So to start with, we have my HSC completed. That was simultaneously the most stressful and oddest set of exams I’ve ever done. They were odd in the sense that I treated them like my school exams, and spent way too much time procrastinating. But I simply could not bring myself to work anymore. School was over, this last hoorah was killing me. And I think when I get my results back, it will kill me. I dread the day they hand out our marks.

After the HSC, a period during which many people I know had a birthday (well, as my HSC took a whole month, I guess that isn’t too hard), requiring several parties (I sadly could only attend one for my friend, and one for my mum), I have exercised my laziness to it’s higher levels. I sometimes get a sense of guilt, thinking that I should be studying instead of playing games or going out, but then I remember I’ve been working towards this for 13 years now (although I may not have realised that when I was younger). It shouldn’t be surprising me, and yet it does.

I will be going on ‘schoolies’ with some friends on Friday, 5 nights up at the Entrance, which is presenting us with some interesting organisational challenges. Sometimes I wonder if the leadership stuff mentioned in my resume and principal’s reference is really applicable to me. I’ve never felt like I have shown remarkable leadership, whether it be in Band, Flute ensemble, Peer Support, group projects, Soul Purpose or DoE. But I suppose the idea of a resume and its references is to make you sound good, and that’s what the word ‘remarkable’ does!

Last night was the Year 12 formal, and what an awesome night it was. All the girls/ladies dressed up, their hair, faces and gowns looking wonderful. It may still confuse me as a guy why they would spend so much time and effort too look so wonderful, but I must admit that the end result is amazing. Not that any of them really need to go through all that effort to look wonderful, but women don’t seem to believe that on formal evenings. Or maybe it’s some preconception that society has created. Whatever. They looked beautiful, and that’s what counts, I guess.

They guys, all of us comparatively lazy and less stressed than the ladies, wearing our suits. I reckon the guys looked awesome. Nice and fine. I was never much of a suit person, but I think it may be growing on me. Well, the formal(ish) dress style is, at least. E.g. Collared shirt and tie on Band Tour (Se** and I said to ourselves “Why not?”) for the last day.

The evening was highly enjoyable. Mrs Pigram’s choice of Oatland’s house was highly beneficial (I do not wish to imagine where the committee would have chosen if not for Mrs Pigram’s experience of past formals, making her choose the place over any objections from some certain members of the grade), with the lovely scenery of the garden and sunset providing rather wonderful photos. The food was nice, and the time with friends was great. I still don’t understand the modern youth’s idea of dancing. Whilst bouncing up and down is easy to do, it isn’t that much of a dance, so when any of you did anything differently, it was nice to see. But whatever you did, I enjoyed watching you guys looking silly as you ‘danced’ while I myself was happy to not make myself look embarrassingly silly (in my opinion at least). I spent a large portion of my time standing around outside, speaking with people. And trying to not fall asleep. Towards the end of the night, I felt strangely tired. Don’t know why. The music was, as to be expected, loud and not of the nest taste. Knew barely any of the songs, and only the pulsing beat of the bass was interesting (must be some psychological thing, like why they use bass drums to excite soldiers in ancient society).

Hopefully I will be having my braces removed soon, probably early next year my orthodontist says. As I’m not entirely sure how much more my teeth need to move or be aligned, I’m going to leave that to his capable judgement. I must say that having braces is an interesting experience. I can now personally relate to other people who have had braces instead of just trying to imagine what it must be like (in retrospect, my imaginings of the experiences of wearing braces were woefully short of the mark, as to be expected). It has been painful at times, other time just plain annoying. Throughout it all, I have felt rather self-conscious about them, and I wonder how I’ll feel afterwards. In case you were wondering what the back-story of my braces was, long story short I had to have some teeth removed, and pull the ones behind them down my jaw to fill the gaps. If you want the longer version, ask in person. It’s a little quicker that way.

