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Archive: exams

Recent adventures in Edinburgh

18 May 2008 20:47

Categories: Commuting, Edinburgh, Fife, General, Personal, Scotland, University

You might have noticed that I haven’t been updating this place so much recently — although that’s quite a common occurrence nowadays so you might not have noticed! This hectic stage of my life finally came to an end on Friday as I sat my last exam. Here are a few things that have happened recently that are notable enough to deserve exclamation marks. Then I will get back to writing about proper stuff.

UFO sighting!

Was this an early sign that I was losing the plot? While I was on one of my many commutes from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh I saw something in the corner of my eye while the train was passing Edinburgh Airport. At first I thought it was a bird or something — it was quite small. Just as I focussed on the mystery object, some kind of bullet or something shot across really quickly and the object disappeared in a puff of smoke.

My first thought was that there was some kind of clay pigeon shooting competition or something going on. But it seems unlikely that this would take place on the runway at an airport. Moreover, it seemed as though the mystery object was taken out by some kind of science fiction-style laser shot.

That experience was probably an early sign that the exams were genuinely driving me mad. For the sake of my own self-esteem, I have decided that it was a weather event. A really weird weather event.

Hand dryers that actually work!

There was a nasty surprise when nature called while I was in Edinburgh Waverley train station recently. It now costs 30p to spend a penny. The current inflation worries finally had a tangible effect on me personally. Forget food and fuel prices — the cost of taking a leak jumped by 50%! And it is plain inconvenient having to use a 20p and a 10p rather than just dealing with one 20p piece as before.

Anyway, I went in to do my business and they’ve given the place a nice renovation. The highlight is undoubtedly the new hand dryers. Hand dryers are notoriously awful. They just never do the job. All that ever happens is your hands get a bit hot and your hands remain as wet as they were when tap water rather than wind was enveloping them.

These new hand dryers in Edinburgh Waverley toilets are something else though. There are posters next to them that actually say, “Hand dryers that actually work!” I just thought to myself, “yeah right — hand dryers never work.”

The new dryers are quite strange. Rather than sticking your hands under a hot air blower, you stick your hands in a little slot in the top of a box. It’s a very strange feeling. You move your hands up and down in the pocket as wind gets blown around inside. I did this for around 10 seconds as the poster advised, but I was convinced that my hands would come out still soaking wet. But to my surprise my hands were bone dry! It’s like magic.

Furthermore, the posters proclaim that these new dryers are more energy efficient than the old design. The future of hand washing is indeed very exciting! These are special hand dryers — they have their own website as well.

So the next time you’re in Edinburgh Waverley station, think about going into the toilets even if you don’t need to go. Worth every of the thirty pennies.

The end of university!

I had three exams this time round. My personal feeling is that the first one went okay — could have been better, could have been worse. The second one was not okay — I had to choose two questions but I could only really answer one of them. The second question was just bluff. We’ll see how that went, but I’m not too confident about that. My third exam — the one I had the least amount of time to study for — was one of the best exams I’ve ever had.

At least I finished on a high. That is not quite my last action as a student. I still have some books to return to the library, collect a copy of my dissertation and utilise the careers service to try and work out what on earth to do next. Anyone want to offer me a job?

I won’t pretend I enjoyed university, and I don’t think I’ll miss it. Many people say the student days are the best days of their lives. The idea that the rest of life is even worse than this is something I’m trying to avoid thinking about.

7 comments

Merry Chrifsmas

24 December 2007 00:59

Categories: Blogging, Commuting, Current affairs, Economics, Edinburgh, General, Personal, Scotland, Technology, University

Yes, I am a liberal elite atheist trying to ban Christmas, and proud of it! Not really. Everyone else can celebrate it as much as they like as far as I’m concerned. But I don’t celebrate Christmas for religious reasons, and I don’t see any point in pretending otherwise.

I am celebrating though. Wintervals are older than Christianity, and it isn’t difficult to see why. Winter is a terrible time of year, bereft of warmth and particularly sunlight. It is quite disturbing when you have sleeping patterns like mine and you end up sleeping through the entire day.

On this basis, I should really celebrate the Winter Solstice, like Adam Smith was a Socialist does. But seeing as everyone else celebrates on the 25^th, that’s good enough for me.

