like everyone else in my class, my mental maths is atrocious: we find ourselves doing sums like 24/8 on our calculators as a matter of routine (and far simpler ones than that). I’m slightly better on things such as surd manipulation because I don’t have a calculator that does this for me and I am very practised, therefore, at manipulating things about in my head. But when it comes to actual numbers I am slow and make many mistakes. So I am going to try not to resort to my calculator when I obviously don’t need to, to try and get out of bad habits. Learning my times tables, which I have never done, also seems sensible - Interrupt people less
I do this far too much. Let’s see if I can improve.
So there we have it, some targets for the year. Wish me luck!
Message
Brain: it DOES NOT MATTER that I’m not the best at my subjects; I’m never going to be a savant and hence it IS IRRELEVENT that I’m not top of the class. Why won’t you listen?
I have a nix desktop again
I finally got round to doing away with the slow-loading, out-of-date, vaguely commercial Fedora Core last night and stayed up rather late getting ubuntu on. I must say, it really advertises itself well as it was insanely easy to install. Boot from the CD, and after a few minutes you have a fully working system. Obviously there are some limitations as its a live CD but it’s a nice philosophy – just run ‘Install’ from the desktop. There are a minimum number of options and it’s painless enough. I wiperised my old partitions and then with a little fiddling (that needed some thought due to an interface that wasn’t an obvious as I would have liked) I got it to create what it needed. Once installed and rebooted it updated itself, which was done very professionally. My task before going to bed was to get the bootloader to default to windows. I got some help with this (and with other things) from my ubuntu-savvy friend nalioth and got this sorted rather quickly. He tells me not to assume anything as the distro is so different – fex, apparently all I need to do to get my printer shared over the network for the benefit of the laptop using a simple applet somewhere. Unfortunately, I may not have time this evening but I hope to. Then I can use it almost exclusively.
I did want to use gentoo but I don’t think I’m really good enough to get it working graphically without frying anything. So, I’m sticking with my current little setup for now and maybe the no root philosophy will grow on me!
xyrael.net v3 // Welcome
So, this is my new site. I wanted a place where I could actually put pages of stuff again in an quick/easy fashion. The design is totally driven by CSS because this is obviously the way to go. Many will complain that it is too boring (try looking at it in FireFox – a curved corner!) as has happened before but I’m using my avatar to make the right area look nice. In fact, this avatar caused a lot of design issues because it moved around depending on the length of the page, so I’ve had to fix it’s y-position rather than having it in percentages. This is a shame. I’m also using Georgia as my main font. Over the past few months I’ve discovered this rather nice one and I’ve realised Blogger (who are still powering this blog, it’s the best way to post and keep a safe version – I hope their beta version still works with this blog) use it in their WYSIWYG. I’m glad that I’ve worked this out because I rather like it. Before now, I’ve used it for wiki stuff.
The backend (i.e. the important stuff) is using SSI to include stuff. This saves time and means that I can change the navbar significantly easier. Wait you say, this blog uses .html extensions! Unfortunately, because I can’t rename the individual post pages it is going to stay like this with an ugly hack causing Apache to parse all pages for SSI stuff in the xyrael.net domain. Another thing – I’ve reduced the number of posts on this front page to two so I need to keep them long in order to stop the right hand column, which relies on a rather simple CSS floating method, from spreading out below the main block. If there is a clean way of dealing with this please let me know.
I need to reorganise my links on the right too. I’m attempting to get more into the blogosphere as I want other people to link to me and vice-versa to help the traffic of both. Hopefully I can achieve this by getting more people signed up to my feed, which seems to be occuring. There is an IRC bot on freenode that broadcasts into a large channel when I make a post 
Since FTP is working again, I can so easily update from school etc. As you can see, I’m ultra-enthusiastic about this blog (yet) again.
This not mean a lot? Unfortunately, this post was only really for me. Now, let’s see if the comments blow up…