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!

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.

Despite yesterdays awful weather, both of the year 13 Geography classes went on a fieldtrip down to the beach. The purpose of this trip was to see human interference on coastal processes. This is important because the information we will collect and the things we will see will help us with an internal assessment later on in the term.

So anyway, when I woke up that morning, I could hear the rain hitting the roof of the house. I was a little disappointed because I had hoped for better weather because I would rather stay warm and dry than cold and wet. I was sure they wouldn’t cancel the trip so I went up school prepared, with pens, paper, lunch and a camera. As I got to school, the rain had settled, although it looked like it could start again at anytime. Regardless, down at the beach was going to be wet and icky.

Everyone got on the bus, and we were off on the trip. Our first stop was down to the Dunedin City Council where we would meet with a lady that will talk about Coastal Dunedin. Oddly, she was Australian and had only been here doing the job for 5 weeks, although she did seem to have a fair bit of knowledge. She talked and there was a slideshow on the projector, but I couldn’t see that. I did have a look and touch of some plants that are down there.

After that, we started heading down to the beach area. But before we went there, we stopped outside McDonalds for people to get (and eat) lunch. It was only quarter to 11 so it was a very early lunch. Me and my mates decided to walk down the road a little bit and get Burger King instead. I got a BK Chicken Value Meal. It was really good, much much better than anything McDonalds could offer.

Then it was time to go down to the beach. We went down the St Clair beach and walked along it. We looked at the water and what the beach looked like. Everyone took heaps of pictures so we could look at them and refer to them later on. During this walk, the weather was starting to get worse. It didn’t pour down, but it was starting to drizzle. We then got back into the bus and drove further along the beach. At this point, it was raining. The teacher decided that we would stay in the bus and not go outside and do what was originally planned.

Driving around for 2 hours was interesting but started to get boring. Then we got back to school and I went home. I don’t know if it is a good thing or a bad thing that the weather was bad, but at least we didn’t have to go out in the rain and get cold and wet. If it wasn’t raining, we would have been collecting data of the beach such as measurements, calculations, sketches and pictures of the beach, so I suppose we got of that work. The trip wasn’t that bad because it meant a day of school. I can’t wait for the next Geography fieldtrip later on in the year, we’re going to Queenstown!

Geography Beach Fieldtrip Photographs are at http://flickr.com/photos/yum9me/sets/72157605209611191/

Tomorrow I will be leaving for an overnight school trip. We are going somewhere not too far away and will be doing something that I do not know. So as of around 11pm tonight, that will be the last time I use my computer until I get back on the Tuesday afternoon.

Now that’s around 40 hours with no computer, no cellphone or iPod or anything of the sort. I am not going to have any technology for a long time. I can’t remember the last time I have been away from my computer for that long, but its probably been years. The longest I am usually away from the internet world is about 10 hours which isn’t that long but I am going to be away from it all for 40 hours and in 10 hours the internet moves pretty fast so I’m going to have a lot to catch up on being away from it for 4 times that.

Being away from the internet for so long is going to make it hard to come back with a huge pile of articles in my RSS reader, stories on Digg, Tweets to read, and other things to catch up on. This opportunity my help me by evaluating my internet usage and possibly help me make some cuts on unnecessary parts so I have more time to do other stuff and be more productive. As well as helping me through the experience of going away, it may also help me in my current life, online and offline. Maybe 40 hours away from it all will do me some good after all.

On Tuesday, it was tertiary open day in Dunedin. This was an opportunity for year 13 students to go onto campus and find out information on courses and such that the Otago University and Otago Polytechnic has to offer. This was compulsory for the year 13’s at my school to go to and the roll was taken to make sure we at least showed up (although that didn’t stop everyone from wagging it *cough* GTA IV *cough*.)

I turned up there and had a fair idea at the presentations I was going to see and the pamphlets I was going to take. I also went to a couple that I wasn’t going to but ended up going to because they were kinda relevant and a mate was going anyway and I needed something to do to pass the time. I went to the General Science presentation which covers the different courses for a Science degree. After that I went to the Applied Science presentation which has Software Engineering, although they didn’t say much about it. Then later on, I went to a Information Science presentation which talked a lot about IT. It was the most interesting presentation up to this point because the others were boring.

At the end of the presentation, I had 5 minutes to get over to the Polytechnic buildings to see a presentation for Information Technology. On my way there, I didn’t make a turn when I should have and I got completely lost. I had had to find my way back to on the right path. When I did finally figure out where the hell I was, I managed to find my way to the building. I was already 5 minutes late and I had difficulty finding the room in the reasonably large building. When I got to the room, there was a notice on the door saying there was a change. Different building, different room. After making my way to the correct room, I was 10 minutes late and I had missed quite a bit of the presentation. I was a little annoyed.

Anyway, after that fiasco, I made my way back to the University area and went to the Computer Science building for my last presentation before I go home. If you hadn’t guessed, the presentation was on Computer Science. It wasn’t that bad of a presentation. After seeing all of the presentations, I am still not 100% sure what I want to do next year but I am swaying towards doing Computer Science at Otago University. Now I just need to get that one pesky English credit and I should be well on my way of getting there.