Things.

Things I have written recently:

1. A report on OTC camp for the website.
To be posted as soon as I can be bothered to link in the photos, since one of the last things I put up was about last year's camp.

2. An essay on the title: "To What Extent Should the Second World War Simply Be Viewed as a War of Production?"
Significant because it, and the consequent interview discussing it, me and other animals, got me into Kent University to do War Studies. Giggity.

Hokay

Yesterday. Tori's birthday. Blog's birthday. Three years. Haven't blogged for about three weeks. But why?

I AM LE TIRED.

But seriously, my internet's buggered up in the house yet again, plus a certain factor has been distracting me. My bad.

So, in brief, but WITH pictures...

Head of the Taff 2007: Morning we raced in fours, afternoon in an eight. My seat came off after a few hundred metres of the 3.4km and I did the rest of the race sliding on my arse, with consequent huge oozing sores. Yummy.



The next weekend: OTC Royal Engineers Competition, Minley Barracks, Surrey. Endurance run with a stretcher made of a chunk of tank track (team pictured below, after the general group one), command task, bridge building and boat race. I ended up being 'RBS Six Nations Man of the Weekend' for being extra specially good. I ran myself sick, as did everyone. I was supposed to sit out the command task to be used as brawn for the more physical tasks, but I substituted in behind the judge's back on the command task because I'd figured out where they were going wrong. Towers of Hanoi with tractor tyres, elementary, doncha know. I apparently lobbed bits of steel bridge girder around like a loon, in the same testosterone fuelled neanderthal rage that saw me taking over the assault boat we were paddling and beasting everyone on from the back. I'd be an awesome rowing cox, if only I were 40 kilograms lighter. Oh, and I forgot to mention the Hawaiian party on Saturday night. Awesome stuff.

Before leaving Cardiff

After the endurance race

Hawaiian carnage

And finally, this weekend Cardiff Company played Exeter UOTC at football. They had their names embroidered on their team jackets. We had this...

Check out the goalie kit... Go Sweden!

The girls, plus 3 of our guys to make up the numbers including me in goal, won 4-1. We lost 2-1, which we thought wasn't bad really, then went to the OTC bar to watch England lose to Wales. Gutted.

Word.

The 600

Go tell the Spartans we made a sequel...

600 posts. Woohoo. Yes, this is one of those "I don't really have anything to say but I've been bullied into blogging" posts. I can't steal something from PostSecret because they're all Valentines themed cards this week, mostly bleak and mopey, and I can't identify with any of them. Sucks to be them. Although it sucks to be me too because I've got a 2k rowing test tomorrow and I haven't been on a rowing machine seriously in a month. It's going to be bad. Possibly horrific. In fact, it had better be. I need more bad stuff to balance out my reason to brave the overly commercialised sickeningly red and pink Valentines displays...

Tagged and Bagged

Having tags on posts, or labels as Blogger calls them, is strange, but going back through my ridiculous number of posts (this will be the 587th) on the pretext of tagging stuff is quite entertaing, mostly because of how dire they used to be and how correspondingly dire the more recent ones will surely seem in a couple of years time.

I've "upgraded" my blog to comply with the new Blogger and thus it now displays labels properly as well as in the new bit in the sidebar. The text on the new version of my template is somehow not quite the same. Pretty sure it's not the font. The spacing between words seems smaller so I've overcompensated for that by making the line-spacing overly large. It may therefore look rather odd.

Sass

Quote of the moment:
"Look at this? I am ons the internets sneakily. Bob been giving me sass and I not put up for that evers." - Weebl's blog.

Pop quiz, hot-shot.

P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney.

Name that film.

bobblog

Quote of the moment:
Stop that!
What?
Thinking!

Bob has a blog :D

Oops

Quote of the moment:
"Happy birthday to you..."



Yup. My blog reached the ripe old age of 2 on Sunday. It was her birthday too, but that's obviously much less important.

Shut Up, Oaten

Quote of the moment:
"What would Tyler Durden do?" - a gem thrown up by the Bloggies 2006. Tyler Durden, for those who CBA to click the link and be reminded, appeared to be Brad Pitt's character in Fight Club.

One of the less amusing posts in turn produced this shocker:



Avril Lavigne looking like an actress in the Sienna Miller mould, not a girly-rock singer. How rare!

