Monday 31 December 2012

Happy New Year

In my glass: a G+T
From my iPod: nothing - the DJ is playing at the pub
From my bookshelf: don't bother asking - I have exams in two weeks
Outside: dark, clear skies, cold
My mood: cheery :)

So it's the end of 2012 tonight. Not sure how long it'll take for this to get online from my phone, so it may well be past midnight by then.
Anyways, tonight I say goodbye to the highs and lows of this year and hopefully welcome a happy new one, with hopefully new people to welcome as friends, more happy memories and a better time of it than this year passing.
A happy new year to everyone!

Saturday 15 December 2012

The Connecticut Shootings

(NOTE: this is not a post debating guns, religion, or any of the other subjects that have exploded over the internet in the wake of the shootings - feel free to share your feelings on the tragedy, but comments debating these subjects will be deleted - that is not the purpose of this post)

I cannot describe the feelings I felt when I heard about this last night. From across the pond, I find myself horrified at this incident. I have not heard much - I find it hard to read about such a henious crime even so far away in the USA - but the headlines I have heard are horrific.
Yesterday in Newtown, Connecticut, a 20-year old man shot and killed 26 people, 20 of which were elementary school children. The shooter was the son of one of the teachers at the school, and had no previous criminal record. He was found dead in a classroom with two firearms, and a third was found in his car.
Newton was not the only place to face the horror that day however. Yesterday morning, a 36-year old  man walked into an elementary school in china, a country with strict laws in gun control, and attacked 22 children with a knife. Though none of the children have died, many are currently in critical condition.
Many people I know here are reminded of the Dunblane primary school shooting in 1996 in Scotland. Many of my current friends were in primary school at the time, my sister had just gone into high school. Dumblane was a little town close to Stirling in Scotland. People throughout the country grieved as people in America and across the world grieved today.
The Dumblane shooting sparked the Snowdrop campain, banning the ownership of handguns by the public across the UK. But though gun ownership is now banned in Scotland, there was still at least 5 people in Scotland killed this year by them, which is still horrific. Any shooting is horrific, regardless of the number.


My facebook feed is full of debate about the removal of guns, and it annoys me to no end. It is time to let people grieve, not stir the shit-pot by sparking debates about guns, medications, religion (all of which I have so far seen in relation to the shootings in connecticut). People are so enraged about the mere fact a gun was involved that they have forgotten that people are grieving, and also seemingly ignored the horror that occurred in China that same day. Getting rid of guns/changing medications/believing or not believing in a certain spiritual aspect is not going to solve the problem, and you're kidding yourself if you think it will, because there are still nutters in this world who will go into a school and let loose on a bunch of kids for little to no reason. That is not to say that guns shouldn't be banned - I firmly believe they should - but it is to say that killing will not stop entirely by the removal of guns. It will likely reduce massively, as statistics show it should, but if someone is that insane to go into a school and kill a bunch of people, not to mention children, then they would likely just find another way to do so, just as that man did in China. Changes in law have to be made by the American people, for the American people. We just have to support the people who have lost so much.
It's time to let the world grieve. Many families have lost everything they hold dear to them - sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, cousins, friends. Flags fly at half-mast both in the town and at the White house. And for those children who have not been lost, like the others in the school, or all those children in the China incident, their childhood innocence has been stolen from them. Perhaps it's time to show a little sensitivity, for the media to give the town space to breathe, give a little support for the parents and children of America, and leave the debate to those of the state and country involved.

Wednesday 12 December 2012

Last Day of Term, and my shitty love life


In my Glass: Freshly juiced apple
On my iPod: Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO
From my bookshelf: Soulcatcher by A. K. Stevenson
Outside: Dark, cold
My mood: Far to wide awake for 11PM at night


Finally! Tomorrow is the last day! And.... I don't have to run around like a maniac like I do most thursdays :) I shifted my tuesday lab to tomorrow morning, because I couldn't be bothered with the stampeding crowd of people trying to get in the tuesday lab so they could get the cheaper flights home before christmas. Then my usual 2PM class is finished for term, which means I have more than three hours to do what I like between the lab and anatomy revision up at foresterhill.
Then we have the TGIO party for the Aberdeen NaNo-ers. We have a buffet and things at one of the bars in town, so it should be good fun.

