From Tablets to School Work

I just realised that I did not write a single blog all summer, so I apologise for the lateness of this post but oh well I'm sure those few of you will get over it.

Summer Youth Project was fantastic and I'd recommend it to anyone who has any slight interest in Technical Theatre. It was a really good experience and I met some great people there! I got an important job too – Lighting Operator: D Maybe another time I'll go into detail but that's a faint outline of what happened. The show was 'My Fair Lady' by the way.

I think my last post was about my new Tablet PC or the specs anyway. I've used my tablet now for many things, including geography coursework and I can honestly say the novelty of a Tablet PC has not worn off yet! It sounds fake and silly but it's honestly a lot easier to navigate round your computer and the internet with the stylus and it's more fun to use as well! I'm really pleased with my purchase and so far it has proved better than my Dell! Speaking of which I still have the Dell because it has a decent graphics card in it and my Tablet only had integrated graphics – the only negative aspect of it but I don't care because I have a PS3!

I'm on Gallery at the moment because there's nowhere else to go when waiting for the school bell to end after Games. Today it was the fitness suite which was ok I guess. School so far isn't too bad; the work doesn't seem as bad as I thought it would be. Having said that I can see that some people can't cope with it but i don't really know why. I think it's because they have better things to do which I can understand, I'm just sad for wanting to do well!

October this year should be a good month for me though. To start with there was the school assembly for Jeans for Genes which is always fun backstage! There's Jazz Evening tomorrow which I'm looking forward to because apparently it's the best evening other than the annual production and Leavers Ball to operate ever! So we'll see how that turns out! On Saturday there's this charity concert thing I operated last year, the band is called Face2Face. It was humorous last year so who knows what'll happen this time! Last but certainly not least is Zak's gig at the Curzon Centre to which I'm hopefully hiring out all sorts of equipment to operate for the event. That's what I'm looking forward to most J

I'm going to stop writing now, I should probably get on with some more work xD

George.

My new laptop

Although it'll show that my last post was merely on Thursday, it was actually written two weeks before that due to uploading issues with blogger. Anyway that's all sorted now and since my last post my Dell Inspiron 6000 died. Firstly as you already know the 'enter' key had fallen off (yes it broke again), the hard drive was way too small, and the final straw was the screen shaking all over the place making the display unreadable. After much research and listening to much advice given from many friends, I decided to go for the Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet. There were many reasons for this, the main one being its portable factor. It weighs half of what my Dell did, and is extremely practical being a Tablet. Also for some reason I had the urge to get a Tablet, and I must say I haven't regretted it!

Here are the specs:

• 2GB Ram
  
• 1.7GHz Dual Core Intel Processor
  
• 160GB Hard Drive
  
• Wi-Fi
  
• Bluetooth
  
• Touch Screen
  
• Interactive screen (ie use for the digitiser pen)
  
• SoundMAX Digital HD Audio
  
• Windows Vista Business
  

Ok, it has Vista. However I think it's really good for Tablet PCs, there is always an on screen keyboard handy when you need it, and the handwriting recognition is almost perfect. It's a decent upgrade from my Dell and should serve well through the next three years of school.

It's now the end of school incidentally, and Youth Project starts on Sunday! I'm looking forward to it and it'll stop my parents complaining at how I 'don't do anything throughout the summer'.

Anyway I'm getting tired now so I'm going to stop writing!

George.

RE Lesson

I am sitting in a cover lesson for RE at the moment, and am having to sit next to Harry :@ For some reason none of the teachers are in school today so we are constantly having cover lessons from the history department, and Harry is correcting all my spelling mistakes even though Microsoft Office Word 2007 has its own built in spell checker :O

Anyway this means that I can no longer hand in my RE re-write to Mr Gleeson! Oh well I'm sure he'll get over it to be honest because he probably doesn't really care about his subject in the first place. Harry is now warning me that I should not disclose this information with you due to the improbable event of Mr Gleeson actually typing into Google 'George Barrett's Blog', but I'll just ignore him.

