Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Finally, one of the major corporations has had a good idea. The problem for the big established companies is that all the new start-ups have the good ideas and so being unable to complete on innovation, companies such as Yahoo and Google are forced to buy out all the start-ups in order to get their hands on some fresh thinking.

Noticing this Yahoo are launching a new division of their company named Yahoo Brickhouse which will attempt to replicate the innovation culture found in the small start-ups. Whether it will actually work is a whole different matter but I’ll be very interested to see if it does.

Had my second session yesterday. A full two hours two. They mixed us in with everyone else so a lot of it was guess work. It was really tiring and my muscles are not feeling their greatest though it’s not as bad as I was expecting, they just seem to be aching a bit. That said, I haven’t really got out of bed yet.

They were teaching the beginners a new pattern yesterday but the problem with that is that some of us were also learning other new stuff – like punches for example. We also did this thing where there were like eighteen stations and you moved round them doing various things. Which is fine except we didn’t know most of the stuff and also had to hold the pads while the blackbelts knocked us several feet back with a single palm strike.

Afterwards I headed over to the Christian Union tent for the final night of Mission Week. They had a guy in who used to be a terrorist in Nothern Ireland and then became a Christian in prison. I found it interesting though maybe a little odd that he came out of what was basically a religious conflict (though I know many people would argue differently) because of religion.

I then headed over to the Quilted Llama for the drinking session (the one I organised and then turned up very late to given I was delayed at the CU deal – the talk was late as they blew the generator) to which Kieran, Heather (yes you missed her – that will teach you to go running off to London), Matt, Kat, Norm, Sophie and Verity turned up to. We ended up leaving at around 10:30ish though because they were closing early. I finally got dinner at like midnight though.

Some would say running two socities, holding down three jobs, running an online business and trying to hold together some sort of social life doesn’t leave much time for you to fail your degree. Yet somehow I’m finding the time. I wandered down to get my exam results this afternoon to find I had failed AI22. As in, the entire module. That well sucks. I was expecting to have failed the exam but my coursework wasn’t that bad. If only they carried equal weighting.

As for my other results I managed a 45 in AI21, 57-58 or something in DB21, 68 in SY21 and 72 in my SE20 double module. So they leave a lot to be desired. If I can resit AI22 and actually make a decent go at it then it should pull my grade average back up to something respectable though.

This semester doesn’t look too promising though. SE24 is going to be a total headache and SY23 and IS23, being the same module and both very vague and so the exams are probably going to be ones in which the BSing wafflers thrive so putting in the work isn’t necessarily a path to success.

I finally have VNC working! After months, probably years of trying to configure it to work with my Linksys network equipment I have finally got it working. Now I can easily VNC into my desktop from my laptop – this means that I will never have to get off my bed and walk all the way over to my computer to answer that MSN message or change my music again :D.

Also I finally gave in and added a blog to Worfolk Online. It will mainly be used for reporting site issues, server outages, planned maintenance, new site launches and other website network stuff.

I might as well have a talk about today’s activities too (well, yesterdays now). I went to the CU Lunchbar – grill a Christian today though only caught the end as I was coming from home. Then in the evening I went to see Jay Smith give a talk on the historical accuracy of the Bible.

He said a lot of it was supported by historical evidence though Michelle challenged him with the very good question of take say Independence Day, the film. 10,000 years in the future people are going to look back and say “yeah, this film accurately represented New York City at the time it was set” and indeed it would but this does not mean that what happened in the film would actually have taken place – whereas thinking along the lines of the argument Jay was making would lead them to believe that the historically accurate context inferred the events were true also.

Anyway after this I went on to the Old Bar for Old Bar Idol. Ant was fantastic as a presenter as usual and Drew made a valient attempt at singing and made it down to the final three of the night as well. It was great to see so many people out too as there were loads of computing folk. This was followed by getting take-away and going back to a very drunk Kieran’s house who has promised several hundred lines of code and no less than three blog posts tonight – I’m still waiting on those though I’m not holding my breath :P.

“Whip me” she begs. It’s 4 am and myself, Danny and Kayleigh are sat round in Amanada’s living room whipping each others naked flesh.

True story. One which I plan to leave at this point to promote a sense of intrigue for the reader (that’s you).

In other news I wasn’t far off smashing up my car on the way home. I was going down the road in between Great Preston and Garforth which is a country lane so no street lights and national speed limit so 60mph. And some retard was riding down the road on his bike without any lights on. Luckily I was only doing 45mph at the time and so saw him with enough time to go round him though that in itself could have been dangerous as there was a car coming the other way no far ahead of me.

