The darkened fields

The darkened fields
go flying by
hidden by the rain
and gathered cloud
as the sun sinks
unseen
far far away.

Out of the mist
trees loom, quickly passing
as the train travels on
passing on
as the light fades
futher
on the humming rails
over moors
through valleyss
Scotland passes by
the glass pane
a barrier
growing stronger
as the light fades
reflecting an enclosed world
Striving to keep out reality.
Failing.

The world reaches
into hearts and minds
will not be held out by
a pane of glass
but while the journey
travels on.
through a landscape
of beauty seen
though a clouded pane
clouds low lying
dropping their load
gently onto the
expectant hills

and though I know
the world trembles
here it steems only
the train.

Knowing the folly
of mankind could
destroy it.
hoping it will be saved.

not ready, not yet
not now.
'will you ever be ready
will you truly be done
the time's been set
the day will come
and you'll not be
ready
but you might be saved'

One should not sleep through ones alarm

It is a bad idea
It causes breakfast to be rushed and muscle burn to occur in the muscles of the jaw. This is an interesting experience.
Thankfuly someone started practising music after they had finished breakfast and this woke me up. My first thought was 'what a nice way to wake up' my second was 'what is the time' my third was 'ahhh!' further thoughts were muddled by high speed dressing followed by running followed by fast eating. but everthing was fine so everythind is alright.
:-)
I do have other posts to post - I just don't have all of them with me.

When the sun is shining

When the sun is shining
and I'm having fun
I'll cycle cycle, cycle on.
or cross the fells traverse
and over sparkling water go
and down the frothing river

but when its
raining dreary
wet.
I'll stay inside
or as yet
walk between the drooping trees
and think.

Or prehaps.


When the sun is shining
and I'm having fun
I'll cycle cycle, cycle on.

but when its raining dreary
wet.
I'll stay inside
or as yet
walk between the drooping trees
and think.

People listening to music on the train

on ipods with big speakers

Background music on trains?
Ugggh. And not even good music just annoying music – since when have we had to listen to horrible music on trains? People can listen to their own music that they like but forcing everybody to listen to horrible music… why? And it does not ven stop for the announcements. The guard of the driver fancies themselves a DJ? Not that there is any talking but the music changes a lot.

Actually it was the person sitting in front of me with big speakers bouncing it off the ceiling that made it sound like it was coming from the overhead speakers. But it seemed so strange that I stood up to check and saw instantly. Has this person no concept of personal space or noise pollution? On busses in London they sometimes have posters asking people not to be too noisy with their music and play it through their headphones so loud that other people can hear – to be considerate. But here on the train someone is using speakers.

But it is a grown up and I have not the courage to ask them to stop. From hair colour estimating 40-50+(and he listens to Bob Dylan not the worst but dates him) White Male. There is hardly a peep out of anyone else. *sigh*. He is giving such bad press being so inconsiderate. Occasionally he sings along and that is even worse – oh and explanation – he brought his own alcohol not that he is drunk just slightly less in control.

Oh well enough complaining already.

Enough complaining for a while in fact.
I will make a concious effort to be positive and to make your day more enjoyable.
The world may come crashing down but we will go down fighting - with a smile on our face.

Spacefighter will rise again

better and stronger than before. We are doing in maths vectors and differentiation again and so I will go back to basics an rewrite my problematic gravity code. I worked it out on paper anyway.

It is really annoying to have lost the sourcecode though the only link still working to internet based ones is the googlepages one that is the exe and the only one I ever gave to someone else to test was an exe. Though perhaps if I am lucky there might be an early version on the main computer J my hopes rise again.

Ha I found an old version - it was before I invented planets or lots of graphics and types of ships - but I have the minimap and the player conroled ship. Yey.

annoyed at the stupid manufacturers

Now I can be even more annoyed at the stupid manufacturers not only did they format my Hard drive when it did not need formatting but they failed to fix my laptop. They sent it back to Iansyst who when they were trying to reinstall found it still had problems – I had got all my hopes up thinking that it would be back Thursday or at the latest Friday but I will probably still have weeks to wait. AHHHH!!!

