Diverse Ramblings

P.S. I Love You (now pass the tissues)

Holly: I don't want to make any mistakes
Gerry: Then you're in the wrong species, love. Be a duck.

from the film P.S. I love you

I just watched the film P.S. I love you and I would just like to say that it is one of the best romantic comedies I have ever seen.

There were lots and lots of laughs, and also lots of tears. Sometimes I go to watch chick flicks at the cinema with my sisters or my girlfriends, and I am so glad that I watched this one on DVD in the privacy of my own home, because it was a tears-streaming-down-your-face sort of a film, in between the hilarious moments that is.

"P.S. I love you" is about a young woman who is widowed just before she turns thirty, but finds out that her husband had made arrangements to have letters delivered to her after his death. So the story is partly about her coming to terms with losing her husband, and partly about their history together, and partly about her friends and family, and partly about what an amazing guy she was married to :-)

One of the things I liked the most is that the characters have depth and are believeable as 'real' people, even the minor characters who barely feature. There's a lot of straight and honest talk, including snappy comebacks which make for much hilarity (I laughed out loud quite a few times, which is always appreciated).

Definitely a film worth adding to the DVD library *grin*

Book meme

Wen over at La Delirante tagged me with a book meme, which is to pick up the closest book, and type the fifth, sixth and seventh sentences on page 123. Then tag five people and acknowledge who tagged you.

Since I rearranged stuff on the desk yesterday and removed stacks of books, there's only three nearby. There's a novel Catching Katie, the Lion Handbook to the Bible, and an Applied Maths textbook, Mechanics and Probability. They were all in a stack and so I picked the textbook as being the funniest (joke!).

Page 123 is a list of exercises, here's the fifth through seventh sentences:

3) A particle moving in a straight line moves from rest with a uniform acceleration of 4m/s^2 for 4 seconds. It is then brought to rest again by a uniform acceleration of -2m/s^2. Draw a velocity-time graph and find the total distance covered by the particle.

Riveting, hux?

I'm tagging: anyone who wants to do it.

Eurovision: Do Not Want

We just got home from watching Seascape at the theatre, and Michael is watching the Eurovision Song Contest. Nooooooo...

At least they're already on the eighteenth song so I only have to sit through a few more. *sob* Ooooh wait, France is on and it's actually quite a fun song with a bop-she-wop backing chorus.

I hate the intervals between songs because not only do I have to listen to the lame presenters, but Eileen Montesin on TVM then talks over them in Maltese too, and she's not even funny. Where's Wogan? He's the only thing that can make the torture bearable.

*plugs in the earbuds*

Incidentally, I'm looking forward to the entertainment that gets put on while we're waiting for the voting, it's usually the best part of the whole evening.

Well that was disappointing.

The Applied Maths A-Level on Monday didn't go very well.

I was well pleased with Paper I, I worked solidly for the whole three hours, and completed around 85% of the paper, which is pretty good for what it is.

Paper II however was a disaster. Of the ten questions available, I hadn't studied one of those topics (too complicated for the amount of time I had) so I was down to nine of which I had to choose seven. I worked two perfect questions, and one nearly perfect, but the remaining six questions were not good.

Of course, one of the topics I knew really really really well didn't show up. Of COURSE.

Of those six, I'll admit that one or two I should have known, but a couple were in forms I had never seen before. These two were both "prove that x equals y" but I just couldn't get x to equal y, it was maddening.

Although I only needed to work four of those remaining six, I couldn't manage to complete a single one so I worked all six partially. I'm not sure of the rules (if they count your best questions out of those attempted, or if they just count the first seven you attempted) but it was the best I could do at the time.

Here's how bad it was - out of the whole of Malta, there were only about fourteen people registered for the exam, one of whom did not show up at all. In Paper II, one guy left after two hours (with an hour still to go), followed shortly after by another four. Now there is no way you can work that paper in two hours, so these people were basically abandoning a lost cause.

