As you know, I went off to Queenstown for 2 nights. It’s not a very long time to go away, but the time we were there was pretty action packed with a full schedule of things to look at, and do. We didn’t just go to Queenstown, we also travelled to the surrounding towns and attractions nearby. The journey starts off on Sunday late afternoon, when I went up to school with all my gear and got on the bus with about 30 other students to go off to Queenstown on a geography field trip.

The bus left school at 5pm, on the dot. Everyone managed to get there before five so no one was left behind. Then it was off to Queenstown. It was a long ride, and it started getting darker, and in about an hour of travelling, it was pitch black. We did however stop in Alexandra for dinner, which was after 7pm. I had KFC, which didn’t taste that nice. It was greasy and the chicken was tasteless. The chips were too salty for my liking. The potato and gravy was edible and so was the bread. Then we went back on the road and off to our destination.

At 9:30, we were at our destination. We were staying at Lakeland Park Camp in Kelvin Heights, which is about 30 minutes out of Queenstown. There we settled in an were in bed and lights out at 11pm. I found it difficult to get to sleep, and ended up having a horrible night. I was really tired in the morning, but a nice hot shower sorted me out. We had to get ready to leave to go into town and needed to be on the bus at quarter past nine.

From there, our first stop was Frankton, which is 6km out of Queenstown. There we first went and had a look at the Queenstown Airport, and took a lot of pictures of various things there. Next we went to the Remarkables Park shopping center. Here we had the opportunity to have a look around the shops and buy food and other things if we wanted. After that, we got back on the bus and made our way to Queenstown.

Here we just drove around the town looking at places in the town, and then we made our way to the gondola. Everyone went up the hill in the gondola and at the top there, drew a sketch of the Queenstown area as well as taking pictures of the area from the top of the hill. After that, we got to go on the Luge. It was awesome! Then we made our way down the hill and back onto the bus at quarter past twelve.

Then we went and drove up to Arrowtown. We had a look around the town, and had food there. There is not much in the town, not many shops and stuff. I had lunch there and got a Mince Pie and a Pepsi, which was damn expensive, and cost me $5.90. Rip off! It was a good pie though and it didn’t come out of my pocket so I was alright with it. Then we went back on the road.

We went to the Bungy jumping bridge and there was watched a quick video while the people going for a jump got set up. Out of all of us, only 3 of our group jumped, one was my geography teacher, and the other two did a double tandem jump. It was really cold out there but it was interesting to see people jump. It looked scary. It’s something I can never see myself doing, ever! Then we went back towards Queenstown and to the wharf so people that wanted to go on the jetboat could. I decided not to go on it.

Then it was back to camp to do whatever until it was dinner time. At 7pm, everyone got onto the bus and we went into Queenstown to have our dinner. Me and my mates walked around Queenstown for 15 minutes looking for a pizza place, but we had no luck so weended up going back and going into the mall and having McDonalds. I had a $10 voucher so I ended up getting more that I would want. I got a Large Quarter Pounder combo, a hamburger, and a chocolate ice cream sundae. After eating all of that, I was pretty full. I do however regret eating the sundae, because it was damn cold and I was frozen for ages.

Then we made it back to the camp where we watch 2 movies that we hired. The first one was Jumper, which I happened to have seen in the weekend on DVD at home. It was interesting watching it a second time, but that’s a story for another post. I decided not to watch the second movie, Chuck and Larry, because I had seen it before and it wasn’t that interesting. I went into my cabin and the group of use talked for a while and eventually went to sleep.

In the morning, it was time to pack. I stuffed all my gear in my bag, which didn’t fit as perfectly as it did when I packed to come on the trip, but I managed to get it all in anyway. Then it was time to clean. I ended up vacuuming 3 of the boys cabins which wasn’t that bad because it warmed me up. Then were were on the bus and started travelling.

We did make a stop at the Millbrook Resort, where one of the guys there gave us a quick tour of the place. We had a look at some of the buildings, the eating facilities, and one of the rooms. It was really fancy, and expensive to own. The guy also told us a little about when Bill Gates was staying there. No one ever saw him, but they had stories about his body guards and what room he stayed and what he did.

Then it was time to head back home to Dunedin. The trip back was longer and more boring than the trip there. We stopped again in Alexandra, this time for Lunch at 1pm. This time I had Subway. The nice old lady behind the register talked me into getting more than I intended. I had a meatball sub with a drink and 2 cookies. It was quite nice, much better than KFC by a long shot. Then it was a 3 hour journey back to Dunedin.

We got back home at 4pm and Dad was waiting to pick me up there. It was a really good trip and I enjoyed it lots. I wish it was a little longer so we could look at more things and do more things as well. This is the last trip for the year, and for my high school life. I’m happy my last school trip was a great one. Oh, and not once did I think about the internet, or miss it. Although I was Plurking some of the time I was there. I took heaps of pictures, 200 (500MB) to be exact which I will slowly upload to Flickr over the next few days. Queenstown is AWESOME!

