For this blessay, I will be going over, routing through and explaining my year of 2008; although some of the events I’m going to keep close to myself I hope to give you an insight into what this year has been like for me.
Hugging, clapping and cheering filled the relatively empty living room on the 1st of January 2008; having watched the usual new year’s eve television show on BBC Two, Jools Holland and the audience counted down and introduced the majority of Britain into a brand, new year. However, time, no-matter when it is, stays and feels the same, it always has done, so it was no surprise to me that the ‘new year’ felt exactly the same as a few minutes ago in 2007. Jools’ and his musical guests continued to get my feet taping, while my fingers typed away on my laptop for the first time that year, hours passed and days passed; it was back to normal. January, for me, remained a miserable month, a month filled with nothing but cold weather, never ending adverts about the January sales and the feel that another year was slowly crawling open in front of me. From what I can remember, nothing spectacular happened in January.
Allow me to fast forward through a few dead, desolate months and allow me to enter the muddy waters of May. May as it happens, is the month that I celebrate my birthday in – May the 24th, to be exact – my birthday was a quiet one; I think I had to go to school on that day as well, I got some nice presents to add to my prised possessions, and as usual the day that comes around only once a year, was over yet again, all to soon. I won’t go into detail, but the month ended with me yet again loosing a friendship that seems to sway in and out of happiness as often as the tied sways in and out of the sandy beaches, for those of you who know me, this will come of no shock to you, but after once again becoming incredibly close with someone, it was taken away from me, from my fault of my own, this person is of course, Lori. I’ve had many, many occasions where the same thing as happened: we’re really close one minute, then the next its like I never existed to her, it’s hard to think that even though it has happened so many times, it always leaves me feeling empty and cold when it suddenly stops, again. I could ramble for many hours on the complicated nature of mine and Lori’s so called ‘friendship’, but I shan’t bore you with that.
Mid-year has come all of a sudden – this is the time of year where it sinks in just how fast the year has gone already, it’s June time and the little signs that summer is on its away are dotted all over the place; now in the United Kingdom, one deems it to be ‘summer weather’ when it’s anything but cold. It is also the month where school is over for another six weeks – now, usually I’d be bored all through the summer holidays, but Year 10 enabled me to make some best new friends, as well as reintroduce myself to some old best friends who I once thought I had lost; these friends being Michael Smith, Ashley White and Liam Freeman are just some of people who I made new friendships with throughout late 2007 and 2008. Thanks to them, my summer holiday was not dull, it was the opposite. I finally felt like I actually belonged somewhere; let me say this now, I love my friends. As quickly as the summer holidays had arrived, they where done and dusted and uploaded onto MySpace in the form of quick snapshots.
A new school year had begun at Wollaston Secondary School, however, this was to be my last year at school. The last year to finish of my eleven plus years of education – but of course I’m going to – hopefully – to their Six Form, if I try my best, so not the end of education all together. Unlike Year 10 where for the first few months everyone got to know everyone, (the years had been mixed up you see, don’t know why they did that, glad they did though), it was little awkward for those first few months. In Year 11, however, it felt like we had never left, we could start the new term as a well oiled machine, and I loved it. I don’t know what it is about Year 11, but everything just seems right, the majority of people get along with everyone as we come to terms with the fact that after this year, we might never, ever see some of the people we’ve seen everyday for the past two years – or more – ever, ever again. I can’t talk about Year 11 more; because I am still in it, we have our GCSE exams coming up soon, I’ll tell you about them nearer the time.
November, the penultimate month of the year, it’s also the year where money hungry business start to plough their Christmas themed adverts into our living rooms, November is too early for that nonsense, if you’re like me, I just feel depressed when adverts like that come on in November, to me it signals that yet another year is all to soon coming to an end. Nothing happened in November, not that I can remember anyway. December has arrived, well I don’t really have to explain this one, because the only thing that happened in that month where Christmas, and New Year’s eve, which I have already blogged about in detail, here and here respectively.
That’s the basis – the general outline, if you will – of my year, much, much more happened during the year which either I can’t remember or don’t want to discuss. I mainly did this blessay for my own benefit, a chance for me to think over my year, and at the same time share it with whoever reads my blog. I look over to the right of my blog to see that the ‘January 2009’ archive has been created, ah, look at that, so many months and years of my life that have been blogged and documented for all to see; sometimes I read back year old posts – oh how I have changed in my style of writing and what I write about, I still don’t make sense, however. In decades to come I hope that I’m still blogging away, clogging up the internet with stories and goings on in my life, wouldn’t that just be great to have decades worth of blogging?
