Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I arrived at work at about 4ish (for my 4 start). Got a missed call at 4:03, by this time I was already in the crew room and got changed which is why I’m presuming I missed the call. I think they were getting worried. You see, Norm had already phoned in to say he wouldn’t be in as he was geniunely ill followed by Amanda phoning in at 3:55 to report an illness of the possibly less geniune type. She was at least the third person that phoned in sick. Worst of all, everyone was out for Craig’s birthday so nobody would come in cover. So on a Saturday when we should have had four people, we had two.

Luckily those two were myself and Neil, half of the Colton Mill all-star closing team. I did front counter close for the first time. You wouldn’t think you could close the counter of a restaurant based almost entirely on guess work but you’d be wrong. Indeed I didn’t think it was possible but with some help from Liz and even a bit from Neil I managed to struggle my way through. Go me.

We were out by 3am which is pretty impressive though we did have plenty of night staff due to pretty much everyone in the restaurant being asked to stay on so we had 2 people till midnight as well as another 3 till 10-11ish. It’s a rare treat to have night staff these days, at least in those sorts of numbers.

The maths is looking good too, 4-3 minus my break results in just over an 10 hour shift, 3 of which hours were on premium rate. I ran the numbers for my various debts and when all things such as my credit card are paid off (not that I have debt on my credit card, they just don’t take the money fast enough) I am about £350 into my overdraft. I don’t think that’s bad for almost the end of the university year but I’d like to try and work my way back up to zero.

I turned up to Debate Soc’s show debate with Amnesty International last night accompanied by Norm and Michelle. They were debating closing the borders to immigrants and it turned out to be an interesting debate. It’s quite a technical sport when you get into it, to quote el presidente Felicity who I was later discussing what we could do with the CU debate.

Afterwards we headed down to The Old Bar to be joined by a cast of other wacky characters. To name names, George, Kara, Phil and Sam. Phil managed to annoy the hell out of Sam as part of the impromptu “pick on Sam day” while Michelle continued her mission to get drunk without drinking alcohol. Admittedly it was much less successful than Monday.

I spent quite a bit of time postering various places yesterday. I hit Roger Stevens at 8:30 to get round before all the 9am lectures and managed to stick a poster up on pretty much all of the notice boards.

I then went to the property office and got permission to put them up in halls too so I then proceeded to go round Henry Price, Bodington and Leodis handing on posters to the site office to get them put up. Hopefully that should throw some decent promotion behind Rockology.

One of the problems I’ve had in situations involving music and being away from my desktop is I don’t have access to my entire music collection. Somehow the thought of dragging and dropping my entire collection in Windows only to have it say the network was interupted after it’s been copying for 30 hours and not tell me how far it’s got didn’t seem appealing.

Python to the rescue. I’ve knocked together a script which goes through my collection and copies it to another location. It seems to do it at a reasonable speed too, way faster than Windows seems to manage it. It scans though my collection and checks if it exists in the new location and if not, copies it over. To allow it to be interrupted it also checks existing files to make sure they are the same size so if a file was only half copied when the script was interrupted it will copy it back over again.

The only functionality I could do to add now would be to scan through the new collection and make sure files were in there that weren’t in the old collection (if for example they had been deleted or more usually, if they were moved as the new location would have been seen as new files and copied over by the script) and if so, delete them.

Yep, LUU has once again opened their ballot boxes reminding students that it “only takes two minutes.” Which of course it does if you want to make a very uninformed decision and therefore void the entire point of a democratic election. What is worse is you have to vote for the referendum, NUS elections and union council elections all at the same time so I was unable to vote for the ones I wanted to vote for while making an informed decision at a later date about the ones I had yet to research.

As for encouraging more people to vote – I’m against it. The fewer people vote, the more my vote counts for. The system already works – the people that care already vote and the people that don’t care, don’t vote. Why force people who don’t care to vote? It therefore does not represent the opinion of what people want because the people who actually care have less of a say in who is elected. Anyway, vote for Matt hippies!

How drunk was Michelle last night?

More to the point, how do you get that drunk without consuming any alcohol? Not that I’m complaining. We got the word out that we will be looking for strippers to work in our club next year when we convert the kitchen into such a venue. I also now have quite a good list of potential people to set up an arranged marriage with Michelle.

