Well, I finished the final instalment of Harry Potter only about 20mins ago.  It is such a great relief to have finished it and I don’t think I could be more satisfied with the ending.  I agree with what Rowling said – it really does finish the whole story very nicely.  The only other time a story has finished so much my way was Life on Mars, which felt so extremely satisfying that I could hardly believe it even existed but this feel like so much more than that.  Having been given so long to read and re-read the books getting to know and love these characters the ending just felt so right.  I’m just so pleased

Similarly now I feel I can go back to doing things I normally do which I had put on hold to make sure that I didn’t collide with any spoilers. I don’t think I can do anything but be pleased at the moment.

How lovely.

The site I mentioned I was working on in a previous post is still being worked on albeit more slowly. The actual news is that I decided to buy hosting and a domain for pretty dirt cheap from tengun.net and go daddy respectively. Go daddy are having a sale on .info domains so I grabbed tehdurka.info for about £0.64 in total for a year. I don’t really think you can get a better deal than that. Hosting equates to about £1.04 per month with PHP and MySQL although register_globals is off so I have to change quite a lot of code to make it work properly but at the same time it makes my code better and more secure so its all good really. I reckon that it costs a lot more than £1.04 a month just to leave my computer on during the day (electricity costs) so it seems like a very good deal for me and it means the site will always be online and working at a good speed so its good for the users as well.

I might see if I can get some Google adsense going to pay these little costs, I dunno whether they would accept me though. I also would like to revamp the site both visually and code wise but I’m going to put most of that off till after my exams since I’ve been told teachers go very easy on us for the remainder of the term. I also ought to do some more university research as well and try and pick out some more places to apply to, I’d like to feel ready by the time it comes to writing personal statements etc. I also need to go on some open days but they tend to be during the holidays so I can’t do that yet.

Ok that really is it for today, I seem to have gone a bit overdrive for some reason.

So yeah I’m on exams at the moment, not much fun. I had my critical thinking exam on Friday which I think went well, particularly the argument paper as I am more inclined to the analysis of arguments given how many there are on this big ol internet. Today was my psychology exam which was pretty tough actually, a few days ago I realised how unprepared I was for this exam and I really wasn’t the only one. I didn’t hear anyone saying they felt good about the exam before or after. To me I’m just glad to have gotten rid of it and I’m just not going to worry about it anyway, which is quite a relief.

My next exam is English literature on Friday, which should be er…fun? I somewhat doubt that I will do particularly well but there isn’t that much I can do about that, except reading the texts and learning quotes. In reality I don’t really care that much about it, I will make some effort to learn some quote for the poetry as I can already remember quotes for the play (Cat on a Hot tin roof). Other than that I will be doing some reading with a bit of daily lit. Quite a helpful website, shame it doesn’t have more books that I am interested in.

It was my sixth form’s may ball on Friday, meaning that lots of people got drunk (including one of my best friends) and it was generally a lot of fun, raving and such. Although I enjoyed having some alcohol and was sort of on the verge of being drunk at one point I managed to avoid it despite having drunk nearly a bottle of wine, a baileys and a malibu with coke (the latter two being one of my friend’s suggestions that I just went along with). The idea behind it is generally a leaving do for the year 13 so it will be “ours” next year. I look forward to it.

Well, I’ve been feeling ill today and yesterday which has just contributed to the general crazy-feeling of today. I guess the most important thing would be finding out that instead of the C I thought I got in my first Chemistry module I actually got a B. This really pissed me off in some ways since I really wouldn’t have retaken the module had someone actually told me I had gotten a B, I assumed that for the score I got the grade boundaries were the same across all the subjects and modules, which would be logical since they are scaled up from the actual mark you get on the paper. Finding out that was wrong made me check the AQA website and after some digging found the grade boundaries, revealing that I had in fact gotten a B.

Another part of it lies in that I was asked for another £5 for the May ball. Now I’m absolutely certain that I had paid enough (I was giving in the money for me and a friend, we both owed £25 and so I gave over £50) but as I walked into my first lesson I was told I was £5 short. I didn’t really want to argue at the time because I figured my friend must have owed more than he thought so I just paid it. Later however, in Chemistry, my friend was asked for £5 as well. He told them he had already paid and they went away but I don’t think they will drop this. Now we’re completely sure that we owed £25 each and I’m absolutely sure I handed over £50 (I didn’t have any money left afterwards, I know that for sure). I figure £10 of that must have been lost in transit or something, so essentially I’ve been scammed out of £5. I guess I’ve got to have the grace to let it go, I want the ball to go ahead and if my paying extra £5 helps that happen then I should be happy, I suppose it makes up a bit for my lack of enthusiasm towards fund raising.  I guess I just don’t like getting ripped off in such a way.

At least writing it down seems to have helped me get over those little things, what with feeling pretty ill it hasn’t been a great day really. I’m off to bed now, tommorow I just have one lesson first period then I’m going shopping to sort of piece together a suit for the previously mentioned may ball…

The kid who didn’t realise I am a guy briefly talked to me today. He seemed genuinely surprised that I am actually a man. Not a great boost to the old self-esteem there. Of course, its actually just funny that he seems to have difficulty recognising my…err…being a male.

Today has been quite a hazy day, feels a bit like a dream. Pretty crap really. Nothing really happened bad or anything it just feels sort of strange. Everything is pretty much on target otherwise, not much to report to the all seeing internet, although I do have the joy of “looking forward” to the may ball next Friday, no idea how that is going to go, I guess we’ll see.