Tomorrow in the late afternoon, I will be leaving on a school field trip. I will be away all Monday and be returning Tuesday evening. We are going away to collect information about tourism for Geography. And the best New Zealand town to investigate this is of course, Queenstown. There we will have a look at different attractions and activities in and around the town and also have a look at the impacts tourism has had on this area.

It’s going to be a great trip and we will be getting 2 days off school. Here we will look at many attractions such as a gondala, the jet boats, bungy jumping and lots of other Queenstown activities. We have a really tight schedule so there probably won’t be much playing around during the day. Although at night I’m sure we will be able to do what we want.

I’ll be able to talk about what happened more once it has happened and I get back on Tuesday. Again, I will be without the internet all of Monday and most of Tuesday. Although I will be Plurking from my cellphone while I am away so if anyone wants to follow what I am up to while I am away from computer, you can follow my timeline there. This is going to be an awesome trip and I can’t wait to go. See you all later!

Yesterday in Electronics, the teacher was updating the school websites snow day page. This was so that when it snowed, the principal can ring him up and get him to put the page up so people know what is going on. This was when I first heard that we were expecting Snow today. The last time we had snow in Dunedin was 23rd July 2007, this exact time last year.

When I woke up in the morning, there had been no snow at ground level. There was a light dusting on some of the hills around Dunedin, but not enough for school to be closed, or delayed. I was a little bumed because I would have enjoyed a Snow Day. Throughout the day, it was cold and windy, but it didn’t look like there could be snow.

well to my surprise, during the afternoon the weather was starting to turn. I went on through my last classes as per usual and as I left to go home, there was a little bit of snow fall. It was not much, and it quickly passed. Then later on when I got off the bus, it started to snow again, this time a big more. Although it didn’t last very long either, but more than the previous falling. A fair bit later, it started to snow pretty kinda heavy. I managed to get the snow fall on video. This lasted a reasonably long amount of time, but the snow didn’t settle

On another note, this was the first time I have tried out Flickr for video. I still think that Flickr should be for photos only. Although this case could be an exception, where a photo wouldn’t be quite the same as a short video. I suppose short clips you have taken with your camera are alright. The video service is pretty good, nothing revolutionary, but it ties in with Flickr pretty well. I may consider using it again for video where a photograph just wouldn’t show what a video could.

Two weeks ago, during exam week, my sister got a phone call while she was at school. This phone call was from MTV and they called her to confirm her address so they could send her the prize she had won. The prize, it was a Samsung SGH-E250V phone. The next morning, there was a package on our doorstep. It was the phone. My sister had already gone for her exam and wouldn’t be home till later on in the afternoon so I wouldn’t get to see it till then.

When she did get home, she quickly opened it and there is was, a little red box with a cellphone in it. I quickly got the camera and asked her if I could unbox it and take pictures of it. She said it would be okay. I did that and then we put the phone on the charger and left it overnight. Just by looking at it, and reading the instruction manual (who reads instructions anymore) we worked out that her current LG phone is a lot better than the new Samsung, so she would let me use it till I got a real (i)Phone.

I turned it in and had a good 10 minute play with it. It doesn’t have 3G but it has a music player, bluetooth, FM radio, camera that can record video, and the other basics that a phone has. Now I needed a SIM card so I could take the phone. My sister went on for another exam that day and got me one while she was in town. Now I could actually use the phone.

Its a decent phone, I’m pretty happy with it. One of the things I have never had a good chance to play with is Bluetooth. Sending files to and from a computer using Bluetooth is amazing. Its quite quick and pretty easy to do, and the best thing about it, no wires! There is also an issue that I have with the phone. Since is it a slide phone, to access the numberpad, you need to slide the screen up. This is not a simple task, it doesn’t just glide up like the LG Chocolate, you really have to push it. On top of that, it is really hard to grip to slide it up. While this is not really a huge issue, it is really annoying, even more so if you really don’t want to touch the screen and get fingerprints on it.

Other that that minor problem, I am pretty happy with the phone. It is a temporary phone until I get my hands on a Jesus Phone, aka, the Apple iPhone. I can’t wait to be able to carry around one device, a cellphone, a music player, and an internet device. If there is a downside to this phone, and many other phones, its that I expect more from them, and they just don’t deliver like the iPhone Hopefully the temporary phone is very temporary!

Today was the start of the mid year examinations. This is from Wednesday to Friday. I however only have exams today, which are Geography and Physics, so I have the other two days off meaning a four day weekend for me.

The Geography exam was pretty straight forward. There were two parts to it, general skills and natural processes. I think I was pretty sorted with them. Although in saying that, I did have difficulty trying to work out the map resource due to it being black and white and not very detailed. Also in the knowledge exam, two of the questions seemed to ask the exact same thing, except they wanted them answered in different ways (one written and one drawn.) I was going to write and draw about the same thing but I wasn’t sure if that is acceptable so I attempted to discuss something else, which probably ended up to be a bad idea.

