Just uploaded some new photos to the gallery. Theres some photos from last night at the Vine and a few nights at the Rose and Crown and some others. I’ve also put my Cosford Airshow photos on. I only took a few photos, mostly of the Red Arrows because, as I explained before I was more interested in watching it myself than taking photos. Enjoy!
Went to Cosford Airshow this weekend. The weather was absolutely perfect for it, there was hardly any cloud in the sky all day so I could see everything. It also meant I got quite burned but oh well. The highlights of the day was the new Eurofighter Typhoon which I saw briefly last year, but came back to do a longer display this year; the Hercules and Chinook (my two favourite helos); the Red Arrows and the Spitfires. It is the 70th anniversary of the first Spitfire flight this year so there were a couple of those displaying - what beautiful aircraft, not only is it nice to look at, its great to listen to! There was also the usual range of side stalls selling loads of junk and a little bit of interesting stuff.
I didn’t take many photos because I was more interested in watching the show through my own eyes than a camera screen, but I did take a few shots of the Red Arrows at the end - they never fail to amaze!
Finally finished my exams! What a great feeling. I can now spend all day every day doing absolutely sod all. Not that I’m going to of course, I’ve got quite a lot planned actually. I might even get a job. Maybe later.
Had my fourth exam today, Synthesis and Mechanism 2, so I’m now half way through! It was a real bitch of an exam too, I managed to answer enough questions though so I’m hoping it should be ok. Next is tomorrow - Thermodynamics, Kinetics and Optical Spectroscopy - sounds fun doesnt it. Well no, it’s not! Far from it. At least I’ve got a week to revise for the next two exams though, next Wednesday.
HRM and Marketing! All went well. I found out an hour before the Marketing exam that the coursework is 50% of the module, and I got 69% on that I think so went into the exam feeling quite optimistic of passing. At least I know I’m a quarter of the way there now! Financial Decision Making tomorrow.
First exam tomorrow! Ive got Human Resource Management in the morning, and Marketing in the afternoon. Having not done much work all through term for any of my business exams, I have been revising them solidly for the last two days, and as a result I’ve decided they’re not really that bad, Marketing has turned out to be quite interesting.
Also, just looked at the SuSE website and found version 10.1 is being released tomorrow. Woooo! Nice distraction right when I could do without it. Nice one!
As of tonight I have had my internet connection upgraded to ADSL Max - up to 8 Mb/s. I have to wait about 10 days now for the exchange to decide what speed it wants to give me, hopefully it will be nearer to 4 but I doubt it will be that great as my phone line has always been a bit crap (it swings through the trees ffs BT!)
Whilst searching around for some ways to get the best out of this upgrade, I came across this interesting article. In short, it says to get the best speeds (I think this applies to any adsl connection) you need to disconnect the orange and white coloured wire in your main phone plug socket. The article says it is the ‘ring wire’, left over from the days when it had to power the bell in the phone to make it ring. Nowadays it just serves to collect interference from any nearby power cables or electrical devices, passing the noise onto the phone line. This makes sense to me, so I’m going to try disconnecting it tomorrow, hopefully to see better sync speeds. Maybe its a load of bull and will make my phone completely discombobulate, we shall have to see.
[edit] Ok, I’ve disconnected both orange cables in the main socket. Theres one orange with a thin white band, and one thats half and half of each. I have no idea what they are for, but they were obviosly just creating a lot of noise on the line. The evidence that proved it was opening the BT box on the wall in the kitchen, and seeing that the only wires from the cable that went anywhere were the blue ones, the others were just twisted together and disgarded. So now the only two wires connected to the phone socket in our house are the blue and white ones. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) reported by my router is slightly lower than before, but its probably not helped today by the heavy rain so I expect it will improve tomorrow. [edit] Next day its noticeably better, but I don’t think i’m ever going to get the full 8 Mb/s due to the distance from the exchange (about 2.5 km) and the poor line quality.
Just noticed I havent really written anything for a while, so an update…
I’m currently about two weeks away from my first exam. I handed my last piece of coursework in last Thursday, so its just revision now. They start on 11th May and my last is on 24th May. So in five weeks time, I will have nothing to do! Wooo. Haven’t really tried to get a job yet, but I might give it some thought once exams are over.
How badly does this website need changing? I’m getting a bit bored with the current design, so that might be a little project I can work on in a few weeks time. Need to sort the kossmic website out first though, thats even worse (worse, in this case means I know I can make it better, I dont think its as bad as some sites out there!).
Just heard that Concorde has won the BBC Great British Design awards. Well done! More news here. She is a beautiful aircraft, shame she had to leave us. To celebrate the occasion, here are some of my favourite photos of concorde.
Hope 2006 is going well for everyone! We’re now half way through January so I imagine most people have already made and broke those New Years resolutions (don’t ask what mine were!). I have had a busy first week back at uni, with four deadlines in the first week. I am still yet to really start one which is for next friday but that isn’t a major worry at the moment.
My diary for this year is also starting to fill up with a whole chunk around april/may time left blank for exams, weekends taken up by band competitions, birthdays, coursework deadlines and various other things that I have to fit in between. Oh, and aswell as that I have to find room for studying; this semester it is going to be more important to keep on top of all the work, even more than the last, and I still have quite a bit of catching up to do from last year! Also, I know it sounds early but I will have to start thinking about getting some revision going pretty soon - those exams come quicker than you think!