Makes a change to think I might be able to relax at a party for a change. As good fun as I've been having at the parties I've been to this last while, I haven't always been comfortable. I think some people are slower to catch onto the change in me since the start of the year.
Mind you, it probably doesn't help that I came this close to slapping one overly-friendly and slightly creepy guy that was with us the last time I was out. With my life having been what it has, I can't ignore the creeps any more. Alcohol used to drown them out and let me enjoy the night, just like everyone else, but now I'm so wary, I can barely even relax anymore. When everyone else is getting drunk, but I can't relax enough to join the fun, or go onto the dancefloor without thinking about all the eyes oggling, it soon wears thin.
Apparently there's a certain rumour about me around a couple of the OTC-ers, which pisses me off since I've not actually done anything worth rumour this term. I'm really, really hoping it stays quiet enough to stay out of the Tae the Lassies poem at Burns, for fear I may burst into tears at the table. I've had enough of this crap.
How are people meant to see me as I actually, when people are making assumptions off my previous reputation? That girl wasn't me, can't they see that? I was acting in the way I did as a way to live through grief. And I regret every minute that I took advantage of someone else to temporarily seal the gaping hole that was my heart, but I can't take it back.
Plus, I can't get my head around the fact that at the time I wanted to pick someone up in the club, it was so easy, but now, when I don't want to be that girl any more, and I just want a normal guy to care a little, it's so, so hard. Why am I rejected so often? I either seem to get kicked to the curb, or immediately friend-zoned by every guy I like.
It's hard for me to get back into dating, after so much time grieving, but it is time for me to carry on with my life - to stop living in the past and start loving again. And I'm trying so hard, I really am, but I don't know how anymore.

Sorry for the sadness of this post - it was meant to be a happy one about the end of term, but I guess I need to offload a few things. I'm being overwhelmed by life. I don't know if anyone even reads this anyway.

Friday 7 December 2012

New computer is broke - again..

So two weeks ago, I had to send my brand new (just over a month old) laptop to get the screen repaired. It was giving me odd colours and lines and all sorts of dodgy stuff across it. The repair guys at PC World decided it was a crack from damage and charged me to send it off to get fixed. Upon recieving it back (three days ago), there's a new screen, and they refund me the money they charged because it was down to something inside. All well and good.
It runs fine as I start it up the next day, and for hours it's all going fine. Until I move it. Suddenly there's red/pink overlaying everything. I put it back, but it stays flickering red. Like you can still see everything, but there's this annoying flickering overlay over everything. I open up google, and the white screen has no red on it, but it still flickers on the bars at the top and bottom, and other, non-white sites (e.g. the videos on youtube, and just about every other site I regularly visit) are flickering.
So I sigh, and go to close it and get ready to bring it back in to PC world in the morning, and as soon as I move the screen forward, the red goes away. I let go and it starts again, but then, with a little manipulating of the screen position, it goes away totally. So I shrug, shut it down, and go to the bed for the night.
I wake up in the morning and start it up, and...it's totally fine. Right. So, having woken up late, I quickly do my online test for uni as I eat my breakfast, and it's all fine. Until I'm about to shut it down and head out the door. And the red flickering starts. By this time, I don't have time to head to PC World, so I shut it down, shut off the charger, leave it on the desk, top open, and grab my old laptop and charger that I'd been using while my laptop was getting repaired. By the time I get in after the day is over, PC World is shut.
So I wake up today, and turn on my laptop. The red flickering was still there, covering my welcome screen and turning the blue into flickers of purples and pinks. I sigh, grab my purse, find my reciepts from the earlier fix, close the lid of my laptop, put it in my rucksack and wander down to PC World.
And wouldn't it be just my luck, that as soon as I arrive at PC World, and open my laptop to show the tech-guy, the red flickering is gone. Just like that - GONE! So the tech-guy thinks it's a pinched wire in the hinges, or a loose connection (if that's true, I can't help thinking it's related to the screen replacement, since it didn't have this problem before), but is confused, seeing nothing when he moves the screen back and forth. So we go through the whole procedure of checking the details of the laptop, and the guy is also surprised that it's needed two repairs when it's still less than two months old. He turns it over, screen still open, to check the serial number on the back, and *Hello, Red Flickering!* He turns it over again, and it stops. Needless to say, he never saw it the first time, and we can't get it to do it again, so I'm starting to feel like a loonatic.
So, the poor guy spends a good half-hour on the phone getting passed from person to person, until he eventually ends up at Samsung, who are now apparently going to fix it, since it's still in warranty. So I probably have another 10 day wait before I get it back. Seriously? By the time I get it back, my laptop'll basically have been away for repairs for almost half the amount of time I've owned it. I don't even know if I'll still be in Aberdeen if it comes back late to the store, so I'll have to reorganise for it to be sent to the store at home, and that'll just be awkward. If I knew this would happen so soon after buying, I would have gone for a different brand - the reason the guy at tech-support believed me was because he had just seen another similarly new Samsung that did dhow the red flickering. I can't help but wonder how long this laptop is actually going to hold up if it's having problems at this stage.
Meanwhile, my poor 5-year old Dell is plugging away nicely under the strain of my uni work. Sure, the battery barely lasts 2 hours, it's a bit sloooowwwww at times, and the memory isn't great, but at least it's reliable and won't start giving me strange screens in the middle of a lecture. Being honest, if I defragmented, got rid of all the odds and ends and programmes on the hard drive that I don't need anymore (or just plain got it restored to factory settings), cleaned out the fan (which is probably FULL of dust and soot from the coal fire at my parents house - my mums laptop was completely choked up with it), cleared out under the keyboard, and got it a new battery, it would probably last a good while yet.
As a matter of fact, that's why my mum was meant to be getting my Dell once I got everything moved over to my Samsung, but that never happened. My dad was going to pick it up, take it to the computer guys in Dundee that fix all his computer stuff for him to get it wiped, then clean it up and give it to mum so she can let her dying 7-8 year old Acer finally bite the dust. Although, judging by the multiple crashes, and the Black Screen of Death she got recently, that might have already happened. Even the computer guys can't fix it. In any case, by God was that thing sloooowwwwww.....