For me, this is an opportunity to enjoy yourself at a bad time of the year. One of the things I hate most about Christmas is the way people get so stressed out about it. People need to chill out a bit and enjoy the holiday instead of running around trying to buy tat which the recipient will, on average, value between a tenth and a third less than was paid for it (PDF).

I am not being smug about it because I have fallen into the trap as well. There must be some kind of sociological law that says the more you’re supposed to be on holiday, the busier you actually are. Just more lies from society. I don’t know why I don’t just exit now.

That’s why I haven’t been blogging much over the past few days, even though I have a million things to say. Story of the year. The busyness is partly as a result of my high-flying career in retail (!). But I’ve also got a mountain of university work to do as well.

In a way, I am lucky as an Edinburgh University student. Our winter exams are done and dusted by mid-December, so we don’t have them looming over us all Christmas. Having the exams that early has its own disadvantages of course, but at least Christmas is worry-free.

Not this year though. I have a 3,000 word essay to write about changes in Scotland’s population since 1945. The module is The Scottish Economy, which is very interesting, but also a damn nuisance because there is very little reading material compared to most other modules. I really will have to pull those 3,000 words out of thin air.

I’m also tearing my hair out about my dissertation. It’s due in towards the end of February. For various reasons, I never got the work done during the year that I was hoping to, so I am behind schedule big time. Well, I’ve written nine pages out of 30, but I’m sure to cover most of the material that will have to be edited down quite a lot anyway.

The upshot of all this was that I was in Edinburgh on Friday to take back some books that I haven’t needed for weeks and to do some reading for that Scottish Economy essay. I also got out some more heavy books. And lots of climbing up and down stairs was involved.

Then, sucker that I am, I went to do some Christmas shopping. Lots of walking up and down Princes Street was involved. And the stuff I bought was ridiculously heavy. I felt like a bit of a tube in the train station, as I battled with all of that stuff.

Worst of all, the combination of heavy shopping and heavy library books has left me with a plethora of strange pains in all kinds of parts of my body. I feel like a decrepit octogenarian. Next year I will probably stick to shopping in Kirkcaldy.

Incidentally, mad busy 24/7 shitlife aside, I will not be switching off the computer over the Christmas period as some people do. I don’t really see the point in that. For me, blogging is — and always should be (unless it’s a pro- or business blog) — a leisure activity. I enjoy it. So I won’t be stopping. There’ll be fewer readers around of course, but that’s their choice. (Proof, if ever it were needed, that blogging is sustained mostly by people who are skiving off work).

I am currently facing the same Christmas cards dilemma that I had last year. Only this time, instead of receiving five cards, I’ve received nine. Clearly, either nobody cares that I didn’t give them a card last year, or they have completely forgotten. Which kind of sums up the insincerity of exchanging cards.

Anyway, my mother is currently bullying me into writing nine reciprocal cards. I was going to give to charity instead, because let’s face it — giving to charity will do a lot more good. Besides, what will happen if I don’t give them a card? Will I end up in their bad books? It didn’t happen last year, so…

Well, I just flipped a coin to decide, and it turns out that I have to write out the cards. Bah.

4 comments

Sleep deprivation

6 December 2007 18:16

Categories: General, Personal, University

People who have been reading this blog for a long time may know that I have often had difficulty getting to sleep. It is not unusual for me to go around the place feeling a bit sorry for myself because I feel tired. And I like to think I have become a bit of a master at coping having had just a few hours of sleep on the odd occasion when I have to get up earlier than normal. I don’t often get ill. But these past couple of days have been terrible.

I had an exam yesterday. That is the reason why I haven’t been able to blog so much over the past couple of weeks, in case you were wondering. Unfortunately, the exam was at 9:30am which meant getting up before 7am.

I know that lots of people have to get up at worse times and more often. I think it is easier to get up if it is just part of your normal routine though. I had to get up at around 7am more often in previous years and it felt like just a minor inconvenience rather than a full-on nightmare.

I am a night-owl as it is. Nowadays my lectures tend to be in late afternoon rather than early morning. I usually work in the evenings. So normally I don’t get to sleep until around 3am or 4am — and I don’t get up until around noon.

