07 Sep 2004
Athletics carnival version 2 was today, and whilst less blatantly stupid than the last attempt our school put forward at such a thing, it still wasn’t great. At least the stupid half wasn’t left stuck at school, whilst the intelligent half were called in a vague attempt to make them return to that boring pointless hole when they could have been at home working far more productively on assessments, etc.
But I’m not going to start ranting about that one again, yet. Maybe later.
I ran in the 100m and came second in my heat, but it wasn’t a particulary fast race. I know this because my shoes were falling off and I still managed to come second. Alex Reid won the heat, but I doubt he was flat out, either… he got the lead at the start and then we both settled into cruise for the remaining 70m, as much as one does in short-distance races like that.
It started raining soon after, and as much as I had wanted to run, my desire to stay dry overpowered any urges to run 200m or 400m races… so I sat with people (Ben, Dale, Kylie, Max, Nick and Soolie + Crusty before they took off) quivering in the cold until the end of the day. At least it finished early ;-)
My house (that’d be Salisbury) tied in 3rd place, with the Evil Empire of York coming first, and Westminster scraping in at 8th place. Dale, it’s all your fault. Anti-participatory individual!
07 Sep 2004
This post has been password protected for the past day or so, whilst this document was in draft form. In a letter to Mr. Heath regarding William McCormack, I outlined the difficulties experienced thus far with this person.
All statements made in the PDF file available on this website are held to be true by myself at this point in time.
Download the PDF version here
If required, the above document can be made available in plain text format.
UPDATE: We’ve been indexed. The URI for the file itself is wrong, but the Google “View as HTML” link is quite snazzy. If/when Google updates their index to reflect the new location of that post, I’ll update the “View as HTML” link accordingly…
05 Sep 2004
Last night the usual suspects went to a production, and sat on the other side of the booth wall. Which was odd, but cool. My addition to the wall was still sitting up there, keeping time nicely, which was pleasant to see… speculation continues as to how long is shall remain, but you get that.
Actually, a few more than the usual suspects — we were joined by Katyana, which was cool, and Sam also came to the party… it was like one big crazy family reunion! Our mission, should we choose to accept it, was to stop ourselves from laughing too hard before the production commenced. You have no idea how hard a task that is.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen scaffolding erected in such a manner, nor do I ever wish to again; it was good for a laugh once, maybe twice, but it’s all fun and games until a structurally-unsound-metal-thing-holding-up-little-people-comes-crashing-to-the-ground when the GAFFERS TAPE which is all that is holding it together comes unfastened. I jest not. The scaffolding has different length struts designed to hold it securely together, but apparently it was too much trouble for certain people in the employ of SACS to find appropriate struts. I’ll leave it there. Actually, no, I won’t, because it’s just too damn hilarious. To make matters better/worse/more amusing, the kid operating the spot didn’t actually have a chair, and was sitting on the edge of this scaffolding supported solely be Gaffer’s tape. I’m glad he wasn’t heavy, but at the same time, a morbid, evil, twisted part of me kept wishing that halfway through the performance there would come a scream and clattering sound from the back of the room as this precariously constructed…. thing… collapsed.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about the title of this post, that’d be because this “White Shark” was invariably lit with a spot with a beam perhaps 1m at best, with a red gel frame HELD up to the light emitted from the spot. Why couldn’t they extend their hire budget far enough to get a nice-ish Selecon 2.5k spot?! That’s like… $77 day rate from Lots Of Watts, which works out to be $154 for three days (don’t ask about the maths, their pricing is a bit odd like that), not factoring whatever discounts the school can pull with them! Seriously, that’s only 30-odd donations… I have no idea what their numbers were like for all shows, but it’s perfectly manageable. That said, perhaps they should have just hired some damn fresnels at $20 each or however much they would be, instead of filling the FOH bar up with non-safety-chained chrome Par 64′s!!! CHROME!!!! *shudder*
*ahem*
Yeaaahhhhh… so that was fun. The plot was decent, but it was disappointingly lacking in finesse… I’m wondering if that’s because we were in the audience and didn’t see it improve across performances and rehearsals, or whether it was just lacking, full stop. Not that it really matters, seeing the show is over now… but still, it felt so much more like a “dodgy school production” than other things have. SACS seems big on that this year, what with their efforts so far; Showcase Concert, I’m glaring at you.
