I just finished watching my first episode of House.

I think I might have a new fandom.

In terms of general updates I had a fairly busy Saturday and Sunday doing actual real life things - I have never been this social in one weekend.

TAFE's going okay, apart from Statistics which is boring (we were doing frequency tables pretty much all lesson on Tuesday). Newsediting for Communications and Contemporary Australia are going great though. We have a current affairs quiz each Monday in Newsediting and this time two of the questions were sport related (I got one of the two questions wrong. One of the questions was who won the A-League Soccer grand final, this match was between Central Coast Mariners and the Newcastle Jets, Newcastle Jets won but I only knew that Central Coast was playing in the match so I put that down and then got it wrong. The other sports question was who won the pre season NRL match which was played in Orange on the weekend - the teams that played were the Canberra Raiders and the Brisbane Broncos, I guessed that the Raiders won (which I got right) but that was only because I knew that they had been in Orange for the past couple of days. I had initially thought it was the Sydney Roosters because I knew that they had also played the West Tigers that same weekend but then I reasoned that if they had been in Orange then my brother (who is a West Tigers fan) would have tried to get down there if he could (Orange is about 30-45 minutes from where I live). So I ended up getting 9/10 for the quiz.

For Contemporary Australia we had to write about 3 cartoon sources and do some research about the issues that they were talking about. They're due for tomorrow's class but I've only done one of the cartoons. I'm here on lj instead so I should probably get off and finish the last two sources.

So I've had my first week of TAFE.

It wasn't too bad starting back even though I didn't want to get out of bed to go to school on Monday since I was used to being on holidays.

One of the main problems to start with was the buses because the bus timetables were changed this year and as a result the connecting bus that I need to get in order to go up to the TAFE/Uni doesn't meet up. The connecting bus leaves five minutes earlier so by the time the bus that I catch to go downtown so I can change buses gets there, the bus I need to be on has already left. In the end I remained on the first bus I was on and it dropped me off about half a block or so from the TAFE, so all I needed to do was walk straight downhill to where it is.

It was funny yesterday though because I caught the bus at 8.18am (I had class at 9.30am but if I caught the later bus I would have been late) and when it came it was full of students who went to Bathurst High School and for a minute I thought I read the name of the bus wrong (it said 523 - Eglinton, which is the bus that I catch) but when I went up to check. The bus driver went to me "The high school?" thinking that I was one of the high school students, I graduated from high school in 2005 (he's not the first one to think that I'm younger than what I actually am) and I go "is this the Eglinton bus?" and after he said that it was I explained that I needed to go to TAFE.

These are the classes that I have this semester:

Newsediting for Communications
Contemporary Australian Society
Statistics

It doesn't seem a lot but I have Contemporary Australian Society and Statistics two times a week instead of once a week. Since I started the course last semester I don't have to do Lals A or Computers (even though I will have to do spreadsheets when it gets up to that since I need to be able to do spreadsheets as part of statistics.) I'm just glad that this semester will be the last time that I have to do a maths subject. Also watching the news at least once a day like I normally do is going to come in handy since two of my subjects will be dealing with Current Affairs.

In other news today I got part of the order that I made through Sanity earlier this week. I used the gift card that I got for my birthday and I ordered Sneaky Sound System's single Goodbye ($3.99) and I also ordered Adam Brand's debut album called Adam Brand (it was $9.99). There was something like $3.75 for postage and I had a $20 gift card so it came to over $17. I got Sneaky Sound System's single today and I received an Order Confirmation that Sanity had shipped Adam Brand's album out so depending on where they shipped the order from I should get it sometime next week, probably Thursday at the latest.

I finally got my seminar presentation out of the road. I'm just glad that I've now finished. I was the second last person to go today (there were only about five of us in class and there are still two more people to go who weren't here today) and it had gotten to the point where I just wanted to go and get it done because I hate the nervous feeling of waiting before I have to get up and speak in front of a group of people.

I feel pretty good about how the seminar went, it wasn't the absolute best that I've done but it also wasn't the absolute worst that I've done either. Regardless I'm just happy to have it done and apart from fixing up my annotated bibliography that I've got to do as well as the seminar, now I can focus on all the things that are due in my other subjects by the end of term.

