Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Having met Joanna who works at the chaplaincy during Rationalist Week I decided to take her up on her invite to come down to Skeptics Anonymous on Friday. It basically consists of having lunch and sitting round chatting about religiously biased philosophical topics. There was quite an interesting range of people there, indeed there were quite a few Christians. As seems to be the way with these events, the audience generally seems to be slightly eccentric postgrads rather than undergrads.

The conversation mostly followed the lines of going round the circle with each person saying where they stand. As points came up we would then drift off and discuss a point more in depth. All in all it was a slightly strange but never the less fairly interesting event and I think I will probably drop by again.

Don’t forget gang, the clocks have just gone forward an hour. I found out this morning that my phone with it’s duel modes for standard time and daylight savings time is great except you have to actually tell it when you’re changing. So it’s just as difficult as just adjusting your time automatically. Interesting. Another time saving feature from Sony Ericsson.

The time gap explains why I’m getting in at 4am. That said I got in later than this last Sunday due to our mini roadtrip to Castleford. Not that we came straight home, we sat around outside talking for quite a while about a strange variety of topics. Kayleigh may not be as low as 8 people from work after all (don’t worry if you don’t get the context, this joke was not meant for you). Looks like I might be doing a 5 hour pattern tonight, need to be up early to go buy random stuff.

In an effort to expand our places of lunching, today’s destination was Walkabout. Due to everyone being rubbish the turnout was just myself and Michelle but that’s everyone else’s loss as it was really good. It’s only mildly more expensive than The Llama (£3.50 a meal and they are individually priced it’s not 2 for 1 so saves all the hassle of getting an even number of people) plus the drinks are cheaper than the union (only marginally more expensive than The Llama, cheaper for spirits).

I tried the chicken and chips basket meal which actually did come in a basket which was cool. They actually followed through on their Check 25 policy as well which I was quite impressed with given several places claim to use it but I clearly don’t look over 25. The sofas were quite decent although they went a little far back.

After lunch we headed up to the Brotherton Library (I had to show Michelle were it was) and on getting in there she found out she had to go to the Edward Boyle library so we then trecked down there at which point Michelle checked something out of the library for the first time. Only 3/5’s of the way through her degree.

The evening ended with a gathering in The Terrace. Again people are being rubbish, nobody else turned up until 8:20 at which point Adam arrived (who said in his text he would arrive at that time) with nobody else making an appearance for another 15-20 minutes. It’s really nice in The Terrace at the moment as they aren’t blasting out music and it’s nice and quiet over Easter. I’ve always liked The Terrace when it’s like that so I think I’ll be making full use out of it over the next few weeks.

“Come back to mine and I’ll show you my pretty underwear” Kat says to Norm.

It’s fill in your own context as usual.

Wednesday night was chilli night up at Bodington hosted by Maths Chris accompanied by his rice cooking assistant B. We made three seperate ones, a totally plain no chilli one, a mild one and a really, really strong one. While several people chowed down on the latter, Michelle somehow found the one which didn’t actually have any chilli in and therefore in no way could it be hot, too hot for her tastes. That girl amuses me.

All in all I was quite impressed. Given I don’t actually like chilli (or rice for that matter) I actually quite enjoyed dinner. And it puts me the cost of a meal closer to getting an overpowered sound system so everybody wins.

Everyone loves open source. Everyone being most of the hippies in SoC. Many people don’t. But that is besides the point. It’s being hailed as the next great shift or whatever, many people argue that everything should be open source. I recently ran into a major problem while thinking about this model however.

The bottom line is, proprietary software makes more money than open source. Yes you can sell support licences on top of that, it’s seperate from the product and indeed even Microsoft sell support licences on top of their proprietary products. It doesn’t make the money. Selling the software makes the money. And you can’t do this effectively with GPL open source.

So what, the corporations are just generating huge profits and can lose a bit of money anyway right? Well, take for example office software. Microsoft put $6,000,000,000 into research and development. That’s not just for office but that’s a massive figure - six billion dollars per year go into R&D. That is money spent on making their product better.