Steven – Administrator.
January 4th, 2009
I haven’t tested a build of Windows 7 since 6801; now a few months later I’ve decided to test out a early leaked build of what is basically soon-to-be public Beta 1. I’m not good a reviewing, so I’ll just describe my first experiences with the build – which is build 7000 by the way. The first thing I noticed is the small amount of space it takes up after installation; I only had a 14GB partition to install the build on because Window Vista’s disk management limited me to 14GB – even though I had 100GB spare, urgh. After installation, I still have 9GB left on the small partition, not bad. I don’t know if this is the case, but the superbar seems smaller than it did in 6801, which is good, I felt that it took up too much room, even on my 1440×900 resolution – the superbar is also enabled by default on this build. Oh, another thing which I found pretty cool is the new loading screen when you turn on your computer, it’s not really a loading bar per se, just a glowing Windows flag; but I like it. Windows Media Center, for me, is still no go area – it’s a bug riddled application that hasn’t supported my less-than-a-year-old TV stick since the first ever build of Windows 7, it’s very, very annoying and it crashes every now and again. Anyway, here’s the screenshots.
Steven – Administrator.
January 3rd, 2009
New Year’s eve; what a good time to post a blessay, it only happens once a year, but maybe that sentence later contradicts what I’m about to discuss. What I’m going to try and discuss is my view of New Year’s eve, and indeed New Year’s day what they are usually associated with. Weather on not I’ll be able to construct a legible sentence that you can understand - or that even I can read back and know what I meant - is a different story all together; well, lets see how it goes.
I’ve realized that I’m being repetitive with my wording, so I’ll bundle New Year’s eve and New Year’s day into just New Year, unless I specify otherwise. When I think about New Year, I associate it with change, a time when people think it’s a good idea to change their ways and change who they are for the better. I think that if you needed to change that badly, you would want to do it as soon as you could, instead of putting it off until the end of the year. Change that people wish to take on, can either be large or small. The one which basically everyone pledges to do is to apply a New Year’s resolution to their lives. Usually this consists of quitting smoking, drinking less alcohol or taking more time for themselves and family, rarely does anyone actually keep this up for more than a month, maybe a minority do, and good for them. But my view is that why didn’t they do this sooner? If they had the ability to conquer and impede this habit, then why does it take a brand new year to force them to attempt it?
Other people may apply a major New Year’s resolution to their lives, for someone this may be wanting to move countries for a new start in life, leaving their family and friends behind in exchange for a sunnier climate and different food - I’ll come onto different good later in an analogy - they may want to run a marathon or they may want to defeat a deadly disease, (are all diseases deadly?), like AIDs or cancer - okay I’m running out of ideas, but you get the picture. Again, like someone who only wants to kick a small habit in comparison to the previous ambitions expressed in this paragraph, I don’t see why they don’t as soon as possible, specially in the marathon case; doesn’t every day of training count? I don’t know. I can’t speak for them.
Looking on the other side of the bookshelf - correct expression? Probably not, most bookshelves only have one side for books, unless your in a library, or are they just two book shelves standing back to back? Anyway, rambling over with, for now - I suppose I can see why people would want to wait until the New Year to try something different, to attempt something difficult to them, it’s the same reason why we take one week at a time, it gives you a chance to look back, reflect, see where you went wrong and correct that for the following week, usually. As I mentioned previously, people may associate a New Year as a new beginning for themselves, so I can see both sides of the arguments. It could be seen as a reason - a force, if you will - to push them to try harder or do different things. Perhaps New Year’s can be seen a parent, in the same way a parent encourages their child to do something different. I’m going to attempt an analogy, I’m going to use the example of trying new food. At a young age, children will be forever encouraged to attempt new food by their parents, without the parent pushing the child, why else would they even bother to try a new food, they wouldn’t do it because they wanted to. It’s only because someone is luring over and forced upon you that you decide to listen and try. You can apply that somewhat-too-long-and-flawed analogy to what New Year is to someone willing to do something different: it will be there to act as barrier to force them to do so.
At the time of writing this, my mind has suddenly gone blank on how to continue this blessay. I’ll get back to writing this later, for now I’ll post what I’ve done so far. Expect an update soon. Think of it as adding more water to pure orange squash: more writing will dilute the quality most likely.
Have a nice New Year’s eve what ever you’re doing to celebrate it, may it be drinking down the pub glugging back one pint after the other while watching the television trying to lip read and watching the seconds to by on the clock to ready on the way to 2009 then shouting and screaming in the street. Or maybe you’ve opted for a quiet evening in with the family, talking with one another and eating pretzels with BBC One in the background. Have a successful and flourishing New Year, humble reader.
