I’m sorry guys, and ladies, I’ll try harder to blog more frequently. However, my three-week vacation is justified, because I’ve got a lot going on right now. But, it’s mainly because of one thing.

School is consuming me. Completely. Gah. The teachers and the parents and the government have this really neat way of making you feel like you are a complete failure at life if you’re not getting an ENTER score of 100. * Basically, you study. And if you don’t study, you can get to do things that you can have a chance at enjoying, but even those are ruined by this constant feeling of guilt for not studying.

Lately I’m finding that all the maths work I’m doing is slowly burning me out. I used to be quite a proficient programmer. Even though my language of choice, VB6, was on its way out of popular use last time I was using it (2005), I could still do some pretty good things with the language. I even dabbled in .NET, which led me to winning first prize in the state-wide VITTA / Microsoft Programming Excellence Awards in 2005. However, since about then, I seriously haven’t sat down and written another app. My skills have slowly crumbled away. While I was busy trying to do well in Year 11 and 12, VB6 practically vanished from existence. VB.NET evolved into VB2005 which is a really nice language for beginners now. Now, I’m about at a point where I don’t really remember how to do anything in VB anymore. By the time I’ve finished school  I think I’ll sit down and learn Ruby or PHP or Python from scratch, and maybe learn some WxWidgets for some cross-platform GUI action.

Most of my efforts have been directed towards Year 12 Specialist Maths. My efforts are futile to say the least. See, there is this concept in maths of Calculus, where you look at rates of change. It sounds like interesting, useful stuff, but I’ve completely lost my respect for it lately. I never used to dislike maths before I knew Calculus. But now, for the first time, things aren’t working for me, and it’s pissing me off terribly. I used to be excellent at maths. Well, excellent enough to be pretty much at the top of my classes from grade 1 until the start of Year 12. ** From the start of Year 12, my test grades plunged. A lot. WTF.

The interesting thing is, I’m doing a lot better in Monash first-year uni maths than I am in Specialist. I passed the first semester of Monash with a high-distinction. I passed Specialist Maths as well, but if the tests we did were counted, I wouldn’t have. You would expect university-level courses to be more difficult than Year 12 courses, right? Monash is harder, there are more concepts to know and they go more in-depth. Then how am I screwing up Specialist so badly when I’m doing so well in Monash, while Monash has the same concepts but extended further? How the hell is that supposed to work?

Anyway, enough rambling about how my life was ruined by maths … I saw The Simpsons Movie last night. It was pretty awesome. There were some very funny scenes, including one of Bart naked (yes, you see it.). I won’t talk too much about the plot, so I don’t spoil the movie for you, but a whole summary is on Wikipedia if you want to ruin the experience. Anyhow, while it might not be a completely-excellent movie (many of your favourite characters only have very short appearances in the film), and it doesn’t seem like it was worked on for the 16 years or whatever, it is still very entertaining and worth watching. I’ll give it four out of five geeky stars.

Another thing I did in the last three weeks is reformat my laptop. Goodbye Windows Vista, it has been not-very-nice knowing you. I had to get rid of it because Vista totally screwed itself. Networking randomly stopped working, no matter what I did if I booted in any mode other than Safe Mode then I had no wireless networking. Plus it bluescreened a lot in its last week of running. It’s kinda odd because it didn’t bluescreen until the last week that I used it. Anyway, I’m back on Windows XP, and it’s being nice to me. It certainly feels good to be back.  However, I made the mistake of making my system partition 15gb, which doesn’t go well with a 2GB hibernation file and a 2GB pagefile. I moved my pagefile, but due to limitations in the Windows OS, you can’t move your hibernation file. Gah. Oh well. I’ve got all my favourite apps installed, including my copy of Office 2007. I’m now using Outlook and OneNote to organise my life, and I’m loving it all the way. There is no equivalent to Outlook, not even Gmail is as good at managing everything. Thunderbird? Forget it, it’s more like Outlook Express.

My desktop is also looking super-sweet thanks to a new theme I found. Office 2007 has a new, distinctive look. The problem is, none of your other apps look as nice. Well, now that has been fixed by the excellent andymorum of DeviantArt. He has created a perfect Office 2007 visual style to add to his impressive repertoire of themes (Check out System5 and PxlPlus especially, they are awesome!). I highly recommend downloading one of his themes. Note that you will need the UxTheme Patch to use themes which aren’t made by Microsoft.

If you made it this far through the blog post, congratulations, you’re either bored or are genuinely interested. Probably bored. I’ll try and blog more frequently, with more short posts … time-permitting ….

–Ben
Now Listening To: John Lennon – Working Class Hero.

* – Note: an ENTER score is a percentage of people who you are ranked higher than. It is impossible to obtain an ENTER score of 100, no matter how you try. It might be possible for Chuck Norris though.
** – Excluding grade 2, but that’s a different blog post.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 1:35 am and is filed under Rants. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.