I haven't logged in to GS for a few weeks now, in part because for the past week I was on the very highly enjoyable Hampshire County Youth Orchestra Bryanston easter residential course (with some very cute cellists ;)), and partly because I am being snowed under with the massive revision load that I need to deal with in preparation for my summer A-level exams. In brief: life is good, but there's a helluva lot of work to be done to keep it that way. As much as I love you guys, I may be very inactive on both the forums and the union from now until the summer. I crave your understanding and patience.

Peace, I am as always your humble servant,

OSCURO

Over the past few weeks, I, along with most of the rest of the world, have been keeping a close eye on our colonial cousins over the great pond. It has come to my notice over the last month that the true reason for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is now perfectly clear. I suppose I must stress that this is my opinion, but still, it is obvious now (to me, anyway) that we did not invade Iraq for weapon of mass destruction, Saddam Hussain or, even, as the cynics would have you believe, the purely economical benefits of oil. Nor did we invade Afghanistan purely to rid it of the undeniably horrid Taliban as the first stage in George W. Bush's global crusade, his "War on Terror".

I would put it to you that all these official reasons for Middle East action are but smokescreens, short-term objectives that are vaunted as the ultimate purpose of the operations, when in fact they merely hide the truth. This sort of thing is going on all the time, most of you will probably already have noticed how certain news stories seem to disappear from the mass media's distorting fish-eye lens at convenient moments for the governments of certain countries (one notable example being the loans for peerages debacle in the UK, knocked off the front pages, or indeed any pages, by the H5 N1 outbreak in Suffolk). Whilst not exactly propaganda, this "selective focus", as I call the media's penchant for appearing to change their main stories when Blair gets uncomfortable is facilitated, but not necessarily caused by, our showbiz-oriented society. This is not a modern concept, though, ever since the middle ages, rulers have been having subtle words in the ears of those who are in the public domain, diverting attention away from themselves.

It is my theory that such a smokescreen operation is now in place, has been for at least the last four, perhaps as many as the last twenty, years and has no forseeable ending. The reason that America and the UK have been invading Iraq and Afghanistan is so that in the (now uncomfortably near) future, the people of these "liberated" countries will somehow owe them something, and they can be used as staging areas for a fullscale assault on the real target of this middle-eastern war: Iran. Iran's recent provocative actions certainly make this course of events more likely, such as today's report of an Iranian missile test in 2005, during the development stage of space-capable warhead-delivery systems. That was two years ago, how much R & D have they achieved by now, I wonder? A working system which just needs appropriately prepared radioactive material for war-readiness? In conjunction with this release on the Iranian state news website (the source admittedly changing the credibility of the news, at best, to threatening propaganda, at worst an understatement implying that they aren't as advanced as they, in fact, are) the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

"...said on Sunday Iran had no reverse gear on its way to mastering the technology to make nuclear fuel, voicing fresh defiance before major powers meet to discuss the dispute.

[My italics]

America's response has been predictable at best, their recent, stupidly named, "Son of Star Wars" project betraying their fears over the Iranian region and the Russian collaboration implied by the Iranian use of one of their rockets causing diplomatic shockwaves around the world. This could easily heat up the long-running Cold War (those of you who thought it had long been over, I would suggest, are wrong), especially with the current White House actions such as the creation of

"...a Pentagon panel...to plan a bombing attack that could be implemented within 24 hours of getting the go-ahead from President George W. Bush."

If the UN and German contingents currently meeting in London do decide on a resolution which Ahmadinejad deems unacceptable, then the Iranians, and the rest of the world, may be forced into yet another conflict with no end in sight. One of the Iranian deputies to their foreign minister had this to say of the situation: "We have prepared ourselves for any situation, even for war."

I'll finish with a phrase which is often misunderstood: "May you live in interesting times." I'm unsure as to who said it first, but as Terry Pratchett asserts, it is most definitely a curse. Who would wish to live in times as interesting as these?

Apologies, the linking thing's not working properly, so I'll have to give the URLs of this news to anyone who requests it personally, or you can google it yourselves.

Well, Thursday afternoon at 12:34 I touched down in London Gatwick North Terminal to be greeted by nine degrees celsius temperatures, heavy drizzle (though not heavy enough to merit the term "rain") and grey, overcast, iron skies. A stark contrast to the 17 degrees (in the shade) average temperature over the previous five days in the Cote d'Azur Provence Alpes-Maritimes region of southern France. It really is great to be back in England. But I've barely started and I'm already getting ahead of myself. As I have mentioned before, I've been on holiday!

