Coursework Conundrums May 6, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Life, Rants, School , add a commentI should be doing my psychology coursework right now. Well, I am. Trying to do it at least…
We started doing this coursework absolutely ages ago but I was always going very slowly. I got the practical and results out of the way a long time ago but writing the report for what I did seems horribly difficult. In fact, coming up with an original study (well, original compared to what everyone else did - replicate last years coursework and then use it as a guide) is a huge disadvantage.
What I did was a bit weird anyway but I have very little relevant guidelines. Unless I do what I sometimes seem to and just pull a good piece of coursework out of the bag with pure fluke this will be a terrible failure and since I’m relying on the shinyness of an A in psychology to overshadow the almost unavoidable C in physics I can’t have shoddy coursework.
Did I mention it has to be in tomorrow?
And of course, due to the fact that May is already in swing, this is one of those deadlines that the teacher has very little control over, I can’t just magic up an extension from anywhere.
One of the most horrible things is that when I’ve talked to him about it I’ve gone away feeling good, feeling like I can tackle the problems. But then when I sit down and actually try and write, nothing comes out. I mean, I’ve been thinking of things to put in this coursework for months, it’s something that interests me and actually gave results that I wasn’t necessarily expecting but now that I try to write about it I can’t seem to find any words.
The title of my blog is looking very appropriate now…
Choas in a shack April 19, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Life, Music, Rants , add a commentSo yeah, first band night style gig last night. We got there at about 5, arriving at a wooden building with Thurgarton village hall written on the side. Things got even better (/sarcasm) when we got inside to see what looked more like a southern American’s house’s veranda as a stage, complete with my first drum kit by Tomy. Seriously. Really. Tiny. Drum kit. 2 toms and two cymbals, with a bass drum that was probably smaller than the size of one of our drummer’s larger toms on his own kit. This was of course the point where we understood why we couldn’t take our amps, there just wasn’t enough space on that stage. There was barely room to move never mind have more amps than the two Marshall half stacks.
I was kind of just in hysterics at this point, the whole thing just seemed so silly. There was essentially no lighting, only a tiny stage complete with tiny drum kit and at this point my amp hadn’t arrived yet. Oh yeah, the “backstage” (really more to the left of the stage) was basically a cramped room filled with stacked chairs. After having dumped our stuff we were essentially just hanging around until we found out some friends were on the bus and were gonna be getting off at the pub so we all headed down there which is also when our singer arrived. We were actually one of the few bands that actually arrived on time in a complete fashion, with one not fully arriving until a while after we had come off.
After waiting around for a while we headed back to the hall leaving a couple of people behind (non band members) to stay lookout. We gave our opinions in the sound check and were told that no one was allowed to change any of the settings on any of the amps. Hooray for every band’s every song sounding the same! With that in mind there was very little point going out and testing things for myself. We had also been informed that anyone wanting to set up their own effects would have time taken out of their set (wtf?) and initially decided to go without them because they weren’t that important.
Then we remembered the killing in the name solo.
Shiiiit.
So our lead guitarist hurried to get his multi effects plugged in. I had been informed that it was starting at 7 but 7 came and went with not much of a crowd built up yet. I think we probably went on about quarter past. We had been told that we had 20minutes for our set, which was fine since our songs average about 4 minutes each and if you chuck in a bit of time for tuning up between our first 2 songs then that’s fine.
We are announced by a maths teacher at our drummer and singer’s school, who we decided when looking from the back looked much like two children standing on each other’s shoulders. It was the long coat that did it, and probably the young looking face. It was a slightly lackluster announcement but we went out fine with some applause and everyone plugged in. So far everything was pretty much fine, we go into our first song, Killing in the Name. I think we played mostly fine, a few small mistakes from me but Tubb (lead guitar) nailed the solo. I quickly whipped the tuner out of my pocket after the song was over and returned to standard tuning whilst the singer was doing a bit of introductory stuff for members of the band (as you do).
Problems arose when I plugged myself back into the amp only to find myself muted. I quickly warned the drummer not to start the song whilst I started jostling with the lead to make sure it was plugged in. I eventually jostled it into a position that worked but it was not a pleasant experience. Anyway, we went into Apple Tree and everything went well, I got into the song more than I did with Killing in the Name with some headbanging at certain parts.
