Thanks for all the gifts I received yesterday! I now have Trackmania: Sunrise, which is definitely the craziest car-racing game I’ve ever played, as well as a doubling of my computer’s RAM, Scene It and Things my Girlfriend and I have Argued About, all of which are great.

People at the party last night will have noticed I made a few cracks about Kate. Sorry about that. She was just on my mind as I was wondering whether she’d get in touch in any way, which she didn’t. Thankfully it didn’t upset me like at christmas, since it’s what I expected. Still, I do wonder quite what I did to justify this. I quite often start down this track and it ends up with me deciding that either she was pretending to like me for the whole time we were going out, or I was the worst boyfriend in the history of everything ever. So I’m going to try not to think about it any more; it doesn’t do anybody any good.

Mum and I hit Birmingham for most of yesterday and I picked up some clothes and various books. I resisted the temptation to buy an iPod, too. I actually walked into the sleek and shiny Apple store, which is a first for me Selfridges is a strange place. I rather like the controversial outside, but couldn’t find much inside that was very interesting. Like other department stores the clothing area is divided up into brands and I’m not sure whether Selfridges runs them all or if other companies are buying the space. It was expensive and cliquey, and we only stayed for about ten minutes. I’ve been told it’s a great shop for shoes, however
Plan for the rest of today: revision. Plan for Saturday: revision, then the Eurovision Party!

Just back from my party this evening. Nod, Lynsey, Rachel, Simon and I went to the “Continental Circus Berlin”, which has set up in Solihull for the week. It was great; I really enjoyed it. I took a fair few photos but the lighting means most of them need a little work to look any good. Here’s the kind of thing that happened:

There were high-wire artists, gymnasts, clowns, jugglers and an assortment of other performers. No animals at this one. Well, there was a giant mouse, but I’m hoping there was somebody inside him. If not, I’m rather frightened. I had candy floss! Without complaining about it being

Hmmm

Names and addresses of everybody who was caught fare dodging in April. Heh, funny

Morning morning morning. How goes it? I am good, thank you. Thanks very much for all the cards! I am also now the proud owner of a Firefly box set, so I can see whether the gushing of a million geek websites is justified I’m going shopping with Mum this morning. I’m in desperate need of clothes (and am incapable of clothes-shopping by myself; I get as far as ‘£25 for a shirt?! Don’t be stupid, I could get 31.64556962 iTunes tracks for that’ and leave) and I hear that Birmingham has a Borders these days. I haven’t visited B’ham city centre since the new bullring opened, so that should be interesting.

Ah hell, it’s my birthday tomorrow and I’ve hardly thought about it at all. People have been asking me what I want for weeks, to which I said I’d get back to them, then didn’t. Sorry about that, guys. My parents haven’t had any joy either, if that’s any consolation. I haven’t particularly thought about what I’m going to do, even. I’d rather not spend the day revising! I’ve a cunning plan for the evening, though…

I would like to inform you all that Fiat Majani chocolates are the height of confectionery-induced joy.

Had my second meeting with the Life Coach today. She’s really very insightful, and I don’t have to say much before she’s figured out what the problem is - I’m most impressed. She’s helped me figure out a few things, and has given me some ways to start feeling better about myself. I’m going to do my best to put them into practice this week. And, as it turns out, today’s a good day to start.

Right, West Wing time. Night!

I arrived at the school, found the correct corridor and hung around behind the melee of students, trying not to look too awkward. After being told about how the questions were divided, we split off into different labs. We were told which desk to sit at (confused teacher couldn’t figure out what I was doing there until he asked) and checked over the exam paper and equipment. Then we started.