Destination

The Cote d'Azur is on the mediterranean coast of France, bordering Italy and encompassing Monaco. If you've ever visited you'll know that it really merits its name, the azure seas (yes, even in February) sparkling an iridescent blue as the sunlight reflects of the deep, welcoming waters (seriously, even in February). It also has a reputation as one of the richest areas in the world, the Monte-Carlo district of Monaco (the second smallest country in the world after the Vatican) evincing the opulence of the locale. Surprisingly, and slightly disappointingly, there is actually only a single casino in Monte-Carlo, predictably named the "Monte-Carlo Casino". Only I have one recommendation if you go to Monaco, do not eat at "Fredy's" in the old quarter; they rip you off a bit. Monaco was only a flying visit, we were actually staying at Nice, a nice place, particularly because of it's people, views and...

Culture

Really, this was a cultural trip as well as just a relaxing holiday. I have French orals coming up in April/May, so I had to get into as many deep conversations as possible. And we're not talking ordering a coffee at a bar either. With one chap, I managed to get into an argument about the upcoming presidential election (I favoured Segolene Royal, the Socialist Party leader, he preferred Nicolas Sarkozy, the Conservative). Another time, I had to interptret while my mum had a conversation with some random guy we met on a train about house prices and the police force. Some of it was fairly useful, though, for our "Topics and Texts" writing paper, we are studying the resistance 1939-45, and we ment one man whose father had been in the resistance, and he told us about a war criminal from WW2 who had recently been caught hiding in the church we were standing right outside. I got even more interested at this point, because Maurice Papon, a similar collaborator who managed to get in de Gaulle's good books just after the war, had recently died, causing a whle lot of political flak for Sarkozy (who supported his burial alongside resistance heroes). Needless to say, we ended up with several tonnes of French newspapers, most of which I haven't yet read, but all of which I will need to read by Monday...better get on with that.

Le Carnaval de Nice: Roi de la tres grande melee

If any of you have seen Nice carnival, you know why it deserves a sub-topic of its own. The exquisitely detailed decorated floats, the foreign paricipation (from Brazil, Germany, Spain, USA and Algiers), the hundreds of dancers...it is topped probably only by Rio carnival in its scope and beauty. If you ever get the chance to go to the Nice carnival, take it, becaus although it does cost money (E7.50, if memory serves, just over £5) to get in, it is well worth it, the spirit of the Cote d'Azur really shining through in this marvellous display.

Transport

Perhaps this might seem a little bad taste given Virgin's recent misfortunes (Fox, didn't you say you live in Cumbria? How far away are the happenings from you?), but I really REALLY think we need to take an example from the French public transport system. In the whole time we were there, there was one single delay: a train arrived 3 minutes late. That was it. It is so punctual, organised, the sytem is helpful, so you know exactly where you will need to be to get where you need to go, oh and it's cheap as well.

The bus from the Holiday Inn where we had to stay the night before we flew out (we live a fair way away from LGW, and besides, weren't going to leave the house at 2:00 am, so we could check in at 5:00 ) to the airport cost £2.50 each (£7.50 in total). A bus, on the other hand, from Nice bus station to anywhere along the whole coast (they even crossed the border into Italy, some going to Ventimille) cost E1.30 (about 90p, so around £2.70 for all of us).

Let me just re-iterate that.

A bus for all three of us from our hotel in France to ANOTHER COUNTRY cost only 20p more than a bus for ONE PERSON on a ten-minute trip from a Holiday Inn to LGW. It's not as if they cut down on quality either, the buses were not really buses in the true sense of the word at all, more like coaches; the type you get on National Express. And, crucially, they came on time. Admittedly, this was comparing one-way tickets, so let's look at trains. Trains were similarly cheap, a similar route, from Nice to Ventimille, two-way, costing E5.30 per person, about £3.71. The full journey (which we didn't actually do, we only visited two countries: France and Monaco) would take around one and a half hours, the equivalent in the UK probably costing at least three times as much, one way.

That's about it, really, well, about as much as I can write at the moment anyway. I'm pretty sure that's covered everything, it was just a really enjoyable, entertaining, helpful experience that I would recommend to anyone.

