foolfillment: the blog

Does anyone have any ideas about how good/bad talktalk are? I don’t have any broadband in the flat at the moment and won’t until they get round to setting me up with it - could be the end of October!

All the bags are back with us now, I got mine on Friday as I was heading up to Torridon for a party (Happy Birthday Hugh!) and I’m just about getting the flat back in order before I start at school next Monday.

I found out where I’m going for this block last Wednesday, it’s a Glasgow school that I don’t know much about. They do all my subjects except Tech Studies and have a large number of teachers for one department so it’s a pretty reasonable size and I should be able to pick up a lot from all the different teachers. I’ve still to meet them and won’t do until Monday morning, we have a briefing session on Friday so hopefully I’ll find out what is expected of us this placement - our last one before graduation.

With all that about to kick off I also have to get myself sorted for my final year project. I really need to have things arranged already but with being away a lot of the summer the project got left on the back burner for too long. Right now I’m sitting in the library trying to put down my ideas of what I need to happen, if you’ve any interest you can read the latest on the wiki if you don’t have any interest then you’re probably very sensible.

So, I went to Budapest with the caving club. Our bags didn’t though. It was an incredible mess and still is.

Of the 10 bags we checked in at Glasgow not a single one turned up on the same plane as us, and then of course everything went to pieces at Heathrow. Eventually 5 bags turned up in Romania and we were able to collect them from our guides’ office and the trip didn’t entirely turn into nothing as it might have, a caving expedition with no caving equipment whatsoever ceases to be a caving expedition very quickly. At the end of the 10 days though we of course we had our return flight.

For the flights BUD-LHR and LHR-GLA we decided that it would be easier to check all of the baggage that we did have as it was crammed full with clothes we bought with BA’s money and might not have been allowed as hand luggage with the tighter restrictions, that’s 9 bags in all. Of those 9 bags guess how many made it to Glasgow, bearing in mind we hade more than adequate time inbetween the two flights.

That burst of blogging activity didn’t last long did it? I’m off to Romania. See you in a fortnight.

As I predicted (following in depth research, and not a little guess work) The Shire beat Elgin 2-1, its the first win in a long season, destined to end in the glory of finishing off the bottom of the league for the first time in five years.

I ought to learn one of their songs, I may even consider going along to a game sometime this season.

The Scottish Football League 2006/2007 kicks off today, and with it another season of predictable woe for East Stirlingshire.

I support a team from Glasgow, you may have heard of them, they play in blue and are disliked by lots of people. I have my reasons for supporting them but to be honest for a long itme I have felt that they aren’t very good. So, I have decided to adopt an additional team - I may as well support a smaller team with more scottish players for no good reason than a big team with lots of fans who do little good for Scotland.

But what team? I ruled out any Division 1 teams just because it didn’t feel right, and after that I decided that I would be just as well picking out of a hat which is what I did. First team up was East Stirlingshire. I’d left in my head a little proviso that if I didn’t feel right with any team I’d pick again but East Stirlingshire, what a team! How could I turn down an opportunity like that?

And so it begins a long hard season battling on the pitch against the other Division 3 clubs and off the pitch against Alan Mackin, the evil chairman of doom.

For a quick bit of research here are a few links to get you up to speed.
Official Club Site
Wikipedia Entry
East Stirlingshire Supporters Society
East Stirlingshire Mad

Today’s match :
at Home to Elgin City.
The Herald’s prediction for the season is us bottom and Elgin 3rd. My prediction for today: 2-1 to the shire.

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I’ve just finishing putting up most of the photos onto flickr that I’m going to, at least for now, in time I might write a little about the different places we went to.

To see them go to my photostream and look for the newzealand tag or click this link direct to them.

I need to arrange a broadband account in the flat in Glasgow for the next uni year. Ideally I’d like to get something that doesn’t cost any money, is really fast, with no limits, and is totally reliable.*

Anyway what is the closest I can get to that? My main problem is that I currently have no BT line connected, what I have been looking at is going with TalkTalk and getting them to provide all my calls and give me their free broadband. There’s a couple of problems with this though; I need to get BT to reconnect the line and then switch over - I don’t know if this is possible without having to pay a huge disconnection fee; I’m also not entirely sure about TalkTalk’s service, if it doesn’t work well and I can’t connect all the time then I’d be pretty disappointed. It is about the cheapest thing around that I’ve seen though.

Another stumbling block is that I won’t be in the flat for 12 months so most contracts I sign up for I’ll have to pay an escape fee or be able to transfer it to wherever I’ll be living next July.

*This, as I said is the ideal. To most people what I’ve just described is unobtainable, which is probably true but it doesn’t mean it isn’t the ideal situation. People too often don’t use words correctly. Another misused word is frequent - Christmas comes frequently, Halley’s Comet comes frequently, but a car might break down often not frequently.

“I was walking across reception when I fell over because I’m useless, the first thing I tought was how can I have the last laugh on all of these people laughing at me? I phoned Scams4U and was awarded a pittance, I was really happy”

I’m not sure that’s the exact quote but it’s fairly accurate. These adverts are everywhere these days, it used to be just the poorer sky/cable channels that showed them but now they are on terrestrial too. It’s a horrible society we live in, in some ways.

It’s good isn’t it? I’ve been keeping in touch with Morven (who’s still in New Zealand) with Skype using the skype out thingy. It’s really cheap, a 20 minute phone call this morning cost just about ?0.25, doing the same using phone cards would have been about ?2.

It’s almost like getting a mobile for the first time a few years ago, you can have great fun sitting in the living room with a laptop and all of a sudden the house phone rings, ‘who can that be?!’ your mum asks as she gets up. How she laughs when it stops before she gets to the phone.

Skype has it’s bad points though, I could almost hear Lordy’s wife’s despair when we were trying a conference call with our oldest brother.