Archive for April, 2007

Something strange is going on. My laptop thought it was May. This might be something to do with the time syncronisation as the same thing happened with my desktop. Strange.

Anyway, I last blogged on Thursday morning. Afterwards I went home and slept before getting up ready for my next all-nighter on SE24. In between getting up and coding I went down to a nice French restaurant in town which I haven’t a hope of spelling for dinner. I wore a shirt and everything, how fancy is that? It was well expensive although the food was fairly nice (not amazing though).

I then spent the night in Eniac and we finally got it finished about 8:30 or something and then headed off to lectures. I finally got to bed just after 3. That evening I crawled out of bed at about 10:30, went to the pub for a few hours and then crawled back into bed and slept some more. It was a facinating insight into what B’s life must be like :D. It’s a really good system to be honest, I might have to try it on a more regular basis.

It’s well past 8 am and I’m still in DEC-10. Myself, Gaz and Kieran have just spent all night working on GI21 coursework 2 which is due in, in about 37 minutes. Fortunately I’ve now submitted my coursework so I don’t have to worry about it anymore. Time to go home and get some sleep before tonight’s all nighter on SE24 I think.

Today (or rather yesterday by now) was the Atheist Society EGM in which we approved a number of constitutional changes. Nobody bothered to read the new constitution though so the change of aims to “world domination” went unnoticed even if I failed to push through a change of name to World Domination Soc.

On a serious note, we’ve made some important changes today. We’ve expanded the committee to a total of 7 people (4 of which places are actually filled lol) as well as making some other key changes, making sure we got nominated for a few Riley awards and planned out the events were are going to round off the year with.

Congratulations to Norm on his election as secretary and Sarann on her election as social sec. It’s been a long and hard race for election and all the candidates have been desperately battling it out to get the votes they need but in the end these two simply led the best campaign trail. It’s the little things like nominating yourself for election which really show through.

Since then I’ve been coding away in DEC-10 on my graphics coursework which is due in on Thursday. I’m finally getting somewhere with it though I think I am going to have to drag my ass out of bed tomorrow morning and go speak to my lecturer to get some issues I’m having with it, resolved. I have it down to a to do list though which is always a sign that you’ve reached the final stage. That said, “the final stage” in this coursework is the hard bit.

I had my 8 month performance review at work yesterday. It’s depressing to think I’ve worked there for 8 months already but on the plus side I scored another 5 (aka “outstanding”). Suck on that Neil. More importantly though Martin told me to start the application process to get promoted to Training Squad.

It’s ironic really that such a promotion is going to look fantastic on my CV especially when I word it as “I am responsible for staff training in the restaurant and upkeep of procedures” given that my CV is a document I hope never to have to use again. But at least on the short term it will result in a bit more money (providing they get it through before I hit 21, which is again depressing).

I’ve just compiled my exam timetable and it’s not nice. I have exams on the Tuesday and Friday of the first week and then the Tuesday, Thursday and Friday of the second week. 4 out of my 6 exams are in the morning and get this – I have an exam on 1 June, the very last day of the three week exam period. Nobody else I know in computing has any exams that late.

Even more annoying is the fact that I have an exam on the morning of Thursday 24th. Which is really bad timing given I have an all-night party to go to on the night before. I’m not amused.

4 days without blogging, you can tell I’ve been busy!

Thursday resulted in another day of the tent being packed out when the talks were on. Then in the evening was the debate with the Christian Union. As of course we were always going to, we lost of the vote, but most people seemed to be saying that if they weren’t voting just because they were CU and not A-Soc (of which we had around 5 members there lol) they thought we put the better debate forward.

Afterwards we headed down to The Old Bar till kick out time and discussed some more theology. Plus it was great to catch up with loads of CU members that I haven’t chatted to in ages.

Friday was a bit down because of the weather but we still got some people in for the talks and continued it throughout the day into the all night debate which went really well. We ended up serving well over 100 hotdogs as well as loads of drinks and biscuits and chatting to lots of people and shifting a lot of leaflets. It was a long day though. Having been up at 8 to finish off some coursework we stopped serving at about 3:30 then finished packing up at 6:30 and then went for breakfast and camped out HSS so we could return the generator. I ended up getting to bed at 9am – 25 hour day.