Amusing things that happened today, number one: Claire, having ducked out of joining me at the gym on Saturday because she was hungover, missed her second on-demand gym session - because she went to the wrong gym. Genius!

Amusing things that happened today, number two: being called "Mark Oaten" became a general term of abuse. Hopefully it will make the next revision of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Twas the Night Before the Night Before the Night Before Christmas

Quote of the moment:

Where are you and I'm so sorry
I cannot sleep I cannot dream tonight
I need somebody and always
This sick strange darkness
Comes creeping on so haunting every time
And as I stared I counted
Webs from all the spiders
Catching things and eating their insides
Like indecision to call you
and hear your voice of treason
Will you come home and stop this pain tonight
Stop this pain tonight

Don't waste your time on me you're already
The voice inside my head (I miss you)

- Blink 182, I Miss You. Ripe for the full orchestral backing treatment.

Just dropped Will T back home. Had some uber-loud Classic FM on with the windows down, in nostalgic tribute to the absent Jim. Earlier we played some ISS 98 with Sarah as my disadvantage. Lol. All was going well until she staged a walkout in protest at my over-zealous captaincy. I wasn't really shouting at her that much...

Managed to run 4k this morning. Still having issues with continuity: I can run with walking pauses further and faster than I can jog. Damn circuit training.

How to Shop Like a Man

Quote of the moment:
"The requested URL was not found on this server..." - Podgy is missing (neither here nor here), presumed snatched by the Thought Police. I went to the extreme lengths of a comic strip to illustrate my theory.

In other news, Claire brought homemade flapjacks to our final lecture today. I had 4. This granted me "loved" status for appreciating her cooking. Lol. Might also have been to do with me losing abysmally in a Gair Rhydd Su Doku race with her. She's promised chocolate muffins next week. Woohoo!

I went hardcore shopping today, cycling to Tesco Extra armed with my CCF backpack:


How to shop like a real man: no quiche here...


There was a bag of apples that I omitted in my decorative unpacking effect and were lurking behind the Rice Krispies.

Just for starters, the cider (on offer, w00t!), excluding cans, weighed 10.5 kilograms... another 3.5 for the tins, 3 for the squash, 6 for the apple juice... all in in all it was about 35kg, plus a few bits (bread, eggs, salad(!) etc) for Steve. In exchange I was using Steve's bike (my back wheel needs spanners, it's so out of line it's lodged against the frame) which was set just a touch low for me... At least I worked out where the icy patch in the carpark was on the way in, by doing an awesome (unintentional) motocross-style slide round the corner it was on!

Backlinks

Quote of the moment:
"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."

Having a cold leads to staying in,
Staying in leads to blog browsing,
Blog browsing leads to Blogger Buzz,
Blogger Buzz leads to Backlinks,
and backlinks link back to Blogger Buzz.

I wonder if Mr private road construction links to my posts as well as commenting?

RIP, Felsted Account

Quote of the moment:
The time has come, the walrus said...

[Edit 16:31 - Or possibly not, as the pics on my blog have loaded once, but only once, since then. Server problems, perhaps?]

[Edit 3/10/05 00:15 - We have visual confirmation. That's a confirmed kill, Captain. Must just have hit 'back' unknowingly.]

Moving Day

Quote of the moment:
Oh, and I wanted to close with a stupid joke about the latest MOTO RAZR and MOTO ROKR fones. If you have been hiding in a hole for the last year, they are MOTO ROLA's latest sleek fones that come with Cingular's crappy calling plan. Anyway: I think I just came up with the next generation product idea... a mobile fone with high-powered vibrate functions, called the MOTO FUKR...

Even Cambridge (and MIT) can't get rid of the dirty sense of humour. Encouraging, yet tragic.

It's D-Day. The big one. The final seismic shift tearing a rift in the fabric of life. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it going to university?

Not for another 12 days, no. It's the last day of my dearly beloved Felsted directory. It must be understood that there are some (totally unusable due to my lacking DRAW) files on there that I made 11 years ago in my first year at the prep school. At least, there might be. I can't actually remember.

Anyway, it's very emotional. I'm attempting to copy all the recent/relevant stuff now, before some evil computer monkey gets up in the morning and destroys my legacy forever.

Alas poor Y012121(|<...