Nano has also started and currently my word count total is 2310 words out of 50000. So I think that's a pretty good start. I'm going to try and get the word count up further before I go to bed (hopefully at least 2500) but I'm happy with what I've done so far.

I've finally finished my presentation.

I ended up finishing it tonight and I didn't have any problems until I went to print my one page summary, which I needed to print a copy for everyone in the class (I'm not entirely sure how many there are exactly in my class but I do know that it's no more than 10) and when I went to the printer I realised that it had run out of ink.

This caused me to start panicking and trying to think of other options if I couldn't get my stuff printed. I had thought of asking Lee (my Multicultural Australia teacher) if I could print the stuff that I needed in class because if I print something in the library and its with a teacher we don't have to pay for printing.

Dad then thought of using the old printer that still had ink on it (this is the computer that I used while I was at uni last year) and he decided to see if it would work if we connected that computer to my laptop. Luckily that worked and I managed to print the copies of the summary and I printed the annotated bibliography for my seminar.

So now all that's left is for me to do the seminar, I hope that I'm not selected to go tomorrow but knowing my luck I'll end up being chosen to go first.

I have officially finished computers.

Yay me!

This means that I have at least passed one subject at TAFE this term.

Yay me!

I was able to complete the rest of the assessment in computers today. The assessment itself was alright. There were a couple of tasks that I had trouble with but I was able to figure it out but at least it's out of the road now.

I'm still slowly working my way through my powerpoint presentation for Multicultural Australia but at least I've made some progress on it. Once I complete the powerpoint I just have to do a one page summary and an annotated bibliography but I'll hopefully be able to complete it all by Thursday.

So my whole goal of writing essays for my Multicultural Australia over the holidays didn't exactly turn out - then again that's not exactly surprising. However I'm pretty certain that I'm not the only one who hasn't done work for MA because in Communications when we were going over an exercise in changing power and stuff (ie. changing 'I should' to 'I choose') and one of the examples I had was 'I should do work for Multicultural Australia'. When I said this one after we read them out I heard someone laugh at that and it indicated that they hadn't done any work for it either.

So I guess my current goal is to now work on my assignments and stuff this week.

At least I'm nearly finished my Computer module this semester. I'm currently doing the last assessment for the internet section and I should hopefully be finished by the end of the next lesson. The good thing about this is at least I'm almost certain to pass Computers, the other subjects I'm doing I'm not sure so sure about (I'm probably going to flunk maths though).

So I thought that I'd actually update my journal for once :)

Not a great deal has been happening lately since I'm on holidays from TAFE. I'm supposed to be working on some essays for Multicultural Australia but I haven't actually started writing those yet (like that surprises anyone), I have to do at least some of them this week so I don't have to do them all at the last minute because they're all due at the end of November. I'm also planning to work on my Power Point presentation for Multicultural Australia this weekend, I basically have all the information for it so I just have to prepare it in the power point.

I've also gotten the flu in the past few days, which has not been so great. I managed to go all winter without getting the flu and then in the beginning of October I get sick and it's in the holidays as well. Hopefully it's going to go away soon.

In other random news I also signed up for Nano Wrimo again, this year I'm actually going to complete it and win it.

I just had my seminar presentation for Lals. All I can say is thank god that's over!

Overall the presentation went okay even though I need to work on maintaining good eye contact and not speaking so fast. The other problem I had was that I had too much information for my powerpoint so I have to remember to only summarize the information that I present.

I'm still happy that it's over though.

Current Mood: relieved

For Lals we have a seminar presentation that we have to do in two weeks from now and we can choose any topic that we want to talk about it. Choosing the topic isn't a problem for me because by the end of the lesson I decided that I wanted to do mine on musicals/musical theatre.

Which means now I'm going to have decide on how I'm going to present a topic like musical theatre in a time slot of no more than 30 minutes. The time allocation is 10 - 15 minutes even though we can go up to 30 minutes but the absolute mininum is 5 minutes. Since I'll most likely end up using audio clips of songs and film clips from musicals I think I'm definitely going to be longer than 15 minutes.