I slept most of Saturday and then got up in the evening to go to the pub for my dad’s pre-birthday drinks (old people can’t do mid-week drinking sessions so we had to move it to the weekend before). After that I headed to Wendy which was an interesting but short night (I gave up at 1 and went to get some sleep). B made a move on Sarann this time and Norm managed to get photographic evidence too.

All in all, Rationalist Week was a massive success and it’s all down to the amazing amount of work put in by Norm, Rich, Paul, Moz and Claire that the society will be forever indebted to. You guys will be going down in A-Soc history.

Rationalist Week is going so well! Today for our 2pm talk we had a full tent. A full tent! All the seats were taken, standing room only. It’s been getting steadily busier as the week has gone on and more and more people are coming down for some good old fashioned debate as well as some free biscuits of course :).

It’s doing a lot for the society too. We finished an entire membership booklet today! I had to run up to the Arc and pick up a new one just so we could continue to sign people up. We also have a lot of what has been done on camera so we will have able to make an excellent freshers intro video for next year, it’s amazing how it’s all clicking into place.

What is most amazing is how well it has pulled the society together. Norm has been absolutely indespensible and it’s safe to say the week couldn’t have happened without him. Rich, Paul, Moz and Claire have also invested lots of time too, not to mention everyone who has just come and sat round and joined in the debates.

After the week is over I look forward to building on the fantastic success that the week has brought to the society. Let’s just hope the success of the week continues for the remaining few days!

Sunday was setup day. We got the tents up without much problems and managed to test things without a hitch and indeed the generator actually ran which was awesome. Indeed worryingly few things went wrong. Not that everything went perfect, I lost a microphone clip (which I’ve now found) and we had some problems getting the generator to output power until we realised it was and we just couldn’t see that the LEDs were actually on.

Monday was an interesting daym the generator failed on us so we couldn’t do much although we got both of the talks done and got quite a few interesting people through. We also signed up another three people to the society. Then in the evening we headed to The Old Bar and then onto Bondi but that is a story for a seperate post.

Tuesday we were supposed to get a replacement generator – it never arrived. We’ve been promised it tomorrow. Signed up another two society members and got a big debate going – Rich’s talk on evolution went down really well and sparked a long debate of which we have about an hour of on video. The Beauty in Atheism talk didn’t get done in the end as I didn’t feel it was worth doing given the audience size and lack of a PA system to project it to people outside the tent. I have my big Why There Is Almost Certainly No God speech in like an hour. Eeppp.

Happy Gilmore on DVD for £2.97 – that is what I’m talking about.

Anyway, yeah, I made it! Came down ill that day and only just hauled my ass into work but I got through it eventually. Long night though, didn’t start feeling alright until I had finished work and I’m still not feeling great now. Now I just have to survive till payday.

It’s here! Yay!

Before I start, yeah! I well only have one more close to do. Tomorrow is day nine baby. Then the real world begins lol. Anyway yeah, back to my story, it’s here! My PA system has finally arrived. I only had a very brief period to set it up and play with it but it’s awesome. I woke up this morning (late) to find it filling up most of my hallway. Photos will follow once I can get decent ones but at the moment it’s all crammed in my room so I have no floor space left.

The speakers are massive, probably bigger than the ones I ordered (they upgraded me to these for free because they couldn’t get hold of the ones I wanted), it seems to go fairly loud though my dad was dubious (this was with 4 of the 6 volume settings on like 50% though so it can go a lot louder than what we got it). It sucks that it’s 4am now as I can’t really start belting out music on them :D.

I got dragged away from playing with the kid to go back to uni though. I had to meet Paul who delivered some more stuff before I headed off to Roger Stevens to plaster every single lecture theatre and then headed down to media services to pick up the posters which was a bit worrying when they couldn’t find them but I was later informed that Claire had already picked them up.

Work was a fairly late one tonight, we got out at like 2:45 and headed down to Tesco. I really miss the post-work Tesco visits, I probably won’t get another one for a while given that they aren’t open Saturday or Sunday nights which is the shifts I work during term time. Anyways, I need to sleep so I can get up early, pick up the generator and fiddle around with the kit for a few hours before heading off for my final shift of Easter. So long.