Robert Leverington

It would seam that we can recycle Apple Liquid Carton Board, but not Orange and Pineapple Liquid Carton Board.

A few of my friends have been commenting that I’ve been very unhappy and angry recently, and asking why this is the case, as such here is a comprehensive list of reasons - mostly stemming from frustration.

Much of my anger and sadness is due to school, I’m really not an ideas or design person and we’re being asked to do a lot of this at the moment. My product design final project, coming up for ideas of what to put in the questionnaire or how it should look is proving difficult; and this weekend we were given an essay in English. “Our thoughts on families, childhood, and maturity” this was very hard for me, I didn’t really know what to put - in the end I put it off and gave up at half a page of writing.

I’ve also been struggling with friendship at school, having drifted away from the group I was with since they began playing football I now spend most of my time alone in the library.  It’s a different story outside of school, but ever since the introduction of split lunches I’ve been separated from most of my friends at school. There has also been a lot of arguments within my group of friends recently, mostly spanning from comments left on MySpace; it really spoilt everything and just makes it difficult for everyone as it has been effectively split in two. Due to one of the persons involved who I’ve encountered before it also means I have to hold in a great deal of anger, which is quite difficult.

Another factor is all the girls I’m attracted to I either have no chance with or are already taken, this sucks very much. Mess is also everywhere, I try to keep the house clean and my room tidy - but no matter what I try there is an endless accumalation of clutter.

I’ve been trying to tie my three home systems together in a network for about a year and a half now, utterly failing each time due to how Windows works (only allowing you to connect to one internet source at a time, and defaulting to the LAN one). Today I decided that I’m going to give up trying and instead look in to getting a Linksys NSLU2, which would serve almost all the purposes my network was meant to - and be just as much of a learning experience. This also means I’ve taken the cheap KVM out of the loop between my monitor and computer, and it looks oh so much better now. As part of my wider general tidy up (involving lots of stuff going on eBay) much of the hardware that I’ve purchased for this will be being sold, hopefully it will actually sell.

I’ve wanted to get a new phone for over a year now, my old one being considerably old and bulky. I was eager to get an iPhone, but sadly the contract is very expensive and the pay as you go version will not be released until Christmas (and it would most likely be infeasible to make full use of the device given the cost of mobile internet browsing). Recently, however, my step-father noticed an offer for 100 texts and 100 minutes a month plus a phone with Virgin Mobile. Since we already had cable television, broadband, and a land line phone through Virgin Media this was only £10.00 a month - a bargain price. It was easily possible for me to spend that much a month on credit with Orange, and not get half as much as what is on offer here.

Switching my number from Orange to Virgin was less satisfying though, I must have spent an hour on the phone in total. Firstly Orange’s systems were quite often down so I’d get through and be told to call back later, and when they did promise to send me my PAC code through the post within three days this never materialized. Fortunately they simply texted it to me when I phoned them to query about this. Next I had to battle with Virgin Mobile and when I finally got through the man told me that since I wasn’t the account holder I couldn’t authorize the transfer - but I knew the secret word!

The phone itself is brilliant, it does everything I wanted and more; the camera is much better than my old digital camera in terms of quality at 3.2 mega pixels (although response time can be slightly irritating, and the flash is useless). It has touch buttons on the front, and while this does make it nicer to use in some circumstances they are prone to being pressed accidentally. The fact that it actually connects to the computer with minimal fuss is also great.

I am now awaiting a Micro SD card so I can upgrade it’s memory, once installed it may actually be feasible for it to replace my iPod nano as well as my digital camera which would be fantastic. Overall I am extremely pleased with the phone and package, it’s just sad that getting my number transferred was so frustrating.

Last month it was the summer break at school and I went on holiday to Scotland and Ireland, but spent a lot of time at home too. On my travels I noticed a distinct difference between the budget airlines we travelled on - Ryanair and bmibaby. In fact, on a measure of customer service, I’d put them at opposite ends of the scale.

Quite frankly Ryanair were rude and quite poor in terms of quality; the queues very long, and they’d call you for flights stupidly too early. Another factor was the manner in which they spoke, treating paying consumers as if they were doing something bad “You must turn off your phones.” for example.

bmibaby on the other hand were very polite, and queues were virtually non-existent. While they did have similar policies to Ryanair they would be conveyed in a non-condescending way.

Overall I am still quite disappointed with airlines right now, after all we’re in the 21st century - it shouldn’t be necessary for all electronic equipment to be turned off on take off and landing, the ride shouldn’t be bumpy, there shouldn’t need to be queues. It’s probably going to be this way for a while, but we are overdue a change in the way air travel works.