While my laptop was being fixed Iansyst had said that it probably would not be formatted and that it was very unlikely that it would be. When they got it back they said that of course it would have been formatted that is what Manufactures do. Ahh!

Accidental deletion.

While trying to delete the old version of windows messenger from my computer I accidentally deleted among other things Windows Media player and Internet Explorer. But not Windows messenger. You have to UNCHECK the tick boxes in the add/remove Windows components and I unticked everything I did not want to unistal. OOPS. Well I managed to get Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer reinstalled again - but I think some other things on that list won’t come back with out the disk – because rechecking the boxes and doing it again did not work – got windows media and internet explorer back but not some other things – it said files that were there weren’t there - I could find them and look at them but it said that they were not there. *sigh* I don’t use Internet Explorer I used Firefox but there was a gap in my desktop where the windows Media player icon should be. It took me a couple of minutes to work out what had happened and a couple more to work out how it had happened (I did the thing that did this earlier and it worked on restart (I am not really that supid)).

Oh well Panic over.

I won’t be making that mistake again. One should be careful what one does to ones operating system. – but that wizard was really stupid it was as if they thought that no one would try to use it, not designed for someone who had never used it before to use.

Hardrive formatted

My laptop which I had to send of to be fixed has had its hardrive formatted.
I am still shocked - there was nothing wrong with the hardrive.
I now have 22 programs to reinstal!
and I have lost the source code to Space fighter - after all that work - and all the graphics I had made and collected for it.
And anything else that was in program directories.
ahhhhhhhh!!!
wah!
I wanted to do something when I found out though I am not sure what I found out Monday or Tuesday I have calmed down since then. I am still angry at the stupid manufacuters though. when I find out who they are I will write a post about how terribly bad they are.
wahh.

Oh and I found that my new list of links to posts not constrained by time is broken. I will try and fix that.
Edit: It was just the one link that was broken and that is now fixed

Poshness in Private schools? (especially boarding schools)

This topic came up for discussion during my art games option (I don’t do art but I get to do it for my games option at least until the swimming pool opens (the terrors of sub-contracting)). People who go to private schools generally are more arrogant and posh (tweed, polo etc.) It comes from it costing lots of money. This does not mean that they aren’t nice people. Everybody is really nice – but then by about 5th form people started growing up (I had despaired that they ever would) and by the end of 5th form everybody was friendly so the feeling that people might be slightly nicer here than they were at my old school is probably to a significant extend biased by the fact that I am now in LVI. But here you have to live with people every day you don’t want to get on bad terms with them.
I would definitely send my children to a state primary school and then to a school that would stretch their abilities – be that comprehensive grammar or if I can afford it private. I would not however send my children to boarding school until at least LVI unless I really had to and only would at all if they would benefit from it. I go because I did GCSEs which tie into A-levels not Highers (and A-levels are better anyway J).
So I have rambled on long enough I think.

Munro Club

Recently I went on the Munro club and it was fun.
We climbed up two mountains! A small one and a big one next door. We climbed vertically 1200m (lots of down in between the ups (a computer program calculated this we are not that sad))
For the majority of the time we were climbing through cloud. Which meant we missed the wondrous beauty of the Scottish countryside in terms of the views. “When the weather it good there is nowhere I would rather be” to quote one of the other people. It was still fun even if we were walking through cloud. The pace was faster than I am used to when hill walking with family and we did not stick to the paths so much – more taking a short cut straight up and scrambling along sheep paths. There were some nice bilberries en-route and we were provided with pack lunches which contained a sandwich, a piece of fruit, a bag of crisps, a chocolate bar, a can of fizzy drink (cococola zero is just as disgusting as the diet) and I was given at least 2 snack sized chocolate bars when I ran out of food. I also took 3 chocolate digestive biscuits with me and half of one escaped into the bottom of the bag and was crushed into a paste over stuff that was in the bottom – not nice.
When we had lunch we had it in a nylon shelter thing which is a bit like a large upside down bag that you sit inside – there were five boys in total + one leader (perhaps girls don’t like hill-walking?). It was amazing how much warmer it was inside the shelter with the wind taken out of the equation and 5 people inside (not enough space for the leader to fit in as well).
My trainers are still soggy and I should be using walking boots next time though even people wearing those got soggy feet. It did not really rain but the damp was penetrating.
All in all I enjoyed it – though I hope for better weather next time.

