Exams Are Over!!

The Exams are over! I'm very glad. How do I think I've done? Well in a nutshell, I think that I was okay with the Database Techniques module. Who knows how Ive done in the Software Engineering module? Advanced Programming may have been a pass but I was too late on discovering a fantastic book from SAMS Publishing called Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days which was loaned to me by a friend. The Networking and Enterprise architecture module might just be a big fat fail. I have had a hard year this year, and I hope I've passed the Quantitative Methods module because I would actually have to leave University if I had to do another seven module year because I struggle with a normal workload. To keep up with everyone is a big challenge, and then they attached a failed first year module onto my work load so this year I have been bodging everything, and after Easter I just cracked and stopped doing anything useful..

On a ligher note I have been thinking a lot about cars. It's funny but in Bradford, you won't ever see a Rover. In fact the closest thing you'll see to a Rover in Bradford is an MG - you won't even see a dog named Rover. If I had a dog, I wouldn't call him Rover, I would call him Leyland, so then he would own Rover. Now where did I know that cat called Austin from? Oh never mind, I digress. Noiw you're probably wondring "Where have all these old British cars gone?" I can tell you they all turned up in Hull. If you go round the University campus, Salmon Grove or Hallgate Road in Cottingham, you'll find then all there. You'll even find the old Austin Metro, but mainly it will be Rover 25's of the 2002-2004 era. This had me thinking. When I look back on my childhood, say from when I was three years old to when I was about seven or eight, all the cars that I remember apart a few were all British, or more to the point, they were mainly all Austins. I remember being at Firecliffe nursery in Bradford (which is now just a family centre) and being taken home in an Austin Metro, being taken to school in an Austin Maestro, and when I was seven, my taxi driver swapped his Peugeot for an Austin Montego in British Racing Green. Personally, I think that was a very very wise switch, as the Peugeot is French, and I'm not the biggest fan of French cars. It's a shame our mass-production of cars has ceased, because it would be nice to look at cars on the road and to say "Yes, that's one of ours". OK I know we still have Vauxhall but they are all just rebadged Opels, which are built in Germany, so that REALLY doesn't count. I get a good feeling when I stop and think for a minute that the Mercedes McLaren SLR was engineered in, yes you guessed it, England's Green and Pleasant Land! So we CAN still build cars! That's probably why why the McLaren SLR isn't a boring Bovarian faceless slug like the rest of Mercedes. I know they aren't engineered in Britain either but given the choice between a Porsche 911 and an Aston Martin V8 Vantage, I would go for the Aston every time, just like Jeremy Clarkson did in the Top Gear Christmas Special in 2005. That was probably the cleverest thing we'll ever see Clarkson do, so if you want to see the episode in question, it is Series 07 Episode 06/

Outcasted by the version of Windows I run

I have just realised that in Chez Student, I am the only person who still runs Windows XP on any of my machines. I have just reinstalled WIndows XP Professional on my Ergo Ensis removing the Windows Media Center/Ubuntu 7.10 setup I had before. My MacBook also runs Windows XP Pro under Parallels and also as a stand-alone OS. Everyone else in this house runs Windows Vista on their laptops, apart from one very sensible housemate that runs Mac OS 10.4.11 on her G4 PowerBook. I like being the only one who runs XP. Personally however, I do like Mac OS 10.5.2, which is the primary OS on my MacBook. I like how you can plug in anything and it will work. I was at my friend's yesterday. I plugged in my Nokia N95 and it worked straightaway as a modem. All I had to do was to enter the phone number to dial onto the 3G/GPRS network, and the APN for the network - an option that Windows doesn't have by default, and then I was online thanks to my new unlimited data plan courtesy of Vodafone. Very impressed