It's funny because I've finished way before everyone else because I insist that the use of my laptop in RE will help me more during class. And no before you ask I don't do this in any other lesson and it is really just an excuse to basically go to sleep for the rest of the lesson. I've written about 1,000 words in RE today and most other people will only have written about 200 so I think I win from that point of view. YEAH HARRY!

Ok now there is a bit of a time gap because I am now sat in an English lesson listening to people's speeches about 'To Kill A Mockingbird'. Mr Cowburn has already shouted at the class and we've just started! I won't be doing my speech in ages so I just generally type anything he says and hope that I may be able to write a good essay or something.

Now there's another time gap because I am now on Gallery (backstage) finishing off my lunch and generally hanging out and listening to music through the gallery monitors. The music can get annoying at times because there are a few arrogant members of the team here and are constantly changing the song half way through between them. Not only that but they just can't help changing the Folio settings individually as if it makes them more important or knowledgeable or something!

Anyway I'd better stop writing now because this is starting to get a bit long for a blog entry!

 

George.

Weirdly relaxed week :S

This week has been oddly relaxed in terms of the amount of work that has been required of me at school. Since the exams anyway homework seems to have decreased and school generally seems maybe even a bit more fun at the moment. I'm sure this all changes soon seeing as I have to take my GCSEs next year but it'll be all over soon J

The only real work I've had to do this week is Chemistry studying reversible reactions, in Maths which I'll go into detail later, and my RE exam re-write which I had to do because I got a poor mark in the exam! I always thought that my RE teacher was maybe a little deluded in that he is completely obsessed with the fact that God creates miracles and he also has an obsession with this film called 'Rocky' which is probably the worst film I've ever seen. However he really sunk to new levels last week by saying how I had to meet him the next day during lunchtime, and threatened to discuss my place at the school with my Head of Year if I did not turn up! I couldn't really believe what he'd said to be honest because it seemed a little over the top. I would understand if I had misbehaved during the year or hadn't done any of the work, but I was in fact probably one of the very few who did any work and yet he thought it was justified to come up with such a threat! I'll be glad when I get to give up RE because I really do think it is an utter waste of time and that I could be learning something more useful and more interesting.

Anyway, rant over for now, because to lighten the mood at school the maths department have come up with this 'RGS Apprentice' idea where someone in the year is going to be appointed as the RGS Apprentice. Obviously I won't win because the class have to vote who the 'class apprentice' is before they can go to be the final apprentice, which means no matter how hard you may work it'll only be 'popular' people who will get through, but it'll still be fun.

Also I still don't really know what to do about my next laptop however I may eventually decide to get the Lenovo Thinkpad X60 Tablet, or one of them there are about three, because they are the cheapest, lightest tablet PCs that I can find and they seem quite good to me. I now have to save £600 and if I'm honest I have no idea how I'm going to do that but hopefully during the summer I will think of a way!

Anyway, I'd better get some sleep now J

George.

Yay for my ‘Enter’ key :-)

It may be a bit of a random title, but it has taken me a week for me to be able to get my enter key back on my keyboard, and now I've finally managed to bend the metal hooks back into place to allow the plastic to slot into the keyboard!

Yay that felt so good compared with that spacer! This is going to be a really random post but oh well. I bet the key will come off again in a minute anyway!

Well so far so good. I'm actually surprised I haven't posted since Sunday but then I suppose not a lot happened during the week other than my exams of course. Overall I think they went fine, and have already got 1½ back. For my Maths – paper 1 – I got 64%, which someone told me was the third top in the set! Whether that's true or not I don't know but if it is then great. Also it means that because I got in the sixties I'd get an A if I were to take an actual GCSE. The lowest mark I've heard is 21% from a different set but who knows. I also got 60% in geography which is a B in GCSE standards, so that's ok at this stage I guess!

Today's been great really as days go because we haven't really done any work due to the going over of exams and stuff like that, which also means no homeworkJ. So I've basically been on my keyboard (musical) and listening to music and playing on the PS3 etc. Apparently some people would use that time wisely and study, but I am yet to find someone that sad – even Harry watches TV in his free time!