I HATE FILTERING

The IT department is preventing me from saving changes to the layout of my blog!
So I am stuck with stuff in the wrong place and looking stupid.
It does show off the new link list I have made but that is supposed to go right down the list below archives - bah.
curses on filtering by IT departments and on DRM because that is evil to.
And They block BoingBoing which I think could tell me how to get round the filtering - they were right they said they were being filtered by filter companies and they are - evil filteres.
haha I managed to add boing boing to my google homepage - so if they tell me how in a new post then I can use that.
They also block a page that tells you how to instal a program to get around filtering called circumventor.
so this is the page to get around stuff.


I have found the list of things you can be blocked from or for

Inappropriate software – password crackers, credit card fraud utilities etc.
Time wasting
Denial of service
Explicit material
Bandwidth consumption
Spamming
Hacking
Software piracy
Unauthorised use of confidential documents

Representatives of the BPI Anti-Piracy carry out surveillance of Internet sites and traffic, looking for instances of illegal music use, with a view to possible prosecutions.
For your information, the following activities are illegal, if done without the express permission of the copyright owners, and could lead to prosecutions and disciplinary action:
· Making a copy of a CD that you own, (done)
· Copying songs from a CD that you own on to your hard drive or any other storage device,(done)
· Making a cassette tape from a CD that you own, (I have copied music from a casset to my computer does that count?)
· Copying a CD belonging to a friend,
· Sharing music files across a network,
· Engaging in file trading of music,
· Downloading music from the internet to your hard drive or any other storage device (done but legaly)

All music is owned by someone. A company or an individual owns copyright to the music. There is copyright in the composition, the lyrics, the arrangement and the sound recording. The term of copyright protection lasts for 70 years after the composer dies, so all the music you are likely to download or copy will be protected by copyright. Under the law, only the copyright owners have the right to reproduce their music or sound recording.

WHAT ABOUT FAIR USE?

For example: it is a violation
to misuse Internet Relay Chat (IRC) software to allow users to hide their identity, or to interfere with other systems or users (the purpose of IRC is to allow conversation between people without them having to know each other or be sure of the others identity)
to send chain letters (oops I have done in the past - but only good ones)
to leave your computer logged on and unattended (I have certainly done that - not that it is connected to the internet or passworded or anything)

Oh and the stupid IT department has managed to write protect the folder we are supposed to put stuff in we want to share with other people at school. silly people.

Watching Rugby: school Rugby.

Loud
Violent fast moving game.
Lots of people jumping on top of each other in big piles. I don’t know the rules.
I do know that every player playing is better than I would be, and that must confer some kind of respect.
I am watching two games simultaneously though I could be watching three. I don’t know the score or who is winning. Apparently the relative school sizes are important and are against us. I think the tide is against us on at least one of the games though we are putting up firm resistance.
The ball just smashed into the stand beside me and a few moments later it was tumbling from great height down the slope in front of me and hit someone on the back.
Ohh first injury one player off. That is why they need subs. I did not see what happened. In the game with the first injury we had been forced into our 22 and the other side scored a try 5: nil down the other game is going much better only 1 : nil down. (I know a little of the technical terms from a bit of rugby training I had before I got myself transferred out to do other things instead).
There is definitely a reason why they wear weird helmet things, crashing headfirst towards the ground does not look fun.
70 minutes is a long time to sit in the cold – mental note next time wear a coat; this is Scotland.
Now I see why the headmaster told us to be courteous and sportsman like in assembly rugby is an emotional game.

Award assemblies – long and boring.

Prize giving and book signing ceremonies where you have to clap continuously are tiring as well as tedious.
Followed by class crosswords! At last my reading of fantasy comes in useful the person who stands in duel(I have not explained this well) is called a second. And I know what tacky means (like glue was the clue). Anyway I know words. :) (note both pictures are random)

Kayaking!