I've got a couple of ideas on how I'm going to go about my presentation but at least I have some time before its actually due.

Current Mood: geeky

I got my very first proper class assignment back (as in, said assignment counting to my overall grade for the semester). The subject that I had the assignment in was Lals (Language and Learning Skills) and I got 52/60, which was definitely way better than what I was expecting. Considering that my first proper class test didn't turn out that good (I only got 43% for Maths - which is actually pretty good for me but not so good in helping to determine whether or not I pass this semester), I'm very happy with the mark I got for Lals.

It's also good considering that I didn't think I had done very well since I left the majority of it to the last minute and I didn't answer one of the questions, but it turns out I didn't need those marks in order to pass.

*bounces*

Today in TAFE my teacher for Multicultural Australia handed out a copy of this email that he had gotten. It was actually rather interesting because it dealt with comparing information and such and the topic dealt with planets/stars and when you compared them you could tell that when you put up one against the other it was big but if you put the same one up against something else it was actually small. The email first compared the inner planets and it compared the outer planets and such but when it got to comparing the stars they had the sun up against stars like Betelgeuse and Antares and the sun was barely visible against it. What I found funny though was that when I was quietly going through it I saw that one of the stars was Aldebaran and I I first read it as 'Alderaan' and was like 'wait that's Star Wars' before I read it properly and realised that I had it wrong.

It was kind of an amusing when we went through the email and one of the guys commented that Antares would crush us, I'm pretty sure that, that comment came when the teacher asked us what we could tell from the information that was given.

This email was actually relevent to the class in a way though because we had to go through this sheet where we had to pick out what was wrong with the information given and how the information given was irrelevant unless you had something to compare it to.

I meant to post this last night after I got home but I decided that it was best to leave it til today when I wasn't as tired.

So first things first I didn't get that job at Coles but I don't really care as much now, hopefully I'll hear from the other place and find out what's actually going on. If I don't hear from them by the start of August I'm going to have to call them again. Then I'll probably start looking around for another job even if I still get to keep the job I have now.

Item number 2: I've started TAFE (earlier than what I had planned). I had my frist week last week and so far it looks like it will be okay. As part of the Tertiary Preparation Course this semester I have to do Computers, Communications, Language and Arts Skills, Maths in Context and Multicultural Australia. The only subject that I haven't had yet is Language and Learning Skills (LALS) but that's because the teacher who is supposed to take it was sick last week. So I'm not sure if I'll have it tomorrow or if we'll have Multicultural Australia again for Tuesday and Thursday like it was done last week.

Item number 3: I spent the weekend with my family up at the Entrance. We stayed with my Aunt and Uncle at their place and it was a pretty good weekend aside from the fact that we really only had one full day up there. I still got my copy of Harry Potter and spent the entire day just reading. I also got more DVDs to add to my steadily growing collection (I got Fiddler on the Roof, Kim Possible - A Stitch in Time and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban).

( Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows )

I got a copy of the book a bit after 9 on Saturday and I started reading at 10:00am. I spent the day reading and I was finished by 9:00pm that night. So I finished the book in less than 12 hours.

So now that Harry Potter is finished these are the book series that I a) want to finish reading or b) at least read some more of the books.

1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (I'm up to Life, the Universe and Everything)
2. The Tomorrow Series - John Marsden (I've read the first one but I'm planning to re read it and I've also got a copy of the second book in the series to read)
3. Discworld - Terry Pratchett (I've only read The Colour of Magic so I've got quite a few books to read in the series)

I just finished completing an application for Coles. I wasn't initially going to apply until after I started TAFE but I saw an advertisement on Thursday saying that they needed people for afternoon and weekend work and since that's the type of work I needed and that there was actually positions available I applied.

I'm also starting TAFE earlier than I anticipated. I didn't think you could start the Certificate 1V mid way through the year but I found out that you could. I'll be starting on July 16. Mum and dad are going to pay for this semester and I'll pay them back when I have the money. I think the only bad thing about this TAFE thing is that I have to do maths, this should be interesting since the last time I actually studied maths was in year 11.