Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

So looks like CompSoc is going to have another stellar year. Attendance for Monday night’s “computing night” at The Old Bar has actually gone down since it started getting plugged as a “CompSoc social.”

There is a more important point here, though.

As Norm mentions on his blog, last Thursday we went bowling which was good to have some kind of circle activity which we haven’t done in a while. I actually had quite a good time and it was a shame I couldn’t get there for the start.

It got me thinking about a few things, though. Circle events have been very much down recently. I’m not entirely sure why. It’s probably a number of reasons. These including the fact that the key organisers of circle events just haven’t been organising events and that people have generally been too busy to turn up. For instance how many people come down to Monday nights at The Old Bar anymore?

This is disappointing because, when it comes down to it, most of us are third years and going to loose contact with each other next year. We’re going to be off doing our own things and if we drift apart now, what hope have we post-graduation? It would be good if we could get some kind of regular Circle social going again beit Monday nights in The Old Bar or perhaps in The Terrace on Tuesdays as me and Norm are there will be loads of us down there anyway. Stop being such hermits people, if I can find time for the pub so can you :D.

Group work is always both difficult and flustrating with meeting deadlines being a particular problem in the case of PD31. That in mind, I decided to make a point. Nobody noticed.

Last week we had set Friday as when I should have had the report compiled by to send to Ben so that he could write the executive summary. Half of the week’s deadlines had already been missed though so in order to make my point I compiled the report and elected not to email it out. Nobody said anything on Friday or Saturday indeed it wasn’t until Sunday night that somebody said something. Not mentioning the deadline but just asking what we were going to do with regards to getting the report finished.

Then when I turned up to the meeting today (fashionably late to make another point, I spent a good 5 minutes staring out of the window on staircase 2) and everyone was like “oh awesome, you got it compiled then.”

Does nobody else think there is some form of urgency for a report due in tomorrow that nobody has proofed? Is this not quite important to, you know, our degree and therefore our entire future? The answer would seem to be, no.

I’m starting to feel the strain from coursework a little more than expected. Having done quite a few late nights this week I was hoping I would have somewhat of an easy week this week. That said I didn’t do much coursework last week but I still feel I have loads to do – I have loads of SY to do, I still have some GI to do, there is a fresh let of labs I need to complete on top of that and in the background there is always my FYP plus I have a fresh set of PD tasks to do from yesterday too.

Time failed to stop again. As of last Friday I am officially 21.

After having been for lunch at the Eldon I went to Tiger Tiger in the evening with my parents. You don’t realise just how crap pub food is until you go to a proper restaurant and it hits you, “ah, this is how steak is actually supposed to taste.” Needless to say, I enjoyed the meal, especially given my parents picked up the bill.

Then yesterday so I could do some quote unquote celebrating with my friends a few of us headed down to Nando’s for a meal. That was another interesting experience, I didn’t realise it was such a cheap fast-food style restaurant (you have to go to the bar to place your order and get your own cutlery) but never the less the food was good. We ended the evening in The Old Bar where I suspiciously wiped the floor with John at pool (he used to be a right shark, I’m sure he was letting me win) and grabbed a few drinks with the small selection of people that had made it down for the traditional Monday nights in The Old Bar.

Our SY33 lectures have recently been taken over by Paul Townend which has been an interesting experience. While Karim’s lectures were good lectures, I’m really enoying our currently lectures. This is probably mostly attributable to the subject matter as we have now moved on to talking about web services which really interests me.

It’s been interesting to see other people’s opinions though. One fact that does seem to be becoming apparent is that we are all really getting into our own areas. I have had a lot of people tell me about how boring SY is at the moment. Meanwhile if I was to go off on a rant on how boring some other modules are they would defend them.

Either way it’s quite a nice change to actually be enjoying a lecture or two.

As I previously mentioned, I went down to the Christian Union’s House Party this weekend. It was at Quinta Hall in Shropshire by the Welsh border. Having been out for my birthday on Friday I got up at the far too early time of 6am so that we could head down Saturday morning. We made it about 11:30 just in time to miss the morning meeting and get straight on with lunch.