That finished, we escaped deftly before someone tried to conscript us to bump-out or something else equally stupid, and went our various ways. Ben and myself were forced into Katy’s car (hey, no complaints here!), Ben started making blonde driver comments, and then… and then Katy missed a turn, and we ended up heading over Glebe Bridge (or the Anzac Bridge or whatever it’s really called this week) by accident. Oops! Hehehe. A quick phone call and three minute drive later, Dale had three stragglers on his doorstep, randomly calling then dropping in at about 22:00 on a Saturday night.
Hey, I called first! Yeah. ’twas pretty cool. We took off about an hour later again, then drove randomly around, got invariably lost in the labyrinthine one-way streets of Rozelle/Balmain, before making it back via the city to miscellaneous places of residence. The magic had to stop some time ;)
04 Sep 2004
I’m pleased to note the success of a late night spent cramming for a Business in-class task, the fruits of which were the second highest mark in the year. That was cool. Even cooler was that my product which I developed and formulated a business plan for was required for another client, so two birds were killed with the one proverbial stone (if you knew what my product was, you’d be laughing or crying at that comment).
Anyhoo… I only got 25/30, which is pretty dismal for the second highest mark in the year, but apparently the assessment average was 16 and a bit, so that means it was a pretty dismal effort on everyones part. I think my night-before-doing-everything-completion-of-task may have been more effort than some others put in, but that’s pure speculation.
The real-world product has been used to pay for a domain name, amongst other things — I can now be reached over at http://www.joahua.com/, which I think is pretty cool. Yeah… so I’ve got a nice new domain name to play with and procrastinate more with as the yearlies draw near. Which they are doing remarkably quickly, I think.
Note to self: post my exam timetable up here some time soon… actually, bugger that, this blog isn’t going public until halfway through my yearlies anyway! Meh, we’ll see what happens…
Yeah. Speaking of procrastination, though, this weekend seems to be full of it. My goodness. Thankyou sincerely to the wonderful parentals who decided this would be an opportune time to sell the house. I’m really enjoying packing my room up and throwing out crap whilst I should be frantically trying to acquaint myself with the maths syllabus for the year. The timeliness of certain people never ceases to astound me. ARGH!!!!
Some of this stuff coming out of boxes (and going into others/the bin) really scares me. I don’t want to remember primary school. I don’t want to see how little I’ve changed!!
03 Sep 2004
Ah, we didn’t do so badly… all went moderately well, and no-one got food poisoning so far as I know! Hehehe. We went with the moderately safe gourmet pizza — there was effort involved, we made everything from the base up, literally!
That said, we ran out of dough by the end of it, so a quick trip was made down to Coles to buy some dodgy el-cheapo bases… everyone was pretty much stuffed full by this time, anyway, so it didn’t matter much — we ended up eating mostly from these bases, but all the girls got fed the good stuff, which was the aim of the evening so all was good. ;-)
It was Rachael’s birthday, so desert was something of a no-brainer: a fairly safe mud-cake was bought from a cake shop, and Matt Pettett brought a pavlova he’d made earlier. I think it all went down fairly well, although I wasn’t feeling that hungry by that point. I have no idea why, I’d only eaten one slice of pizza, but apparently being around that much food makes you less hungry, or something. The air was pretty thick, perhaps that was edible enough.
We didn’t even over-cater by much! About thirty to fourty people were fed, and we only had enough slices for one pizza left over at the end, which was sweet… apparently Pete Campbell was going to eat it for breakfast, although this rumour has yet to be substantiated.
It was a pretty good turn out, which we like to attribute to the fact that everyone knew it was going to be excellent food, although the reality is probably something more like “Wow, guys are cooking?! Hahaha, I have to see this!” — not that I’d ever be so cynical as to suggest it, of course.