Last night was the final heat of Old Bar Idol before the final after Easter. Computing was represented once again, this time by Hootie who also became the second person to formally fill out an application form for the circle. Kieran and Matt seemed to have a good time too as the video and photos contained on mine and Norm’s phones respectively will testify to. It was great to see everyone having fun in the midst of the winter depression. Good turn out as well, we had around fifteen of us sitting in the group.

It was about ten minutes after we had got outside after work that I began explaining how I was doing my dissertation for my phyics degree on the phenomenon known as the Hasselhoff Recusion. For those not familiar with said phenomenon, observe…

(more…)

I stood at the back of the kitchen about 1am this morning and thought to myself “I really don’t want to have to come back here again tomorrow and do this all again.”

I felt better once I got outside but still, I grow tired of the constant flow of activity. I made the mistake of giving my body a few decent night’s sleep this week (due to me feeling ill on Wednesday and then my always highly ancipated Saturday morning lie in) and now it’s got a taste for metaphorical meat – it wants treating properly all the time now.

I look forward to Easter. I’m hoping I can resist the temptation to grab more shifts at work and sleep through msot if it as I could really use the rest. My metaphorically 24-7 lifestyle is starting to reflect that of those already caught in the rat race and it’s scaring me a little.

While I’m feeling the strain myself, I’m far from alone though. We recently seem to have been hit by a wave of doom that has been getting people down. The group doesn’t seem to be our sociable selves, lunch attendance numbers are poor and even when people do come, nobody eats or drinks anything.

We only had two organised lunches this week. Two! Indeed the only reason we had a second was because Norm sent a text asking if there was some lunch plans so I threw some together. Thursday there were two of us there, myself and Michelle. Two people! What is that about? Friday also saw lunch plans though I don’t class them as “organised” as Si simply asked “are we going to The Llama?” at like 2pm so we just grabbed whoever was in DEC-10 and headed down.

I suppose the failings of Monday and Tuesday could have been my doing. With Michelle not eating anything due to the Sports Ball and Kieran tiring of The Llama, there were no backup organisers to sort things out when I didn’t, which I didn’t due to general apathy (take that Si, you’re not the only one who can use apathy in a sentence :p).

I think everyone is currently tiring of life in general though. I’m feeling lots of unease and tention from the circle. I’m hoping Easter will cure this Winter solace (I know what the word solace means and that this sentence makes no sence I just think it’s a nice word to fit there providing that you completely ignore it’s actual meaning).

Maybe we are simply seeing things through jaded glasses. I mean, we’re still hitting The Old Bar quite a bit so it’s not like the social scene for the circle had died. It simply feels lackluster at the moment.

I think I’m going to expand on this topic at a later time. Unfortunately that means you’ll have to read more of this rambling crap at a later date. I’ll try and add some silly crap too to keep you entertained.

Yep, it’s already that time again. Here is my list for this year. The top 3 where placed there in some kind of order. The rest where just randomly placed. As you’ll notice I continue my quest to get Lara Croft back into a good rank. There are of course many, many fit females missed off my top 10 though I think my choices are fairly self evident to be good ones.

1. Lara Croft
2. Sarah Michelle Gellar
3. Carmen Electra
4. Charisma Carpenter
5. Michelle Branch
6. Christina Aguilera
7. Mary-Kate Olsen
8. Adriana Lima
9. Holly Valance
10. Jessica Alba

Jenny’s list consisted of a little more free thinking. In no real order…

1. Jessica Alba
2. Elisha Cuthbert
3. Kate Beckinsale
4. Monica Bellucci
5. Salma hayek
6. Sarah Michelle Gellar
7. Tera Patrick
8. Angeline Jolie
9. Avril Lavigne
10. Brittany Murphy

Ms Lavigne making an appearance is probably one of the most contraversal names on the list though I have to say I agree, now she has dropped she “sk8r boi” crap she looks great.

Feel free to add who you voted for in the comments so I can shoot down your list :p.

OMG it’s already March! I thought it weird I hadn’t blogged since the 28th until I realised the 28th was only Wednesday. I got quite a lot of sleep in after finishing GI on Wednesday night as I was feeling ill so I went to bed at 10:30. Then last night I went to speak to the debate society about the debate we want to hold with the Christian Union and then spent some time in The Old Bar.

Today I’ve got an SE24 group meeting which I’m not looking forward to as our project is going nowhere though Si assures me nobody elses is either. Once that’s done I’m done for the day sort of. I’m done with formal SoC stuff like lectures and labs so I just have several hours of running around doing other tasks as my to do list is now up to three pages. Fun.