Another Pair Of Eyes

Dictatorship

Not good. The generals say the army must be biased towards Mugabe and then send them to ‘help police control political violence.’?

Likely. I can’t decide whether I’m more disgusted by Burma’s leading junta or Mugabe’s regime. At least the junta did let aid workers in eventually, despite their continued opposition to the idea.

There are no words for their disgrace. I am actually rendered speechless.

EDIT: I was so annoyed/alarmed/frustrated/angered when I published this that I forgot to add a title. Ugh.

Basshunters

“Now you’re gone
I realise my love for you was strong
And I miss you here now you’re gone
I keep waiting here by the phone
With the pictures hanging on the wall
Now you’re gone.”

It’s interesting how startlingly lyrics can hit home, regardless of simplicity or genre. I’d suspect that the Basshunters aren’t known for their deep and meaningful lingual constructions, but I’d say they’ve hit the nail on the head in this case.

PC

This is one of the most pathetic cases of political correctness I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s even worse than the banning of brainstorm (for epileptics) and spider diagram (for arachnophobes).

Unbelievable.

Screenshots

In another feat of avoiding revision, here are a few things I’ve seen over the last few days which have amused or depressed me, and then a picture of my eco-lettuce shoots for good measure:

I saw this, and couldn’t help but notice that the image on the left doesn’t look much like a cross section of a microscope. Pedantry, but it certainly amused me!

Fairly self-explanatory. I particularly like the status.

When the internet came back on, these were the first four headlines I read. I guess there never was such a thing as ‘positive news’. Sigh.

The eco-lettuce. As you can see, still quite a away from the cutting dilemma, so not really of too much concern at the moment. It is distinguished from ordinary lettuce because of its gifted-by-an-eco-warrior origins.

Procrastination

On Friday night, it rained. Several feet of rainwater fell through thousands of feet of sky, a few feet of earth, through a foot or so of concrete and finally the precipitous inches through metal casing into the ISS dedicated servers which run the University intranet, campus internet, and halls internet. Yup, for the past few days there has been No Web.

As I’m sure you can appreciate, this makes procrastination a lot harder. In fact, I was even forced to do some revision, especially as being without a phone for that time period meant that I had literally no way of contacting anyone short of physically going and finding them. However, I managed to waste huge reams of time (without the advantage of facebook) by:

• Cooking a complete roast meal
• Spending hours setting up my phone, once I received it this morning*
• Taking my old phone apart using my dissection kit, an tiny leatherman, white-tac and a fork**
• Going to the vending machines and spending all my 5p coins.
• Writing out 64 questions on respiratory anatomy, and answering them
• Highlighting where the answers came from in my book
• Numbering the pages of my notes
• Watching my eco-lettuce grow***
• Writing this convoluted post (surely not, a post of this kind of wandering aimlessness simply MUST be the result of a focused, efficient mindset)

As you can probably tell: productive.

Anyway, back to the point. With no phone, and no internet, I actually felt quite isolated. I couldn’t text one of my friends to co-ordinate revision, or indeed the ‘quiet drink before exams’ (which resulted in me being more inebriated than I have ever been in my life). Trying to organise anything with my friends in Monte (another set of halls a mile or two away from the ones I live in) was completely impossible. I couldn’t look up the lecture notes on the web, nor could I see what lectures I had to read up on once my night out kicked in the following morning. I couldn’t search for reference information or articles for questions I couldn’t answer. It just made me realise how much the internet has integrated itself in my life, and how much I rely on it during my day to day activities. Effortless communication is a huge benefit and like many things, you don’t really appreciate how much you use it until it is gone.

Much, in fact, like the inability to use my left thumb after I smashed it into an unspecified solid object in a dancing-related injury. But that’s another story.

*I am incredibly pleased with this phone. It is a phenomenal piece of kit, and really does begin to blur the boundaries between the net and phones. I can skype, msn, facebook, google search, everything…from my phone. And properly too, not the craptastic WAP of yesteryear, but proper 3G-speed access to decently designed web pages with an interface that isn’t the clunky scroll-though-every-possible-object approach that so destroyed the flexibility of phone internet before. Colour me impressed. It also doesn’t have a joystick =)

**The dissection of my old phone, once I put it back together, resulted in the screen being fixed so that it now works like it did before it broke, but after it started breaking, which was a big improvement. However, it also resulted in the lower half of the keypad no longer responding to anything at all. Never mind.

***I was given a pot of compost and seeds by some green types at the eco-fair which was being held in the Union as I was passing through to buy vegetables. I was presented with these items together with a cotton bag and an energy saving light bulb. The lettuce is growing, and is now bout 6cm high. All well and good, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to actually consume them – I’ve grown quite attached to the lil’ buggers and don’t think cutting them up and eating them would sit very well!

Hockey

I just participated in the most amazingly brilliant (fun-brilliant rather than skilled-brilliant) game of hockey I’ve ever played and it was fantastic. Everyone easily outplayed their previous bests and it was just one of the most satisfying and enjoyable afternoons I’ve had in a long time. Two hours might be a long game, but it certainly reassured me that I’m not as unfit as I thought and, better yet, reminded me why I play – knowledge which was sorely lacking two weeks ago. Nothing quite like sport to bring your mood up to scratch =)

I feel fit, I feel cheery and weary, and I can’t quite walk properly because I’ve rubbed parts of my feet off. Now all that’s hanging over my head is revision, and boy does it know how to loom. The loom and gloom is not helped by the fact that half my friends are either finished or in the process of doing so.

But still, I’m going to bathe in my little patch of metaphorical sunshine for another ten minutes before I start. Take that, revision.

Contract

In regard to this entry, I have decided to take the plunge and get a contract. According to my manifold, scrupulous calculations this will save me a grand total of about £5-6 a month, as well as the cost of a new phone which would be a (relatively) major outlay. This is good, although not a little scary – call it commitmentophobia, stereotypical man-behaviour, poor financial organisation, whichever excuse you wish! Somehow the word ‘contract’ has a similar impact to the word ‘responsibility’ accompanying a door key when you were about 10. It has a weight far disproportionate to both its letter count and the item which accompanies it.

On the plus side, it gives me a credit record which I can wave proudly at passing mortgage companies when I’m older. And 1100 free minutes/texts. The latter is the important one really, I’ll be much older (and richer, hopefully) than I am now before the mortgage component comes into play.

I’m also leaving O2, with whom I have been since they were BT Cellnet. The nice man on the phone tried to sell me all sorts of things when I rang up to get my PAC code, but using my research I argued his sales pitch into the proverbial mud. I still felt a bit like a deserter though – funny how brand loyalty works…