Ain’t life grand? December 14, 2009
Posted by Sharny in : Essay,Life,School,Thoughts,Work , add a commentSo this is the updatery and depressive post that will explain why I’m posting here again and why I have relaunched durka. It’s not exactly going to be much fun but I kinda want to write some things not addressed to myself and explain the sudden reappearence of posting.
As planned, this year I started higher education at Nottingham University on the 21st of September, after moving in the day before. Things didn’t exactly have the easiest start, you hear tales of university being so much better than school before hand and people really finding themself and such. I didn’t get so lucky. All of it was a massive struggle and it was all a very depressing and downtreading time. As a few weeks went by and routine began to set in things did get better, as they surely do.
Then, something rather unexpected happened. Essentially, in the space of a day I realised that Chemistry was not the course for me. It was a real epiphany moment, and not a moment I wanted to have. There were other doubts around it, including ones about whether being at University was even the right thing for me to be doing. Through talking and thinking and thinking and talking some more I got some plan of what to do.
So much for rebranding December 2, 2009
Posted by Sharny in : Fun,Gaming,Internets,School,Scraps , add a commentSo after realising that my relaunched durka is practically impossible to actually find due to both it’s rebranding and it being parked on this domain. Also, Godaddy are having a sale on .info and it was hella cheap for me to grab my old domain back. So I did.
Now the un-rebranded durka can be found over at tehdurka.info. This does have the possible bonus of past visitors coming through random searching or something. I can’t imagine anyone will still be hoping that it re-appears and regularly look for it but maybe there’s one guy. And one guy is all it takes! So long as he has friends…
Bringing Durka Back November 27, 2009
Posted by Sharny in : Fun,Gaming,Internets,School,Work , add a commentIt’s been my plan for a while to relaunch my old filter avoiding website tehdurka.info. As my most sucessful website ever, it’s demise was quite unfortunate. At the point of taking it down it had received over 400,000 hits during it’s lifespan, not massive on internet scale but certainly something for me. Of course, if it ever did get especially popular I would probably run into trouble anyway due to it appearing on the radar of school and workplace filtering technology. A few thousand hits a day was quite enough for me.
I can’t entirely remember why I shut it down, probably to do with the hassle of juggling free providers to keep my costs down to a minimum. In order not to run up massive bandwidth costs (my host, nearlyfreespeech.net, operates on a pay-what-you-use system with a high level of transparacy in their operation, I would reccomend them for anyone needing a cheap place to host a low bandwidth/storage site) I will be using free web hosting providers wherever I can, a slightly dubious practice but if they’ll let me hotlink then hotlink I shall. Most are very limited in terms of both space and bandwidth so it’s quite a bother juggling it all. But I’ll do it again, to keep myself occupied.
My new incarnation of Durka is named Malarky and is currently hosted as part of this website. Depending on what happens, I may give it it’s own subdomain or possibly get some unlimited bandwidth hosting for it. Of course, that’s a point where it gets worryingly popular and could possibly fail because of it. There’s also issues of copyright on the games I’m hosting, I have a very open takedown policy and I think most game makers are mostly interested in people playing their game rather than making money but I’m sure there are some out there who only want their game on a specific site and I’ll respect that provided that I’m aware. There are of course lots of ways for flash games to make money irrespective of what website is hosting them, mochi ads for one.
Hopefully my good faith will keep me clear of any trouble, and it should improve my programming skills as a by product which is always positive. So, if you’re in need of entertainment at school or work (obviously not during a lesson, wouldn’t want to ruin your education) then head on over to Malarky and get playing. I will be adding lots more games over the coming weeks to get it back up to the level that Durka had when I shut her down.
Judged August 14, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Life,School , add a commentIt was a pretty surreal experience really, going in, getting the envelope, opening it to find an ominous note to see my tutor, which I knew for sure meant I hadn’t hit my grades for everything. The first thing I read was my AQA statement, which gave me a B in both Chemistry and Psychology, the former of which was a B by no less than one UMS point. Then I found the OCR one, which stated the now obvious result of a C. This was entirely predictable, I hadn’t really felt that a B in Physics was likely at all, I was however hoping for an A in psychology to make up for it but unfortunately that didn’t happen.
So from there I consulted my tutor who told me that he had been unable to get an answer out of Nottingham (their offer was BBB) as I needed to check my UCAS track before they would even talk to me. With this information in hand I was just eager to get out of there and find out. If I were a different person or the results had meant clearly that I had been accepted I would have liked to have found out how well quite a few people did, not to mention thank some of my teachers but the need to confirm my future and the fear involved with talking to people led me home as quickly as I could get there.
I quickly found a UCAS letter stating my application number thingymawhatsit and logged in to track, which was surprisingly responsive given that so many people accross the country would have been logging into it around that time. There, on the first page, was the message.
” Congratulations! Your place at The University of Nottingham (N84) to study Chemistry with a Research Year in Industry (F104) has been confirmed. ”
Sweet relief.
The hour of judgement August 13, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Life,School , add a commentIn less than 12 hours I’m going to have my A level results in my hands. Nothing so big in my life has rested on one thing in the way this is. Although there are plenty of other people accross the country in an almost identical position to me I still am very alone with this, none of my friends have quite the same pressure on them. Sure, GCSEs have importance but they are much more flexible, if you don’t get quite what is asked of you often you will be allowed in anyway, perhaps with more terms.
Having known this feeling of dread ever since my last exam, never has it been greater than now.
There is a huuuge ramble potential for this post but I’m going to have to restrain myself. Ultimately, nothing I can do can change my results (at the moment, I could get a re-mark) and it’s not like there is anything I need to know about what will happen if I do/don’t get my grades.
I’m just gonna try and get some sleep and hope beyond hope that this will go my way…
That time June 16, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Life,School,Scraps , add a commentTomorrow begins my final week of exams. My most important week of exams. The exams that could well decided my future. Unless the universities decide they suddenly don’t need grades they will decide my future.
Let’s just say I could definitely be more prepared.
Of course, times like this make me all looky at my life time. And listen to music at a higher than normal volume, that too.
There is really no point worrying, I know this, it doesn’t really seem to stop me doing…whatever it is I’m doing. At least once this is over I really have very little to worry about and I think it’s about time I got some worry free moments. Well, I have to find myself a job but that’s another story.
One nice thing at the moment is that I have been given the job offer by my Ski resort so that is one more hurdle down, only one big one and one small one left. The big one is the visa process. Gee that’s gonna be fun…
