At school in computing we are doing communications and we have three practical tasks to do. One is participate in the schools chat room and take a log of it. Then we have to post on the schools forum in one of the topics created by the admin and thirdly we have to keep a blog on the schools site. So in the next few weeks, if you read some seemingly random posts or oddly structured and themed articles, they will most likely be a copy of my school blog posts. I will partly be doing it to get the extra posts on here and to try and get a more regular flow to my blogging.

Since we Sydneysiders get a public holiday on Friday I will probably be having a friend or two over since everything in the center of Sydney (known as the city in Sydney and its suburbs) will be closed. We get a public holiday because of APEC, the state government decided that it would be wise to have a public holiday to help the event run smoothly. For those of you that don’t know what APEC is, here are some links from wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APEC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APEC_Australia_2007

Now onto the game half of this post. I found a cool but simple game, the idea is that that you whack a penguin that dives off a cliff as far as you can, I know you and I will probably get sick of it soon, but I like it for now. Penguin Game

Blackle – Energy Saving Search

Someone told me about this interesting site at school today. The idea behind the site is that it is more efficient to display black on a computer monitor than it is to display white. The people who created the site then applied this to google, they created a custom search page that is google but in black, the results page is even black. The site is limiting in that you can not do video or image searches or other google things. They do have international versions as well. The idea overall being that even though the energy savings for one visit to blackle instead of google are minimal, when you considder the amount of hits google gets the savings would be large.

For those of you that are on the IRC channels I visit, you will know what I am talking about. For some reason, robobot doesn’t seem to like its running environment and creates masses of errors every day.  That is why it has disappeared from the channels I visit, this is only temporary and it should return soon once reinstalled in a totally clean environment with the same setup except with a clean install. It also hasn’t been logging for sometime which breaks stats as well so that should be fixed with the reinstall.

Hopefully at the end of the year,  robobot’s website will be getting a major overhaul and will be using Drupal. With this its blog will be merged with the main site. I will hopefully be able to improve several other things with this as well such as allowing the user to select their desired user name on the chat applet. I will also be trying to make browsing the logs more pleasurable. Also the forums should be getting upgrade to PHPbb3.

On Tuesday 14 of August, I went to the Department of Agriculture’s farm on an excursion. It was entirely hands on. We watched a sheep dog rounding sheep up, then we did it as two groups of 9 separately. The second group of which I wasn’t in lost about 17 sheep as they ran off and through the fence but remained on the property. After they rounded the left over ones up into a pen we clipped their nails. After that we learnt to select individual cows from a group and move them into a race. Once we did that we gave oral dredged them. We had lunch. We had a look at the robotic dairy then we went to the traditional dairy where we got to milk the cows. I put the milking machines on the udders and then disinfected them with the spray once the machines were done. Then it was home time.

On Thursday I have a commerce excursion to the police and justice museum where we get to do a mock trial. I am thinking of doing a TAFE course on radio djing, I am interested in this sort of thing, and it sounds interesting. I will report more once I get more info about it.

Tomorrow (Thursday) at School all of year 10 is going out on a Geography field study excursion. We are studying coastal management. This excursion is compulsory in gaining our final award for the year, the School Certificate. We have been told that in the final exam we have to write a report on a field study we have done, so we basically have to go on it.

Then on Friday we have a group of people coming to the school to talk to  the year about Antarctica. This will take half of our day up which is a good thing. It should be interesting. I have heard that it will be slightly interactive. It is also for Geography.

However these two excursions have been causing a few problems in the school. The main one being our English half yearly was supposed to be on Thursday, but the faculty did not want to move it to the week after for some reason, so they had to have it on Friday, but of course Geography has already got the Antarctica thing planned so we have to loose our last period or so doing an English exam. The Antarctica thing has already had its date changed three or four times already. I wont go into why it was moved.

This is my favorite song. It was by an Australian/NZ band. It came out in the 80s and is about computer games. I was surprised when I found a video of it on YouTube. That is all I have to say in this short post.

The carnival has been postponed till the 31 may so I shall blog about it then. I am now at school playing sharemarket games and other things.

Tomorrow it is my school’s athletics carnival. It is almost a lazy day even though I intend on going in lots of things. I intend on going in the 100 and 200 meter runs as well as the walk. I intend on going in Long Jump, Shot Put, Discus and Javelin. When I get home tomorrow I shall post more about what I actually did and whatnot.