First of all, a big welcome to the summer holidays to everyone ending term today! Whether you’re jetting off to far-away places or sheltering from the freak British weather here at home, enjoy yourself. This even applies if you’re going to Cornwall 
Secondly, it is of course less than an hour until the release of the final instalment of Harry Potter. Sorry, what’s that, a comment about my age? I’ve been with this saga since the beginning, spoilsport, so bugger off. Under normal circumstances the release would cause me to disappear for the weekend to read it, but Lucy is coming over, and sitting in opposite corners of a read immersed in a book would be rather antisocial. Therefore, my reading will probably start on Tuesday. But – and this is a big but – I’m working on the QPCS summer school that week!
If the chatty Year 6s and 7s manage to avoid totally ruining the novel for me, therefore, I won’t be online for a bit. Why bother when Harry Potter is waiting? So, ur, if you need to contact me try casting a spell or something.
Until Voldemort is sorted out, goodbye!
Just back from visiting Chesham, for the sole reason that I’ve always been curious about what lay at the very edge of London’s transport network. In fact, Chesham is the furthest station from Central London at the very end of the Metropolitan line.
So, um, what is Chesham?
… not home to the most congested route
… not very ‘Underground’ either
… a small town with a tube station plonked in it
… a bit behind the times
… a high street and some shops
Ah, tube geekery. Rivals Nic’s buses any day… 
A quick post – it’s been too long – to announce some things. In a breathless, overly-enthusiastic style! Yeah!
This holiday, I’m going to Wales, Brighton and Russia! Huzzah! I wonder where I get my penchant for holidays from, mother?
Tasha has just finished two weeks of work experience at a solicitors, and sounds like she’s had a great time – popping in and out of court, taking notes on dangerous criminals, etc etc. She’s also actually dressed properly for her placement in a nice shirt and everything, which I’m not sure I quite bothered to do Well done!
Katie got a merit on her clarinet exam! Hooray! Congratulations! 
And I am about to get a haircut! A divisive act, apparently, since I always get a severe telling-off from some people for not maintaining hippie hair whilst others seem genuinely relieved and delighted that I can see them again, and don’t keep bumping into walls. Cheerio!
(You should always beware of people who over-use exclamation marks. They are often struggling to maintain a failing front under the weight of great repression and deep seated anger. Beware, I say!)
Note – title is for ‘catchy title’ purposes only, I don’t claim this is actual hacking on any level
One of the nifty features of my new laptop is ‘Dell MediaDirect‘ – essentially a button which quickly loads a hidden partition allowing you to listen to your music, see your pictures, watch videos and DVDs and display PowerPoints all without ever booting up Windows. It’s nice to have – and though not as pretty as Windows Media Center – a fairly cool thing to have available.
MediaDirect runs on Windows XP Embedded, so I wondered if there was a quick and easy way to have a bit of a play about with it. Thankfully, there is!
1. Make a PowerPoint presentation containing a hyperlink to C:\Windows\explorer.exe
2. If using Office 2007, save this in the 97-2003 file format so that MediaDirect’s 2003 viewer can open it
3. Boot into MediaDirect and click on the link – and voila!
4. To enable the Task Manager so that you can quickly repeat this process in future, find taskmgr.ex_ in the ‘Windows \ System32’ directory and rename to taskmgr.exe.
XP Embedded
(Paint isn’t included in that version of XP Embedded and loading Vista’s version from the main partition didn’t work, but a copy of XP’s Paint did the screenshot job nicely.)
So – what practical purpose does this all serve? Probably very little. There is some space – about 265MB worth – for adding your own ‘quick access’ stuff. A fully functional (it appears) version of Windows Media Player 10 is included. A few DOS games – loaded from the Vista partition – also work, which is useful since they didn’t in Vista. It could also be feasible to update the PowerPoint viewer and allow viewing 2007 file formats. It also occurred to me that if your main Windows installation was damaged beyond repair that this could be a good way of easily accessing your files from the hard drive, since USB devices are recognised by XP Embedded. But really, it was just nice to achieve – really by accident – at 2 in the morning 
I had a dream last night. In my dream, Bart Simpson was trying to find the distance from the bottom of my house to the top of the Eiffel Tower. He was using Pythagoras, since he knew the height of the Eiffel Tower and was looking on a map to measure the horizontal distance. In my dream, I stopped and realised: “but the Earth is curved! That won’t work!”
When I woke up, I was still thinking “and even if it did work, the height would be so tiny compared to the length that it would get lost in the error…”
I relay this dream to illustrate that, somehow, my brain is actually still working after school. And I’ve been surprisingly productive with it actually – especially since my aunt has appointed me her PA – so I’ve been busy phoning up people to get spare parts for dishwashers etc. I can do that! Soft skills! (I do get paid, don’t worry )
Other events: long-overdue Birmingham visit (yay!), Physics class pub evening (I love it when teachers buy you drinks), Saoirse buying me a birthday present (thanks!) and Dominic playing with Virtual PC. For, y’know, the thrill of seeing Windows 98 in a little box.
Rob Bell on Baby’s first blog: “Congratulations! Sounds like you are really enjoying the first few weeks which is great. Time flies!” Oct 13, 12:59
