Things.

This is an edited version of an article I have written for the Year 11 magazine, ICON, at my school.

If you ever find yourself lost in the far dark corner of my school’s science block, one might stumble across the ‘Control Lab’, where you faintly remember the horrors of your Year 9 System and Control lessons, writing long, mundane and senseless code. A common sight in the control lab is that of panicked Year 11’s, scrambling to complete various aspects of their controlled assessment; the head of department and his highly sarcastic nature, bellowing at incompetent students (including myself); and those bored of everything else, browsing sites like Reddit or 9Gag, going there to escape the wrath of the IT department head in the Computer Gallery; however, occasionally, one can catch a glimpse of someone unsuspecting planning and building a weird and wonderful gadget or gizmo.

This sighting can usually be caught on a Tuesday lunch, where those who make these things gather together in a slightly chaotic manner in a school society called RoboSoc. Returning to the point of this article and its cryptic title, the point of this society, is all about building cool things. One group is building a quadracopter (those 4-propellored helicopters), another, a remote weather station, and myself, an internet-controlled rover; but beneath all of this, there is something much more profound going on, unrelated to technology, and it is causing a revolution of sorts. I just plan to use technology to convey my message, as it is probably the subject I am the most interested in (as shown by my Preview booklet) and contains possibly the easiest way to explain my argument.

Two Months. Damn!

Nope, I am not dead (yet anyway...)! It's approaching almost two whole months since my last post, and I apologise for that. There has been a lot happening in my life recently, some of which I shall go through here, as well as some of the other, more tech-related things, but nothing about the iPad mini or the likes: I trust you have already been bombarded with enough of that from tech blogs or even standard news sites (which, in my opinion, don't do the whole story justice, but anyway...). Let us begin.

Following my wishing of good luck in my last post, we hit the ground running at the start of term! Firstly, the pace of the lessons increased dramatically as we are approaching GCSEs, especially Geography, where my teacher bombarded us with not-so-subtle hints about where we stood in relation to the rest of the year and how it was not good enough in order to achieve that A* at GCSE. He was right, as our end of year exam results were less than adequate (excluding mine, of course!), so now we are all under pressure to preform better. That was one of the more mundane stories.

I volunteered to design and operate the lighting for a small school play called, The Long, The Short and The Tall. I had no idea how to design lighting, so I was running around like a madman taking to the director and the technician for the show, discussing various ideas. Tech rehearsal went smoothly and so did dress, and on that note, opening night came around.

In the audience, I could see several English teachers, of course, as well as my sister, self proclaimed not-nice-person technology teacher and my slightly intimidating chemistry teacher, all of which were sitting within my line of view and had noticed me on the lighting desk. The Chemistry teacher was right next to me, and he told me, in what I interpreted, incorrectly perhaps, to be a good-humored joke, "Don't screw up". Famous last words.

It all went smoothly, up to a point.

The actors were in the middle of a little dance thing. I was hovering over the "go" button, waiting for my cue a few lines later.

Click. BAM! Blackout.