I genuinely want this term to end ASAP now because whatever we learn now at school isn't going to be remembered by the time we go back to school in September. I just can't wait for the summer because there's so much to look forward to, Summer Youth Project and Kittens to name a couple!

Well I'd better get some sleep tomorrow so I don't look like a total fool when batting tomorrow during PE in softball!

George.

P.S: Microsoft Office Word 2007 (Microsoft Cooperation 2006 ©) claims that 'Yay' is incorrectly spelt.

One More Week

I have to say this weekend has had to be one of the most boring ever! Although what do you expect when you have to revise for exams. The ones we had on Friday went OK in my opinion, however I feel particularly in the English I could have done better. Nevertheless I'm feeling confident overall about the coming week and I hope to achieve good results.

It's weird because I've been doing so much revision lately (again not by choice – and whether any of it has been worthwhile I don't know) that I've kind of forgotten about all the things I'd usually do everyday such as watching telly, playing on my games consoles or listening to music. So I'm really looking forward to Friday because that's basically when I return to normal.

I have a few things to look forward to after the exams though. Hopefully this time next week I'll have visited our kittens again, which we are allowed to collect in 5 weeks time! They're so sweet the way they all hang around together. For those of you who don't know we're getting two kittens, one male and one female, and they're both British Shorthair silver spotted/tabby. They're really sweet so that's something to look forward to over the coming weeks.

Also directly after the school holidays I'm taking part in this thing at Wycombe Swam called 'Summer Youth Project' where basically people aged 10-19 act as the cast and crew for a fortnight and this year the production is 'My Fair Lady'. I entered as part of the technical team, having heard of it from the RGS SLST. I'm not totally sure how it'll turn out although from what I hear it's a fun thing to get involved with. I guess I'll have to wait and see!

Tomorrow I have English and Maths exams, so hopefully they'll go OK.

George.

Exams

Yay I'm onto my second post already! I have to admit I'm not really used to writing a blog every day but I'm sure I'll get used to it!

Anyway I've basically been revising for my end of year exams since roughly two weeks before half term (over a month now), and I'm finding all the revision is dragging on a bit now. I can understand having to revise even more next year, but just for end of year exams it kind of seems that all this time revising is a waste of time. Anyway it's nearly all over as the exams finish a week tomorrow so I'll get over it. It was really annoying though because yesterday we had our French oral exam, and I thought I'd prepared well as I'd learnt my whole speech off by heart and had also looked at the other questions we had to revise. However, I was not aware that the presentation was only worth 8 out of 28 marks, the other 20 being the questions; therefore I will have lost out on A LOT of marks for that exam. Obviously our teacher thought it would be particularly helpful to tell us this directly after the exam, but oh well at least I now know for my mocks and for my actual GCSE next year.

Today I have been revising mostly Physics, and to be honest I'm not entirely sure how well I'm going to do during tomorrow's exam because our teacher Mr Hardyman cannot control the class to save his life. It's a shame because I think he actually knows a lot about the subject and would be a really good teacher if the class gave him half a chance. However they seem to have forgotten that we're taking a serious exam next year and it may decide on our future. Being one of the better behaved students in the class Mr Hardyman seems to think I'll do well, but I'm not totally convinced seeing as we haven't really covered a full year's work.

The other exam I have tomorrow is English, and again I'm not totally sure how that's going to turn out because I don't actually know what the exam will be on. Mr Cowburn hasn't really told us about any of the exams and hasn't prepared us nearly as much for them as other teachers have done. I saw one of my friend's coursework folder today (he has a different teacher) and it literally has at least 50 pages of solid handwriting. My coursework folder has about 15-20 pages of writing and that slightly worries me about whether I'm behind or not. Also I'm not totally convinced he's prepared us properly for the exam because you're meant to understand certain texts before you enter the exam and the teacher is meant to go through these in class. This unfortunately is where Mr Cowburn fails because he isn't able to explain something without going all senile and over the top, which means you can't really take notes because you wouldn't be able to write down what he says in the exam.

Anyway I think I've bored you enough about my worries for one day. I'll post another update tomorrow so I can express my views on how the exams actually went.

George.