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.

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.

This weekend was relatively boring, though Saturday’s Doctor Who was one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. The new episode had Alex Kingston (who plays Dr. Corday in ER and is extremely hawt) and had the title of this post. The graph above is nicely doctor who related too, lol (found on the internets). David Tennant is one of the best Doctors, and as you can see Colin Baker sucksss. I was going to go Revolver with everyone else, but I really couldn’t be bothered to go out all the way to Corby. I didn’t feel like it tbh, and we had an ace time last week anyway.

I did get a chance and tried to email circlehosting again, but the email bounced and they said it was inactive. Their support site is not working due to a MySQL error and I tried emailing the guy from last time but I’ve heard nothing. The domain seems to be registered with eNom, so I’ll try and contact them tomorrow and see what they can do. I’m getting quite annoyed now!

I’ve been watching a bit of South Park and Family Guy too. I seemed to have caught up with what they’re showing in the US. I want to start watching something new but I’m not sure what. People seem so addicted to Lost so I might try watching that, though I don’t want to get hooked, hehe.

I went in today for physics revision, and it seems Mr. Tiktin wanted to move it to Tuesday because he thought Biology was supposed to be today, when it’s actually the other way around. So we’re staying at Mondays. Got quite a bit of revision done, which I was quite happy about. It seems I need to focus more on the later modules, especially nuclear reactions and the transformer stuff, we went over those units quite quickly! The first exam is in a week and two days, so by that time I’ll have this learnt like the back of my hand. Chemsitry’s not bad either, just a bit worried about Biology, I hate plants lol! I’ll be revising that tomorrow in school, so I’ll table out all the stuff I’m not too sure about.

I also found out that the school now have an unencrypted Wi-Fi connection (presumably for students) that we can then log in to with our school details. A nice idea, though sadly implemented a bit late for me to get the best use out of. Eh, I’ll live.

In two and a half weeks time it’ll all be over, and I can rest and enjoy not having to go to school anymore. It also better start getting sunnier, I can’t take all this rain. We need to have a barbecue soon too, the last one was canceled because of the rain.

I haven’t posted in a few days, mainly because I’ve been enjoying the days off, as well as having to go into school (on the first two days as well) to revise Biology and Chemistry. I’m glad I went though, because I can assure you that I would not be revising at home during this time. I’d most likely be preoccupied infront of the TV or the Internet (watching the West Wing - hence the title of this post).

It was nice and weird being back in school again. I liked being able to leave at any time I wanted though. We had roast for lunch on Wednesday, which was lovely as always.

We got to pick up our Leaver’s Hoodies as well. They look absolutely awesome! You can see the reverse side above. The school logo is on the front, and I’m glad they chose the old school logo, it suits it much better, as well as showing the nostalgia during our time at BW. They were well worth the money, and I’ll enjoy wearing it to school and on results day!

In other news, I put Ubuntu on my sister’s old laptop, and it seems to be working fine. For a while it seemed to restart and never make it past the boot screen, so I took it apart and put it back together and it seems to have done the trick. I think the BIOS battery might have been a bit loose. I got WiFi working through ndiswrapper, it took far less time to get it running than I thought it would have. Sadly there are no visual effects, even the minimal ones don’t work. It is an aged machine, with the Video RAM taken from system memory so I can’t say I was too surprised.

I am getting a MacBook for University though, and after long deliberations with myself and the wider internet, I have decided to get a white one! ^_^ I think it looks far better and I think it would be unique as compared to the other black laptops out there. Plus this way we won’t have three MacBooks within the family. Luckily it seems I can get the educational discount with a conditional firm choice. My sister rang up and asked them, so I won’t have to wait until September to get it. Woop!

I have been around James’ house and I got to play on his PS3. I can say that the PS3 is as ugly as it looks, but the UI is nice, and I want GTA IV. That is one mad game, though I’m a bit skint on cash at the moment so it’s a no go for me, yet anyway.

I’ve been keeping all my iphone converted videos and movies, as well as lots of other things on my external hard drive ‘Rubik’. It was getting pretty low on space, and without keeping anything on my main hard drive that also was quite low (20GB out of 80GB).

So I decided to replace the previous 40GB hard drive with the 80GB one from my sister’s old laptop that no longer works. But then dad suggested I replace the music network drive which is 100GB with the 80GB one so I could have the 100GB one. There is only 10 or so GB of music so the space won’t be missed and now I’ve got plenty of breathing room in mine. The process didn’t take that long, it was just a bit messy replacing the external drives, reformatting and making sure all the data was intact.

Anyhoo, now that means I’ve got space for more bittorrenting!

The C4 exam is over, which means that there is no more Maths for me forever! Woooo!