Steven Knight - Administrator.
December 31st, 2008
If I get a time, I’ll post a blessay about New Year’s eve and what joys the day entails. I’ll also be giving my views on why people only want to change when a New Year starts… or something along those lines, I’ll think about it in detail more later. Not sure weather I’ll post it actually on New Year’s eve or day, it will be soon though.
Steven - Administrator.
December 30th, 2008
My good friend Michael got a really awesome camera for his birthday, soon after he came round to my house along with my other good friend Ashley. After some of our hourly visits to Whibleys - our local corner shop - we somehow always sway the conversation onto how Ashley wants to squeeze my hamster. It dawned on me that I hadn’t take any pictures of my new hamster; photo opportunity.
Sweet; isn’t it? For more lovely pictures like this of Michael’s, visit his Photobucket page.
Steven - Administrator.
December 27th, 2008
To every person - even if they are the ones not reading this post - have a very happy Christmas regardless, everyone deserves to be happy.
Steven - Administrator.
December 25th, 2008
It’s certainly been a busy few weeks for me: new version of website, new blog theme, new blessays - better standard of writing, may I add - and a new logo. I mainly did the updates and changes for me, to how I like them. And if someone else likes it as well; that’s a bonus. Have a look around, read some of my blessays - see category section - and have a look at some of the archived posts, to see how I’ve evolved personally. It’s quite a change, if I say so myself.
It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow, doesn’t that just make you excited?
Steven - Administrator.
December 23rd, 2008
PSDTUTS is a successful branch of the tall, green Envato oak tree. PSDTUTS is a very high quality website that focuses on ‘spoon feeding’ Photoshop tutorials to the masses, creating high quality results regardless of the user’s ability.
A friend of mine - Sam Wriggley - introduced me to the popular website a few months ago; since then I’ve used it’s tutorials which inevitably ended up on the homepage of this website. As well as using the tutorials, it has enhanced my own ability to create my own work, making it look more professional.
Head on over to PSDTUTS, you’ll be surprised with what you create.
Steven - Administrator.
December 23rd, 2008
I’m a big fan of Stephen Fry’s podcasts - or podgrams, as he prefers to call them. My favorite podgram is the one where he discussed the license fee - boring it sounds, but particularly interesting. Coming in a close second as my favorite, is the latest podgram: Language. As the title suggests, Mr. Fry discusses the uses and the meaning of language.
His website is located here, have a rummage around the sections and subsections and view some little gems of the genius that is Mr. Stephen Fry.
Stephen Fry: Language
Steven - Administrator.
December 23rd, 2008
It’s Christmas; which means by default, whether you like it or not, whether get along or hide away when the phone rings: family. I don’t know where this post is heading, probably nowhere. If you’re like me, you only see your family on a few special occasions per year; birthdays and Christmas. I’m going to discuss Christmas gatherings in more detail than my last blessay did.
It’s weird how families need a government acknowledged, registered day off to even consider seeing each other. I bet that there are very little families that meet up purely because of leisure.
Christmas day family gatherings are a special affair. Speaking from my own experiences, here’s what will usually happen. Shamefully, when I wake up on Christmas day, even before I think about anything more important, I think presents, simply because I’ve been anticipating them for so damn long! It’s usually about 6AM; the sun light has barely surfaced and crawled over the top of the poorly painted tarmac road, the majority of the surrounding neighbors haven’t woken up yet and a thin layer of ice has just about covered tiles on the top of the tallest houses. Setting aside the present aspect of Christmas - I refer you to my last blessay - having recycled the mountains worth of once used wrapping paper and miles length of clear sellotape, you finally hear the call from your mother or father that interrupts you from exploring your new presents, the call that signifies that the next couple of hours will be filled with small talk and irrelevant questions: “They’re here!”
So, you take a deep breath, put your newly owned possessions down and go downstairs and kindly greet who ever has turned up to spend the day with you. I’m not complaining about this, I’m just asking why do we only do this on Christmas, why not every week for leisure purposes? Anyway, when I sit down in front of a television to watch a Christmas special of some highly acclaimed long running sitcom or drama. I just feel happy. I love television and the power it has over people; in this case: to sit down and watch.
This will be my last mini-blessay - it’s not really that long this one - before Christmas. I will post one before or on New Year’s eve though.
Steven - Administrator.
December 21st, 2008
Previous Posts