The Physics exam was quite difficult. It was a practical where we had to write a comprehensive method of a pre-determined experiment. That was pretty simple, but then carrying out the experiment was a challenge. We had to make a pendulum that swings on a diagonal. Its too hard for me to explain what I mean but it was very hard to set up, and even harder to run. The data was average due because of the experiment. Doing the math on the raw results was simple but then when it came to discussing the experiment, I was blank.

Staying at school until 4:30pm is really strange, mainly because it is so deserted, as well as being dark (well in winter.) I’m pretty happy that both of my exams were on the same day to allow me to have an extra long 4 day weekend. Now it is time to relax after all that hard studying, or lack there of.

This year, I was given the opportunity to do a course in Computing which is run by the Otago Polytechnic. The school is paying $1000 for each of the students in the course (5 of us) and we pay $100. The lessons happen once a week on a Wednesday and are a one hour video conference. The course consists of 3 parts, and the first part was programming. The language we were learning was MSW Logo.

Now for anyone who has used Logo before, a lot of you may think it is stupid and not even a real language. I would semi-agree with the above statement, but its the easiest language to teach and learn in a very short space of time. Logo can do quite a few things and is more powerful that you would think, there is more to it than drawing lines on the screen. I think the most important lesson it the process of learning a computer language, and from it we obtain the skills that will help us learn new languages in the future. A lot of the concepts are very similar, if not the same.

There were 3 assessments for this topic. The first one was a long one where we had to write the code (on paper) to draw shapes. Very basic. The second assessment was about using arrays and lists to store, retrieve and analyze data. Again, we had to write the code on paper, without any help with syntax or anything. Slightly more difficult but still easy enough. The last part of the assessment was a project where we had to use Logo to display the time, either in analog or digital clock form. This was the most difficult part of the test and required a lot more thinking, as well as trying various methods to make the clock work.

This first topic in the course I found to be really simple, and the main reason behind it is due to the fact that I had already learnt 80% of the stuff four years ago. In saying that, it was still all very enjoyable, and even somewhat challenging during the end with the more complicated stuff. Now we are moving on to Operating Systems where we will learn about DOS and Linux and such in a bit of depth. One last thing, kudos to anyone who gets the relevance of the image.

I’m a geek, but I only eat Chicken Teriyaki sushi, and I don’t like anime, comic books, Star Wars or Star Trek.

I don’t like fantasy or Japanese RPGs, so I’ve never seen Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, and I’ve never played Final Fantasy or any MMORPG. I don’t mind the odd western RPG though. On the other hand, some think I’m crazy because I never play First Person Shooters.

I do however have a PSP and a PS2 (and a retired PS1). Mum has a Wii but I never play it (I only used it for Mario Galaxy.) No one else plays it anymore, it collects dust. I don’t have any of the other “current generation” systems, but that is not due to financial issues. I wouldn’t mind owning a PS3 one day.

I use RSS client on my computer, this is because I don’t feel that web readers such as Google Reader are powerful enough to handle my bloated set of feeds. I only use VLC because Windows Media Player and Quicktime never work. I do however love iTunes because of the way it manages my music library.

I absolutely hate websites made in Flash. Flash should only be used to play videos, music or games on. Another web peeve is websites that play sound and video automatically. I don’t want to hear your crappy alternative taste of music blasting over my speakers. It’s going to make me never come back to your website again.

When it comes to operating systems: I use Windows Vista and I kinda love it. I would love to move over to Mac OS X because I am sure I will love it too. Linux is okay (my favourite distro would probably be Ubuntu) but I’m not using it on any computer right now. And I know Windows Vista works just fine, better than XP actually.

I’ve never use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo ect. I do have accounts there but I will not use them. There’s nothing on those communities I miss.

The vast majority of my music collection is from 2004 onwards (although the majority of it is my sisters.) I am currently in the process of discovering my own taste and trying to obtain albums that I fancy. I try to stay away from the shuffle mode, I prefer to listen to full albums at once (the way it was intended.)

I don’t feel the need to risk my life to conquer challenges such as climbing mountains, falling out of planes or jumping from high places. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. In fact, I wouldn’t get any enjoyment or satisfaction out of them. To be honest, I’d be scared shitless.

I am a night person. I prefer to be awake late and sleeping early in the morning. Although in saying that, I do like sleeping on a schedule, going to sleep around the same time, and waking up around the same time too.

I never wear jeans. I’m always more comfortable in other pants. I also rarely wear short-sleeved shirts, even in the summer, because I never get cold (and I’m not that keen on showing skin).

I didn’t get a cellphone till 2005, and used it primarily for text messaging. I got a second cellphone in 2006. Both of these phones went into retirement in 2007 and I don’t miss having one at all. I may think about getting a feature-rich cellphone in 2010.

Inspired by Marco and Marcus