The ramblings and thoughts of Balazs.
TNT likes to take their time delivering my shiny white MacBook. Dammit they could hurry up! It’s in Holland currently, maybe it might be here for tomorrow. One can always hope. If not, Wednesday.
In other news I’ve only got 3 exams left! Woooop! Then it’s all over. Can’t wait. This summer is going to be amazing. Prom, Hungary, Reading, Amsterdam, then Uni. Just these few exams left, I’ll be revising intensly for them.
Woo! Chris and James came up with the idea of going Amsterdam, and we all like the idea, so 5 of us are heading off to Amsterdam on September 3rd. We booked the hotel, flights and transport to and from the hotel today. It’s all done. The total price was £191 per person. Quite a good price for five nights! It should be amazing! That’s our hotel in the photo above, though ours will be for 5 people, at the Hotel Kooyk. It’s gonna be crazyyyy.
So Apple announced the iPhone 3G on Monday at WWDC, which was to be expected, to be released on July 11. No-one was really surprised, though they obviously still clapped and cheered for Jobs. I don’t really know what to make of it to be honest. It’s a nice upgrade, but I’m still shocked they haven’t included Cut and Paste yet! I’ll have to try one out in person, but I don’t like the white colour at all, and the curviness of the back is not something that I’m too happy with.
My EDGE iPhone works perfectly fine, and I really don’t see myself upgrading anytime soon. You have to sign the contract at the store this time, obviously they’re trying to get around people jailbreaking it and unlocking it, though it’ll still be done. You could sign the contract and then cancel it, but you’d be charged with the early termination fee, and I doubt that’s cheap.
I can’t however wait for the iPhone 2.0 software. The App store looks great, and some of the games look amazing. Spore and Supermonkey Ball are perhaps the best, and from the others that Jobs demonstrated, it will definitely be worth will. At leasr it’s a free upgrade for iPhone users, $9.99 for the touch (which is due to legal reasons I believe).
I’m sad to see the camera’s still remained the same, and there’s no front facing camera either for 3G. That seems kind of a let down to be honest, the camera is perhaps the worst feature of the iPhone. There is Assisted-GPS in the phone, and TomTom have announced they’ve already got software made for it, so expect to see competing applications soon. This is definitely a feature I’d like in my iPhone, as the cell-tower location is just too flimsy, and it’d be nice to have in the iPhone, especially for walking and stuff. It probably does suck on the battery life quite a bit though.
Overall, it’s a nice device, but there’s still stuff lacking. O2 have priced it at £99 for the lower end contracts and free for the higher end contracts. It’s definitely an improvement over the previous price, but somehow I think they’ll make up that money (due to increased contract price and the contract details).
So today was my first exam since Maths, and well it wasn’t easy to say the least. It was quite different from the past exam papers I’ve done, and though most of the content was the same, it was just a question that annoyed me. One part was only one mark, so that’s not going to make much of a difference, but the other one I was close to getting after discussing it with my friends.
I though that the bottom was r-squared, so I lost a mark there, but luckily I got the part before! There was also a bit to do with the energy released when two atoms of Palladium were next to each other and a neutron caused fission. This was more complicated, and again it was only 2 marks so I don’t think I lost that many overall.
Reactions from other people were quite mixed, some said it was hard, others said it was okay. I think that most of it was good, it was just some of the formulas that took me a while to remember. The exam is only worth 61% of the module as well, and I aced my research report so that’s worth the other 49%. We’ll have to wait until August for the results anyway.
Chemistry of Materials tomorrow (the resit), and having done quite a bit of revision today, I’m feeling quite confident about it. I’m going in early tomorrow to revise more. Then it’s just SN4 and SN5 Biology on Friday and the synoptics next week. It will all be over soon, thank god.
In other news, I’ve fully transferrred theminiblog.co.uk over to dreamhost, and the domain is now under my sole control too. Took a while but it’s all done. There are still some picture problems with that, but I’ll sort it out later.
Political Compass borrowed from politicalcompass.org and adapted by me.
What a busy week it has been, both in my life and politically. Biology and Chemistry revision went pretty well, and we did quite a bit of Topic 7 and 8 in Biology. I’ll be revising SN4 during the weekend as well as the Physics to get me sorted before next weeks exams. I can’t believe they’re already so close! The weather has been a bit shite lately, which doesn’t make for the best motivational tool!
Now, getting onto the politics, I recently retook the political compass test and you can see the results in the graph above. I modified the graph at the website and added some other names, including the current British political parties and the candidates for the US presidency, as well as some others in black. I am fairly liberal on the social scale and a lefty on the economic scale. I was quite surprised to see that the Labour party are so right economically. It seems that I am closer to the Green party than any of the other British parties, hehe, though sadly I doubt they’d ever get in power.
Barack Obama has surpassed the needed delegate counts to be made the presumptive nominee as the Democratic candidate for the President of the United States (link). I always thought that he would beat Hillary, who has lied on many occasions and has really jabbed Obama when he was doing so much better than her. Now we just have to wait and see in Novemember whether it will be McCain or Obama. Meanwhile Clinton didn’t immediately step down after hearing the nomination stories and said that she will think about it and speak to the Senate. Later on this week though, CNN reported that she is expected to suspend her campaign by the end of the week. I don’t see why she doesn’t just concede, it’s not like there’s a point to still officially remain in the race.
She should support Obama, though maybe a Obama-Clinton ticket is not the best idea, nor would it pull many voters. The diehard democrats that voted for Clinton would likely remian with the Democratic candidate anyway, whilst those that were torn between Clinton and McCain with no enthusiasm for Obama will move over to McCain. Essentially all that might come of it is some minor scale swaying with no use, considering it would probably have no effect on the electoral college.
Tomorrow is Saturday which means that the new episode of Doctor Who will be on! Woo, I can’t wait. Though I guess I’ll be doing revision beforehand. I started watching Greek as Callum recommended it to me and I absolutely love it! I have been watching it a bit too religiously and I’ll be dissapointed when the season ends as the next season is not expected to air (in the US that is) until Autumn 2008/Spring 2009. That’s a long time, and everything else on TV seems to be getting to the end of the season, bar House. That and Doctor Who seem to be the only good things still running (oh, and Heroes) on TV. Everything is ending as Summer is near (wooooo!) and not many people will be watching their TVs so closely.
