bradford

Me = Not going to Manchester

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The letter from UMIST came today – I definitely don’t have the place, due to my A-level grades. I’ll ring them up later today – they have offered me alternative courses, but in something completely different (Textiles). Erm… what? I applied to do Computer Science. All of the other degrees on my UCAS form were Computer Science (or related). Why do I want to study Textile technology? Talk about adding insult to injury…

So, I’m going to Bradford in 4 weeks. Okay, so Manchester is a nicer city, and the accommodation at UMIST was better. But Bradford isn’t bad, and at least I’ll have free internet access in my room (albeit on 56k dial-up). And it’s closer to home.

Last night, we went out for a meal as a kind-of ‘getting into university’ celebration. Okay, we only went to the local pub, but we had a nice meal nonetheless (and I was absolutely stuffed afterwards).

The waiting is over

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The waiting is over – I now know my A-level results. But to be honest they weren’t really worth waiting for – I didn’t do nearly as well as I had thought I had done.

The best result was a ‘C’ in Geography, but I only managed dismal ‘D’ grades in Maths and French (of which I achieved ‘A’ and ‘A*’ respectively at GCSE only two years ago), and a ‘D’ in Computing AS.

What was really annoying was the fact that I would have got a good ‘C’ in computing, if it weren’t for the coursework – that didn’t even make ‘E’ grade. And apparently, my coursework was one of the best in the group. Doesn’t give you much faith in the York College computing department, does it?

But every cloud has a silver lining – I was still able to get a place at Bradford University on the course I applied for. I’m still waiting for a response from UMIST, but I doubt I’ll get in – by my calculations I was at least 60 points short of the 300 they were asking for. There is the opportunity of internal clearing at UMIST, but I’m unsure whether I really want to do the other courses that are still on offer in the Computing area. One is based around electronics – not good because I’m more of a software junkie – and the other was Computing with Geography, which might be worth it considering I did well in Geography, but do I actually want to do it?

The reason why I’m still waiting for confirmation is down to the fact that the UCAS website appears to have gone down, probably due to the huge numbers of people trying to access it. Fortunately I got in early while it was still working, which is why I know that Bradford accepted me.

Still, I’d find it incredibly annoying if I was trying to find information about clearing, or to get my results, only to find that the server isn’t working.

Okay, so here’s the explanation

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Okay, so here’s the explanation for the lack of updates: I’ve been busy. And here’s what I’ve been doing:

Tuesday

Not much to report, though I did stay back at college a little later than usual to get some help from the Maths department, about a rather nasty piece of homework. The afternoon was then spent working on the help file for X-Setup 6.2 (the latest beta uses the 6.0 help file I wrote over a year ago), and although I did type out a blog entry, a system crash wiped it.

Yes, briefly, my computer returned to its pre-fixed stage, whereby it would randomly crash if left on standby and thus require a reboot. I do believe it had something to do with Optimizer XP which uses the Inno Setup routine to optimise your system settings. However, I fear it may have tripped a setting, so I did a system restore and everything appears to be okay now. Despite what people say about System Restore hogging resources, it really is a life saver.

Wednesday

Today was the last of my university open days – this time it was the turn of Bradford. My dad decided to accompany me – probably because mum and dad came with me to Manchester on Sunday and mum became all nostalgic, and with dad being a Bradford graduate he obviously wanted to see how things had changed (or not). All in all it was a good day – it is now my second choice (since Newcastle is out of the running due to my potentially disappointing Maths results) and was better than Northumbria. The accommodation left a little to be desired, but there were good computing facilities – all rooms have phone sockets and dial-up net access is £40 a year unlimited (to put it into context, that’s how much you pay monthly for broadband at home), which also includes free internal phone calls. Okay, so UMIST has ethernet, but this isn’t bad. Better than Newcastle anyway, which is supposed to be one of the best Computing places in the country…

Wednesday night is Ventures night, and so we went swimming at Archbishop Holgate’s school. We got plenty of time in the pool, and I enjoyed myself quite a lot – I’m still recovering from tiredness though – I really did exert myself. Unfortunately yesterday I missed the Student union elections at college, so I couldn’t vote. I couldn’t nominate myself since I’m in the upper sixth (and therefore not around next year), but would have liked to have voted given the chance. Darn open days.

Thursday

So, today. It was my last day at college before the Easter break (wahey!), and Computing was cancelled so I only had two lessons. Though I did have to drop buy Tesco to buy a French stick for lunch – we were out of bread, though it smells like mum has made some more. Yes, we have a breadmaker, and yes, it’s great. It makes really nice loaves, actually, and it works out cheaper for making specialist breads. And it’s healthier since you don’t need to add preservatives. Other than being at college, I’ve spent the day working on Blankbusters at the ODP – it’s a project to rid the directory of web sites with blank descriptions, by adding them. I seem to have ended up with a load of education websites from Walsall (a lot of the UK education sites are without descriptions, I think because they were added in bulk and never sorted) – although I realise it is making a positive difference it can get a little repetitive. And I was amazed at how many schools have sites that are under construction – some haven’t been finished in 3 years or more. In fact, one personal home page hadn’t been updated in nearly 4 years, and was offering audio to stream in… wait for it… RealAudio 3.0! How times change… though at least back then it wouldn’t have had all of the spyware in it. I’m sticking with 8 – I’m in no hurry to upgrade to RealOne.

The Vorbis Petition is now at a whopping 752 signatures… the only way is up :). And if you’re wondering, my French coursework went in on Tuesday – I was just over the target of 700 words, and I think it was a reasonable attempt in the end. Let’s just hope my French teacher and the exam board agrees :).

Anyway, since I’m still recovering from Wednesday, I’d better sign off for the night – see you tomorrow morning, the first day of the Easter Hols! Woo!