Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Previously
Liz’s grandad was taken into hospital so Liz had to miss the start of the week because she was in Lincoln.

The marquee hire company said they can’t get a team together to put the marquee up on Sunday so we’re going to have to re-arrange plans. They do however say they will be there at 6am Monday morning. Fantastic, with a long day ahead of us we really want to be up that early.

I tried to book a van but they secretly charge you double as a deposit and so it actually cost me more than my available balance on my credit card and therefore my credit card company rejected it. So I had to make other arrangements for paying for it.

The hoodies cover whatever t-shirt you are wearing in fluff.

Saturday
Norm comes down ill.

We arrive at the van hire place having already paid for the van to find out that TJS Hire, the branch we were at don’t have insurance for under 25s. Even though Sixt said it was fine. So they can’t give us the van.

So I drag an ill Norm out of bed to get me the phone number for Self Drive Solutions. I phone them and ask them for a van today. The guy says he will try and get me one and ring me back in 2 minutes. A few minutes later TJS get a phone call asking if they can do a van for a week starting today. Yep, because Self Drive went through Mayday who went through Sixt who then called TJS Hire. So we ended up with the exact same van but paying like a hundred pounds more for it. The exact same van.

We then head off to the generator hire place to find they are closed. I phoned up and was told they were open till 4pm but they are closed. And the computer system has been closed down for the day. So they can’t do anything.

Sunday
We meet to set everything up. But we can’t decorate the marquee because it hasn’t arrived yet. We can’t put the other tent up because it’s raining. We can’t test the generator because we haven’t got it yet. We can’t test the heater or PA system because they need power. We can do the various staff briefings but half the staff are missing. We head off to poster Roger Stevens but it’s locked.

We decide to fold all the leaflets up. But they haven’t been printed yet. I’ve run out of SoC printer credits. So I go to an ISS cluster. Except ISS don’t have Publisher so I can’t print it normally and I can’t export it to images on my laptop and transfer it over via USB because then it won’t be double sided. Which is all fairly irrelevant given both myself and Norm are running low on ISS printer credits anyway as it turns out (where are all mine?!?).

Monday
It rained a lot. And hailed. Heavily.

It turns out our fuel containers have cracks in them so we have to alter the plan for the day to include buying some new ones. Because our time and money budgets aren’t quite shot enough.

Myself and Norm arrived on site at 6am ready for the marquee hire company to arrive at that time as they said they would. They turn up at 8:30. Suprisingly enough, they don’t get it up by the 9am deadline promised.

In the mean time we aren’t doing much because there are pieces missing from the other tent so we have to wait for Paul to arrive with the other of last year’s tent so we can get parts from that. Meanwhile I go to pick up the generator which turns out to be even more complicated to get out of the van than we thought so just to get the thing out takes 15-20 minutes.

The wind destroyed the generator tent and I mean destroyed. It broke the metal poles. So the generator shelter is just a plastic sheet pegged over it.

Tuesday
It rained on and off all day including some hail.

We had a cash discrepancy at the end of the night.

Nicola was ill for a second day.

Norm had to miss the end of Mike Lake’s talk because Michelle had stolen him for the evening because she had booked her flights incorrectly.

Conclusion
Are you really still trying to sell me on the idea that a benevolent god exists?

It’s been a busy few days.

Friday: 15
Thursday: 14
Wednesday: 13

I couldn’t say before this date as my call log doesn’t go back that far (I only knew Wednesday’s because I already knew the figure, half the calls have already moved off the list).

Yeah, organising things is fun.

Having pretty much finished the first draft of my FYP on Friday I made a few tweaks to it today and handed it in to my supervisor to have a look over.

This should probably be a time for celebration but given I need to do some more work on it as well as sort everything out for Rationalist Week and do my AI23 coursework I’m not really celebrating. Not because I think I shouldn’t but because I just don’t feel any different from having handed it in.

I mean, it’s 2am, I’m tired and I’m going to bed. But not to sleep. I’m taking work to bed again. Somehow curling up in a nice warm bed isn’t quite the same when you know you’re going to spend the next hour starring at a laptop screen trying to get some work done.

So A-Soc still has no money. We’ve spent a lot of it but we don’t have any. Any chance of getting sponsorship is all but gone we’re in a deep financial mess.