We got there and walked into the hall to try and find someone. Wandering through a few corridors it really reminded me of the mansion in Resident Evil. Nobody around, classic old stylings and so quiet your footsteps were the only sound you could hear. Spooky. Luckily we eventually found someone who informed us C.U. were in a different building.

That afternoon was seminars, I choose to go to “Science vs. The Bible (Or not…)” which was delivered by Anna and Luke. I’ll talk more about that later but it was pretty interesting. Afterwards me and Michelle walked into the village of Quinta which contains a shop and a pub (and not much else!). So we bought some stuff and had a few drinks in the pub. Finally that evening there was a Christianity Explorered talk on the holy spirit by Carl Gibson.

The previously mentioned seminar brought up some interesting opinions. Naturally it turned to evolution where Anna tried to encompass all views so not to exclude anybody but the problem is, that some people just have really stupid views. How can you believe in microevolution and not macroevolution? They are the same thing! Perhaps we just need better education, maybe they think they are actually different.

Sunday consisted of a main meeting in the morning which was the concluding series of talks on the book of Jonah by Morris who was the weekend’s guest speaker as it were. There was prayer and worship also. It was interesting as with all the evangelism and debating I see through my official capacity, it’s easy to forget that sometimes the C.U. just spend some quality time worshipping King Jesus (heh, some of the lyrics were so cheesy I had to stop myself from laughing).

All in all it was a decent weekend. It was a bit of a drive but through some beautiful countryside, there were some interesting talks, I got to spend some time with Michelle and meet some new people. Cool stuff.

I’ll be away at the Christian Union’s house party so I may be out of contact this weekend. I’m hoping I can get phone signal and connect my laptop up via the bluetooth modem but none the less, responses will be a little delayed until next week.

Up till now I’ve used a fairly limited taxonomy system. I had three categories – general for my blog posts, video for my video blog posts and gossip for things to be syndicated to SoC Gossip. This dates back to when I was blogging on Nerd Federation and the posts were organised into channels. It’s a bit out dated and not very Web 2.0 these days though so I’ve finally got round to implementing tagging instead of categories.

So from now on posts will be tagged, usually with multiple tags. There are also new URLs, though the old URLs for the categories will still continue to work in that they will redirect to the new URLs.

You can tell when the end of term coursework deadlines are approaching. The days get longer, or at least shifted later. No longer can you go home after lectures, some actual work is required. Work that normally lasts long into the night.

It worries me slightly then that we are still in October and the season has already begun. Last night myself and George left DEC-10 at 2:15am. Granted it wasn’t literally “all night” but when you have to be up the next morning for lectures it’s late enough. I added up all the deadlines we (well, I, it will fluctuate slightly depending on your program of study) have a total of 10 deadlines between now and the end of the term and that isn’t counting all of our FYP work.

It’s going to be an intense year.

It’s strange how much people can change. It’s also perhaps worrying that I am now old enough to have people I haven’t seen in so long to be able to say that. That said, perhaps they haven’t changed at all and if time has done anything, it has simply changed your perception of them. Thus resulting in the discrepancies between your perception and the person themselves.

Last night was Wendy House. It’s been a while since we had a good turn-out to Wendy though last night was really something that would have to be stretched to pass as an old school turnout. Only a small selection of the circle made it down (though a better performance than reason months at least) and of those that did, even less stuck around until the end.

All in all, it was quite an unexpected selection of faces that lasted the night. Gaz decided to come down, who given he is only doing a very limited second year this year, I haven’t seen in uni for many weeks. John’s appearance was also a much welcome one as we haven’t seen each other in a few months so it was good to catch up.

Finally I also ran into Krystina who I haven’t seen since high school. It took me a double take to recognise her as the perception I had of her was similar to that of most people I knew at high school – not a particularly good one given I class most of them as failures with no hope of ever achieving anything with their life. In reality she was looking great and provided some quality gossip, which is really the most important thing. It was great catching up as we had both high school and The D to talk about.

So there you have it. Seeing old friends again, just another great reason to go to Wendy.