Closing off the long post, I’ll make a mention about my job hunting. Last night Mr Van Loon told me that most places have got their Christmas staff already lined up, or are conducting the interviews, making it much harder to find and land a job right now unless you plan to work for the longer term (e.g. throughout Uni), which would be hard when I’ll try to do full time study next year. Anyways, I have no idea where I’d find a job, what field it will be (probably as a cashier or similar) and if I feel like doing it. I’m actually afraid of getting a job. Not only does the idea of doing an interview make me nervous, I don’t like change, and getting a job is a change from my school life. But I suppose there are plenty of people like me, and most of them get used to the change, as shall I eventually.

Well, I feel like ending this post. There was probably a lot more I wished to talk about at some point, but it’s lost now. And besides, this post is getting long enough as it is. I’d just like to say a huge thanks to all my friends for the most wonderful 6 years of high school, and the immensely enjoyable night last night. I don’t know where I’d be without any of you.

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

During the assembly, I felt mixed emotions. The songs were touching, the slide-show was great and nostalgic, watching my friends and I go up on that stage to receive our portfolios, after watching the years before us do it… I don’t think I can describe it now. The aftermath, the photos, signings, hugs, tears, laughter, well-wishes and snacks… It was memorable. It cheered me up (smiling supposedly releases endorphins, which makes you happy) smiling for all the cameras. It was nice to see the entire grade milling about, taking photos. Stuff.

Hanging out with my friends afterwards was great. We watched Johnny English Reborn, wonderfully funny movie, another great work from Rowan Atkinson (is that how his name is spelt?). I miss my friends already. Afternoon tea afterwards, for me consisting of a KFC Ultimate Burger Meal, followed by the group aimlessly wandering around Castle Towers, for an enjoyable day out, despite it being a school day =P

I honestly cannot thank my friends and grade, their parents and the support of the rest of the school (including teachers, students and administrative staff such as Mrs. Brown in reception) through the last 6 years. It has been a great time through thick and thin, and I can not, nor will not, imagine it with anyone else, any other way. The memories that you have imparted on me will last for a long time (or so I hope. I do wish to not forget any of you), and will serve to continue to shape me even beyond the life changing experience that is Baulko XI. I know that many of you won’t read this, and that is fine by me. I’ll still think of you dearly whether you see this or not =] Except you K. Z.. Not you K. C. Y. Z., the other one. Yes, you, the one who hit me in the back with a water-bomb yesterday. You. Are. Going. Down! Just as soon as I work out a suitable comeback.

As I sit here typing this, I see that on Facebook you are all crazily uploading your photos, with people tagging away like journalists trying to make the deadline (speaking of tagging, someone mentioned that they wished for our grade to attempt to crash Facebook with our uploading and tagging. Sadly, that hasn’t yet happened, and is very unlikely to happen), commenting, liking, and all the while, I’ve propped my iPod up beside me as I type on my mum’s laptop, waiting for Facebook to finish receiving my photos from the memory-card reader. So as I type, I hear the notification noise go off continuously, the screen lighting up telling me what has happened. And you guys are scaring me with the number of times that is happening. Is like half the grade on Facebook right now??

Anyways, back to what I was talking about. The relationships I have formed between my friends will probably not be replicated for many a year (because I won’t be seeing people for over 6 hours a day, 5 days a week anymore. I’ll be stuck with “free-roaming” at uni), and I will sorely miss seeing almost each and every one of you on a regular basis. And yes, I’m implying that I won’t miss some of you as much as the others, but that’s understandable, right? If not, too bad. I’m being honest. They say that you won’t really understand how much something means to you until it’s gone. I never realised just how much school meant to me until time itself wrenched it from my life (although I suppose having so far had an existence dominated by school, that is to be expected), leaving me with a feeling of “Oh my! What do I do now?!”.

I don’t believe that I’m very good at writing down what I’m feeling. Perhaps there is the partial fact that some of what I’m feeling is so deeply personal that I don’t really want to have the world hear it. Especially as anyone on the internet can read this. Hmm… should change something in this post then. There, done. Anyhows, I’m going to give up now, since I simply cannot express how I’m feeling, nor am I awfully good at writing sentimental, nostalgic and thoughtful messages (look at the message I wrote on Facebook for an example).

