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To conclude my mega-post from Thursday, TARDIS is the name of my new baby PC. (Wonderful sense of naming I have… PC1… PC2…PC3… and then TARDIS. In my defence, it’s not part of the network or the ‘official’ line of PCs in my house.)

Anyway, TARDIS isn’t exactly new. It’s been lent to me by Dave Cooper, the systems admin at school, along with Windows XP Professional, to prepare me for the MCSE 70-270 exam I’ll be doing soon in Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft Windows XP Professional. What’s really cool is that I have completely free reign to mess about with it as much as I want. Who cares if it breaks? I can always re-install the OS about 100 times.

I’m using the wonderful Remote Desktop feature to connect without having to pull out all the cables from PC3. Life is good…

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.