When you've finished studying.... now what?

It's been a while since my last post. Mostly because I've spent 3 months in social obscurity and writing my dissertation. Now that I've finished, I'm left unemployed, partially bored and having nothing currently set in stone for the future.

This time last year, I was stressing out because I was still looking for work and for something to do after I graduated from Warwick. When you live with your parents and stuck in the house because you have no money, no job and nothing planned ahead, it sort of makes you feel like shit.

This year, not much has changed, I'm still looking for work, I'm living with my parents again but yet I don't feel stressed. I'm keeping myself occupied, I'm enjoying the current time I have free from studying and although I am looking for jobs, not applying for the first thing that comes up.

Yes, I'm aware that the job market is in the dumps at the moment and the so called 'economic crisis' is really shutting everyone down. But as I'm looking for jobs and applying for the dole, I'm not forcing myself to pick up any job that pops up on the advertisement. For one, the first that popped up was a hairdresser and frankly, would just be hypocritical because of my terrible hairstyle :P. But also, I'm aiming for something this time.

So far since I finished my uni courses, I've fixed things, applied for jobs, made videos and writing blogs. And that's all in about a week. Ironically, I've been more productive during this week than the last few weeks of my dissertation!

Festival Failings

Having recently comeback from Glastonbury a few weeks ago (and barely managing to recover). I look back at my first festivals that I went to when I was back in college.

Glasto is my 4th music festival that I've been to. I've been to Leeds 3 times and each time you go, you learn from your mistakes. I see so many festival virgins and regulars going to their first festivals and simply failing not knowing what to bring and how to survive in the wilderness that is the music festival forest!

First and most obvious one is: Clothing and footwear. Always pack for everything. come rain or shine. Literally. Even if your wellies don't match your matching orange shirt or pink hoodie. Most notable fail I saw on the first day at glasto was a girl braving the thick mud with sandals at the entrance! (Little did she know that the mud was bordering 1-2ft deep as you get further in!)

Buy a decent tent! The first year I went to Leeds Festival, my tent door broke on the last day while it was pouring down and my tent got waterlogged. I've also found out how much of a difference double layered tents are to single layered. It's sooo much nicer without all that water and sweat dripping on your head!

Transport. No, not how to travel to the site but how to carry all your booze there! It's all about the big wheels! Get a decent granny trolley. Do NOT bring a suitcase like I've seen. This ain't barbados (unless you replace sun with rain and sandy beaches for muddy fields... and even then I wouldnt bring a suitcase onto a beach!)

Okay, decide to go green this year by taking the train. When you think train vs car, you'd think trains are faster. Not this one. This one was 'low priority' which means it was the cyclists of the railway. You're on the rails but no one gives a shit about you because you're a cyclist and you're just a nuisance. Therefore, our train had to stop and start and let every other train passing come through.

Being on the long train journey, I was having conversations and asked the people next to me if I get searched for drugs or anything. Not that I was carrying anything but they somehow had the idea that I was some sort of heroin dealer :S...

Since Glasto was my first festival that wasn't Leeds, I thought I'd see what the big difference was. In fact, the difference was huge. There's so many things to see and visit. Even after the gigs have finished, there's performances, circuses, drinking, silent discos, I forgot what bands I wanted to see. I don't feel like they're trying to milk all the money i have in my wallet except for when I'm trying to buy food.

The only thing I hated about glastonbury was what I call 'QuickMud'. I'm not an expert in mud (and if I did, I probably wouldn't be a very good one). But there's 3 consistencies of mud: Hard mud that you can walk on, Liquid Mud that you can swim through (or at least still walk on and move your feet) and QuickMud where you get a perfect consistency of not being able to swim through and barely able to walk in. Glasto was the latter. I was better off travelling through hot lava on bare feet than through that guck and people who've played 'Stuck in the mud' before have no idea what it's like being literally stuck!

But yes, besides all that, the field was great, the sights were great, the music was great (even watching Beyonce was sorta great, don't ask why I went to see her instead of Queens of the stone age!)

The Top Shelf...

I've been looking at the top shelf of the magazine shelf at my local supermarket. And before you ask, no, I was not looking for porn! Instead I've been trying to find my regular gadget mags that I normally buy.

Whilst I'm already understanding that lad's magazines such as FHM, Nuts and Zoo probably do need to be on the top shelf. I'm struggling to understand why my usual tech magazines such as Stuff and T3 have had most of their bottom halfs covered.

Back in my teenage years, I used to buy Nuts and Zoo a lot. Back in the time before they became a porn mag. When I first bought it, it was pretty tame. Nowadays, it's ex-Big Brother stars showing their balloons like they have no shame (oh wait, they probably don't). Then I started reading FHM with the same idea since some of the content were more interesting such as fashion tips and the occasional fitness advice (of which, despite all the reading, I have not taken into practice).