So I’ll say this to those from my grade who are reading this: Good luck in your HSC! Good luck in the times ahead! May you enjoy life to the full, have success in your life, and (at this point I would raise my hand in a Vulcan hand salute, which is easy by the way… I can’t understand how people cannot do it, probably because I can do it…) Live Long and Prosper. I look forward to seeing you at the formal (if you are not on holidays by then), especially my closer friends. I miss you all very much already.

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

While a part of me is happy to be finally finishing my 13 or so years of schooling, to be moving off into the wider world filled with new amazing possibilities, there is a large part of me that is actually afraid of the future. Now that I no longer have a law forcing me to do something, I have to actually make my own choices. And the responsibility is scaring me. All this emotional turmoil is not helping my already stressed body. I continually find myself trying to distract myself from my work, from tomorrow, from the things happening around me, just anything that reminds me of what is coming. And it’s not working too well.

I wonder what it’ll be like tomorrow. Standing there, in front of the school for one of the last times ever. Getting my portfolio, performing in front of the school (in two separate items. One of my friends has actually managed to convince me to do some singing. Albeit as a tenor/bass, but still, I don’t really like singing in public much.), and then the Year 12 finale performance before we walk out the hall for a last time. What will I think as it sinks in that it’s over? That all I have left is the 7 exams spread over 4 weeks, countless hours of study leading up to them, infrequent meetings with my friends in the mean-time? One last Band Christmas Concert? I don’t know, but I’ll most definitely find out tomorrow.

I’m really going to miss my friends. I look forward to the Year 12 formal, a week off with schoolies (how does that even make grammatical sense? Schoolies? Is this some colloquial term that Aussies spell their funny way? Look, ‘Aussies’ has it too.), just hanging out with my friends every so often. When I was in Year 7, the older people told me that High School would be the best time of my life. I didn’t understand what they meant. Now I do. I wish that young minds could better understand what the older minds say, it would save older-younger-minds so much time trying to explain it to the new-younger-minds. Does that even make sense?

Anyways, this is has been a rather emotionally charged blog post from me, or at least more emotionally charged than I usually write. I think. I’m going to stop writing now and let my heart become queasy with surging emotional outbursts of nostalgia, happiness, sadness, longing and regret.

If only we had more time. But alas, our time has expired.

I wonder if I was quoting anyone? Even just paraphrasing? I’m sure my mind dug that up from somewhere…

Anyhows, TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

Regardless, I thought it’d be nice (for me at least) to mention a semi-funny happening during English this past week. Last week, Mr. Van Loon decided (or so I’d like to think) that he’d have a rest from teaching (read lecturing in his monotonous, odd, sometimes humorous-if-you’re-awake-to-hear-it, rather intelligent and informative way), and so tasked us to do presentations to the class to help in our English work. Some members of the class have come up with some wonderfully helpful presentations (I’d name people, but I’m wondering if they’d like their names splashed across my blog for the whole world to see…) about essay hints, areas to look at in particular modules, or ideas for quotes. Unfortunately, my memory capacity for English lessons is about nil. So if it isn’t written down (and I suck at taking proper notes), then I’m probably gonna forget it. But only for English (and maybe Chemistry).

So for my presentation, I couldn’t think of what to do. But at the last minute, I was browsing through some posts on my blog when I remembered a certain poem I had found from a certain Tumblr ‘blog’ I follow (semi-sadly my only link to Tumblr. Funny place. They love Nutella as much as I do!). This poem. So, I printed it out, and when I got to school, got to English class, Mr Van Loon (after a little bit of settling the class down) asked me if I had anything ready for today (long story short, I was supposed to go up a previous day, but I didn’t have anything ready by then XD ). I walked up to the front of the class, and my presentation went something like this:

