Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I did warn people that allowing poor people to go to university was a bad idea.

I was right. Leeds Met Union have declared themselves bankrupt. They were losing somewhere in the region of £80,000 a year and have been for a long time. Because the people who go to Leeds Met are pennyless losers with no future. And now they don’t even have a union. That will teach you to blow all your money on sports facilities!

I learnt a new word today.

Interestingly, when we were in meeting room 5 for the faith & cultural assembly meeting today the previous group (or a group before them) had left there work on the white board. Which consisted of the terms dogging and cottaging as well as a few other terms. Which leaves me wondering who the last group in that room were. Having mentioned it around, it also appears to have left Kieran wondering what the last group in there were doing? :D.

How hard is it to get an internet connection?

A lot f***ing harder than it should be!

You would think that in London you get get an internet connection but apparently not. The hostel, which we picked because of it’s wifi access, didn’t have it’s wifi access working and none of The Cloud’s wifi hotspots would give me an IP address despite many, many attempts.

I had to resort to getting my emails at 9.6k using my phone as a Bluetooth modem which I had the pleasure of paying for which took half an hour of fiddling with to get it to work including disabling G3 and this just failed to work all together on Sunday during my repeated attempts.

Then I finally got home to find UK Online was down AGAIN and it took me 15 minutes to get that back online just so that I could finally get an SSH connection to get my server back online!

Feel the burn baby, feel the burn!

It’s 3am and I’m still not in bed yet and I have to be up at about 8ish. I’ve been busy. Yet interestingly enough my to-do list is now running at 6 pages – 3 pages for the main list and 3 sub-lists coming off that.

So who else is feeling the pressure from third year?

One thing that does occur to me though. We have another 3-4 weeks of uni and then we have a month off. It happens again at Easter. And then we have 3 months off over summer (or at least we did, we don’t this year). So why are we ramming all the stress into like half a year when we could spread it out over so much more time.

I mean sure, we’ll get some FYP and revision done over the holiday but not as much as term time. There are no deadlines over the holidays. There are ones for the end true but you don’t have the pressure of term time. You can probably make a case for needing it to work full time to top up the old bank account and there are probably other reasons too, but still – personally, I would trade a little of those 5 months of holiday for a little less stress during term time.

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.