But with Stuff and T3. The only 'raunchy' bit I see is the front cover. The rest are consumer electronic reviews and gaming stuff. Granted, some of the photo work in T3 is aiming more at the woman then the electronics in some sort of gratutious fashion but I doubt there someone who's masturbating over the new shiny iPhone (and dear god please get help if you do!) nor do people intend to buy the magazine for the lovely lady shown in the middle of the magazines. They don't mention the model's name and neither do they interview her in a page 3 style manner where they expect their opinion of current affairs.

If you go on the websites I've mentioned, you see little to no sexual content at all. But move into FHM or Maxim, then you see their intentions and marketing straight off.


Now I was under the idea that top-shelf mags are for porno mags or magazines that have sexy ladies that are pretty much close to porno mags. Yet I almost feel ashamed and disgusted if I'm only getting a magazine off the top rack because the moment you reach for that, people around you start staring and think 'Oh dear! I know what that boy's up to in the next hour!' It's actually making me ashamed to be geek!

I see more boobs and cleavage in Heat magazine! You don't see them getting covered up do you?

So the next time someone sees me pick up a mag from the top shelf. Fine, think what you want, but it's not what you think. Yes I like reading geeky magazines and there's no shame in it.

And for anyone else who has to know, porn is on the internet. I do not need a magazine for that!

OMG! I finished all my exams!!.....Now What?

I just finished my last (and possibly last EVER) exam. All I have left is my dissertation to do....

....

....

I'm bored already!!

I've been yearning for all this free time after my exams and now that I have, what do i do?!

I'm currently writing myself a list of things to do during my dissertation work for 3 months.

* Complete Portal 2 co-op

Incidentally,

* Find a Portal 2 partner for co-op

* Make some money by some sort of money-making scheme

* Go to gym more

* Erm.... Find a job?

How NOT to revise!

I don't know why they invent easter holidays. Easter's during the holidays when all the kids 16 and up are spent most of the holidays revising and although having chocolate eggs is a plus, still does not hide that fact that you're spending your holidays 'holidaying'....

I have about 2 weeks before my big exams coming up. It's hard to believe that I've been studying for nearly 20 years now and you'd have thought after 20 years of learning to learn and revise, I'd have got the hang of it now. But I haven't and I spend most of the time procrastinating. I particularly remember my maths A levels resits which mostly involved me doing past papers and writing notes about a week before the exam. To my own surprise, I came out with an A in Maths and B in Further Maths! Unfortunately, as soon as I decide to do engineering, I find out that I'm forced to LEARN things properly to get a good mark which has been hit and miss so far.

So, although I'm not the perfect person to write this, here's a list of things to do to revise for an exam for all those poor students and kids having to face the most gruelling days of their lives:

Find a quiet place - Your bedroom, the library, the basement, a soundproof room, a graveyard, a room full of deaf people. Anywhere where you can get peace and solitude to work.

Treat your studying like you how you would do if you're working - By this I mean work like you're going to work. As in job 'work'. In other words, get this right or you're going to get fired! In fact, you're not gonna get fired, you won't get a job! And therefore you're already fired before you're even hired!

No TV should be turned on - the only exception is if you have an exam on television programmings... though I would love to see a uni course to a study on TV programs and whatnot. Maybe they'd call it something crazy like 'Media Studies'! Ha!

All distractions should be kept out of your room - THis means TV mentioned above, games consoles magazines, porn, your girlfriend in front of you, that pen with that picture of a woman that takes her clothes off when you press the pen down etc... (actually, I don't think i've seen them in a while)

Avoid the Bed The bed is the equivalent of Sienna Miller asking to have urgently have sex with you but you are tied to a chair until you finish this revision... well you get the picture.

Coffee is your friend - Some say coffee is the solution to all of life's problems. Although they will not solve the Bernoulli Equations (a small engineering joke...), it does help you concentrate. I have bad after-effects of coffee when I get comedowns (similar to taking drugs) after a while and just sleep it off... in fact, coffee occasionally helps me sleep at night which is ironic I guess

Facebook is your enemy! - I've written down on my diary to arrange to sue Mark Zuckerberg for all the hours I've lost on Facebook...

And finally

DO NOT START WRITING BLOGS TO PROCRASTINATE!

and that's all, I will leave you with this video :)

Red Rum! Blue Vodka! Black Whisky!

Contrary to what many people think, I rarely go to the bookies. One of the only times I go is to make a small bet on the Grand National. This is the 3rd time I've done this and given the fact that I know as much information about horse racing than I do about brain surgery, I pretty much have to get really lucky to win one.