Meanwhile I found out yesterday that Michelle has stolen Norm on the Tuesday night. So he will miss Mike Lake, not that Mike Lake has a confirmed topic to speak on yet.

Oh and the marquee hire company got back to us this morning to say they couldn’t get a crew to put the tent up on Sunday so they are doing it Monday morning. Despite the fact we are all meeting on Sunday to decorate the tent. Indeed I booked the weekend off work (at considerable cost to myself) to do just that.

I could go on. I could talk about how we don’t even have a generator booked yet because the hire company haven’t got back to me and a list of hundreds of people who have failed to return my emails. But I’ll save that for a later blog post.

Just when you’re down enough there is always something to give you that little extra kick.

Went round drive-thru this evening to find that meals have gone up £0.30 as well as having gone up £0.50 on breakfast!

With my phone out of commission I was going to have to rely on my old phone. Oh wait, no, the browser doesn’t work on that.

Not that it matters that I can’t evaluate my software as having just failed my GI coursework I’ve pretty much dug my own grave anyway.

And don’t even get me started on A-Soc…

As I left for uni this morning I was debating whether I could be bothered to go into town and pick up my phone (which was in for repair) or whether I should pick it up later. I decided to make the trek down to town as I need my phone to test my FYP on a phone browser on. I got down there to have them turn round and say “sorry, we had to send it off, it’s going to be 14 days.” So it should be due back right about the time I’ve just handed my FYP in. Fantastic.

It is a strange time of year. Often the large amount of procrastination that occur at such periods as this sends people towards the blogs encouraging a flurry of posts. But things are for the most part silent at the moment. Hell, even my blog has been fairly infrequent recently. We’re talking days between posts. Days!

People on the whole have been fairly quiet. It’s a mix of people not being here and people generally being dispontent. The usual suspects can be found in DEC-10 every day – myself, Si, Dan, Jezz, Chris S and crazy Spanish guy.

Stress levels seem to be flucuating quite a lot at the moment. I felt fairly good about Rationalist Week this morning, I had found us some places that would rent us a van and things were falling into place. But it occured to me this evening that if we don’t get our funding sorted by the end of the week – we are going to have to cancel Rationalist Week.

Yeah.

Then there is FYP.

Yeah.

Then there is post graduation plans.

Yeah.

The moral of the story is, you all need to blog more. So the rest of us have something to read when we’re supposed to be doing things that will affect the rest of our entire lives.

Stress levels are rising. Ignoring the fact that I have like a week left to finish the first entire draft of my FYP write-up, the fact I have 10 hour shifts at work today and tomorrow, the fact I need to fight Vodaphone over bricking my phone, the fact I need to have a bitch at o2 because my new SIM won’t work, the fact I need to speak to careers, the fact I need to find a job, the fact I still need to catch up on a load of work for my business and the fact I need to sort my financial situation out, Rationalist Week is like 2 weeks away.

So, does anyone else fancy spending every night for the next two weeks in The Terrace shooting pool and getting really drunk until we can’t remember our troubles? ;).

Having got my new phone I requested my network unlock code for my old phone.

I phoned back in a few days when the said it would arrive. It hadn’t. So they requested it for me again. I rang back on the Monday. They still didn’t have it and requested it again. Wednesday I got an email with it. I entered it into my phone. And it bricked it.

Everything worked fine. I followed the instructions and then restarted my phone to find I got a “configuration error” message no matter what SIM I put in it.

I phoned up Vodaphone, several times, and they had no clue. They said back up your data on it and take it back into a Vodaphone shop and they will send it away for repair. So I downloaded and installed the crappy Sony Ecricsson software to backup my important data and guess what – it fails every time.

Any idea how you can recover data off a mobile phone anyone?

Meanwhile o2 is a whole different story. Norm dug me out an o2 SIM card which I inserted into my phone so I would have a pay as you go phone on o2’s network when my Vodaphone one wasn’t working. But the SIM refused to activate. So I tried to activate it online and was greeted with a message saying this was not an o2 number.

So I phoned up customer services who informed me that they had no record of this number in the database.

So I went down to the o2 store to get a new SIM card. Which I did as well as £10 top-up. I got home, inserted the SIM into my phone, phoned up and activated my top-up card and got the text messages to install the “settings” whatever that is. But despite having topped up, I apparently don’t have any credit. Fantastic.