Last weekend of holidays in precisely an hour (at time of writing). At least I’ve gotten a lot done. Much study, major projecting, applications for early entry to UoW and a haircut yesterday.

I reckon it’s time to go back to school. <nostalgia> For the last term ever. </nostalgia>

My haircut

Firstly, I just can’t be bothered to be one of those post-an-hour blogaholics. The aim of my blogging isn’t to explode in a supernova of terrible content and then never post again.

Secondly, I haven’t been getting a hell of a lot of sleep, but that’s probably mostly my fault.

But thirdly, and more importantly, I’m revising for my trials. And it’s meant to be holidays. I suppose I’m not the first to complain about the massive and steep increase in workload in year 12, especially towards the end. But it really is a poor decision by the BoS(s) to drop this bombshell on us so suddenly; it’s less ‘preparing us for work’ and more ‘killing those who weren’t used to work already with stress’. (You could probably also replace ‘work’ with ‘life after the parental moneybag dries up’, because let’s face it, many of us are planning to go to university.

The whole system is really very terrible. You can really feel the fact that the HSC courses have been designed by committee, with their broad focus and watered down, entirely uncontroversial content (the religion course with its lack of opinion, the science courses with their lack of [you may laugh, but it's true] science). Not to mention the whole ‘big bang and it’s over’ HSC exam, all for the sake of standardisation so the universities can cherry-pick the students with the best grasp of Shakespearean drama for an honours course and scholarship in applied mathematics.

But, as is probably the case with most of my posts nowadays, the thing that I start out writing about isn’t the point. The point, this time, is why the HSC has gotten so out of hand. And it’s fairly simple: because students don’t have the time to complain when they’re in the midst of it, they haven’t experienced it beforehand and they really couldn’t give a shit afterwards. It’s just that straightforward. And, frankly, that’s exactly how I plan to act. Enjoy, year 11!

Much love,
Bethistotallyrad.

P.S. I’m aware of the general melancholy and pessimism of my posts. Just think of puppies and bright balloons.

It’s a robot for the Robocup Junior Australia Premier Rescue challenge. This means it can do a lot of cool stuff. And surprisingly enough, after spending just 24 hours on the code, it does everything pretty reliably. Pretty good considering we spent 2 weeks on it last year with three people on the team instead of two.

However, we only get five marks for it doing what it’s meant to do. And yet if everything else is done we still get a non-serious attempt for not having (at least semi-) working code. So the documentation (written to the HSC SDD standard, which isn’t even close to any industry standard I can find and is nowhere near as clear, concise and forgiving as anything else you’ll have to do in later computing courses) is worth 95 marks. It feels so pointless to have done so much for so little. And the documentation still has quite a lot of work left to do, which is why I think the SDD course is so pointless. It’s nothing like the real world. If you produce a crappy solution with an awesome design plan and user manual there, you’ll soon be unemployed (or it won’t sell if you’re independent). If you make an awesomely excellently fantastic solution in the real world with scant and rushed planning, it’ll sell and you’ll be successful. The only difference is that 20 years down the track tech support and the computer illiterate will hate you instead of the coders who fix bugs.

Not to mention all the documentation described by the course is useless bullshit anyway.

Much love,
Bethistotallyrad.

Yes, it’s about how we’re all getting a bit old. Lately, I’ve been remembering a lot of things that almost seem to have happened one or two years ago in my mind. Maybe that was once the case, but not anymore. We moved into this house five years ago. The beginning of high school at the same time. And, being the motor racing fan that I am, the last time Mark Skaife won Bathurst was also five years ago (and I wasn’t even there for it :’( ). He has now retired, and he was one of my favourite people throughout most of my life thus far. Along with my first overseas holiday, all of these things feel like they happened a short time ago but in reality a rather long time has passed since 2005.

Even more startling to me is the realisation that my earlier memories of my childhood are actually becoming history. History is a term that I always associated with stuff that happened well before my time. But the politics and current events at my birth are now being taught in Modern History classes, and it’s been almost nine years since the twin towers fell (this is one of my earliest clear memories). This has to mean something, because it’s making me feel a bit old, even though I’m clearly not by today’s standards.