Upon my third time in betting for the grand national, I realised that I was burning money betting on horses with odds of 50-1 or more. The past two years I put a quid on a two 100-1 horses and they didn't pop up. Now if I put that statistically, assuming that the probability is actually correct (which it probably won't be), then for every 100 goes I place a bet on this, it should pop up once. Figuring that, I realised it wasn't going to happen this year so I'd put my money on safer bets.

(Those of you who do maths should already be aware that this is not actually true... Yes I'm not stupid... most of the time)

Next decision is to choose a horse based on a funny name. Last year I put a few bets on lots of funny names such as Big Fella Thanks, The Package, Made in Taipan, Hello Bud and this pretty unusual one called 'Don't Push It'. Personally, I think the odds are based on how ridiculous the names are. The more ridiculous, the higher odds. This would probably mean that more suckers would put bets on this horse thinking that they have a 'special' chance to win it. Of course it never happens (bar the odd fluke of a time) and bookies rake it in.

Of course, if I ever owned a horse, I would probably put the name down as 'Your Mum'. The joke would be hilarious the first time round. But then you'd eventually get sick of the joke because you'd hear it all the time. You then apply this logic to winning races and therefore 'Your Mum' would be perfect!

Using this approach I look for a name that looked pretty cool and not too ridiculous. Looking at the names this year, some I recognise from last year. Some that I've chosen before and regretted, others that I've chosen before and reaped in my winnings. And then some that just sound to crazy to be true. Even though I won last year with Don't Push It, I'm also aware that no horse has won it twice in a row since Red Rum so I decided not to 'push my luck' on it (see what i did there? :P)

So finally deciding, I put a few quid on Silver by Nature and What a Friend after being tipped by a punter there. His reasoning? He was grey haired and was a Man U fan (What a Friend is part owned by Sir Alex Ferguson). Using this same logic because I too was also grey and red, I went to bet on these as well. Good luck to me!

Taking a quick glance again, I looked at the weirder names on the list and I saw 'Ballabriggs'. What a name! A name so crazy like that would never win a race surely!

And there goes my story of how I didn't win anything on the Grand National.

The Significance of Protesting

Put your placards up, write a sign, speak to the world and try to fight the power!

The past few months have seen a bigger jump in popularity in protesting than Justin Beiber supporters! (actually, that's a bit of a lie, because Justin Beiber's a c***). Tuition fees, cuts, money, pretty much hot topics that have been widely debated for a while. But just how many of these protests were successful and overturned a decision in their favour?

Tuition Fees? Close, but failed. Cuts? Not really. Libya? Well, it's a mess at the moment at least. EDL? Well they just like to batter things up.

Now I'm not saying I'm against protests. I think it's one of the greatest forms of voicing your power and significance towards a government or higher power. But the success rate is so slim that it's either because their minds have been made up or it's too little too late.

And then you have the credibility of a protest(or). I'm pretty sure 99% of a protest group are actually true to their cause. But it takes just that small minority to fuck things up and bring their credibility to that of a small child. All that minority has to do is break a window, start a riot, say a stupid thing. Like many massive groups, it takes one person to fuck it up for everyone. Which is a shame really because that minority is either a little 'over' enthusiastic about a protest or is simply there just to cause trouble and sabotage the whole protest from the beginning (which I'm sure happens).

The tuition fee was just clearly asking for a riot. If you're asking students (which I'm sure 99% are clean cut) to protest. And also being along bunches of 16-17 yr old hooded gangs into the mix, you're going to massively ask for trouble. And unfortunately, the media love things like this and show the dark side of this rather than the rest of the group which are all safe and clean.

The media also like to publish credibility on ONE individual out of a protest and publish how rich this kid is to be complaining about tuition fee rises. Whilst yes, there could possibly be a fact that his parents are well off but it doesn't mean that he can't protest about cuts in fees at all.

(I should mention that I hate newspapers and havent bought or properly read one page to page in about 10 years, and even then all I read was the comic strips!)

Now the last protest I went to was in 2003 against the war in Iraq. Well I say protest, it was just most of the school deciding to stay outside after lunch in the field area. Much as I had no idea how this was going to make an impact, the idea came after the local paper put a rival school on the front page saying all these school kids were doing the same thing as a protest to the war in Iraq.

Now I got to be honest, seriously? The idea to protest a war in Iraq was to stay outside, miss school lessons and basically pull a 'sickie' at school? I'm not sure who actually started this protest but if your idea was to gather the whole school playground into one area and play truant. You managed to get that working alright. Although it actually had no point on the war in Iraq at all. No signs, placards or music. But all the kids went anyway because it's a free excuse to get out and not go to lessons. HUZZAH!

(Yes, I was a tiny 'swot' at school)

Okay, that's enough from me for now. I'm off to protest about why there aren't enough renewable energy power stations by going for lunch. Ho Train Out. :)t