Really!  Just been pre-occupied with things, that’s all.

And this is take two, as Mozilla crashed.  Actu­ally, why am I typ­ing this in Mozilla?  Kon­queror has nice spell check­ing and stuff!  I’m nor­mally pretty good, but a sec­ond opin­ion can’t hurt, now can it?  *switches browsers*

Ah, that’s bet­ter.  Haha, “Mozilla” is show­ing up in red text… no, we’re not anti-competitive ;)

Yay.  So, about… life.  Sem­i­nar pre­sen­ta­tion.  I’ve already bitched to half the world (so it seems… half my world, any­way… prob­a­bly more!) about how poorly I thought it went, but hey, for the other part of my world (the purely-connected, non-“Met” half), I’m rant­ing here, too.  Feel free to ignore me if you think I just need to STFU and get over it.

Yeah.  This sem­i­nar was meant to go for ten min­utes.  Mine went for four­teen.  I’ve never been great (read: utterly hope­less) at tim­ing things, espe­cially of this nature, and brevity has never been a strong point either (phonecalls should be billed in 30 minute blocks, not per 30 sec­onds!).  This, how­ever, was appalling.  As I said, it went for four­teen.  That isn’t too bad, in and of itself…

Had I fin­ished.  Know­ing full well that my tim­ing was prob­a­bly way out, the sem­i­nar was pre­pared with des­ig­nated “exit points”, for use in a sce­nario such as… oh, say, the one that occurred.  Essen­tially, there were pre­ma­ture con­clu­sions which wouldn’t appear pre­ma­ture should I have to use them.

All that is based on the pre­sump­tion that I actu­ally DO think to use them… oh, yes, that old “thought” thing.  Evi­dently too much.  So I hit a break in pre­sen­ta­tion, and asked how long I had gone for: they said 14 min­utes.  I thought I was per­haps just over 10, 12 at the most.  It shouldn’t have been panic induc­ing, but then, I’d just endured a point­less 30 – 45 sec­onds of DVD footage due to impos­si­ble cue­ing (my frog, the but­tons on the front of those things are fid­dly.  Give me a remote any­day.), and knew I needed to make up for that some­how.  I don’t know.  I basi­cally for­got that nice con­clu­sion which was glar­ing fiercely up at me from the sheet I held less than a meter from my face.

That, of course, isn’t the thing which annoys me most.  If my stu­pid­ity doesn’t affect the over­all qual­ity of con­tent deliv­ered, then that’d be no prob­lem.  Unfor­tu­nately, with­out my use of an appro­pri­ate con­clu­sion, the whole thing falls down some­what.  The study of ONE appro­pri­a­tion, no mat­ter how in-depth or well pre­sented that may be, does not con­sti­tute “a range of” other contexts.

I looked over the pre­sen­ta­tion again, and I’ve esti­mated that were I to run the full length of my pre­pared con­tent, it would have gone for approx­i­mately 25 min­utes.  Damn, my tim­ing sucks.  I say “pre­pared” con­tent because I should have liked to go longer… per­haps I’m not a pub­lic speaker for a reason? ;)

Despite all that, I con­tinue to agree with oth­ers who have described this assess­ment as one of, if not the most enjoy­able assess­ment they’ve ever undertaken.

But it’s over.  So that prob­a­bly means I should stop work­ing on it, and focus on myr­iad other assess­ments build­ing up, hey?;)

Oh, it’s not so bad.  A mod­er­ately huge busi­ness thing on Mon­day, which I’m a tad ner­vous about, an Eng­lish lis­ten­ing task on Wednes­day, which I could care less about, but not by much, and a Mod­ern His­tory essay which is due Thurs­day.  Then a week?  Maybe two?  I don’t know… until yearly exams.  Bleh!

And a cer­tain Herr Goldrick is try­ing to con­vince me to do HSC stuff.  I’m uncer­tain why.  Appar­ently is shall “reas­sure” year 12.  More so than paid staff shall?  Bleh.  I don’t see why a cer­tain per­son con­tin­ues to be employed.  It’s funny, see­ing he’ll be present for their rehearsals, and yet Goldrick is con­vinced that I need to be there because I was there for the tri­als.  Yes, well, cer­tain oth­ers who shall be wit­ness­ing afore­men­tioned rehearsals WEREN’T there for the tri­als, because they had bet­ter things to do with their time.

Grrr.

To go off on a com­plete tan­gent, my par­ents are going to New Zealand tomor­row evening.  (YAY!)  This’ll prob­a­bly mean a several-hundred fold increase in pro­duc­tiv­ity, for var­i­ous rea­sons (namely that there is no pres­sure to “appear” to be doing work of any par­tic­u­lar kind — time man­age­ment CAN occur unheeded, thankyou very much).  The lovely LCD device is going with them, in the hope of attain­ing a tax break… I don’t know how all that stuff works, so I won’t spec­u­late further…

That’s the last few days in a nut-shell.  Today was a write-off.  Absolutely.  Appar­ently Heath is upset about the en mass deser­tion of his school, but given that they’ve never had an estab­lished “Bring your school books and work in case it rains” pol­icy, I don’t think he has any right to be.

I left it too late to escape, and sub­se­quently lost a day which could have been spent tend­ing to assess­ments.  St. Andrews Cathe­dral School embraces aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment and effi­cient time usage.  What a joke.  Six hours of absolute noth­ing.  Sure, we did work in physics, the one sub­ject I’m adamant about drop­ping.  Won­der­ful.  Other sub­jects?  Oh, I’m sure I could have worked, had I come pre­pared with BOOKS.

I’d like to take this oppor­tu­nity to extend my grat­i­tude to the admin­is­tra­tion of the school for their astound­ing short-sightedness in deal­ing with this sit­u­a­tion.  Duty-of-Care and tru­ancy is one mat­ter, actively refus­ing parental per­mis­sion to release stu­dents so that they may pos­si­bly make some use of their day is quite another.

Appar­ently he is angry.  Well, so am I.  I value my time more than that.  I was look­ing for­ward to this car­ni­val, but I can cope with it being can­celled — I’d like to be able to get work done in it’s place, though.

“Nor­mal school day” was a fond catch-cry of admin­is­tra­tion.  I cer­tainly hope you don’t con­sider that nor­mal.  This isn’t like broad­band, there is no such thing as a “fast churn” process between schools.  Not that I’d really con­sider mov­ing, any­way — I do love SACS, despite all its capri­cious odd­i­ties.  This sort of thing does irri­tate, though.  Yes, the sit­u­a­tion was unavoid­able, but the response left much to be desired.

Hah, the male parental unit is a source of much amuse­ment.  In the morn­ing, whilst hopes of escape still dwelled in the ech­e­lons of the imag­i­na­tion, I called the parentals in hope of them call­ing and ensur­ing some means of ess-cap-ee.  He was in a meet­ing, but sent a TEXT mes­sage as a per­mis­sion to leave.  You have no idea how hard I fought not to fall off my chair laughing.

“I give per­mis­sion 4 josh 2 go home now that the car­ni­val is cancelled”

No joke.  I haven’t laughed so hard because of a text mes­sage EVER!  Mrs. Earle found it just as amus­ing, hehehe.  That ele­ment of humour made the day lastable, methinks ;)

Any­way.  I’m off to com­pose an essay.  Or some­thing.  Hooray for ridicu­lous SMS messages!