You know what’s weird? Although I walked into the exam room, my physical intuition didn’t. I was entirely reliant on equations and what I knew to be true. I was so nervous that I just couldn’t figure out what *should* be happening, so had to go with what worked. For example, one experiment involved balancing a metre rule over a prism and attempting to determine the mass of a marble placed on one end of the rule, using moments. Not too tricky, but I was so worked up that I couldn’t figure out whether I should increase or decrease the distance of the fulcrum from the marble. I just changed it until it worked. I knew that if I could only calm down a little I’d be ok, but I couldn’t manage it. Still, at least I didn’t completely panic
The first experiment involved passing a current through a (an?) LED and a resistor and measuring the resistance of the former. We then had to swap out the LED and resistor, and try all combinations. Thing was, the resistance of the LEDs seemed to change depending on which resistor I used, which confused the hell out of me. As far as I knew, LEDs were like normal resistors and didn’t change their resistance. However, I couldn’t argue with the results and I couldn’t see anything wrong with my setup, so I went with it. I’m now pretty certain that the resistance of an LED does indeed change, and I’m not sure whether I should have known that. Still, hopefully I didn’t mess anything up too badly.

The most entertaining moment came when I was asked to measure the diameter of a ping-pong ball, without using calipers. As Ben pointed out, quite why they should ask me to do something so pointless is a good question. I couldn’t think of a clever scientific way of doing it, so I ended up holding the ball between two set squares and holding them over a ruler. Similarly, at one point I was asked to effectively find the height of a right-angled triangle, given only the hypotenuse. Well if there’s a way other than just measuring the damn thing, I don’t know it. Naturally none of the supplied rulers were long enough, so various contortions of set square arrangements ensued.

A couple of students were friendly enough to chat to me afterwards, which was nice of them. One more practical left, then it’s only ‘normal’ exams left.

Completely stealing Bloggers4Labour’s meme-alteration…

Bloggers4Labour: 7
Jonathan Derbyshire: 5
Jo Salmon: 1 (#7)
normblog: 4
The Thimble: 3
James Hamilton: 3
Rullsenberg Rules: 8
Bebere: 2

Anybody else want to play?

I’m back. It could have been worse, although it wasn’t a breeze by any means. Weird diode readings and broken slopes caused problems - I shall explain after I’ve had lunch.

I’ve expressed my love of Scrubs before, but I’m going to do it again. It’s just the best sitcom around, I think. I’ve said before that it’s expert at changing tone, and an episode on Sky last week went from very funny to terribly, terribly tragic in about half a second, without being cheesy or over the top, and kept coming to mind for the next couple of days. The show’s very much on my wavelength (”I missed that, son, I was thinking about soup”) which could explain it. I think it helps that all the characters are actually decent people underneath, as opposed to a fair few sitcoms where they’re pretty unpleasant. Maybe I’m a sucker for idealism, but I just enjoy the show so very much
I’m going to bed now. Well, I’m going to lie in my bed now. I have a Desperate Housewife to catch up on (steady), but after that I shall attempt to fall asleep in preparation for getting up at 0700 tomorrow. It’s terribly unlikely as I haven’t fallen asleep before 0100 for months, but I’m damn well going to try anyway.

I’ll let you know how the exam goes. Hopefully the post won’t consist solely of sobbing.

Spotted on normblog, and in no particular order…

1. Been to a nightclub
2. Walked on hot coals
3. Stroked a monkey
4. Used an iPod
5. Spoken to an MP
6. Had a letter published in a newspaper / magazine
7. Slept on a train
8. Eaten lobster
9. Jumped into the sea
10. Had cybersex

I think I’m meant to ‘tag’ people to continue, so who wants to memespread? Lil? Nod? Lynsey?

In possibly the most uninteresting beginning to a blog post ever written: This morning I put on a pair of nice clean jeans.

Bear with me.

I have been revising for much of the morning, yet as of 1300 these trousers are covered in drool, mud and grass stains. Guess whose fault that could be. Mad animal
Update: Megan also claims responsibility for the SullyCam showing a close-up of the carpet all morning.

Update 2: She cannot, however, accept responsibility for surreptitiously adding a tube of cleaning wipes to the image. Megan simply wouldn’t be so gross. No, that is entirely down to my father. Right, this calls for revenge.

