Archive for October, 2008

Petrol prices

Monday, October 20th, 2008 | Life

Last night, I filled up for less than £1 a litre!

While many of you will probably remember the days back when it was like £0.90 a litre (and the really old of you may remember when it was like half what it is now – along with the switching on off BBC2, the second world war, etc 😉 ), this is the first time I have been able to get petrol for under £1 since I started paying for it.

I wonder if all the companies that put their prices up due to “fuel price increases” will be dropping them back down again, lol.

One Life is drawing in the crowds

Monday, October 20th, 2008 | Events, Humanism

Last Friday was the second session of One Life. Not having our guest speaker in to do the human needs session we re-arranged things a little and Norm delivered an excellent session on society and community. Sarann’s cooking and Sophie’s recipe were excellent as usual.

The real success of the evening though was the turn-out. We had no less than 17 people turn up in the end, we could hardly fit people in and this is after having moved from the Parkinson building to the union after campus security declared we couldn’t have the room the union had booked us after all because they wanted to close the building and go home.

As it happens this caused perhaps the best part of the evening though. I was chatting to Joel, male president of the Christian Union as he greeted people outside the union turning up to Ignite (previously known as Friday Night Live) and not really doing much greeting myself until over a dozen people turned up en masse 😀 .

There was also a great deal of discussion for hours in The Terrace afterwards too. All in all another fantastic success.

The Register on AdWords

Friday, October 17th, 2008 | Tech

Back in March The Register published a very interesting article taking a look at Google’s AdWords system and how it can often be unfair to inexperianced users.

I didn’t see it at the time but Google having just announced another bumper profit I got passed a link to it and it makes a very interesting read. I’ve used AdWords before, admittedly not for a few years so maybe the features weren’t in back then but they could well have been, and wasn’t aware of some of the features the article points out.

It’s been a bad day

Friday, October 17th, 2008 | Life

So my boss is trying to bully one of my colleagues into quitting. I mean, what are you supposed to do in that situation?

Not to mention the fact that it’s gone 1am and I’m still up working and I still have loads to do and as usual I have to be up early for work tomorrow. I hate going to bed because as soon as you close your eyes it’s the next morning, you feel awful because you were up all night working and you have to get up.

It’s a good job I don’t want to do anything but sit here and work I guess as it’s not like I have any space to move in my room as all my stuff is on the floor after my Ikea draws fell to pieces because all flat pack furniture is a pile of shit. I mean what the fuck are you supposed to do with a set of draws you can’t put items in? I’ll post some pictures of what happened when I get round to it.

I did manage to fit in a quick budget calculation over lunch to find out that even though we’re half way through the month I’m already massively over budget so any hope of having some money to go out with on my birthday is long gone.

And how the fuck did I reach 22 anyway?

Speed dating

Thursday, October 16th, 2008 | Friends, Life

While myself and Zoltan were sitting around in The Terrace last week, RAG came round selling tickets for speed dating and being tired of his moaning about being single I decided to sign him up, which of course meant I had to sign myself up as well.

After all, it’s a fantastic opportunity. 3 minutes to chat to 20 different people about A-Soc, what more could you ask for? I managed to get it into quite a few conversations and Zoltan even had a conversation about it with someone who had already talked to me so that was a nice little double team 😀 .

Less importantly (because let’s face it, it isn’t more importantly as I was going to start this paragraph with :p ) Zoltan seemed to have fun so everything worked out for the best. It was actually quite a lot of fun, you don’t really have time to get bored of someone or run out of things to say because you’re only there for a few minutes and you’re bound to find a few people you really have a good conversation with unless you’re an especially boring person. Plus it’s another thing to tick off my things to do before you die list.

This is His church

Thursday, October 16th, 2008 | Humanism

Tuesday saw the long awaited Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster at A-Soc. We got another fairly decent attendance, about 30 people or so turned up in the end I think. We got quite a few new members down again so hopefully they weren’t too freaked out that having been their first meeting 😀 .

The event itself went fairly well, it all seemed to happen so fast at the time though according to the time stamp on the camera it actually went on for about 40 minutes. The video will be up on YouTube as soon as a I get some free time to sort it.

We haven’t really had a post mortem discussion about it yet but it is definitely something that we want to repeat in the future.

You are winner

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 | Life

It’s finally happened. I finally beat everyone else to work.

Only by 2 minutes, Nick turned up with Tom just after I had arrived but never the less. Good job I didn’t turn up really early really, I was going to be in well before I actually made it in but a combination of having to load my car up with more stuff than I was expecting and increased traffic (which is probably what slowed everyone else down though) I was delayed somewhat.

I did however find Craig working drive thru at Oakwood which was a pleasant suprise. Apparently he hadn’t quite sobered up from last night yet, so he was in the right place for a recovery breakfast when he did. Good times.

Technical difficulties

Monday, October 13th, 2008 | Tech

I came to access the data partion of my hard drive yesterday and received a message informing me that my E: drive was not formatted and would I like to format it now?

Awwww, crap.

Having tried all the usual solutions I installed Partition Table Magic (having shelled out quite a bit for it) to fix everything. Which it didn’t. It did however mess with my partion table so that instead of booting off my main partition it now booted off the small media partition that you can use to play movies and such without booting up the full operating system.

So now I couldn’t get Windows to boot at all.

I downloaded GParted and booted into that with the LiveCD and managed to reset the flag so that it booted off the proper partition. But now the media center partition is visible for the first time and who knows what other damage has been done.

Still, I’ve got past the heart wrenching hours where I thought I was going to have to shell out for professional data recovery so things could be worse.

Late night sport

Monday, October 13th, 2008 | Distractions, Life

Having arrived late to the pub quiz due to technical difficulties I will later elaborate on, we headed up for some food and ended up sitting around in the car park when someone pulls out a rugby ball.

I’m going to be honest, playing rugby at half 11 on a Sunday night in a cark park isn’t were I thought my weekend would end up. Not that I’m complaining. We also got a game of football in and by the end of it, well, sport and computer scientists don’t mix. But it makes me feel slightly better about the amount of junk I eat so it all works out for the best in the end I guess.

Pro Life Through Pro Choice

Sunday, October 12th, 2008 | News, Religion & Politics

Following the initial meeting last Tuesday, the Pro Life Through Pro Choice campaign finally launched today. The campaign is to promote the idea that pro choice does not mean anti life (whereas those who traditionally describe themselves as pro life generally are anti choice) and that the abortion issue is a serious one which needs to be approached with an open mind.