BISY BACKSON

GON OUT



BACKSON

WILL GOES WEST

Quote of the moment:

Will Goes West
Possibly Good. Probably Bad. Provably Ugly

It's up, running and has an awesome picture grid menu with all pics stolen from Prill's Kr3w mugshots.

That Is A Good Name...

Quote of the moment:
"That is a good name and I would like to hear the story of it some day" - Greeting taken from The Borribles. An absolutely awesome trilogy. The second one was in the prep school library before it got stripped out and reinvented as a second computer room with a couple of bookshelves, but I found an omnibus edition in Waterstones and read them all in under a week. Awesome stuff.

The US Blog

What .blogspot.com address should my Summer Camp blog have? Camp Will Camp It Up Will Goes West Other Current Results

I've decided to have a seperate blog for my travels, because:
A) It'll be easier to go back and browse later.
B) I can keep it clean because my parents want to read it. Anything dirty and/or unconnected to my travels will go on here.

So I went to create a new blog and tried entering several addresses. Blogger told me they were all taken so I gave up and went to bed, but when I logged on today I discovered that the above three were obviously not taken because they'd appeared on my blogs list.

I wrote and meant to post this about 5 hours ago, but got distracted by drawing up a huge Excel list of songs to put on my MP3 player. Oops.

Strength and Honour

Quote of the moment:
"This to disclose is all thy guardian can: Beware of all, but most beware of Man!"

- Sounds highly appropriate to me. My middle name is Danger. My last might possibly be Mouse, although no doubt Jimmy would dispute that.

There seems to be an increase in comments corresponding to people finishing their exams. You who committed yourselves to revision, we salute you. That's me and Oswald.


Shadows and dust, Prill m8, shadows and dust.

Skid Marks

Quote of the moment:

Start here and go up...

I thought the excitement of being driven by Jim might have got lost in the previous post (and I was bored) so that might explain it better. Fortunately nothing came around the corner in the opposite direction until we had started driving back slowly to inspect the skid marks on the road.

Alas, the Harlequins, my favourite rugby team back when I took an interest in such things, in the glory days of Will Carling, have been relegated from the Rugby Premiership after a close-fought 23-22 defeat.

This is post 250, by the way. Hurrah!

Paddy's Profile

Quotes of the moment:
"Oh yeh, if any of you have a Britta water filter, you can filter dirty cheap vodka with it, and it actually works. See, I knew there was a point in a university education." - Rob owns.

Jimmy says:
we can as long as you're on a leash the whole time
You bet we can ;)

It was my last day at Tesco today. [Sobs]. I forgot to say "It's been emotional!" - D'oh! That was amply compensated by Dr Who, which was pretty cool in a Casanova low-budget-camp-and-proud-of-it way.

I noticed when looking at Paddy's profile from his gap year blog that he was actually second to get a Blogger account after La Podge:

1st = Koel: 2922991
2nd = Paddy: 2926280
3rd = Rob: 2982232
4th = Jim: 2982462
5th = Prill: 2986649
6th = Will P: 3020710
7th = Vince: 3035724
8th = Kaz: 3169260
9th = Will T: 3171079
10th = Jimmy: 3181733
11th = Anna: 3194477
12th = Hawwy: 3395490

Funny how when Paddy 'finally got' a blog he got a new account: 4091923!

In other news: Another classic Helen Bromley quote from earlier in the evening, to a guy Dixie was talking to:
"I wouldn't go too far with her, mate, she's got HIV!"

Join The Cult: Admit You Love Me!

Quote of the moment:
When is someone going to invent an emoticon for "I've just realised I'm talking to myself again"? - Me.

Since my cunning plan was hatched, the following people have realised that they love me and they can't deny it:
April
Jimmy
Anna
Emma

Come join my minions! I'm offering the promise of everlasting PIE!

I got a whole load more Visa application stuff in the post today. Apparently I have to download my application form from the American Embassy website. The problem is that:

A) The website is dire, and doesn't give you what you click on the link for.
B) When it eventually directs you to an affiliate page with the forms, you have to pay $19.95 to access their database of downloadable forms. You can then access them whenever and however many you want. NOT HELPFUL. I only want one form, and I probably only want it once! Bah humbug...

[Edit 01:36 - Oh yes, and I went swimming. 28 lentgths in a cracking 35 minutes. Not bad given that it's a 33.3 metre pool.]