Of course, there were still more surprises to come. After finishing the song we were informed from those offstage that we could only do one more song, despite the fact we had only about half the time we were promised and had a small argument over the song to play last. We chose not to do Ace of Spades simply because Nick (the bassist) is quite bad at remembering the rhythm to the intro (and actually I don’t blame him, it’s quite tricky to remember it even though it’s so recognizable) so we did Cavemen Rejoice instead.
We went into the song fine and played fine up until the bridge where I used my whammy bar on a held chord and of course…my lead cuts out. I’m then left trying to play the bridge and fiddle with my lead to get it to work which eventually succeeds and we finish the song and go off stage.
We were all royally pissed off at being cut short and generally the way we had been treated but our drummer took it one step further (drummers, what are ya gonna do with em eh?) and confronted one of the organizers which lead to a bit of pushing after which our drummer stormed out and punched the wall.
Twice. He left some skin behind too.
He then left with a couple of others to go to a nearby friend’s house to put a plaster on his now bloody knuckles whilst we hung around a bit, eventually choosing to follow their route to try and find them. At this point two random members of the audience shook my hand and congratulated me. Dunno if they were taking the piss but who cares eh.
After eventually finding our drummer and him having a chance to talk over his motivations with the guy he confronted they shook hands and that was pretty much the end of it. I actually think he handled the situation quite well really all in all, we were all annoyed and he articulated our feelings very well.
We basically just hung around for the rest of the evening, which was pretty fun in itself. I actually really enjoy the company of a lot of the people who were there, they are generally very friendly and likable and I had a good time doing that.
We did sort of have the last laugh in a way because the organizers (not particularly popular people it would seem, probably reasonably like us y’know) put themselves last in the running order, behind all the bands filled with popular people. Essentially, after the second to last band finished there was something of a mass exodus outside with only about half the original crowd hanging around to see the final band of which most of them were just milling about chatting anyway. They also played a really really long set, like 40minutes or so, filled with typically bland songs to a rather lackluster audience.
Although some audience members returned everyone was rather apathetic towards the organizers and even with the length of their set they still finished 20 minutes early. Essentially there is no way that our <4 minute song needed to be cut out and that was basically the icing on the cake.
Oh, did I mention, one of our friends was trapped outside almost the whole night because they wouldn’t let him pay on the door. The woman in charge of that also did a terrible job, apparently band members were supposed to have something written on their hand to be let in but she never even informed us of this and she did have a chance to because she came and spoke to us directly at one point. The whole thing was a ridiculous show of how not to run one of these things and that has left us very determined to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
Wow that’s a wall of text. It’s probably riddled with mistakes because its taken so long to write that I really don’t have time to check it over, I need to be getting on with coursework.
In summary: We played well and I’m pleased with that, it was just everything else that badly organized and executed.
Will I ever encounter a computer that just works? March 17, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Life, Rants, Technology , add a commentComputers. Wonderful things. The main issue however, is that they never seem to actually work. I have never encountered a single computer that didn’t have something wrong with it, some weird behavior, something it did that made no sense or something that just didn’t work. A few times I’ve been able to quite happily put this down to the age of the machine or the fact that it’s components just weren’t that good. But that has stopped working.
I got my current computer for the Christmas before last, it was a very exciting moment for me, the first time I had ever gotten a computer all for myself and one that was good enough to play the games I wanted to play and do the things I wanted to do. Things didn’t exactly start off well when the video card that came with it was faulty, oh well, back to the shop with that. They replaced it free of charge and I also bought and had them install another 512MB stick of RAM as it only had the one at the time. Things were lovely for quite some time after that, everything seemed to be working fine. I started playing World of Warcraft and it could handle that no problem.
Then things start going wrong. I have honestly no idea what caused it but WoW just started crashing the computer all the time, just causing it to instantly restart. It would only happen when playing WoW (save for I think one time) and almost always when loading a new zone. Windows had about as much idea of what was going on as I did, giving a range of complete crap as to what has caused it, none of which made much sense and sounded very vague and unhelpful. I cut down a bit on my at home WoW playing as it just got too irritating having it just crash all the time. Originally I thought over heating could be to blame (as according to a temperature monitor I installed things were running pretty hot in there) and thought maybe cleaning inside could help but it didn’t, this weren’t actually very dusty in there at all in fact. I came up with a sort of semi-fix for when it restarted the computer, this was essentially to unplug it before it started up and then plug back in and start up properly. Once started I would close all the situational processes I never use and open very little else on the computer. This seemed to work.
