The Diary Of John
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy? - Gandhi
Saturday, October 09, 2004

Struggling..

I'm struggling here to stay awake, there is nothing more boring than having to give exams to students. 90 mins of boredom even with a book or two to read. Thanksfully these are my last ones for a couple of weeks lol. I was going to correct them now but they cant find the correction key anywhere here so i'll end up doing them in Planaltina later on. Hopefully all of my students will pass so i dont have to give any extra reinforcement classes as its impossible for me to get here on any day apart from Saturdays

I think we will go to see Resident Evil 2 either mon or tuesday depending on whether we are going to visit the farm or not. I cant wait to see what nemesis looks like in the film. Also we wanna see Annaconda 2 just for a laugh. I think it shouldnt be too bad a film as the special effects in the first one were quite good, just Jon Voights slightly crazy french accent was a little wierd lol. The website for Res Evil is quite cool although takes a while to load as its got games and all sorts of stuff to mess with, best only if you have dsl etc.

I guess i had better go make sure they have all of my stuff ready for the exams now or the students will get here and god knows what stuff will crack off. plus i wanna call roberta too before her exam today to wish her good luck :-)

posted at 11:34 AM by john |  

Friday, October 08, 2004

Bull!!

Man this gets worse and worse, Now this Bigley has died from no fault but his own apparently they are going to blame Tony blair for it. did Blair make this idiot go chasing after the tax free dollars? Blair hold a gun to his head? Lets face it this guy knew what he was doing, took the gamble and had to pay the price and there is only one person to blame for all of that.. Kenneth Bigley. Just as two people threatened to shoot me here when i refused to give them my stuff when i made that choice so did he. Yeah, i'm still here in Brasil too which again is my choice. Roberta and me will stay and live here, our choice. Or shall i say its Tony blairs fault that i choose to live here? For people to blame Blair is just god-damned crazy, after all Bigley had all the info before he went there and knew the dangers and, well we know the rest. The best PM we have had in a long time and people still wanna blame him for Iraq, it was already a mess long before the troops went it to the country. They had all sorts of crazy stuff going on there, their own dictator leader was testing poison gas out on his own countrymen and someone had to take him down, who cares about whether there were any WMD. I cant see that Conservative poofter going to war to save those children who got gassed by Saddam, then again he cant even control his own political party, just chews over Iraq over and over again because he cant fault the PM with anything else. Maybe they should stop doing what Thatcher thinks is best. After all she screwed up the UK completely in her years of destruction. Plus now we find her son was apparently fianancing some sort of coup in Africa. Man can it get any worse? lol

posted at 6:12 PM by john |  

Manny..



Everyone meet my friend Gayle from Manny in the UK. If you dont know where Manny is then tough as i aint going to tell you hehehe! I dont remember how long we've known each other now, years i guess lol. We used to host chatrooms in Msn back in the time before Msn closed the UK chatrooms in order to protect chat users (well so they said anyway). Man it was a crazy time then, i think everyone from the chatroom we used must have lived online, messenger was always lit up with people chatting, but now most people have moved on i guess and found other things. The old community is still out there somewhere in Msn groups i think, i'll have to drop by and see if i can find it again. I wonder where everyone has all got to? Shame they closed Msnchat in the UK as there used to be thousands of people on it. Alot of us also tried out IRC too, there was a new room called Congos but Irc meant people had to use Mirc or another type of program and i think it got too complex for most people to experiment with. Maybe they all decided to go blogging like me lol. One day i'll get to catch up with some of them i guess, i changed my messenger though which doesnt help. I dont think my old log name works anymore either. I'll try it one day and see lol.
posted at 4:25 PM by john |  

Bigley..

Well it looks like they killed Kenneth Bigley, its all over the internet saying hes gone. Its sad really but at the same time people know the dangers of going to work in Iraq and are drawn there mainly by money as i read that they get paid well over the going rate to take jobs in Iraq. Its tax free in alot of cases too according to Newsweek. It says that when he was asked by the Iraqi neighbors of his if he was bothered about the violence he replied "I'm not afraid. You only die once". Sad then to see him on the TV begging for his life and accusing people of not doing enough to save him, maybe he should have thought about this when he was chasing all that tax free cash :-(

"Tony Blair is lying, he is lying when he said he's negotiated. He has not negotiated. My life is cheap. He doesn't care about me," Apparently more of his words but to be honest although he is dead really he should have stayed at home thinking of his family instead of chasing the cash. Now theres just misery, they cant even claim his life insurance i would think. As for blaming Tony blair, well Blair didnt make him go there right and i'm sure he must have been warned many times about the danger to his life. After all when i came to Brasil 3yrs ago i was warned well in advance about Rio and listened to the advice i was given and maybe he should have listened too.Sad thing though must be that people remembered him saying he wasnt afraid only to then see him grovelling on the floor, didnt see the Americans doing that, obviously they had some self respect and dignity. Now all thats left is the sadness of his family. Probably sounds a bit hard as i'm British saying some of these things but i guess this is what happens when you let greed get the better of you!!

posted at 10:26 AM by john |  

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Poster..