This is perfect for my normal routine, but when I am given one day — just one day — when I have to get up four or five hours earlier than normal, it is full-on panic stations time. Normally I try to get up a bit earlier every day, but it doesn’t really work. If I don’t have to get up early, I don’t get up early. I have tried all sorts of things like giving up coffee, but they never work.

Although I have done it before, I felt like I couldn’t afford to get to sleep at around 4am before having a vital 7am start. So I decided to get up at 9am on Tuesday morning, hoping that it would make me tired earlier in the evening.

Of course, that didn’t happen. I had awful trouble falling asleep, and in fact I finally dropped off at around my usual time — 4am. For a 6:45 start. The upshot was that in two days I had around 8 hours of sleep.

At first it felt okay. Not great, but capable. I suppose when you have an important exam you don’t really have the time to feel tired. You just have to get on with it. I felt that mentally I was fine, so I had no problems dealing with the exam in that regard, although my writing hand was tired, so it was a bit of a scrawl.

It started to hit me on the way back home. Ever since then, I have felt just about the worst I have ever felt. It was hunger, shortness of breath and a flying heart rate at first. Since then it has been indigestion, strange aches all over my body (particularly in my upper arms at the moment), a headache, loss of appetite, dizziness and — my favourite — inability to sleep properly.

I felt like taking a nap yesterday afternoon and ended up staying in bed until around 8pm. I got very little sleep during that period and when I did get to sleep — at around 11pm — it was the start of a highly uncomfortable night. I must have woken up six or seven times and my duvet felt like it weighed a ton.

I have often felt tired and lethargic, but everything that has happened to me before feels minor. Now I know what real sleep deprivation feels like.

7 comments

Hello! I’m back!

17 May 2007 13:59

Categories: Admin, Asides, General, Personal, University

The exams are finished. I won’t write about them, because that might just send me into a spiral of depression. The summer is what matters now, and I have lots up my sleeve including sleep, installing WordPress 2.2 and designing even more unsettling colour schemes.

Comments closed

Exciting narcissistic stats whore update!

10 May 2007 23:12

Categories: Admin, Blogging, Current affairs, General, Personal, Politics, Scotland, Technology, University

An update to this post.

It probably says a little bit too much about me, that in the middle of exam hell I have engaged in a spate of political blogging which was quite excessive. In one sense, I guess everyone procrastinates / lets off steam in these situations. In another sense, it was a spot of bad luck that these fascinating elections coincided with my exams.

I don’t think I have done so much political blogging in years. Obviously, an election is a likely catalyst to get me going again. But I have to say, I surprised myself.

While a few years ago I aspired to be a political blogger, I soon discovered that I didn’t really have the stomach for it. I find the tribalism a bit off putting, which is one reason why I refuse to join any political parties or any other kind of organised movements. Politics is also a bit of a dirty game sometimes.

Things get heated all too easily, and little comments can be construed as major personal attacks. It seems as though, whenever you express an opinion on politics, you gain ten instant friends and a hundred instant enemies.

Recently I have come to learn that it is all part of a game, and usually no real harm is meant. And I think I have come through this busy period of politics relatively unscathed.

I think I have also learned that I find Westminster politics tedious, and Scottish politics quite fascinating. But that might be down to the way I committed myself to Scottish Roundup. I had no choice but to get informed about Scottish politics.

Westminster politics feels really stale in comparison, with your Blairs, Browns and Camerons all shamelessly chasing the median voter and cabinet ministers seemingly in a competition to out-bland one another. Then there are the downright distasteful characters like John Reid and probably about half of the two largest parties.

At least at Holyrood there is the odd Alex Salmond or Tommy Sheridan making it their raison d’être to do something a bit different. And I certainly can’t imagine the next Westminster election being as interesting as the Scottish Parliament elections we’ve just had!

Anyway, all of this is just a long way of saying, I don’t really know how much I’m going to write about politics in the future. But I’ve enjoyed these past few weeks and months a lot, even if it has led to me completely messing up my exams.

And most of all, thanks to everyone who reads, comments and links — both here and at Scottish Roundup. It’s great to express an opinion and let off some steam. It is even more amazing to know that people actually read this nonsense!

1 comment

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