More recently an even stranger thing started happening. Something in my computer started rattling. The first time I turned my computer on to hear this I freaked out, since rattling inside the case is generally not a good sign. I did discover, however, that this noise didn’t seem to have any effect on the actual operation of the computer, which led me to turn the computer off and open it up to see if I could find the cause. Once I got in there everything just looked completely normal but upon turning the computer on again the rattling started once more, seemingly coming from the power supply. Over the next few days I worked out that it probably rattles according to the heat, when the computer is cold (eg when turned on after being off during the night) it is really loud and as the computer warms up it gets quieter until it becomes silent. A quick Google search reveals other people with similar problems generally getting told to replace their fans, at the moment I’m not sure what I’m going to do, if it were rattling all the time it would make sense to me but the heat dependency thing is just really weird…
Just to make things worse my computer is being crashed by WoW even more now, even with all excess process closed, iTunes not running (or any program for that matter) it crashed 3 times whilst zoning so far today. It basically makes the game unplayable and given that my friends are away home is the only place I can get my WoW hit during this first week of the easter holidays. At the moment it is kinda working but I can’t really guarantee anything at the moment which is pretty annoying.
To return to my title a bit, a few other examples of computer failings include my friend’s new Dell which is only a few months old but is already suffering from a failing hard drive and intermittent blue screens, their older one which has a good few error messages upon start up (but otherwise works alright-ish) and their oldest which, following a recent format and clean inside the case, cannot be relied upon to do anything more than browse the internet.
In essence, this point is pretty pointless as I don’t imagine that computers will ever stop failing on me or anyone else. Ever. Ultimately, I’m just going to have to put up with not having a computer for a few days whilst presumably some parts get replaced and hopefully sort out my problems without a format and really get used to it (although it’s not really like I’m not used to it already, given the number of formats our previous computer had).
It would just be nice if, for once, something worked…
The Cause of Global Warming is Irrelevant October 22, 2007
Posted by Sharny in : Environment, Essay, Rants, Thoughts , 2 commentsOk. I’ll admit it. I am a bit of an environmentalist. I am concerned about the future of this planet. I am worried about the amount of fossil fuels we use and the wasteful attitudes of our society.
But if there is one thing I am really sick of, it’s this on going fight between lazy assed people and hippies about what the cause of global warming is. I’m here to tell you right now. IT DOESN’T FUCKING MATTER.
Of course, to start with, no one knows what is the cause of this increase in global temperature that we are having. The systems of this planet are very complex and we have difficulty really knowing what the fuck is going on with them. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what side of the line you stand, you still don’t know. I personally think it is a bit too convenient a coincidence that as we start releasing a load of locked up carbon and destroying the things that get rid of it the world starts getting hotter. But at the same time, I perfectly understand that this is by no means proof and really I don’t want to discuss the whole are we/aren’t we causing global warming.
If we are the cause of global warming then our burning of fossil fuels probably comes top of the reasons for this. All we really use this stuff for is fuel: to make our electricity; to run our cars and to cook our meals. Perhaps one of the biggest worries for some of us westerners is the ever increasing price of oil and how much of an effect this can have on our lives.
Now, no matter how you look at it, this is a simple issue of supply and demand. As more nations industrialise and populations increase demand (as it currently stands) can really do nothing but go up. On the other hand, supply is constantly going down. There is most definitely a finite amount of fossil fuels. This means that the price of this fuels will rise over the long term.
On an individual basis
Most of the things the average person can do to reduce what is currently becoming known as your “carbon footprint” involve saving energy in many different ways. A lot of these things are very easy and can be done without some massive overhaul. Ok, lets see less energy used = less money spent. As the money required for energy goes up this is going to be more noticeable in terms of the chunk coming out of your pocket.
Lets recap: Easy ways to save energy -> less energy used -> more money to spend on other things.
Now, I don’t even see how global warming needs to come anywhere near this. It’s just common sense. Yet for some reason lots of people object to the mere suggestion of this. I know you’re stubborn and demand for everything to be your way but this really has no downside. Well, it might cut 1 minute out of your day that you could be spending reading motivational lists on self improvement blogs. Damn, wouldn’t that be a shame.
