English Paper 2 today. Section A was a bog standard piece of poetry comparison that, you know, I just did without too much thought. And then in Section B I made a choice – I could have done some incredibly easy letter about improvements to our school or something equally done, but I decided to do the much more fun “Describe a nightmare world.”
So then I spent 45 minutes having fun just doing some creative writing, following my well worn formula of writing a narrative featuring a character walking down a street (this time he gets to shoot someone, but she’s bleeding to death anyway, so what the hell) and then arrive at a camp to have a confrontation with a “chavvie” before being gassed by the metallic Wardens. Oh, it was cool. Although I can’t seem to stop putting in Doctor Who references – this time the ‘Kaled clan’.
I did wonder about making my ‘nightmare world’ a Tory party conference or something, but sci-fi seemed the way to go.
I also managed today to wrench PC2 off the horrible, resource-hogging and damn UGLY Norton onto the standardised McAfee that every other PC uses. And then I got terribly bored and re-branded it. How weird. (The file is oemlogo.gif if anyone cares enough.)
…and it came from Slashdot! In response to this Daily News story, Nerds make better lovers (Ready for a real relationship? Ditch the pretty boys and grab yourself a geek – no comment!) ‘ackthpt’ posted this. Hahahaha!
The History exam was really a two-pronged attack. Firstly, the content itself is not easy and while I knew about 90% of the facts, getting it all to gel was difficult, especially in the section on Indian Independence. Worse though was just the sheer amount of writing. I’m really bad at writing short answers and managed to completely fill the 16 page answer book in 2 hours. (OK, it was more like 15 pages since the front is mostly instructions and the like, but still – that’s a rate of around 8 minutes per A4 page.)
The good news is that I did complete every question – didn’t run out of time at the end although I literally had about 3 minutes to go. My handwriting of course deteriorated but hopefully still legible enough to get marks. Really no idea on how well I did overall – but I figure that with all the facts I did put it, I can’t have flopped it, even if one large mark question had me a bit confused as to what they were actually asking!
As you can imagine, I was also pretty glad for my bottle of water.
Tomorrow afternoon is English, which should be slightly easier but still a mass of writing. And poetry, which I’m not looking forward to. The second section is more creative writing though, so hopefully will be able to pick up some marks there. Hmmm… we’ll see!
On a blog-related technical note – Captchas are currently not working due to Freetype not being installed. GD, however, is installed (see the PHP into page) so we might be able to get something working eventually. Until then pre-moderation for all items will continue I’m afraid, at least until I weather this round of spam.
Overnight, I got 130 pieces of comment spam. Luckily, the first few started trickling in before I went to bed so, fearing the worst, I turned on pre-moderation for all comments. Unfortunately, this will now remain until I figure out a better way to deal with this. (For those of you screaming Captcha – my initial tests suggested it wouldn’t work on here, or at least not without fiddling.)
I think the main problem is that the master blacklist doesn’t seem to be keeping up. For now, I have put all the URLs spamming into a text file to download and I suggest that anybody relying on the Blacklist adds these to your personal list ASAP.
Ironically, since all links are tagged with rel=”no follow” the whole spam operation is meaningless anyway.
…and probably not even to them either. But hey, I was bored. Enjoy.
Helen on It’s (waiting) time.: “Fabulous news, congratulations to you both! X” Jun 8, 21:51