And just maybe it does. Maybe this isn’t just a trip down memory lane. I usually don’t try to take a political or argumentative angle on things, but this is something I actually feel strongly about. I reckon that I’ve become something of an adult. Not all the way there, but the only way I’m going to progress further is by taking on some responsibilities and learning first hand. The fact that my childhood as I remember it started more than a decade ago means that I’ve gotten all the ‘life experience’ that I can out of it. It’s time to move on, move out, get moving.

But the government doesn’t let me. And it won’t let you, if you’re like me. None of the responsibilities and rights that are important to an adult and independent lifestyle are granted to those under 17 (those being solo operation of a motor vehicle, a whole bunch of minimum wage and workplace protection laws, freedom of choice in education [soon they'll change the leaving age to 17], being able to move out without parental/guardian permission, and to a degree voting rights and drinking [disagree if you will but I think it's an important part of adult culture and socialisation]). To the government, there is an age where you become an adult (which is a flawed concept in itself, but it works well enough for now) and that age is going up, leaving people like me feeling underprivileged for their maturity.

Just think: if you’re male, almost a quarter of your expected lifespan is gone by the time you get to do anything useful with it.

So I vote against changing the school leaving age to 17, against raising learner driver hours (reducing the practicality if not legality of driving independently by 17) and increasing the drinking age. I vote that if people are too irresponsible at my age, they’ll stay irresponsible right up till their 17th, 18th and beyond. So I vote that the barrier to independence at a young age is taken down.

Not that I can vote.

Much love,
Bethistotallyrad.

On the one side are the teachers and more pedantic students who question the lack of qualification of many frequent Wikipedians and lack of a structured framework of accountability for editing and other such nonsense (e.g. scant citations). On the other are the frazzled students themselves who applaud the ease of access and scope of the encyclopædia.

But this isn’t the discussion that I believe we should be having. It’s obvious that Wikipedia is, frankly, shit as an academic resource, despite its aspirations and the amount of material present, simply because of its lack of organisation and proper review. In fact, its nature has created entirely something else. Something that, on the whole, is less useful in the traditional sense, but simply more awesome.

It’s created exactly what we want.

It is because of the very things that make it a terrible research tool and suicide to include in a bibliography that it has become endeared to the people of the net. Because it does not require a qualification to edit or add material, any ordinary netizen can do just that on a topic of their choice. Their fairly lax notability and citation rules make it quick and convenient. And most of all, the lack of structured review of material means that it isn’t watered down and ‘corrected’ by someone who has six million degrees in a vaguely relevant field.

Which leaves us with an encyclopædia that is written in our language, contains tonnes of easily accessible and searchable information about stuff that we want to know about and is utter crap for assessments. But I know it’s my resource when I’m trying to remember what happened in that random straight-to-DVD movie I watched last October.

Which is why we love it. And that’s my very-early-morning rant for today. Probably not coherent or valuable, but fuck you.

Much love,
Bethistotallyrad.

And then to UNSW. But it’s hard to get excited about that.

Anywho, it’s now school holidays again. Given year 12, that means several things:

-18th birthday parties. Lots of them.
-No more assessments ever, per se. Barring majors and exams. But no more class tasks and hand-ins, anyway.
-Software major needs to be done. Like, almost the whole thing, despite my vow to start it early. Oh well. Doing a robot for software pretty much means that the algorithm contains nothing that needs to be documented according to the syllabus (i.e. data flow and I/O), plus old Mr. Stead loves robots so getting good marks should be a simple affair.
-OMG TRIAL STUDY! Not really. I should, but I shan’t.
-Tutoring is nearly over. Which means that I should get paid soon. I know that sounds shallow, but I’m really not enjoying it given how much of a dick one particular person who I have to work with is.

So, with this in mind, hopefully a new age of enlightenment, relative wealth and blogging shall begin.

All in all, a fun use of a holiday Wednesday.

Also, I really need to make less general categories than ‘life and love’.

Fair enough, then, and some might say not worth writing about even on this humble blog. But this sign, I found, rather contrasted with the ones hung just round the corner by the council, celebrating ‘NYE 2009′. Now I’m certainly not too pedantic, but the close proximity of these two notices got me thinking. Is each New Year’s Eve denoted by the year it precedes, or the year that ends with it? Enlighten me. And on that note, there needs to be a recognised standard for the naming of each NYE. Otherwise, it simply looks unprofessional.

OK, maybe I am a bit pedantic.