I’m liking weekends at the moment. I miss sleeping in until gone midday. Especially now I have my laptop and can blog without getting out of bed :p.

So I finally did my first session of taekwondo today (today being yesterday now as it’s past midnight). It was interesting. Myself and George got tuition by ourselves by one of the instructors, Andy given that we were the only new starters there which was good as it means we can learn a lot fast but it does mean that we didn’t get the gentle introduction I was expecting, we just got straight to it.

George’s status as a newbie I would contest as he soon revealed that he was a green belt in karate and so was able to pick things up quite fast. I on the other hand, just sucked. It was all like contacty and stuff. And we didn’t even get told to run around. The one thing I could do and we didn’t get to do it.

Afterwards we hit The Fav for food and drink. Although at the prices The Fav charge for drinks it literally was drink singular. Still the food was as cheap as the Llama’s and while it wasn’t quite as good it did arrive in quite a decent time and wasn’t bad by any means, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

So yeah, day one. Now I need to have a mull over and decide whether there should be a day two. I’m hoping they are going to announce free membership and fees and such within the next day or two so I don’t have to shell out like £100.

I got talking to Rich in the laundry room who was saying we went to the Christian Union‘s Alpha course last night and they were talking about who Jesus was. The possibilities they came down to was he was a) a nutter, b) some evil dude or c) he actually was the son of God.

But how about this for an idea – he was an alien. H2G2 fans might want to consider him a teaser. Think about it. If an advanced alien race sent someone to Earth, perhaps he came of his own accord or perhaps it was some kind of investigation into our primative species or an experiment to see how we would respond to this whole God thing (again, relating back to H2G2, Earth was an experiment).

The alien would surely be advanced enough to be able to do tricks we percieved as miracles such as turning water into wine and healing people due to the technology. We got scared and nailed him to a cross. Just like if you walked into a medievil village and turned a torth on (or “flameless torth” as they would perhaps refer to it) you would be burned at the stake for witchcraft.

So even if you accept that Jesus exists (despite the lack of historical evidence outside the Bible which consists of absolutely no primary evidence what so ever, the best we have is people’s writings based on hearsay long after Jesus was dead) and did all the things he claimed you have to look at what is most plausable – was he the son of a God or simply an alien lifeform?

McDonald’s have recently introduced some new small cups. They are far less tall than the old ones but much thicker. Basically they are now as wide at the top as the medium and large cups so they can all use the same lids and so therefore not as tall as the older small cups which used smaller lids.

There is a more important difference between them however – the new cups have the same generic design on them as the medium and large cups. Prior to this they had a kids design on featuring Ronald McDonald and the other kids characters that McDonald’s use.

Why is this important? Because it makes small an acceptable choice for adults. Previously, small was clearly marked as a kids drink – the kids design said “this is for kids, adults should not be drinking this” and a lot of people were embarassed to be walking down the street with a cup with a kids design on the side. The new uniform design is saying that it’s a perfectly viable choice to go for small which is one of the biggest problems causing obesity – portions getting larger in restaurants and takeaways. Maybe McDonald’s are serious about this whole not killing people with unhealthy food thing.

Part two I guess. I’m blogging live from the societies fair again as I think it’s “hip” that I can blog wirelessly at something approximating a convention as if you go to the proper tech conventions about such topics as Web 2.0 everyone is just sat around blogging on their laptops. It’s quite cool to see there are plenty of laptops here anyway, give it another few years and everyone will have laptops in here I recon.

Today has been a little more dead than yesterday but we’ve had a few more mailing list sign-ups and I’ve given my contact details out to the C.U. with the hope of inspiring some debate. I’ve also signed up to the Assassins Guild which should be fun.

It’s now a matter of hours until the launch party, it’s going to be fun.

Life is tiring.

Very tiring.

I got a lie in on Saturday morning at least. Probably my last decent night’s sleep until next Saturday morning. Before another two weekend closes at work. Interestingly enough my store has applied for extended opening hours – till 1am Sunday-Thursday and till 5am Friday and Saturday.

We’re not sure why. Apparently they didn’t tell our store manager, head office just phoned him up and told him to stick a sign in the window. I don’t see the point really, we do hardly any sales last thing at night. And how are we supposed to staff the place throughout the entire night? We have enough problems now. Plus if we are open until 5am and open again at 6:30am, what’s the point in closing? We might as well go 24 hour.

I’m still majorly stressing about housing next year. Nobody else seems in any kind of hurry to get things sorted though so I fail to see why I need to lead the charge. Something tells me that next years living arrangements isn’t finished damaging our social circle quite yet.