“Now, since my English mark probably sucks more than most of you-” pauses to look around class, realises how wrong this statement is and corrects himself. “Actually, sucks more than all of your marks. Anyway, I decided that there wasn’t an awful lot that I could come up with that could help you out with your essays or such, so I thought I’d read out this poem I found. Some of you should recognise it.” And yeah, I started reading through it. Had a few interruptions thanks to a certain Noorty person putting chairs in the door handles making it awfully hard to open the doors, but I read through the poem, getting some of the pronunceations(? HOW IS THAT SPELT?! Spell check doesn’t seem to understand what I want) wrong, and earning some laughs from the class. Mr Van Loon liked it =]

So yeah, that was me skiving off of doing any actual work while actually not making proper excuses =]

In other news, I’m currently working on a webdesign for a rather temporary subdomain I’m hosting for my school friends, and I’m not getting very far. Partially because I haven’t done my usual drawing a dozen different concepts in a book that I normally do, or that I haven’t been bothered to work on it. Actually, I think the latter is the crux of the problem. I need a colour scheme. Stuff.

Anyhows, that is all. I think.

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

Today happens to be the day of the Music 1 and Music 2 practical examinations. “Oh, you do music do you?” I used to do music, but I dropped it because it was too much work for me. I’m not that much into music that I would do an essay on something, or analyse the musical techniques used in a certain baroque piece (baroque is my least favourite era of the ‘classical’ music). I just like to listen to it, and to play it. I like to do music, not analyse music. Anyways.

I had this really long post written up, but then Google Chrome thought it’d be a regular jerk and delete half the post suddenly. Unfortunately, I think it has something to do with how Webkit deals with text-boxes and “Crtl+z”. That is, it’ll undo as much as you want. It won’t redo. I’m sure there’s a way around it, but I can’t be bothered to find out. In fact, thinking about it, all the webbrowsers suffer the same issue.

Anyways, long story short (you’ll probably thank me for this), a friend’s (I’m not going to post his name. I’ve decided I’ll just put nicknames or initals, to help protect their identity. I’ll one day retroactively do this to all names mentioned in the blog) Ext Music HSC piece requires an ensemble, and he chose the Concert band to play with him (a past Yr 12 did the same piece, so it was in our band music folders). So that’ll ben enjoyable.

Also, did I ever mention I like Star Trek? Well, I do. My favourite series is Star Trek: Voyager, partly because its’ the first series I remember watching, partly because it’s the only series I’ve watched in full, and partially beacuse I have seen barely any episodes of TOS, TNG, DS9 or ENT (that’s The Original Series (a name given to it after they made the animated series, and The Next Generation), The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, then Enterprise). BTW, whenever WordPress saves a draft (auto save), Webkit removes the focus from the text box, so I have keep on having the tryping suddenly stop when it auto-saves a draft. It’s really annoying.

Anyway, you probably may not know this, but some time ago I played Star Trek Online, a MMORPG based, obviously, on Star Trek. It’s set after the Star Trek: Nemesis move (hence after all the TV series), in the original universe (or Alpha-universe, distinct from J.J. Abrahm’s alternate reality that CBS/Paramount said he could create, which actually was a brilliant idea, because it lets him put his amazing flair to the entire franchise, hence the more compelling story of the 2009 Star Trek film). It’s an interesting game, not the best one around, but I like it, and it certainly has a very ‘Trek’ feel to it, and it has plenty of UGC (User Generated Content) I’ve yet to try, so that’ll be interesting.

Anyways, a technological aspect of Star Trek I’ve enjoyed is the OS that the starships run on from TNG onwards (ENT is a prequel series, set before TOS). It’s called LCARS (Libary Computer And Retreival System). More particuarly, I like the interface. Because the person that developed the idea needed to make a clean, simplistic, futuristic looking interface out of a TV show’s budget in the 80′s, he made these ‘screens’ out of plexi-glass with light behind them. Later on they became actual computer screens which the cast pretened to interact with as CRTs became cheaper to use (and graphics were easier to make). But I thought I could adapt the style of the Star Trek Nemesis/Star Trek Online LCARS interface and put it on my blog. Partially because it would be similar to what I currently have. Anyway, I’ve got to draw up my idea first, which is what I always do with my website designs. Speaking of webdesign, I was going to enter the school’s ‘Design the new School Website’ competition, but HSC and HSC trails got in the way =[  And the prize was $200. Defiantely worth it, considering web design is easier than painting. At least for me. I wonder who the winner will be… The competition said that aspects of the winning design would be used to create the new one, so, I suppose unless your design really impressed them, and actually conformed to their and the DET’s policies (not that they are overly strict, looking at different school’s sites), then the final product would only resemble your design. But who cares anyway? You’d have won the competition.

Anyway’s, I’ve got to go now. Eat some food before I get ready for the HSC music trial for my friend.

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood is being addictive, and I want to finish the story, although finding all 101 Borgia flags seems too much of a drag, so I’ll just leave that alone till I have more time (and a lot more patience). Meanwhile… It’s kinda weird, this feeling of being on edge all the time, remembering the half a million assignments and assessment tasks ahead of me, it’s probably a bad way to think right now, but it’s also the only way for me to remember the ‘seriousness’ of this last year of secondary schooling…
Anyhows, this post from the ‘QuickPress’ box on the wordpress dashboard is getting long enough, and I’m intrigued to see how the formatting goes for this.

EDIT: How do you like this redesign/refinement of the theme?? It was worked out in two sessions, but spaced apart by about 6 months, so it’s like 2 days worth of work over 6 months… yeah, my productivity is odd =]  Don’t worry, there’s still more work to be done on the theme (like I lined out in the ‘Roadmap’), however, I probably should reschedule the AJAX ideas to halfway through uni, whatever year that might be (2013?), when I’ve finally decided to read up on AJAX methods and manipulation.

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

P.S. what do you guys think of the changes to the theme I’ve made?? Personally I like it (duh, I made it), probably mostly because it looks different to the previous one, no other reason than that. I’d probably change 2 colours on it next year and like that more instead, also just because it’s different. I’m trying to follow my ‘roadmap of sorts’ in progression of ‘features’ in it (e.g. I’m currently calling it version 1.0.3, with plans to have a working 404 error page by version 1.0.5 and yes, I’m doing my development in stages like that… I wonder what kind of software development approach I’m using… little documentation, lots of prototypes… probably Rapid Application Development. See, I am learning something in 2 unit Minecraft… er, I mean 2 unit Software Design & Development. =P

Reading different people’s blogs/facebook posts/tweets/tumbler blogs can be funny sometimes. Never really bothered checking out other pages…

Right now I’m in English Advanced (period 6)… right before lunch, and today we have a substitute teacher. Hashan & I have dubbed her the female version of Mr Hagan… yeah, we’re mean like that =P But we’re down in the library,  supposedly working on our English essays, which is rather hard to do as most of us left our notes at home, and haven’t chosen a related text yet (me included). At least I have an interpretation of the idea of belonging:  belonging is an psychological attachment we place upon people, objects and ideas around us as a way to define ourselves. Not entirely sure how I’m going to wrap that up with Romulus, my Father or with whatever related text I come up with

Finally the holidays are here! No more school, well, for two weeks, that is…..

Today, after a short, and annoying, first 10 minutes of Music with Mr. Wong…. then the year 12 Graduation Assembly, and while the presentations were boring like always (who ever thought 200 students could take so long?) the items and the speeches in between were good. Then again, the speech by Mrs Monday wasn’t the best….. But Mitch’s was! The music was good as well. Who’d ever think William was so flexible? The things the year 12s showed in their presentation were…. interesting (go to YouTube and search up Baulko 07 jump on it, you’ll find one of the videos they made….).

Anyways, after that, and all the stuff that went with it, we got to miss out the 1st 4 periods (Double music and Sewing), leaving only the last 4, which, except for science (darn it, our class is behind, so we actually have to work) all they were bludges. Maths especially. “Just do stuff quietly” is what the maths teacher said. I mean, how often does a maths teacher say that?!

Anyways, now its the holidays, I can work on my website, maybe actually get it working? That would help a lot. And now I can play games! Yay!