I’ve never managed to get into the habit of making vlogs consistently, nor do I think I will ever be. Part of the reason for this is that it isn’t possible for me to simply come up with a brilliant idea on demand, I can’t just think “right, today I have to do a vlog” and come up with an idea that I deem interesting. Of course, I could film me talking at the camera once a week, or do a simple idea that may not be interesting, but where’s the fun in that? I want to make videos that I can be proud of and that I think will entertain the people that watch them; I don’t want to upload a video for the sake of it.

The video that I posted on Valentine’s Day, I am pretty pleased with. It was quite different from my normal format, in that it wasn’t simply me talking about a topic to the camera. Now, this doesn’t herald an end to my usual format – I do enjoy ranting at the camera for half an hour – but I enjoyed making this one, so I’ll probably do more like it in the future. One thing you may notice in the video: I’m definitely not an actor. This video wasn’t to showcase my acting skills, if it were then I wouldn’t have put it on YouTube, it was a bit of fun, which I hope you find entertaining!

What I would like to know is: did you enjoy the video? Would you like to see more videos like this? Now, people hardly ever comment on this blog, but I would really appreciate it if you did this time…

My interest in computers revolves around how they work, fixing problems, coding, creating websites from scratch and other activities that require a basic level of computer knowledge. IT A level, however, doesn’t need students to have knowledge about computers. Take what I’ve been doing tonight, for example: tonight I have been placing content, which I wrote last year, and putting it into a website. “But surely creating website requires knowledge of HTML and whatnot?” I hear you say. Well, in my case it does; I created my website by typing HTML and CSS into Dreamweaver, no WYSWIG editing in sight. I also learnt some basic JavaScript in order to give my site an extra level of complexity. But will I get extra marks for doing this? No. The rest of my class is using a programme called Serif, which is a WYSWIG website editor, allowing you to simply drop content in without so entering so much as a basic tag. According to the specification, creating a website like this involves the same amount as skill as creating one via HTML, and therefore deserves the same amount of marks.

So why did I decide to make life more difficult for myself, if it’s not going to get me any extra marks? Well, quite frankly, I get bored. Dragging and dropping content into a pre-made template is boring. Coding and problem-solving, however, are not boring; they present a challenge and allow me to learn new things which I can use later on. But now I’m finished creating a template and have to copy, paste and format all of the content that I typed last year, whilst finding and creating images/videos/audio files to go with it. That is boring.

All of the text content, I created myself. Last year we had to write 13 essays about various topics relating to the Internet, by researching the subjects and then writing as much as we could about them (one of my essays was over 7,500 words long). While this was actually relatively interesting, what does it have to do with IT? Nout. It’s closer to an English essay than something you would expect from IT. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy writing, that’s why I have a blog and am taking English Language, but writing an essay about topics related to the Internet doesn’t require computer knowledge, it requires an ability to use Google to search the Internet. You have to be pretty tech savvy to do that, right?

IT definitely isn’t a subject that shows you have a good knowledge of computers, so what of use can it be? Well, it shows employers that you know your way around a computer and that you can perform some basic tasks such as word processing, researching and creating a simple website in a WYSIWYG editor. Sure that’s useful to some people, but not for those of us who actually want something to show that we know about computers. For that reason, I am most likely going to drop IT next year and focus on my other subjects instead; it is a very coursework-heavy subject, which gets worse next year, and I don’t want it to impact negatively on subjects which may be of use to me. I also know that I will get bored with the tasks that focus less on computer skills, and focus on those that do, meaning my coursework is likely to drop in quality.

In other words, IT doesn’t require any computer knowledge. In fact, when told that someone had created a website using only Notepad, a girl in my class said “He created it in Notepad!? How did he do that? That’s like me making a video in Microsoft Word!”. If we are doing websites, surely we should be aware of the basic concept of HTML and how the Internet is formed? Surely we should know what happens when we go to a website, what our computers are doing and why it is done like that? Apparently not. We just need to know how to drop a text box and some images onto a canvas, and allow a programme to convert that into HTML.

I would love to be taught some new skills, or be given a task that requires me to really think and do some problem solving, but I haven’t learnt much in IT, aside from what I have found out myself when deviating from what I’m supposed to do. Edexcel need to rethink the specification for IT coursework so that it requires more knowledge of computers. If people don’t know how to do something, they can work it out or be taught it, isn’t that the point of going to school? But, obviously, that isn’t going to happen soon, so I shall go back to copying and pasting content from a Pages document so that I have something to hand in tomorrow.

Edit: I have just looked at Edexcel’s exam spec. for IT and seen that they do, in fact, have topics that involve computer skills. Unfortunately, these aren’t the ones that my teachers picked.

Disclaimer: I am not saying that IT is a completely useless subject. I am sure IT is of use to many people, and it will appeal to many employers. What I am saying is that IT isn’t an advanced subject, doesn’t require knowledge of computers or an above-averge IQ.

My friend Luke would like to add: “I think IT is sh*t and a complete waste of all the time in the universe. In my opinion, it is pointless.”

Looking at my old theme made me think about how much I must’ve changed since I started blogging: I don’t know what on earth possessed me to put such an atrocious theme on this blog, along with such a rubbish header and introduction box. If I went onto a website that had my old theme installed on it, I would probably leave, yet somehow 15 (ish) year old me decided that it was wonderful. The blue colour that I used on the blog, is the colour that I have used ever since I’ve owned this domain, and for sentimental reasons (or something like that) I didn’t really want to let poor old #3399CC go. However, I think I’ve grown up enough to choose a theme on the basis of appearance and usability, rather than a colour.