On a national level
Ok, so I’ve covered why the causes of global warming are irrelevant and in fact why global warming needn’t even play a part in this stuff. Now its time for coverage of this irrelevance at a national level. Again, we mostly rely on fossil fuels and they will run out, some of them potentially within my lifetime. This leaves at the point - what are we going to do when the fuel all runs out? Renewable energy of course. Now, given that potentially we are the cause of global warming, wouldn’t it make sense to get on with the whole renewable energy plan before we actually run out?
So the idea is simple. America - end the war in Iraq, it is costing you millions upon millions every single day. Not only is it a waste of young life out there in the army but that money could be used to treat the sick, to get scholarships into college, to end hunger and make the world a more stable place. So, with all that money you save you can start researching ways to produce energy without the need of any fossil fuels.
Many solutions already exist. It is already very theoretically possible to power the whole of the UK on a series of wind compressing turbines out in the sea. Good because compressed air is easy to transport, easy to store and also good because some pompous middle class woman in a country village somewhere can’t complain about those “ugly” wind turbines ruining her view. Relatively inexpensive changes by the government could pay themselves off very quickly in terms of energy saving.
A further bonus for governments of acting on this crisis is that it would greatly lessen the hold that some countries influence on the west due to their sources of fossil fuels. Really, it’s our reliance on these things that makes us weak in our opinion. It would really take very little to bring the west to its knees, just take away it’s energy. You’re worried about looking weak to terrorists? Well guess what, you already look weak because you rely so heavily on something that’s running out.
Conclusion
If you want to keep up this pointless argument just because your ego makes it that important then you can. But ultimately, stop using your lack of “belief” in global warming as an excuse for your laziness. Get off your ass and make some changes, you are effectively throwing away money. Get off your ass and put pressure on your government to make changes to the sources of its energy in order to have indefinite energy and greater security due to not needing foreign oil. No, this is not someone else’s job. This is for you to do and I am sick of everyone pretending that it’s not.
Edit: Just stumbled on an interesting post that has done some of the maths along the lines of what I outlined (spending the money the US spent on Iraq on solving energy problems). Link: How Far could 68B go in securing our energy independence? Over here in the UK I think there is much more promise in wind energy rather than solar but for a country like the US (certainly large parts of it) there’s a lot to be said for solar power.
To be fair… September 21, 2007
Posted by Sharny in : Life, Rants, Thoughts, World , add a commentAfter seeing a little snippet of a program on TV I figured I should add a little more balance to my arguments relating to the whole Madeline issue. Really, I don’t think that the parents were directly responsible for what happened (although I still think it was irresponsible to leave her on her own even when they were close by) and most importantly the Portuguese police seem to have been pretty useless at responding to what happened.
Both the crime scene and the car that was also part of the investigation were not taken out of the influence of outside variables. In fact, without even doing a proper forensic analysis of the room she was taken from other people were staying in it. That’s pretty damn shocking really and as this TV program pointed out, making the mother a suspect takes the focus off their very shoddy policing and generally distracts people, a technique that is quite powerful and is in full flow with this “war on terror”.
As I said in my previous posts, my real objection to this situation is the injustice in the amount of attention that is paid to these people when much worse atrocities than one girl going missing happen all the time. Similarily I’m sick of seeing all these posters around the place begging people to report information or witnessing of this girl when realistically, no one is going to have any information, it didn’t even happen in this country for reason’s sake.
Unless something major happens, this will be my last post on this subject. The whole thing has just gone on too long and it’s a pretty narrow piece of subject matter.
Madeline’s mum now a suspect - ha! September 9, 2007
Posted by Sharny in : Rants, World , 1 comment so farI was quite pleased when I heard this on the news, as I said in my previous post, I really don’t buy into all this feeling sorry for them bullshit. Those parents have been milking their daughters disappearance from day one and I’m not afraid to say that I’m sick of their crap.
Now I’m not saying that the parents did have anything to do with it (or that the mother accidentally killed her as they were trying to get her to admit for a reduced sentence) but if you were going to do that I think these two have gone the right way about it. What better way to drive suspicion away from yourself by making such an effort to find your daughter. Similarly, I don’t think it’s impossible that media crazed parents so desperate to find fame whatever way they can may organise the kidnapping of their own child (although I do think it’s pretty unlikely).
Either way, as I said before, I don’t think the chances of finding this girl are very high, generally people only reappear after having been gone this long when it hasn’t been publicised so much. I would imagine that she’ll turn up dead sometime and I would feel more sorry for the parents if they weren’t such media dairy farmers.