By 18:50, with ten minutes to go, there were just six of us left.

I had, honestly, done everything I could do. I heaved a sigh, and I heard a couple of others do the same. Sod it, I said, and began to pack up, and I laughed when I saw that three other people had also decided, at the same time, to do the same thing.

We walked out of there leaving behind two die-hards, one of whom it seemed was only waiting for the other.

I'm quite annoyed and disappointed at the way things turned out - if the questions had been of a different form, I'd have done much better. This exam has cost me around Lm45 in textbooks and Lm30 in exam fees (the late application fee was Lm20, ouch). Besides that, I've been studying in my lunchbreak for months, studying on buses, studying in cafes, slogging through the syllabus.

So it represents quite an investment in time and effort too. The other students are doing this as part of their education but on the other hand they have twenty hours a week of lectures, whereas I have a full-time job, they get a stipend for being students and I don't, they get free tuition and I don't, and they get free books and I don't.

On the other hand, I don't have to worry about getting into University and they do, msieken, plus most of them also had another A-Level, three Intermediates and the Systems of Knowledge to worry about :-)

But yeah, I'm still disappointed about it.

I've been trying to phone the Matsec office all week to ask if I can sit the resit even if I passed the exam, but no-one ever answers the phone. Maybe the numbers in the phonebook are incorrect, who knows. However I just read on the website that students sitting the Matriculation Certificate can register for resits irrespective of what grades they got in the first session, and I imagine that it would apply to Single Subject candidates too. (Because I registered for just one subject, not for the whole caboodle that is the Mat Cert).

I want to resit because it would be a shame to go through all this and just walk away with a low grade, so if there's a second chance going, I'd like to take it. *looks at her textbooks with renewed hope*

Well, two months to go before the results are out. If you know anyone who just did their O-Levels or Mat Cert, be extra-nice to them during this time because it can be very stressful just waiting!

Me, I spent the rest of this week enjoying not studying in my lunchbreak (instead I'm re-reading Sqaq l-Infern (Book I of the Fiddien trilogy) before diving into my brand-new copy of Wied Wirdien (Book II)), and also watching DVDs in the evenings, aaaaah.

A feel-good video *grin*

I came across this video on YouTube yesterday, and I loved it so much that I thought I'd share it with you. It's Smoke On The Water, classical Japanese style...

Maltese Weather

The weather has been quite changeable lately (although hey, Maltese weather often is).

On Thursday, I was waiting on a bus stop at lunch time and the sun was beating down, when suddenly I felt a blast of cool air, like when you open a fridge. I looked around, and no fridges were in evidence, so it was a natural cool breeze. Aaaah!

Random people have been complaining to me of the heat, but I'm sitting here at my PC at 8am drinking coffee, and guess what? It's THUNDERING. The forecast is light showers, so here's hoping the country gets to cool down a bit.

Summer is definitely on the way, and as usual I am wondering what it will be like. Last summer wasn't so bad in terms of heatwaves (thank goodness, because we had lots of wedding-related running around to do) but you never can tell what the next one will be like.

This will be my very first summer of living in a place with airconditioning (the previous owners of this flat installed a unit in the master bedroom) but giving the ever-rising cost of electricity, I don't intend running it on a regular basis. It will be nice for the really hot nights though - you know, the ones when you get in to bed and the sheets are hot.

That reminds me, we need to go buy a couple of fans for the kitchen and living room so we're ready when the hot weather hits. They will go on the shopping list along with a kitchen table, lol.

Applied Maths - what was I thinking?

There has been a distinct lack of posting on this blog lately because I've been busier than usual.

This Monday I'm sitting for my Applied Maths A-Level and I realised that trying to study when you have a full-time job, a husband, a flat and a cat is a whole new kettle of fish. I study on the bus, I study during my lunch break, I study in cafes, I study in the middle of rehearsals... *sigh*

Just two days to go *meep* and I am wading through mechanics like nobody's business. Well I did most of this stuff already as part of my Physics A-Level or as part of my degree, but some of it is new stuff and some of it I never really got in the first place.