Anyway, off topic now. I do hope this is the last issue my laptop has. I do want to get around to buying scrivener one of these days with the NaNo winner codes.
Wishing you better luck than I've had this last while :)
Tigereye

Ramblings: Mobiles, communication and social situations


On one of the first weekends of the academic year away with the OTC, the rules of the mess were explained to the first years. There are two major rules to help the sociability of the place. These involve, respectively, no PDAs, and no mobile phones in the mess. I remember during my first year having a few free glasses of port going around courtesy of those caught, which well serves to get the rules into your head, especially as a broke student.
However, recently, outside of OTC, I've found myself quite stunned by the sheer number of people who go around on their phones, with headphones in and such. It's worst when someone does it in the pub, because it almost seems to form a wall between the people on either side of him (unless of course, those two people don't care about talking over people. Personally, I find it quite uncomfortable."
In any case, I found myself faced with the question the other day as to whether people spend too much time on their phones, and not enough speaking face to face with people, and I have to say, I agree to a point. I myself find myself guilty of it. I often listen to speakers through podcasts as I walk to uni in the morning, and I've occasionally found myself not realising people in the real world are waving to me or saying hello until they've already passed me.
I do think that texting, or using social sites such as facebook or twitter does become antisocial in certain situations. It is as if the online personas of people sometimes seem to become more important than those they speak to, although in reality it is likely not true. Some people even text or facebook people in the same room. Sure, it might seem funny between the people involved, but it can make the other people in the room feel put out and unimportant.
That said, even though texting in social situations is a sure-fire way to kill the atmosphere, phones have very much become a great way to communicate with people who are not nearby. Of course technology now allows face-to-face interaction over long distances, via wi-fi using applications such as Skype or Face-time. These prove to be a great alternative for long conversations, and are often preferred over regular phone-calls to familiar people. However, these applications are not always practical. Most people would prefer to either phone a person or see them in person. Skype and Face-time are almost some grey area in the middle, and something I would probably only use for friends and family, but then that's just me. Certainly a normal phone call has definitely not out-grown its value as of yet.
Texts on the other hand have some entirely different advantages. They give you the opportunity to contact people if you are not sure whether or not they are available to speak on the other end of the phone. They do not require someone to answer immediately, and so people can take the chance to think about what they are actually saying. They are also a great chance to get an answer to a question if you don't have time to phone, or are involved in a social situation, and a phone call would be inappropriate or antisocial.


Anyway, this is just a little post on my views on the issue. Can you tell I'm stuck somewhere in the middle on this one? As always, let me know your thoughts if you happen to pass by.