Thinking about how odd my choice of theme seems to be now prompted me to read back on my old posts to see what they were like…. I think ‘not amazing’ would be a very kind way to describe them. I’m not saying that I am an amazing blogger now – by no means are my blog posts fantastically interesting – but at least I use proper grammar and don’t type in such an annoying manner. Honestly, who the hell puts ‘”cya” after every post and an exclamation mark at the end of almost every sentence. How I loathe younger me.

Perhaps I am being a little hard on myself. I think that many people my age will read back on something that they wrote a year or two ago and think: “why on Earth would I write that!?” Our younger selves are of a constant embarrassment, in fact, I’ll probably read back on this post in a few years and immediately think, “hypocrite.”

That’s all for now. To younger me: sorry for insulting you, but please, have better taste. To future me: try not to be too mean when you’re judging me. Cya.

I’m late posting a vlog to the blog again, what of it? Though, as I’m typing this post, I cannot remember very much of what I said in the video, so I’m not entirely sure what to write. I swear most of my blog posts are simply a stream of consciousness; I’ve no idea if this all makes sense. This video is just a completely random vlog, which I made because I haven’t done a video in a long time. Watch it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGbnZt-rtWw

Anyway, the point of this post is to say thank you. Thank you to Beth (@_BethRose) for putting up with me for all this time, for not giving up on me and always being there for me no matter how much of a pain in the arse I am! You have made the past year absolutely amazing and I can’t wait for more!

Oh, and you can read mine and Beth’s blog here.

Thought it was about time that I updated this blog! This was a vlog I did a little while ago about dreams and why we have them. It was quite interesting finding out about why we do it and what they could mean (and it was great finding out some quite odd theories that there are) so I actually ended up learning quite a bit while vlogging! I was thinking about doing more vlogs like this as I enjoyed doing it… I just completely lost my train of thought there and I thought I should just carry on typing regardless! Ah, yes, if you want to suggest something for me to find out about then feel free to comment on this post (or talk to me in some other way) and next time I do one of those vlogs I might answer your question! Anyway that’s all, I’ll do another post soon as there is another vlog that I’ve done (that you can watch here) so, yeah, bye!

http://scrobby.com/feed/

I filmed a vlog a couple of weeks ago, well, I filmed most of it, then towards the end my memory card ran out of space so I had to delete some footage (see where this is going yet?) and in the process of doing that I managed to delete my actual vlog. I did re-film it immediately afterwards, but then I didn’t have a chance to edit it for a little while, then Beth came down for a week and I would have felt rude making her sit there and watch while I edit the video down in my quite slow, OCD fashion. So then came today, I have a few hours before my Maths exam (hooray!) and so I thought it would be a good chance to edit. I hadn’t actually watched the footage back until now and watching it back I really don’t think it was quite up to scratch.

Fine, I could’ve edited it anyway so that you get to see a video, but I’ve done that before (my second vlog – The Musical Internet) and that video is always going to bug me, sitting there not being very good at all, and if I watched all of my videos then I’m sure I could find another! I’m not taking that video down, though, because I think that would be cheating: I chose to upload the video and even though I don’t like it, that’s something I made and it’s staying up there!

So instead you’re just going to have to wait for a video if you want one, or re-watch one of my old ones if you’re that desperate (though I doubt anyone is!) to see me. I will try and upload one soon, that’s all I’m going to say, I’m not going to tell you, as I have in the past, that I will make a video every single week as long as I may live, without fail, because we both know that’s not going to happen. What I will do, is make a video next time I have a good idea and my dad’s camera is available for me to use. I want to put things on YouTube that I can be proud of, I’m going to be the one who gets blamed if it’s awful because it’s my video, and I don’t wanna have another video that I would really like to take down.

Well there you have it, an excuse post, it’s not the first I’ve done, and I highly doubt it’ll be the last, I just felt I owe it to you to explain. Actually, I doubt anyone has even bothered to read this far, I can’t imagine this is the most interesting thing ever, and you’ve all got better things to do! If you’ve got anything to say then leave a comment, I like to read them. That’s all for now, bye!

Right click link and click ‘save as’ to download the video.

This is a video myself, @Gazman162 and @HisLittleEmoo made for our year’s leavers assembly. It was really fun to edit (even though it took 6 hours) and I’m pretty pleased with the result so I thought I’d share it with you all.

[Update] I had to remove the video from YouTube as it included copyrighted music and I wanted to monetize my videos. It is still available to download if you would like, or you can simply click on the link and watch it.

So, this is the first vlog I’ve done in a very long time (not far off 2 months!) and it’s quite a long one… I talked about a lot more things than what actually made it into the vlog because there was too much to fit in, and it ended up long enough as it is!

We also went Austrian bowling, which is a lot of fun, instead of having 10 pins there are 9, and they are arranged more like this:

This, as you may guess, makes it a lot harder to score a strike, and that’s not all that’s different. Instead of bowling individually like you would normally do when you go out with your friends, you bowl in teams against each other. On the first bowl that each person has, they use their strongest hand – in my case my right – to bowl, as you would normally. However in the second one we have to use the hand that isn’t our strongest – for me my left. We then had to go through a series of different ways to to it (including bowling it through your legs, bowling it whilst having your arms round someone else and bowling it under someone else)

Another notable difference is that if you get the ball in the gutter, or throw it over the string that’s at the start of the lane, you get a black mark on your head from a block of wax that has been melted on a candle. By the end of the evening some people looked a lot like Dalmatians. So if you ever get a chance to go Austrian bowling I would definitely recommend it!

Anyway, that’s all that’s really worth mentioning in this blog, I shall try and vlog more consistently (I know I say that a lot…) but I have got exams coming up very soon so if I don’t do it often over the next few weeks… SORRY! Anyway, hopefully see you next Monday. Byeeeeeee