28/6/2006
Just checking in briefly: spent last week at an "oxbridge life" conference at St Cats, Oxford, which was great fun. It was an opportunity you don't normally get, to just live a week as tho you were a first year student (more or less). Daunting though the academic side of it (inevitably) was, it was nonetheless a very fun week, and I got the chance to meet some good people :-) And, of course, to get drunk three nights in a row - after all, it was supposed to give an insight into student life...
Of course, strictly speaking, it wasn't much other than fun - I was never in doubt as to whether or not I wanted to apply to Oxbridge (or rather to Cambridge, if I'm honest), so it didn't serve to pursuade me of anything. Not having spent a week as a student anywhere else, it wasn't really a comparison exercise, either. However, I guess it does at the very least prepare me somewhat for the terrors to come. Or rather the terrors which I hope are to come.
I had hoped to get online that week, and had brought the new (well, very old but new to me) linuxified laptop in order to do so, but it proved more difficult than simply pluging in and going (I'd have had to get a username and password), and in the end it became clear that I didn't really have enough time in which I was doing nothing so could go online for it to be worth getting it going. I then returned home and fried my main computer by misusing the powers of root (the superuser who has power to do anything), so I do have plenty of excuses as to why I haven't written anything here for far too long. It's only going to get worse now, as I'm off on a Duke of Edinburgh expedition next week, and I'm certainly not going to carry a laptop around with me on the off-chance that one of the fields we camp in has a wifi hotspot ;-)
In other news, my sister's come back! Returning from distant thailand yesterday, accompanied by innunerable elephants in every form you could imagine, was a rather shiney happy sister for Giles :-D
Happy Giles :-D
10/6/2006
DISPERSAL ORDER
UNDER THE ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR ACT 2003 A DISPERSAL ORDER HAS BEEN AUTHORISED BY CHELTENHAM BOROUGH COUNCIL AND CHELTENHAM POLICE FOR THE AREA BELOW.
[Map]
THE ORDER GIVES POWERS TO POLICE STAFF TO DISPERSE GROUPS OF TWO OR MORE YOUNG PEOPLE, AND TAKE THEM HOME IF REQUIRED, IF THEY ARE PRESENT IN THE SAID AREA AFTER 9PM.
THIS ORDER IS IN PLACE FROM 1ST JUNE 2006 TO 31ST OCTOBER 2006
FAILURE TO LEAVE THE AREA WHEN REQUESTED TO DO SO IS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE AND MAY RESULT IN ARREST
Second class citizens? I almost feel like wishing it were that good...
Quite apart from being judged based on the actions of (or even the perceptions held about) a minority, from a practical standpoint it's a nonsense. If there're no policemen present, then nothing has changed - thankfully, the general public aren't given any extra "powers". If there are policemen around, then they previously had all the powers they'd be justified in using: if people are causing trouble, there is legislation to deal with it (the wonderfully named loitering, for instance, is of course already criminal), and if there's no trouble there should be no need to disperse people.
Sorry if this has turned into a rant, but I'm pretty depressed by it...
3/6/2006
Cocooned... what with revision for some more ASs, which loom rather large, and doing all the technical stuff that mummy seems to want in her family service, I've been rather cut off from both the outside world and any threat of anything interesting enough to write up here happening to me.
I've written some useful C code, tho, which is quite an achievement: On one computer the only way you can play an audio file is by running a certain command, so there was no handling of playlists, and certainly nothing that could randomise a list. That's all been changed by 150 lines of C, which do a number of things I've never tried before (including running system commands from within a program, and using files as an input source). I don't really know why I keep blathering on about my tech stuff - I doubt many people who come along here can make head or tail of this nonsense, but then I suppose it is a fairly large chunk of my life. I am, indeed, a geek. Perhaps a geek page would be in order for the new site...
And England still can't play cricket - why do they have to keep being surprisingly good, and actually achieving things, so as to build up my hopes before losing to Sri Lanka (who are really a team of one player plus hangers on...)? Misery abounds.
:-(
;-)
One should be able to combine those smileys, perhaps into ;-( A man who's got a sad face, but is winking, so he doesn't really mean it... Sounds good in theory, but in practice it just doesn't look right.
1/6/2006
Apologies for the lack of updates - the first week-ish of absence was entirely my fault, but since then Lee & Dewi (who're generously hosting this site until I get my server going) have been changing hosting companies, so I havent been able to make any changes to the "live" version of the site. I did, however, add a couple of posts to the version on my computer, so there's a pair of updates below to fill the gap I left: