Eurovision Song Contest 2007
13.05.2007 3:06 PM |
Tags: offtopic |
Armenia came 8th (again) in the contest, which guarantees a place in the finals next year. Woohoo!
Working methods
10.01.2007 9:44 PM |
Tags: offtopic |
I tend to work in sporadic outbreaks. ComputingStuff is a website run by my friend where I help out. There are some pretty lively forums on there, but apart from that, there is very little other content. Despite many changes of CMS making it so easy to post new articles, nothing groundbreaking ever happens. That is, until a special time of year it seems. The site’s been running since 2002, and ever since I’ve been helping out, work seems to happen for a few days or so every year.
To give a recent example, nothing at all happened for the whole of 2006 except for a few days in the middle during summer when I worked flat out for a couple of days with my friend to change the CMS, upgrade the forum software, tweak the databases and even move the whole site to a new host. For the amount of work done, two days is very little time. We were working for literally the whole day each day doing a whole year’s worth of work and maintenance in only two days. It might seem crazy, but after that period was a very big sense of satisfaction, followed by months of doing absolutely nothing until the next period comes up.
I don’t think any of us completely understand this phenomenon, but we laugh about our lack of work all the time, catching up when everything piles up and yet still managing to keep the site running and hosting the great forums. The forum members are mostly friends from school, and they’re always taking the mickey for the lack of content on the site, but then they suddenly get subjected to all these upgrades and they’re happy for a few more months.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to any university work or work for a company which always happens on time (since it really does need to!) but for this voluntary job that I have, it’s an interesting way of working which really gives a boost once all that work has been done!
What’s all this pink about?
It’s not quite 1st October where I am, but I can see that my automatic date style script has decided that it’s time to unveil the Pink for October theme on wackomenace.
Pink for October is a campaign to get webmasters to dress their sites in pink for the month of October to promote Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
As you can see, the site looks quite pretty, don’t you think?
September 11
11.09.2006 10:04 AM |
Tags: offtopic |
Today’s the fifth anniversary of September 11th, and the BBC has a series on 9/11 and what’s happened five years on.
Going Pink
For the entire month of October, sites will Go Pink to raise awareness about Breast Cancer and raise money.
wackomenace will also go pink for the entire month of October. It’s a great opportunity to support a good cause as well as allowing me to tweak the design a little and see what happens when my site wears its pink dress instead of its black suit :)
5thirtyone and Natalie Jost as well as many others are going Pink for October, so why don’t you too?
A Levels aren’t worth the paper
Martin Belam’s hit it right on the head with his article “Do boys even take A Levels these days?”. As well as commenting on the omission of boys from most of the national and local media, however, he also comments on the delusional beliefs of some people (who get far more airtime than their opponents) that A Levels are somehow getting easier. As I commented on his blog:
I think you’ve got this one spot on - I got my A Level results this year, and I was amazed to see that the media still keeps bringing out the old “everything’s getting easier these days” argument every year without fail.
God forbid that any students might actually perform better because of better teaching methods or good old brains. No, it must always be the exams that are getting easier, not the students that are getting better.
It’s ironic that not one person who comes out to criticise exams for being too easy has actually sat one himself in the past 30 years. How would he know if they were getting easier?
Oh, and on the subject of only girls taking A Levels these days, maybe boys aren’t half as interesting on results day :)
Now let’s see some of these people come out and actually sit a modern A Level exam, and then we’ll compare their results with ones of today’s students. I’m sure that’ll shut them up.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
I’ve just found out that I’ve got into the University of Reading to start this September on Computer Science!
Woohoo!
The 33000 Calorie Sandwich
7.08.2006 12:05 PM |
Tags: offtopic |
“Recently, I came across the 30000 calorie sandwich. Being a big fan of food, I decided to go one better, or more specifically, three thousand better. The result would be a monster of a snack, so stuffed with meat and cheese that you would get fat just by being near it. Containing enough energy to sustain a normal adult for nearly two weeks, eating this sandwich would be comparable to pouring gravy directly into your veins. Not one to care about eating a balanced diet, I made it anyway.”
Have a good read and vote for this article on digg if you like it :)
My current favourite photo
I can’t quite work out why, but this is my current favourite photo.
Maybe it’s because of the sheer randomness of it, or maybe it’s her expression :)
Support Coalition 2010
If you’re a student or you care about students going to university, you may be interested in showing your support for Coalition 2010, a group set up to encourage the government not to remove the £3000 maximum cap on university top-up fees. After all, how can the government set itself a target of 50% of students going to university when fees are increasing all the time?
If you want to read deeper into the matter, then you can also read Early Day Motion 1397, proposed by Ian Gibson MP.
Beliefs in a badge
14.07.2006 1:24 PM |
Tags: offtopic |
Some of you who visit my site on a semi-regular basis may have seen the new blue Y i Believe badge that it’s sporting at the top right-hand corner of every page. You might have clicked through to see what it was all about, or just glanced over it. I thought it’d be good to write a little about what it stands for and how people can help out in its cause.
The Y i Believe campaign is a dynamic initiative that firstly aims to spread the good news of Jesus Christ through personal and commercial websites and secondly aims to get Christians evangelising using the internet.
Charity sponsorship
6.07.2006 11:04 PM |
Tags: offtopic |
Well I did the charity sponsorship activity which I blogged about a few days ago…I eventually got enough donations to not embarass myself and I had an extremely fun time walking around central London for 4 hours finding answers to some weird questions :) If you want status updates on what happens with the donations and the good work done by the charity, please have a look at the DA Connection website.
Charitable or not?
Recently, I have been trying to raise some money for a relatively new charity with branches in the UK and France. The charity is taking a group of young Armenians from the UK to Armenia in the summer holidays to help out with renovating schools and looking after the students. Medical and care staff are also in the group. Each person has paid their own air fare and living costs, so the charity is looking for donations to pay for the cost of buying materials to renovate the buildings.
One of my friends is going on this trip, and he asked me if I would like to help him fundraise. The fundraising involves a sponsored competition in which small groups of people have to go around London for a day finding the answers to a number of questions. The first group to return will win a prize. I accepted to help out and printed out a copy of the sponsorship sheet the very same day in order to get a head start. However, I did not know how difficult it would be to ask people for such small sums of money…
Helping me out
In a few months time, I’ll be packing my bags and heading off to university to study Computer Science. For this, I need a computer and some textbooks. Unfortunately, these things cost a lot of money - money that I just don’t have at this moment in time. Now I hate having to beg for money (it makes me feel very bad), but maybe some of the readers of this blog can help.
I’m not asking anyone to just reach into their pockets willy-nilly and hand over some dough. No, I want to work for the money :) If you have anything internet related that needs doing, whether it is to do with domain names, hosting, web design or even if you live in London and you need some help with your computer, please consider calling on me. You’ll get first class service and you’ll also be helping out a student in need! Please contact me for more details. Thanks!
Eurovision Song Contest 2006
21.05.2006 10:14 PM |
Tags: offtopic |
Armenia came 8th in the contest, which guarantees a place in the finals next year. Woohoo!