In other news, it turns out that tomorrow’s physics practical will have very little, if anything, that relates to materials physics. So that’s a relief. I should have realised straight away, but I panicked somewhat. Once tomorrow’s exam is over I’ll be concentrating on Pure 1 and Pure 3, which are both next Monday. Pure 3 is the exam I’m worried most about, and while I don’t think I’ll do brilliantly I’m hoping to get at least a C-equivalent.

Various things I’ve found interesting enough to add to my del.icio.us links lately. Also known as “things I’ve been meaning to blog but haven’t actually managed to.”

• T.U.R.M - a website hacking puzzle. I’m on number 2 and am stuck
• How to write by hand, properly - Apparently I’ve been getting it wrong since I was three
• GIMPshop - The GIMP is an extremely powerful open-source graphics package with a notoriously difficult to understand interface. This version integrates everything into very few windows and makes it as photoshop-like as possible. The Windows port has an annoying disk-error bug (for me) but works very well otherwise.
• An author speaks about e-book piracy - interesting argument
• Gender debate - a few months back the head of Harvard suggested in a lecture that perhaps men were in general more suited to becoming professors than women. He meant it as an evolutionary possiblity, but various female staff members walked out. Here psychology professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke debate the available evidence for and against the claim.
• Sand Sculptures - somewhat more advanced than my attempts
• Getting Things Done - TiddlyWiki - a decent wiki implementation in a single web page, with no database or external files needed. It’s designed with the GTD philosophy in mind. I really must buy that book.
• Masturbation 101 - examines why masturbation has such a stigma attached to it.
• Gadgets powered from the phone line - no more description needed, really!
• The all time top 10 best ever numbers between 1 and 10 - The Observer Blog’s latest list
• Every word in the english language described by a limerick - with surprisingly stringent entry requirements!
• A group is its own worst enemy - Ok, I haven’t actually read it yet, but it looks interesting
• They Work For You - find your local MP by postcode, and find out what they’ve actually done / how they’ve voted in parliament / what their expenses are…

Many of these were found via Boing Boing, Lifehacker and populicio.us.

Anyone seen the new BBC Weather displays? They’re cool! You can see where rain / sun / clouds are predicted much more accurately than before. I always felt a bit sorry for Wales, which generally had just the one logo overhead. Now you can see small pockets of cloud and rain appearing as the hours go by. Once I figured out that light = sun, shaded = cloud, I could see what was going on very easily.

Hopefully they’ll be able to use the new technology to compare these maps with the actual results, so we’ll be able to see how accurate it is. I’m not making any sly references there - I studied some meteorology briefly and sympathise hugely with anybody who tries to make any predictions! When chaos theory comes into play, you know you’re dealing with some complex systems. Incidentally, the computers than power it are ’standard’ desktop machines:

• Dual 3.06GHz Xeon Processors (533MHz FSB / 1MB cache)
• 2 GB Dual Channel DDR 266Mhz ECC SDRAM
• 2 SCSI 73GB (15,000rpm) hard drives
• Ultra 320/M SCSI Controller Card
• NVidia FX6800 Ultra 256MB graphics card

Damn, apparently my computer wouldn’t be up to displaying the weather map. This calls for an upgrade.

I met the Solihull School exams officer today to go over times and places for the various units I’m taking. I have to wear a shirt and tie (ugh, but needs must) and trainers, entertainingly, because most exams are sat in the sports hall. We also looked into the physics labs and spoke to the head of the department, who told me that the dates on my timetable were wrong! The physics practicals are in fact on wednesday and exactly a week later, as opposed to tomorrow and saturday. So that was worth knowing We checked out all the other dates I’d been given and they were fine.

I got something done this afternoon that has needed doing for quite a while, and that’s the last major blip on my horizon dealt with. Hopefully I can concentrate fully on the exams now.