31 Oct 2005
I discovered this on Wikipedia today or yesterday… I can’t remember how.
On September 15, 1595, a group of pupils of Edinburgh High School barricade themselves in because of a dispute about holidays. When adults break in, pupil William Sinclair shoots city bailie John McMorane dead. The boys were arrested but acquitted later.
Um… proof violent video games aren’t the sole cause of school shootings? They were even acquitted!
Yeah, tangential. Whatever.
I think I absolutely killed Extension English today. Not by shooting, but still. Felt very good about the whole thing. My creative was an inversion of a story I’d previously written for an exam (this was the closest I think I’ve ever gone to repeating myself in what I write for an exam), which was based on Robert Browning’s poem The Laboratory (go ahead, click, it’s very readable). The last version was an extrapolation of the persona’s experience (extending to her murder of two women), whilst this is a journal entry from a remorseful apothecary.
He knows from the persona’s monologue her intent is to kill two women for her husband’s [alleged] indiscretions, yet is compelled by her imperative to “take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill”. Afterwards, he is overcome with guilt and fancies he could kill himself with a drop of poison dissolved in his wine, which he takes and swills around until the colloid is no longer visible, dissolved in the glass… but he does not wish to take another life, to put another mark against his already-damned conscience. So he pours the wine back into the bottle, with some care, and replaces the cork, returning it to the darkened cellar. Thus, he will die by poison and not at his own hand, seemingly freed from the damnation of suicide, absolved from his crimes — and he must die because he is London’s last apothecary of this kind [that is, the malevolent!], bringing death unjustly and remaining beyond reproach, the crime of poisoning enacted by other agents.
I’m a little annoyed we don’t get the papers back, actually, but oh well. I didn’t particularly care about English Advanced, but I was actually quite impressed with my efforts for this one! Modern, on the other hand, will be rather the opposite… so I must go and study. Or try to. Cram.
30 Oct 2005
Just for fun. And because Google probably won’t get this indexed until after the Extension English exam tomorrow commences, which means the only people likely to see this in time are those who go to my school anyway ;-)
At any rate, good luck to anyone who feels like trying to memorise any substantialish chunk of this by tomorrow…
Without further ado, quotes in PDF format. (53.1KB)
If you want fulltext, Project Gutenberg has a nice HTML version (better than plain text because it’s not scattered with stupid linebreaks).
29 Oct 2005
I managed to get my finger stuck in a car boot last night (n.b. the rest of me was outside the car), so posting will be a little light for the next few days due to mobility restrictions and the difficulty of typing. This should be the case anyway, as I have an Extension English exam Monday and a Modern History exam Thursday, but the increased strain is, inevitably, the deciding factor.
It was my right hand, so I’m planning on using a scribe for at least the Extension exam (which could be kinda fun, because I can talk about that stuff quite easily, at length. Just like delivering a seminar, only slower and with more pauses to tell some kid in year 11 how to spell various big words that are fun to throw in essays.)
Somehow my left hand has managed to pretty much escape damage all my life, whereas my right has scars on my thumb, middle finger (courtesy of an ice skate), and now a mashed-up nail on what I am reliably informed is known as the “ring finger” — apparently a technical term, because it appeared on my medical certificate!
So there’s my excuse for not writing lots. Meanwhile, have a picture of a helicopter.
p.s. whilst I can type–this post is testament to that–, it takes an inordinate amount of effort not to appear as though drunk at the keyboard, if you will. So, it’s altogether safer just to stay away.
28 Oct 2005
In an exchange between Phil Tripp, a music media commentator, and Telstra Corporate Affairs manager Craig Middleton, it’s revealed that the record companies/distributors are just like the rest of us.
Craig Middleton said this:
No I am not saying iPod users can download directly into iTunes. But they can download and burn CDs. With a CD there is no need to ‘engineer’ anything with iTunes – although it is illegal to rip from CD onto iPod. As the Sydney Morning Herald once pointed out there is no legal way to use an iPod – but that makes a lot of us criminals
:-)
Then Phil Tripp (albeit under a pseudonym) fired this back:
And I’m one of the biggest criminals around with a succession of three generations of pods with 11,000 songs on one now and a hard drive with 26,000 songs–but all legal from my own record collection.
SO what you suggest I do is use a PC to download songs legally from BP, then burn to CD and then I can transfer these over to an iPod. KEWL! You got me. Any chance that BP is going to do the 99 cent downloads again for November if iTunes launches?
Telstra pulled out the lawyers.
Phil suggested that Telstra encourages customers to circumvent its digital rights management protections. In fact, Telstra in no way advocates or condones this type of action by customers. Transferring BigPond Music downloads from a CD to an iPod or other device is an infringement of copyright. It is also a breach of the terms and conditions that customers agree to when they sign-up to use BigPond Music. Craig made this clear in his email to Phil by saying “it is illegal to rip from CD onto iPod.”
Telstra is extremely disappointed that Phil chose to misrepresent his exchange with Craig on the themusic.com.au website.
That is, of course, assuming smiley faces have absolutely nil semantic value. Bull crap. (I try to keep this site clean, and that’s probably one of the stronger expletives I’ve used here. This debacle irks me, lots.)
Telstra, just like the rest of us, fully recognises what consumers will do with DRM’d media. Namely, whatever the hell they can and want to. No-one reads “terms of service” for B2C services, unless they’re security paranoid (I’ve been known to, but only when I really don’t trust a source–certainly not because I’m afraid of prosecution!), and distributors know it.
Record companies are a bunch of ostriches, it’s true, so maybe they’re the only ones who haven’t cottoned on to this fact yet. This whole DRM thing is a massive façade to convince the record industry they do, in fact, have some control over the distribution of their music. Here’s some news: they don’t. You probably didn’t hear it here first.
27 Oct 2005
I’ve cut a one-act (Bec and Nick’s take on the English Advanced course) bit of The Revue and compressed it into a digestible chunk, and have published it on OurMedia.
Get the dialup-happy version here (it’s 5MB or something), or [25MB decent quality version coming, if it ever uploads. Their site sucks. Watch this space.] See this update for more.
OurMedia is terrible to use aside from the whole free bandwidth and storage thing. I honestly don’t mind supplying ridiculous amounts of metadata, but its interface is absolutely painful — and, to make things worse, if I do as they recommend and use their crappy “OurMedia Publisher Tool” (it sucks, don’t use it unless someone has a gun to your head, and think twice even then… the gun to your head may have nothing to do with OurMedia!), I can enter all the metadata I want in its “helpful” wizards, and none of it will make it through to the actual site. Thanks guys. I’m now uploading a higher resolution version again via HTTP, because… yeah, you guessed it, the Publisher tool crashed.
There must be something about that name and crappy software. Microsoft’s product was (I haven’t used it for years) far more stable, but equally pathetic.
I’m thinking about switching across to Google Video instead, but am reluctant to because it locks data in a little bit more… so, we’ll see.
Okay, I got sick of trying to publish it for free… so it’s going up on the same server hosting the year12.joahua.com site (appropriate, niet?). Audio is a little cleaner in the WMV version… but if you want near-source quality instead, get the DVD. Here’s the broadband version. If someone feels like contributing captions, be my guest.