The actual exam went really well. The first paper was good, with nothing I couldn’t do. There was a question with a trig identity, but I remembered that correctly ^_^. The integration and general algebra questions were rather simple. The vectors question was lovely (shocking that I used that word to describe anything to do with vectors!) I actually knew how to do it and I seem to have got the same answers as my friends.

The comprehension paper was also rather nice talking about Sudoku and Latin squares. You didn’t actually have to read much of the paper to understand the question. There was quite a bit of filling in the squares and then some stuff on a formula for the numbers given, etc. Nearly everyone finished early and we were let out early by like 10 minutes. I sat there for a while though before we were allowed to leave.

Now there are 7 exams left, a mix of Physics, Chemistry and Biology. No doubt Biology will be the hardest out of them all. 

This is absolutely outrageous. An unnamed teenager has been served by the City of London police after a peaceful protest in which his poster exclaimed “Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult“. The poster was confiscated by the police from the teenager, who is under-18, and have sent the case file to the Crown Prosecution Service. 

Within five minutes of arriving I was told by a member of the police that I was not allowed to use that word, and that the final decision would be made by the inspector

The teenager accurately cited a 1984 high court ruling, where Justice Latey described Scientology as a “cult” that was “corrupt, sinister and dangerous“. If the Judge is allowed to call it a cult, why isn’t he? The policewoman read him Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 (pdf), which in part says that a person is guilty of an offence if he “displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting” (sec. 5, 1, b), and strongly recommended that he remove the sign.

What’s even more worrying is that an anonymous demonstrator wrote on the anti-Scientology forums that they “protested outside another Scientology building in Tottenham Court Road which is policed by a separate force, the Metropolitan police, who have never tried to stop us using the word cult“. Where’s the fair and balance the police are supposed to be serving?

I didn’t even know that back in 2006 the City of London police got into some heat because it was found that over twenty officers had accepted gifts worth thousands of pounds from Scientology. These weren’t all low-ranking officials either, they ranged from Constable to Chief Superintendent. When the new headquarters opened that year the Chief Superintendent Kevin Hurley applauded Scientology for “raising the spiritual wealth of society“. Whilst this may not be bribery, it does display some sort of low-level corruption. Gifts in exchange for speaking good about Scientology perhaps? We can only speculate. What is certain is that the Chief Superintendent has clearly lost his head.

What a load of bollocks. If it’s not clear to you that Scientology is a cult, I’m sorry to inform you that your mind has been warped. It was founded by a bloody science-fiction author for Christ’s sake! How un-realistic can you get?

This pretty much amounts to public censorship. This is not threatening or abusive wording at all. Whilst it may be insulting, it’s hardly a reason to confiscate the poster nor face the teenager with prosecution. This all reminds me of V for Vendetta where Steven Fry shows Natalie Portman all the government banned loot he has stashed around. What word will the government ban us from using next? It was a peaceful protest, no property was damaged, lives weren’t lost and perhaps just some egos were bashed.

I honestly hope this kid doesn’t make it to court, or if it does, some ace barrister will offer his counselling pro bono for him. This is a disgrace. I wouldn’t really expect this here in the UK, at least we don’t class Scientology as a church (unlike the USA).

link (guardian.co.uk)

With my C4 exam the day after tomorrow (wow this time has gone fast!), I’ve been revising a bit going over all the topics, especially the comprehension paper. I really hate vectors! I was looking at the January 2008 C4 paper and that had a section B question on vectors, so I hope this means we won’t get a section B question. I can do simple plane, vector equation and scalar product questions, but I really don’t like doing anything too big to do with planes. I’ll be revising vectors nearly all day tomorrow; I think I’m getting the hang of it now.

I haven’t yet started (proper) revision for any of my other subjects. I’ll start it as soon as maths is over and done with. Sadly the first day back next term I have to go in for Biology revision. I was going to rather enjoy exam leave on the first day. Oh well, I’ll probably get more done there than here at home anyway.

I finally finished the 4th season of the West Wing though. I just started the 5th season, it’s rather interesting with Zoey’s kidnapping, I don’t really remember this well (even though I’ve seen it plenty of times.)

I did also get AWstats working on the blog though. Thank god I have shell access, otherwise there’s no way I could have fixed it. There were so many problems with trying to get the configuration working, and now that it’s done I’ve only got one problem. The times reported by AWstats are US Eastern times, and this is because the server is located in the US, and the log times reported are therefore in US time zone. I can’t figure out for the life of me how to adjust it, so I’ll probably email the dreamhost support staff.

I started watching the West Wing again a few days ago after taking a long break. I’m currently in the middle of Season 4 during the election campaign for Sam to the House of Representatives. This was a really good episode, Toby and Charlie were arrested for getting into a fight because a guy was vocal about his thoughts on Andy’s pregancy. I missed watching it, although it seems to keep my mac mini’s fan powered a lot which doesn’t make for good background noise!