I´ve just finished typing up the poems my students created and printed them off ready to go onto the poster Roberta is going to design for them and then i can put it up on the wall in CCAA. I was showing some of the teachers here some of the poems and they liked them alot, it just goes to show that i have some very talented students in my groups :-). Who knows maybe some of the other students from the other groups may wanna write a poem to add to the poster too? you never know eh?

Its another hot day here, well its always hot but these last fews days have been really hot. Thank god for air conditioning lol. I have two days off for holidays next week though which is nice :-) I'll probably go to see Resident Evil 2 with Roberta one day and maybe visit her farm the other, not sure yet. I watched Dawn of the dead on dvd last night, its different from the original but still an excellent film. I watched a bit of it with my students yesterday night just to pass some time as we were advanced in the schedule, i like to show clips and stuff with my MEC students if i can as its good practice for their ears as well as having some fun watching a film too ;-) I got a copy of Alien Vs Predator on svcd too, it'll be nice for Robertas cousin to watch as she isnt old enough to get into the cinema to see it. the subtitles are in german but not to worry she can still watch it. It plays just fine in my dvd player, theres just one part where someone walks to their seat but the rest of the film is excellent :-) I watched it at the cinema with Roberta first as i love seeing films on the big screen so it doesnt bother me watching it now on the small screen.

My newsweek just arrived at the school and there is an interesting piece about neurofeedback video games. I might check it out online later just to see what its all about. The good think about Newsweek is that its always got something interesting to read in it. They talk about a game called The journey to the wild divine, some sort of interactive game/program. I'm here at the website now and it looks quite interesting, $160 price tag too lol. Hmmm the pcs here at the school probably wouldnt be powerful enough to run it anyway hehe! I'll read up on it later on, it will give me something to do ;-)

I'm getting hungry here, i think i will go raid the fridge and stuff my face for a while lol..

posted at 8:20 AM by john |  

Bullshit..

Dont you just get tired of hearing people saying that music downloads have cost the music industry billions of dollars etc? The truth is that they were losing lots of money well before downloading became popular. Newsweek did a great review on how the music industry got it all wrong, concentrating on a few big sellers and losing ground to the internet because they ignored it and even tried to kill such things as internet radio so they could keep their internet challenged business models up and running. Now yet another story appears on the internet as the British music industry decides to try to make money by suing fans who download saying that it will help to increase their profits etc. What kind of babbling bullshit it this? So lets just get this right, first they screw up their businesses, then they target fans weho cant get enough of their favorite music and hav e to resort to downloading it from the net, then even though they know they fucked up big time they decide to sue fans, the very same fans they have been miserably failing for years. I'm sure that once it hits the newspapers in the UK they are targetting 10yr old girls who shared a few songs for thousands of pounds they will regret all the bad publicity etc that will appear everywhere. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), should be called The Big Prick Industry if u ask me!! As much as they rave about Apple and Napster selling songs it wont stop people using the internet to get free stuff, they should have done something positive a long time ago and set up good stuff that fans would wanna pay to use online but no they just wanted to kill it off and concentrate on digging up the dosh for their next Britney, when are these guys every going to learn. I can see the time coming when everything will be encrypted and private networks where people share stuff underground giving birth to all sorts of stuff being trafficed around with no one knowing what it is. Still its got to be good for the rest of us as one it'll shake up the music industry more and more as they lose more and more cash (but then they made millions from all of us anyway, right?) and all the new technology that gets created to hide what we do online will result in more privacy for all of us. You could say that the music industry is actually fueling programs like Grokster and Kazaa, we should all send them emails thanking them shouldnt we? hahaha!! Anyway the story about the The British Phonographic Industrys stupid games is below if you wanna read it.. i love the part about how suing 12yr old girls resulted in the recovery of the American music industry, yeah guys you carry on believing that!

Cyber Theft: Music Fans Face Clampdown

Music fans who download their favourite tracks on the internet for free are facing the threat of legal action.The music industry says illegal file-sharing websites have hit their profits hard and they have no choice.

The record business says it has experienced a 22% drop in sales worldwide, and a 50% dive in the sale of UK singles.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is to pursue legal action against people who make their music collection available on the internet, illegally, for other web users to share.

It wants to target a hardcore 15% responsible for 75% of all illegal file-sharing on the internet.

Lawyers for the phonographic industry say there is no excuse for downloading tracks illegally - as more than two-and-a-quarter-million have been bought legally on quality music sites set up by Napster and Apple.

The move, targeting sites like Grokster and Kazaa, comes after court action in the US resulted in a recovery in the record industry there.

Last year, a 12-year-old schoolgirl from New York paid £13,000 as an out-of-court settlement. She had been one of 261 Americans sued for downloading songs.

The BPI announced in March that it planned to take action and has since sent hundreds of thousands of instant internet messages to people, warning file-sharers they were being watched.

But the messages have not deterred the most prolific offenders, the BPI says.

posted at 7:49 AM by john |  

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Photo time..



Okay here we go, finally a photo with me in it lol. I'll add another one tomorrow when i get a minute free to edit the original as its a huge photo. So this is my MEC1 group here, from the left Theres Elejohn, Me, Olga & Jesiel.
posted at 5:45 PM by john |  

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

St Helens..



A pic of Mount St. Helens taken from a plane flying over the crater.

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