I wrote a massive blog entry for today, but GS was retarded and deleted it. You can guess from what I was going to put as tags what it is about:

PC World, ICW, Impersonal Conputer World, Customer Services, detailed note, power supply, idiot's guide, idiot, retard Crawley, commute, £9.99, format, HDD, software support, low prices, never buy from PC World, boycott

Basically, the staff at PC World (ICW) are ignorant, stupid, illiterate and rude.

In other news, I got a really cool hat yesterday! I will put up a pic of it after half-term, but in the mean time I'm in Nice! Have a good holiday everyone!

Over the past couple of years I have had several issues with my Toshiba laptop, which I use for virtually everything. My first mistake was probably buying it from PCWorld, generally recognised as the crappiest dealer in the UK. A few months after purchase, in autumn 2004, the mousepad stopped working (despite any amount of fiddling around with drivers I tried). Annoying, but because I also had an external mouse, so I kept putting off the complaint. I also didn't receive a CD key for OneNote, the Office application bundled with it (I eventually got it after phoning up, and immediately realised it wasn't worth it), and there are various other little nitpicks which weren't quite big enough to warrant a claim on the £9.99 a month "PCSurgery Cover". Now though, my computer has had enough, because Saturday was the day the bytes bit back.

In the morning, I tried installing the Supreme Commander demo, reasoning that my 1524 GB of RAM would easily make up for the 300MHz difference in processor speed, seeing as all the other system requirements were fulfilled. Nope. It didn't even try to run properly, not even giving me a chance to put it on minimum settings before blowing a raspberry in my face and shouting "Ensure system meets minimum requirements". Ok, I thought, that's disappointing, but it's not really unexpected, SupCom is extremely demanding after all. So, not a little discouraged, I moved on to Just Cause, you know, that game that does away with the laws of physics, just to see what all the fuss was about. After the install, the demo took objection to my GPU, which I know for a fact has pixel shaders 2.0, and once again splattered my visage with virtual saliva ("ERROR: Please use a graphics card that supports pixel shaders 1.1 or 1.2"). The one thing I really hate about demos is that the developers rarely bother to support more than a couple of different GPUs with them. So annoying... 

Well ok, I thought, my unspoiled optimism once again shining through, Just Cause is probably rubbish anyway, so I shut down and went to watch some TV. Coming back later on, I started up the system for a little Dawn of War, fantasising about how i wuz gunna krush dose spaise marieney boiz wid ma orky WAAAGH!!!. Startup complete, I noticed that my sound had stopped working, my taskbar had gone, Windows Defender needed a patch (which I had already downloaded a fortnight ago) that I couldn't get becuase I didn't have an Internet connection in that location, and Windows Desktop Search Index had decided to break. Oh and HomeWorld 2 seems to have uninstalled itself for no good reason. After a while fruitlessly doing diskchecks and trying in vain to get GoBack to remember a time before eight o'clock saturday night, I gave up, and decided to let those idiots at PCWorld see if they can do any better. I'm taking it in tonight, but I'm not getting my hopes up. One of my friends who relied on PCW ended up with a formatted hard drive, two extra viruses on it and a broken (yes, BROKEN) cooling fan...I really should have backed up my files...

I got another Halo video I finished yesterday. For those of you with a broadband connection, here is a link. Sorry, the rest of you.

Assassin     -     Muse

Peace

No one has commented so far on the videos, but please do, I really want to hear feedback on them, good or bad.

Today I finished my two most recent Halo music videos, Buck Rogers and By My Side. Have a look at them if you like Halo, or even if you are just interested and want to see what all the fuss is about. The full list of my four current videos is as follows:

Chasing Cars   -   Snow Patrol

Apocalypse Please   -   Muse

Buck Rogers   -   Feeder

By My Side   -   The Automatic

Of course you could just navigate to them by clicking the videos link at the top of the page, but now you have a choice ;). Enjoy, and I'd appreciate feedback, requests and any comments you feel relevant.

Peace.

I'm finally a Pheonix Down in the GS community (I'm not really that keen on FF though...) and that means that I've been busy! The music videos I've been working on over the New Year are uploaded and you can take a look at them by clicking on my Videos link at the top of the page. I've already tested them out on my friends at school, but I'd be interested to get some feedback from you.

Peace.

PS: There's a third project underway (shhhhh);)