Do you think OpenOffice.org are putting those kind of resources in? Of course not, they don’t have those kind of resources. What OpenOffice.org have done is produced a clone, a bad clone, of MS Office. But without the money invested into R&D by Microsoft they wouldn’t have a fantastic office suite to make a clone of. They rely on the investment made by Microsoft in order to clone it for their open source version.

If everything was open source, who is going to be providing these kind of resources?

At 9pm I rolled out of a 3 hour non-stop A-Soc meeting to plan Rationalist Week. With it being less than four weeks away we’re really getting into the swing of things. I now have a whole new to-do list on top of my regular to-do list of things that need sorting out for the week and we’re busily working away on posters, leaflets and a whole host of other material in preparation.

If we can pull it off it’s literally going to be amazing. Given that we have such a small active member base compared with the other societies (Christian Union, ISOC and JSoc are some of the biggest societies on campus) it will be a fantastic achievement and a true credit to all involved.

It was Sunday night close. Martin (store manager) was back from his holiday in the morning so the close had to be spotless. I lift up the bin to empty the grease traps into the main bin and, disaster. I drop the bin. Nooooooo! It’s all happening again. Last time I coated the koral in grease we were there till 5am. What’s worse is Becky is stressed out so I need to deal with this before she notices.

Luckily, myself being “Chris Worfolk of the great grease trap disaster of 2006″ (which I can now confidently claim as my title given we’re now in 2007 and nobody managed to outdo me in the final few months of the year nor had anyone previously outdone me) I had a fair clue what to do. Scrap the little 1 litre spray bottles of bottles of diluted degreaser. 4 litre bottle of undiluted heavy duty degreaser poured straight on for the win. 20 minutes later and all was good again.

We actually got out just before 3:30 which I didn’t think was too bad given it was such an ace close (everything got done). We then headed over to Texaco for a sandwhich but on finding it closed we went on a mini-road trip to Castleford to the Shell 24 hour garage. They were selling two bottles of 500ml coke for £1.40 which I thought was impressive. They are £1.20 in the union which should in theory be nice and cheap compared with a 24 hour garage in which everything is usually at least twice the price it is in shops that open sensible hours.

I ended up getting to bed about 5:50 and slept until late afternoon on Monday getting up just in time to inform my parents I wanted feeding. I managed to get a lift back into town after dinner as my parents were driving in to go see Rocky Horror Picture Show (and indeed dressed up for the occasion) and soon found myself heading out to the Royal Park Pub. As a venue it sucked as always but the company was good. This was followed by food, debate and then sleep (which will be taking place as soon as I have posted this - so long).

By the way, last night’s closing song was Baby One More Time.

Saturday started off with a good old fashioned fairy cake baking session at Michelle’s. It’s been literally about seven years since I’ve done any baking and safe to say my baking skills have slipped a little but anyways. We hit The Old Bar at 7, 8ish where Maths Chris, Norm, Kieran and Matt had been drinking Guinness for several hours in order to collect badges and hats. B got the pleasure of sitting around watching them though because Maths Chris was observing his tradition of breaking lent for St. Patrick’s Day, B and Michelle saw this as a good excuse to start drinking.

Myself, Michelle, Maths Chris, B and Norm headed into Wendy at about 10:30 with Kara promising to join us soon. Predictably she decided to bail on us and go home with Si though. Luckily Sarann and Kat showed up for a bit to keep numbers up. Most people ended up bailing at 1:20, Michelle lasted an extra 10 minutes.

One thing I did find out last night was that orange juice is well cheap in Stylus. I ordered a pint which is £1.50 in The Old Bar but only got charged £1. I thought I might have been under-charged but apparently not as I ordered a second one and it was the same price. Not bad at all.

I discovered today that Si did indeed break my laptop.

Recently it had started blue screening whenever Si touched it. If the reason why is what I think it is, then Si did indeed break it. I found that one of the two clips that holds the battery in place on the laptop has unlocked (it was locked before I gave it to Si). So the battery could half slide out which would be consistent with the theory that the problems were caused by loss of power from the battery. Could Si be the next Craig in training?