The Great British summer

The first part of my summer was busy and wet to say the least; the reality was that i didn’t get to relax properly for a fortnight after we broke up, and during that time it didn’t just rain, it pissed down.

This didn’t help the first activity of the holiday, the Duke of Edinburgh expedition. 4 days of bad weather, tiring physical exertion and the torture of being around a combined force of David Gopsil and Ian Dodd. The first day we were forced to change our route due to high winds, on the second day we got the same treatment but with a side order of rain and we couldn’t avoid it this time as we had to go into it to get to that night’s camp. The third day was better but the wind wasn’t with us at all so sailing was out of the question, although we did have a good campfire that night. the final day was a slow relaxed paddle as we found ourselves being an hour ahead of time, but we weren’t complaining as we didn’t have to paddle like the clappers and we got off a bit earlier.

The second event of the holiday for me (and Marie from my D of E group) was a UCLAN summer school, which was supposed to give a taste of university life, but what it actually consisted of was a 3 days of activities and workshops that really didn’t have much to do with uni at all. It wasn’t that bad though, the activities and workshops were great, and me and Marie made some new friends while there, one of which came to Carlisle at a later point in the holidays.

well that's it for the first half of the holidays.

One big update

It’s been ages since I've written to this blog so the following entries are basically what has happened since my last entry just before the exams

A Life With Less Maths, That’s My Futurama

I’ve finally done it! As of today I no longer have any formal maths lessons, due to the fact I had my last maths A-Level exams today I’m able to get rid of maths from my timetable altogether, so now I have a negotiated absence set for every Tuesday morning, 3 hours free on Friday morning, and the ability to go home at lunch on Wednesday. I say “formal lessons” only because I might have to attend some of the next Y12’s lessons to brush up on the bits I’m useless at, but that’s only if my exam results aren’t up to par.

Recently, my mum got a Sky subscription, so I’ve been able to watch more of the TV that I wasn’t able to watch much of on Freeview, namely The Crystal maze reruns, Robot wars (which has sadly left bravo 2, hopefully not for long) and some others. The main program that I’m watching more of is Futurama (yes, I prefer it to The Simpsons, although I’ll still watch that), I’d liked what I’d seen of it on CH4 but never got into a routine of watching it, or was simply not awake to watch it, now I’m watching it on Sky1 at 6 pm every night; because of this I’ve become a bit of a fan, and I’ve spent the last 4 hours customizing my PC with a desktop wallpaper (which wasn’t of the best visual quality, so I spent about an hour fixing it) and system sounds (the searching for and editing of which took 3 hours). I still haven’t got around to making icons yet, although I have a few from themes I downloaded while looking for sounds that might do the job.

Exam Assault

Now its crunch time; up to now I’ve only had a few exams, and they were lighter ones and i only had 1 per day.

Tomorrow is the big one, I have 3 exams lined up, physics in the morning and two maths exams in the afternoon.

The following Thursday is my final exam day, with two maths exams in the morning.

I’m now going to continue my last frenzied attempt to cram as many equations into my nut as possible.

the Impending Doom

There's only a week to go until study leave begins, but that doesn’t mean that the exam period starts then.

For me, the impending Doom of exams starts this coming Monday.

On Monday morning I have my Computing COMP1 Practical exam. This basically consists of a small amount of theory, paired with a set of tasks to code into a supplied program. I'm good at coming up with programming solutions, so this should be a breeze; the following Friday morning contains the Computing COMP2 Theory paper.

The papers I’m worried about are the maths CORE3 and CORE 4 as the topic they cover are difficult and I know I won’t get my B target. The physics, Decision Maths, and Systems papers are OK, but I still worry about them to a degree. I also have a Maths Mechanics re-sit, which the only problem with last time was that the questions were lethal.

Even though it’s supposed to be study leave, I’m going to enjoy myself a bit, I’m going to be ordering some trading cards to improve my game, so that during the revision breaks I’ll have, I'll be able to go out and play against the community that gathers regularly in the town library.

After buying those cards, I won’t be buying anything for a while, as I’ll be using any money I get for putting money back into my bank account, in order to re-fill it after buying my laptop.