My wonderful hosts enabled FreeType support this morning, and as a result a Captcha has been implemented with the comment form. It’s simple enough – simply copy the characters displayed in the image to get your comment submitted. And if you mistake, never fear, your comment is not lost and you can just try again.
This should bring an end to my anti-spam woes, and consequently instant commenting has been re-enabled on all posts from the last 7 days. Older ones still need pre-moderation, for now, while I assess how it’s all working.
Thanks for bearing with me as the spammers descended. Message to the vultures – it’s over, go home. And no, you don’t get your ball back.
I’m having trouble thinking about anything other than Doctor Who tonight… how on earth am I going to get through next week’s exams waiting for the conclusion now? Damn you Russell T. Davies!
The reality stuff was great, defying some expectations, and the scene where Rose was shot was brilliant – because you really didn’t see that coming. It’s TV, the heroes always dodge the fatal blasts at the last minute… but not here.
And now – the most important thing – theories. I know when a lot of people heard the voice on the ‘Next Time’ trailer they assumed Davros or the Emperor Dalek was back. However, to me, the Adam theory seems very neat. He hates the Doctor for abandoning him on Earth, he’s got advanced technology, knowledge of history – GG might be right – he might even be Davros!
That’d be perfect for me too – since the character in my English exam was called Adam and part of the Kaled clan. Enough for extra marks? 
Red Dalek says – EXTERMINATE!
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.
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