As I already said on Friday I came to school dressed as a pirate. Now, of course there were no doubt loads of things said about me either to my face or behind my back and I don’t really care as to the nature of these comments or anything like that.  What it is that has kinda stood out to me is when I heard a kid refer to me as a “pirate woman”.  Firstly we should probably consider the irony of that statement coming from a pre pubescent squeaky boy with long hair. Err yeah. Perhaps with the costume on his poor little senses just got overloaded and he mistook me, in a male pirate costume, for a woman…in a male pirate costume? Mhhmmm… Perhaps the stranger part of this is that when he saw me again yesterday he said to his friend something about a pirate woman again. Now here is where I’ve got to start having doubts about what I shall now dub gender recognition. Really, I’ve not had people doubt my gender so obviously since I was little and also had shoulder length hair, which, to be fair, would probably throw people off. Back then I found it very hurtful but now its just odd.

If my slightly-in-need-of-a-shave facial hair wasn’t enough to point him in the right direction you would think my not particularly feminine clothes may have helped. Or maybe my quite broad build. Even though I can tell that this was generally quite stupid of him I can’t help feeling a slight blow to my masculinity. After all, I think most men don’t exactly like being mistaken for the opposite sex.  There isn’t really much of a conclusion to this, its just quite strange…and funny.

Well lets see, last Friday I went to school dressed as a pirate. Now, you must understand this is by no means a normal thing, it’s not normal for me to decide “why, today I think I’ll be a pirate”. No. In fact for me it was quite a big thing really, finally facing head on my self consciousness. I enjoyed it. Sure, there were maybe some things I could have done differently but unlike most things in my life I really don’t have any true regrets.

The response from people was really great, most people just said it was awesome (or some variant) with a few saying I looked stupid or whatever. I can happily say that I have no care for the opinion of the latter, I laughed at most of them actually. It’s a shame I don’t have any pictures of me in the costume, it was a really good one actually, unfortunately my camera decided to go missing so I couldn’t get any.  It’s a nice feeling, being able to laugh at people in that way.  When I was younger I didn’t have that, I couldn’t laugh at myself, not at all. I actually think it almost destroyed me, it wasn’t until I realised how this works (and that actually laughing at myself can be pretty funny) that I recovered out of the shithole I was in at the time. I don’t know who said it but I remember hearing at some point someone said “if you can’t laugh at yourself you really can’t laugh at anything”. So damn true.

I haven’t been posting mainly because I’ve been working on a website, the intention of this website being to allow kids in my school to play games on the school computers. The school’s internet is filtered by the ISP and its pretty crap really. Lots of times I’ve been trying to do research for something, King Lear for example, when I click a link to a site only to find it is blocked for being “pornographic” or for being a “hate speech” site. It really, really isn’t. What is perhaps stranger is some ways of getting round the filters. One way I used a while ago that seems to have stopped working now is to use Google’s cache, that used to work quite well until recently when it is very temperamental. Another odd one is sometimes clicking a link to a site will enable you to see it but if you type it into the address bar it won’t. It’s all very odd.

So, this site has been set up to get around the measures in place to enable people to play games at school. I’ve put a lot of work into it to make it nice and easy to manage and it also gave me something to try and do using PHP and MySQL. The basics of it are layed out, all that is left to do is to make it look nice, which may or may not be easy, I don’t know. It would be quite cool if the word got out and soon all IT lessons were turned into chaos with teachers unable to prevent kids from playing games. I think that would be pretty awesome, a socialist uprising to take over the school.

Or not.

We can all dream, can’t we?

Link to the site: here. By the way, the reason I have used the word malarky everywhere is to avoid saying the word games, as that will result in an automatic block it would appear. According to the firefox spell checker that isn’t how you spell malarky, it should have an e after the k. But that spelling is stupid so I’m changing it to mine.

So the new carpet arrived and was fitted yesterday. My mum almost burned out the engine on the vacuum cleaner due to the amount of it seemingly not attached to the carpet itself. Now the whole house has a rather indescribable smell, other than it smells exactly like the new carpet, strangely enough. It’s very nice to have this new carpet, one thing that is rather a shame though is the floor underneath the carpet. To try and smooth out the area on the floor which had previously been a wall separating what used to be the small dining room and my bedroom my mum had chipped away at it and then proceeded to apply filler to it. The only problem is that she got it quite far from flat. There is in fact a quite definite lump across the middle of the room, its visible but more importantly I always feel it when I walk across. Obviously there is nothing that can be done, I’m just going to have to get used to it.

But it just feels so icky, having a lump under the floor.

Ew.

And in case you hadn’t realised, it is most definitely NOT a lovely smell. Maybe something to do with this pounding headache, either way I’m going to stop writing here and have a lie down.

“We should be outside frolicking” he repeated.

Again, everyone took it as a joke but in reality he was right.  We’ve had a week of beautiful weather and managed to spend as little of that time outside as possible.  Too drawn into progressing the generations on The Sims 2 to bother going outside. It’s possible that a slight change of wording would convince us of the truth in the statement.

“This is what summer is going to be like, just us festering here in the sideroom”.

Not exactly how he said it but it gets the message accross. Really, if its this warm and sunny now I can’t imagine how bad its going to get. And of course, we should be outside, enjoying the nice weather before it gets so hot that heat becomes an excuse. I always go up there with the intention of arriving earlier than usual, with more time to do other things, yet I still always manage to get there at around the same time. I don’t know how it happens, some sort of intrepid laziness that forces me to stay in my house up to a certain time.

What we really need is another expedition, another walk through the countryside surrounding the area we have lived for years yet never explored. Some might say 16 is too old for such escapades but not me, even having said this it did only happen once although I dream of it happening more. Perhaps one day I will finally break out of this and get on with things, I don’t know when that day will be, probably when I really think I have nothing better to do. Could be a while, what with the prospects of internet piracy.