New College Enrollment.
Okay so on rge 26th June I had my New College enrollment, so went along spoke to Roger the IT tutor sorted out my course, which was lined up to be BTEC Computing ( Software Development ) and … French. *shakes head and laughs* I know i dont know why i chose it either… was on of those spur of the moment things, i fancied learning french… well yea.. lets just glaze over that shall we 
So yea, i obviously changed French GCSE to a Maths A Level O.O Now the BTEC is a THREE A Level Course! which is more than i need for university, and more than most do, not forgetting i do quite a bit out side of school, with my business XDnet.co.uk other websites, CALM Charity, and of course Swindon 105.5 (Shameless plugs there!)
But i am told i can drop the BTEC course down to a Double (2 A Level instead of 3) which would make it easier, which i will most likely do unless of course i get as obsessive with it as i do with other computer stuff 
which i hope i do!
So i sorted this out, with “Roger” who really likes the word “bud” one of those things, flicking through the book of courses trying to find something easy interesting… to do for the next year of my life… and I have this guy i have never met using “bud” as a period (full stop). I mean I’m happy for people to have words like that they use but i mean he used it A LOT! sometimes mroe than once in each sentence.
Im going off on one here, so yea talk to this guy get my courses sorted get my free “can” of drink… which turned out to be a juice pouch… “Hey! Welcome to New College the place where you will get treated like an adult… Have a juice pouch. Look like your FIVE! theres a good boy O.O… and the lady by the tuch shop thing where I got it from must have been paid extra to keep that smile on all day.
So you go over sit down waiting to get my photo taken for my ID… eventually get to sit on a stool have the picture taken from the device which looked like a eye on a stick, i saw my picture and just knew instantly I am going to regret this moment for the rest of my time i have a college ID with that photo; And of course i go that looks awful to the girl manning the computer, while in my head im screaming going o crap i look stonned, drunk and asleep ALL at the same time! NO! And I get that “O Everyone says that” … I couldn’t be bothered to argue, i had been up since 7am with only a few hours sleep because i had been at the station (Swindon 105.5) all day before this (from 8AM to 3.30PM)… its not a good picture, then again not many of me are!
So eventually you get walked up stairs to the computer room, which i happened to have done a “Gifted and Talented” Web Design course in… but i wont go into detail. So i sit down to take this enrollment test, to basically make sure i have a brain. Now bare in mind i was 
half asleep worn out and had to sit through some crappy flash application to test my Numeracy and Literacy skills, the first question for numeracy was something like “Whats 8 - 6?”, i re-read the question to be sure… it did get more difficult as the test went on, and i ended up with a Level 2 - 3 for numeracy, which supposedly was where i was supposed to be. The Litteracy one however… not so good, i ended up with Level 1 (which of course i was told was where i was expected to be) but what seemed like hours of, On our leaflet we have made 3 spelling mistakes grab this crappy cross and place it on all the spelling mistakes… JUST USE THE BLOODY SPELL CHECKER… Now before i have someone comment about good spelling, and how it’s important etc etc, I know. Its just it gets tedious when you are looking at a tacky looking Flash Application, and just wondering if they would wake you up if you went to sleep on keyboard not generally a good mix
So after 50 minutes and 46 seconds taking the Literacy assessment and 35 minuutes and 52 seconds for the numeracy, i was finally FREE! (ish) now i moved into yet another waiting room (and some how managed to lose my card thing with my Student ID number on the way >< ) then i go to meet what i think was the Physcology tutor who basically went over everything and looked at the score. yay now i can spend another 15 minutes walking back to the studio!
Bottom line, im both excited and also dreading college, excited something new hopefully much more advanced than the rubbish from Greendown, and meeting new as well as old friends. But then I have that but look how much i have done being off all day! I am going back to having less time to manage my business, and projects and Swindon 105.55.
But I hope i can manage, should be fun, and will probably end up spending more time at studio so can get moe involved with the radio - at the moment im learning the system a little more to be Tech Op, would really like to become deeply involved with the Tech side and also will hopefully getting a show together and running, and besides the fun and hope to get more listeners that just friends and family, it always looks good on your CV!
Just a note, i will be posting a tutorial soon about retrieving and displaying cPanel server status on a normal webpage for users so you can expect that and the script soon too!
Cya.
Dan 
Monday, June 30th, 2008
CPU Gadget, this definitely had to be the most “used” gadget, always handy to check how hard I’m working my system, helps me know when i need to easy off a bit to avoid problems.
RSS Feed Reader, Only recently have i started properly using this great little gadget, its one which comes default with Vista, and is nice and simple, you subscribe to a thread (through IE) and they show up, you can select to show 10-100 items, select a single feed of just one, handy tool to keep up to date with goings on, I started to use it to try and learn a bit more and be more in with whats going on with the Web, and also an attempt to get more ideas of things i can talk about both on my blog, and on my Radio show.
Notes, yes this is a simple little gadget comes with Vista by default like the CPU monitor and RSS feed reader, its a Handy note pad on your desktop to jot something down to remember later, i was (and admittedly still am) guilty of having a desk covered in little piles of yellow sticky pad notes, most of which are in unreadable handwriting or just end up lost and forgotten. So in that sense it is a handy little gadget, also means i don’t have quite so many random .txt files on my desktop with random things in. However a bad note (no pun intended… okay that’s a blatant lie.. anyway) is its quite a small area, and would be a very handy if you could extend the note pad so you don’t have to scroll down the note o read it all however i am not sure how easy this could be done on Vista Gadgets, it would be good though if it was possible.
Weather Gadget, never bother to use it before the other day, but its pretty good does a variety of weathers, and it does my local area (Swindon) so I am happy.
Calendar again one of the pre-installed gadgets with Vista, but its something which i use daily, much easier to give it a glance and see today’s date etc in nice big letters, without having to faff about hovering over the clock like i used to especially when i am busy working on scripts or working with clients. 
feeling, I am now both excited and dreading college in September, most of the people i like and call friends are going to the same as me - New College, so that’s good but there are still a few which its nice to talk to every now and then which are not, and of course there are a lot of “people” which thankfully are NOT gong to same college as far as i know and i hope to escape them! yay!