Recently I did my first kayaking on a river which was also my first kayaking for a while. It is much more interesting kayaking on rivers than on lakes. Much easier to capsize – you have to adjust your edge using your knees especially when crossing the current if you let the current side lean down then the pressure will build up and you will flip.
I managed to do the whole long trip without capsizing despite not having a bung (I did not realise this till I got out). I did however have to get out and walk for a shallow bit – I was not going anywhere and was only damaging the bottom of the kayak.
Kayaking is fun.

The etiquet of Kilt wearing

Today (last Sunday (notepad post)) was the first day I had to wear a kilt. I found there is more to it than I first thought.
Firstly you have to wear a sporn with your kilt otherwise you are not decent (despite wearing a pair of shorts and pants underneath) secondly you have to wear garters on you socks to stop them falling down. The socks are long reaching almost to the knee.

Wearing a kilt is an interesting experience. The bobbles on the sporon beat like a small drum as you walk. I can easily se the disadvantages of wearing skirts when you sit down you have to smooth your kilt underneath to prevent sitting on it in an uncomfortable way - and crumpling the back. Also it is more airy than trousers and so chilly in cold weather. Which makes it hard for me to see how it came to be the national dress of Scotland which is often cold; especialy in the morning. I can however see that skirts could be an advantage in hot weather.

When Kilts were first made they were big enough to ve the blanket for two people and they were more like togas and therefore much warmer.

Kilts can cost from 200 - 400 pounds (the pound sign is not working when you press it you get # ahhgrh) but I got mine for 40 pounds on the inerenet (nylon rather than hadmade wool) . You also have to wear a kilt Jacket with it and that cost over 100 pounds - extortionetly expensive, and very itchy. I feel more than slightly stupid wearing a kilt.

It is a long way ot Edinburgh in a rattling bus, nice scenerey and sky though.

Please bear with the low frequency of posting - I don't have much time and getting to an internet connected compueter is harder than usual.

Still no scanner working! and all they need to do is login! :(

Boarding school

I have now started at boarding school for the first time and I will now tell you about it.
Boarding school is... interesting.
The boarding house is far enough from the main buildings for it to be worth cycling there - but you aren't allowed to but it is not to far to walk.
I like the IT department better than the one at my last school already - despite their accidental failure to create an account for me at the beginning was swiftly remedied and I found that the space available on the system is all that you will need and that the only limit they put on you is that if you put lots of music on it then it will be deleted.
Also it is apparently possible to install programs onto the computer without administrator access. something I am thinking of taking advantage of before they fix it - if they intend to fix it.
ahh it seems that hole may have been fixed humbug.
But complete school coverage with wifi network and lots of space still great - I think I should recommend them some free software software seems to be a department which is lacking.
Okay the IT department is lazy and incompetent.
it still has not managed to make the @ key work - it is still found under the " key.
It still has not managed to get a single scanner to work - and all it needs to do is to log on as an administrator and then plug the stupid scanner in.
It has discovered all the problems with cloning - even cloning computers - a computer stuck in continuous restart was cloned and so the poor teacher lost address books and stuff. at least one computer does not have a sound card - how is a teacher supposed to show a video without one?
Food
The food is certainly more fatty and salty than I am used to - worse than my old school and much worse than home (where salt and fat are down to fanatically low level (DAD)). Chips every day this week for supper - and a couple of times for lunch as well (cook was ill or something and this should not happen normally) but fried eggs, hash browns, cream, bread and butter pudding made with butter (it does not need the butter). The food is however quite nice, and I can have grapes with every lunch meal. which is nice.

Sorry for the late arrival of this post - I started it ages ago but my loan laptop has no Internet connection as it has no wireless ability and it is not worth upgrading it as when I get my normal one back after the inordinately long time they have spent fixing it. More to come soon.

The smell of burning chicken stock

Is not very nice and if you smell it just before going to bed it is a very good Idea to go to the kitchen and turn off the hob. That bit I did right but poring water from a glass onto the smoking chicken stock was not such a good idea. but everything was all right in the end - though very smelly.

I have been a bit busy getting ready for going to bording school and have been distracting myself from nervousness with webcomics which I will tell you about when I can but at the moment I have to go. hopefuly I will be able to post again soon.