Ocram’s Blog

Just random musings I guess, but at 3AM there isn’t really anybody about to share them with. :P

What is love?
How do you know if you’re in love?
Can you know if you’re in love? Surely if you’ve never been in love, you don’t know what it is to experience it. But then again, maybe you just know.
Can you fall out of love?
Can you ever fall in love with more than one person?
If you have truly fallen in love with somebody, can you ever stop loving them?
Do people at some point in their life feel that they are in love with somebody, and end up regretting it?
Do people kid themselves that they have fallen in love in order to alleviate circumstances?
Or make a commitment as a result of circumstances in the belief that they will fall in love at some point?
Why is it that so many marriages end in divorce?
Does ’staying together for the kids’ end up having an adverse effect on the children?
Does the above have an adverse effect on the partners involved?
Does ‘true’ love ever pass somebody by as a result of a relationship they are currently in?

Mmm… rhetorical questions. Yummy!

So there you go. If you ever wonder what I think about when I’m awake in the wee hours of the morning, you have your answer.

ready to kill. :mellow:

So, I recieved my A-level results last week and they were, the only way I can think to put it, bad. I got a B in Computing, and a D in Physics and Maths.

Do those really reflect my abilities? I don’t think so. (although I may be slightly biased. :P)

I got an A* in Maths at GCSE, which means in two years my ability has decreased to a D. How does that make sense? The one way that I can explain it is by the teaching ability. My teacher from Year 8 to Year 11 was much better than the one I had in Year 12. In Year 13, everything is building on previous knowledge, which was lacking. As a result, my overall grade dropped significantly.

The grades in my statistics exams (which was taught by a different teacher in Year 12 than the ‘core’ maths) were a B overall, which seems to reflect my beliefs.

Physics: The first time that I took my module 1 exam, I got a U. Obviously, I chose to retake that exam. In the Spring of this year, I got a B. This was for the most part, self taught with a little help from friends.

I chose the three subjects (four, if you count Psychology) because they all interest me. Unlike (at least, I think) most people, who choose subjects based on what career they want. (read what will make them the most money.) Most people I have spoke to took Psychology as a ‘filler’ subject, as something that was considered an easy A. I dropped it within a month because the teacher just seemed to have absolutely no interest in teaching.

I believe that the whole examination process is flawed. It relys on coursework and/or exams, which focus on a small subset of the overall subject. Results are (heavily?) influenced by teachers and and what basically results to pot luck. If a person is particularly nervous, it may be harder to concentrate in an exam. With a basic knowledge of any subject and a lot of revision, a high grade would probably be attainable. I am not a big fan of revision, I find it had to sit there and concentrate, and end up giving up when I find any excuse to.

Being the morbidly curious person that I am, I have to wonder how many students commit suicide because they feel that they haven’t achieved their goals, and their life is now over…

For the past few days, I’ve been experiencing a sharp pain in the left side of my head. After a few minutes, it subsides to a dull headache which lasts for anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. As far as I can tell there is no common cause. :unsure:

This isn’t the first time, about 6 months the same thing happened, but stopped after a fortnight or so. :ermm:

David Duchovny rocks! ^_^ Still waiting for the X-Files movie though.

What has Gillian Anderson done since X-Files? :unsure:

I feel a X-Files marathon coming on… :think:

The results of an interesting survey on the acceptance of evolution in Western nations (and Japan :huh:) have been released.

The top three don’t surprise me at all. There are a few countries that I would have expected to be higher up the list, and then of course there is the US, second from bottom. I expected it to be low, but not at the bottom of the list. However, given the prevalence of fundamentalist Christianity in the US, maybe it’s not such a surprise after all.

Of course, one day the theory of evolution may be disproved (not by an American ;)), but I doubt I’ll be around if that day ever comes.

The UK is 6th in the list, which is maybe higher than I would have expected, and we have the lowest percentage of people who completely dismiss the theory of evolution.

Go Iceland! Just one more reason to justify wanting to live there. :P

I can’t even find the right words to open with. :hmm:

There is so much that I want to say, and that I feel I need to say, but nothing ever seems right. In a way, I guess I’m scared of saying it - it’s not exactly the kind of thing to say when you’re trying to reestablish a friendship, especially given the past - but I need to get it off my chest. Otherwise I don’t see how things will be different this time round.

Add to that I’m not even sure that it’s a good idea in the first place, and I’m having more than a little trouble trying to find the words to say.

Birthdays need to happen more often. :rolleyes:

According to the BBC, Google has started to warn users when they are about to click through to a site which contains malware.

This raises two questions:

Why include ‘bad’ sites in the listings at all? It is already part of their quality guidelines that a site must not contain viruses, trojans or ‘badware’. They already remove or penalise sites for infringing on other guidelines (and occasionally for no reason whatsoever), so why not enforce this one as well?

How will this affect Google Adwords? Going purely by SiteAdvisor, the majority of the sponsored links for the ‘dangerous keywords’ given by the BBC are rated as ‘Use caution’. If Google was really acting with the searcher’s best interests in mind, they wouldn’t accept advertising from sites which attempt to either scam a user by charging a subscription for products which are available for free, or spread malware. But of course, they couldn’t possibly do that, it might hurt their bottom line.

In my admittedly short testing period, I could only find one site, which I had to search for by domain, which triggered this doorway. The SiteAdvisor plugin however listed several bad sites for each search, as well as a link to why the site was marked as such.

If you are an IE or Firefox user on Windows, I highly recommend the SiteAdvisor plugin from McAfee. (Probably the first and only time I will recommend a piece of McAfee software. ;)) It has a much more thorough collection of sites, warns of spam and scam sites as well as malware, and checks every site that you visit. If you are not paying attention, you might miss the SiteAdvisor warning, but it also alerts you if you attempt to download anything from the site.

I applaud Google for taking these initial steps against malware, but if they want to do so, they should do so properly. Integrating something similar to SiteAdvisor into the Google Toolbar would be a good start.

Angel, by Sarah McLachlan, is such a beautiful song.

It isn’t something that I’d normally listen to, but every time I listen to it, it brings a tear to my eye. :blush:

That is all. :P

Woohoo? :unsure:

Today is the first day that I’ve woken up feeling relatively normal. ^_^