The answer – Mock GCSEs and setting up TARDIS (more on that, later…)
Monday kicked off with English 1 – aka “A little bit of comprehension followed by a newspaper article.” Not too difficult, but my hand had forgotten what it’s like to write 10 sides of A4 in 90 minutes or so. (Painful – why can’t we type it??? Why?!?)
On Tuesday there was Science, which was OK for the bits we had already been taught. The rest was kinda tricky, as you’d imagine. And I screwed up on a question on Forces, which I know I won’t be able to live down for a while. Force = Mass * Acceleration? Oh yeah! [Me idiot] Continue Reading
Saw The Incredibles today, a wonderful achievement from the dependable gang at PIXAR, who always produce a truly great movie for all the family.
That phrase, incidentally, has got to be one of the most misused in history. For years, ‘for the family’ meant nothing of the sort, it was dragging parents to increasingly painful Disney movies to buy more merchandise. But with PIXAR, each film is virtually guaranteed to be a winner, movies that everyone really looks forward to seeing.
The hilarious thing is watching the downfall of Disney in all of this. Coupled with the success of DreamWorks’s Shrek (don’t get me wrong, that’s also a great film) they seem to think that CGI is the reason for PIXAR’s success, rather than great characters and story. As a result, Disney abandons 2D movies apart from lame straight-to-video sequels. The slow rotting of an empire. The great news is that PIXAR only has one more film to do, Cars, before they are finally free of Disney, which leaves the company pretty stuffed as far as I can see. Take a look at Freeview’s ABC1 channel to see why.
There’s only one wholly-Disney film which I actually love, The Emperor’s New Groove. It’s witty and un-hyped, with not a The Emperor’s New Groove II in sight. But even I can appreciate that up to the early 1990s, Disney did make great 2D animations, climaxing in universally-praised The Lion King. Is there a way back for the Magic Kingdom? I hope not. It’s always fun to watch giant media companies crash and burn.
Simple problem – since I’m now regularly using both IE and Firefox – how do I keep my bookmarks the same? It’s infuriating to bookmark a page in one browser and then not have it available in the next. (Hopefully Firefox will at some point be able to use Windows folders as bookmark folders and then the whole problem wouldn’t exist…)
The solution? Use SyncMarks. It’s still in beta and the most useful features are not available yet, but it’ll do for now. It can do lots of other clever synchronisation things that I’m not interested in, but what’s useful to me is that the extension automatically copies your Firefox bookmarks to your Favourites folder, so at least they are now half-in-sync! (Merged Bookmarks is on the way, fingers crossed…)
Talking of Firefox, I’ve just been very geeky and done lots of tweaking to get it almost looking and feeling exactly like IE.
Woo! I finished America (The Book) today. Truly the funniest thing I have read in a long time, and would a perfect Christmas present to anyone with a vaguely political sense of humour. Why has this not been released in the UK yet? Oh, who cares, import it for only £14.85 (including shipping) from Amazon.co.uk. Yeah, it’s in hardback, with beautiful glossy pages. So go on, order it now. I’ll wait.
Jon Stewart is a genius. If you want to see him at work on American TV, just look at all of these hilarious video clips from his show.
(I’ve edited this post about 5 times now!)
Most obviously the new banner, of course. Have you ever noticed, Nic updates his site and a few weeks later I mysteriously get round to changing mine?
In other news, I’m now on study leave for mock GCSE exams. But the cliché about sitting in a gym is over, our class gets the luxury of a nice room upstairs, with carpets and everything. They’ve given this to our class for almost every exam for years now, perhaps we’re just ‘better’ in some way than the other classes? Yeah, that must be it.
Helen on It’s (waiting) time.: “Fabulous news, congratulations to you both! X” Jun 8, 21:51
