This month ending and the other one coming soon I will be dealing with final exams which started on Saturday with the English one where I shined. On Friday I hope I'll shine again on literature, but it sounds a little bit difficult.

Glad people remembered this topic.

@Afrim, well done on the exams, I admit when it gets to this time of year I still always feel a little odd for not! having either exams or some massive piece of work to hand in, sinse it was such a common occurrence for so much of my life.

@Trenton, I'm still not exactly sure what this Gopher thing is for.I get it's some sort of site network or social network or something else using some gnarly software, but I'm a tad confused as to what it's purpose is and I'm afraid the link you provided wasn't too illuminating on the subject sinse it said nullhost 1 a huge amount and something about tilda town but there didn't seem to be much actual content.

@Soul keeper, a guide for Kerkerkruip 9 would be good, I had no trouble with version 8 but for some reason version 9 seems much harder. Then again, I don't know how soon victor will have version 10 out and there are some distinct planned changes there especially in making combat maneuvers a little more useful plus adding more rogues.

As for me, I'm not exactly exerting myself at the moment, pretty much continuing with Buffy and messing with several games, nominally for db reasons but also just for fun, I had a good time with audio defense yesterday and I keep having the odd pop at beat star. I've alsoo been reading through someone's blog about rewatching Startrek tng and his thoughts, and sinse he's a major trek author it's an interesting business, although like most reviewers I like to read I don't always agree I find the reasons he disagrees with me worth reading.

At the moment I'm half way through C freidman's Black sun rising, which is a very odd combination of amazingly good and shockingly cliched. It's set on a human colony world which has a natural field called Fey that produces affects like magic including accellerated evolution and unguarded thoughts or desires summoning certain things. There's a church who are bent on restoring old earth science, and sorcerers who use the force of the fey to do various things.

It's a truly unique mix of sf and fantasy elements and some of the writing is great.

Unfortunately however it  often really blunders into the sensational, the prologue was all about a woman who spent the entire time talking about her great and wonderful and tallented and handsome and oh so devoted husband who she loved so much, ---- really it was kind of a relief when she got sacrificed! .

Likewise, the main female character spends all her time being a huge great galumfing damsle, and one of the principle male characters is a semi immortal sorcerer who preys on people's vulnerability to stay alive, ---- well I say people, what I really mean is attractive young maidens!

Then again, the other principle male character is a sorcerer priest who is genuinely fascinating, and the alliances between him and the evil (or at least rather amoral),  dracula style sorcerer (he's even a count), are quite unique, as is the world and the  hints of forces that threaten it.

I particularly like for example the idea that the world's principle native species only developed sentience  because one of the original colony surveyers, not realizing how the fey worked did lots of evolutionary studdies and predicted that they would've evolved into a human like species!

So, a real mixed bag, I'm definitely going to write a full review for fantasybookreview.co.uk when I'm done, though I will probably have a break before going on to the rest of the trilogy sinse freidman's writing does get a bit fullsome.

Oh, and yesterday i finally setup the wireless bit on my victor stream  so I can use podcasts and internet radio hurrah! having to use the humanware companion software to transfer podcast feed urls onto the stream is okay, sinse it's a one button press thing, plus it does seem that the victor can take a number of feed types, rss, xml etc which is handy.

@Dark
I've been studying a lot these days but I'm still not getting tired of it. I still love this school, all the staff whom I had to do with these three years, and both me and them keep saying that we will miss each other, since when I enrolled at that school they were extremely amazed how could I learn and organize my opinions and thoughts. Being only a blind student at that school, they paid me a lot of respect which I didn't really think of in the very first days there.
Another unsatisfying thing which I've been going through these two weeks was whether they would allow me use my laptop in final exams or not, since I will have to deal with four final exams which have a writing section in the end. The problem was that I was not using a test written in an electronic form, but that was a usual paper containing 25 questions and the last one was a writing section, which certainly needs to have a method of writing by me, because I don't think any person in this world in the modern days can write an essay on the spot.
After I wrote it in Microsoft word, my teacher assistant wrote it back on the paper and that was well done. I think I'll get at least 97 out of 100 points.
The English exam was too easy for me.

@Afrim, I certainly didn't mean being tired of studdying. I loved my secondary school (well at least the decent place where I did my a levels between 16-18), and would gladly go back there. Like you they didn't want a blind student, were in fact very obstructive (they attempted to refuse me studdying English literature with the excuse there weren't enough chairs), yet things worked out amazingly, I met some great friends, had an awsome time (including learning how to play poker), and in fact later recieved virtually an appology.

Then again, exams are one thing I do not miss .

I'm a little confused what you mean about "A writing section" several of the subjects I took such as religious studdies (in effect religious philosophy), general studdies and history required writing of essay questions during the exams, (not to mention when I got to university), which I did on a laptop in microsoft word. I had a portable printer and so just printed the thing out, and got my teaching assistant to check all pages had printed correctly. That's part of the reason I had the laptop and indeed the portable printer in the first place.

@Soul keeper I do keep meaning to try Empire assuming the nasty experience I had with the game's developer was a fluke (see the empire mud topic for details), it looked an awsome game, which was why it irritated me I couldn't find any space to begin building my empire. It probably even needs a db page at some point sinse it has some great screen reader adaptations such as the textual scan.

As to C friedman, well a friend of mine recommended her books to me and suggested the coldfire trilogy. As I said thus far it's something of a mixed blessing but an interesting one all the same. Interestingly enough it is one of the few occasions I had to stop a book and restart it, sinse I started the book back in March then got that bloody annoying flue infection and just found Friedman's overblown prose and intricate world weren't want I wanted while feeling utterly dead, so had to stop an hour in, which also meant I had the annoying stepford wife from the prologue twice, but at least the second time around I could look forward to her getting a gory death for being such an annoyingly sterriotypical person .

it's actually a little odd doing Buffy and Coldfire at the same time sinse they're strengths are almost diametrically opposite. Buffy has witty dialogue, great characters including some awsome ladies, but the world, magic and general fantasy elements are mostly pretty stock, while Coldfire has only a few more complex characters, skirts rather too close to sterriotypes in places, but has a really fascinating world.

@Trenton, that answers what Gopher space isfrom a technical standpoint, but I'm still a little unclear exactly what the point is or why I would want to use the thing. In fairness I felt exactly the same way about bbs, and indeed the only time I tried bbs was first one called gameszone and later of course nerbbs.com, and that was for, as you might guess the chance to play lots of cool games like usurper and tradewars . 

Is Gopher space just a tech for tech's sake thing? or is there more of a tangible point.

Ah afrim that makes sense. My biology exams were all single answer questions, as were certain parts of the general studdies exam.

I will say not all of secondary school was fun, the less said about the shithole I went to between 11 and 15 where I did my gcsee qualifications the better. i'll also say that the fun didn't stop for me when I finished secondary school either, sinse the time doing my degree was likely the best I've ever had.

Well,

Coming back from a memorial day dinner, it was country style ribs, baked beans, and patata salad, at least for me.

Now, as for trying to explain what Gopher Space is like, have a look and listen to a Gophermap HowTo podcast by a "hacker/coder" who calls himself "DeepGeek," who can explain what Gophers can be used for "way" better than I can. I can "definitely" tell ya though with my own words, that a "Gophermap," is similar to an "HTML" file, though writing gophermap pages, is "way!" more easier than writing HTML files, do to how they are structured.
Additionally, have a listen/read to DeepGeek's Gopher History , which should explain how useful they are, and gives more insight in how they were used back in the day.