I am hating differential equations, but I love that today I did an entire topic (shear force and bending moment diagrams) in a relatively short time because it was one of my favourite subjects back in Uni. Heheheh.

When I decided to sit for this exam, it was part of my "Sit an A-Level every two years" master plan, which has the ultimate aim of preventing stagnation of my brain. Then for the in-between years I do musical theatre exams instead, which fall at around the same time of year. I was thinking of doing chemistry, and started working on it, and then decided that no way, it was much too hard. Lol.

But Applied Maths didn't sound too bad because I'm already familiar with the subject. Now in the pre-exam weekend I am panicking a bit because I haven't been through ALL the topics yet, I'm struggling on a couple of the more esotric ones, I am not doing so well on the past papers... aagrh! What was I thinking?

Well, we'll see how it goes.

After the raging success that was my English A-Level two years ago (I got an A, along with four other people out of the 819 who sat the exam), I thought I would aim high this time too. I doubt I'll get an A though, that was a bit too optimistic.

If I did, I would totally skew the statistics for this subject - there are generally less than twenty people who take this exam every year, hardly anyone goes above a C, and there aren't even any official statistics because the sample size is so small.

Mind you, I can see why the grades aren't that high - there's a lot of pure maths in it, but anyone taking Applied at A-Level won't be taking Pure at A or I and therefore will be missing a lot of background. And there's probably too much "applied" content to allow much time for teaching the "pure" background that is so important. Pure Maths A-Level is an absolute NIGHTMARE but I will be the first to say that it left me with a good grounding.

I realised earlier this week that there is a much greater chance that I will actually study if I prepare a space with everything I need already there. So I cleared off a desk that my sister had donated to us (my proper desk is full of PC, old-skool monitor, speakers, telephone etc) and I put all my study stuff there.

This is what my study desk looked like yesterday, with textbooks, past papers, highlighters to mark what I need to study (yellow for paper I, orange for paper II), water bottle, file paper, calculator, pen, kitchen timer for timing study sessions, chocolate cupcake for motivation, and cute toy for mindless moments. What more could an aspiring student need?

This is what my study desk looks like today, several hours of use later. I ditched the timer because the ticking bugged me, had to dig out an engineering textbook because the applied maths textbooks I got don't cover one of the topics, Jenny ran away with the remains of the cupcake (who knew that cats like chocolate cupcake?) and as you can see I'm using a lot of bits of trees. *sigh*

The blob on the chair is Fuzzball, the newest member of our little family. I'll blog more about him later.

I'm off to bed, thoroughly fed up with calculating collisions and closest approaches (one of the topics I don't remember ever doing before).

Just remember, for collision or interception to take place, the relative velocity must lie on the relative displacement vector. Or something like that.

Retraction - redirection of annoyance towards ministry

Last night I was annoyed and wrote some nasty things about WasteServ, and it has been brought to my attention that (at least some of) what I said was undeserved...

Apparently WasteServ have nothing to do with the 'waste separation at source' scheme, which is why there is nothing about it on their website. They are involved with the recycling of packaging waste, but not with how it gets from households to the plant. Sorry! Chris Ciantar, whose name is synonymous with WasteServ, has been involved with the scheme through his post as a director in the Ministry for the Environment (a couple of weeks ago he got made Permanent Secretary in the new ministry).

Also, while I still am not so impressed with how WasteServ has done some things, and didn't get such a great impression when I toured Sant' Antnin, on the other hand yes they did do some things right, so apologies for my sweeping generalisations.

So, all my annoyance has now been re-directed towards the ministry, and the ranting about the grey plastic bags, their unavailability, and the overall mismanagement of the implementation of the scheme still stands.

Hekk, mela.