Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

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.

I read an interesting article on FastCompany.com recently about Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg entitled Hacker. Dropout. CEO. It discusses the origins of Facebook and is well worth a read.

I feels like ages since I’ve had a night out. Mainly because it has. I actually haven’t been clubbing since the start of term (before then even) as far as I can remember so I headed down to The Fav to catch up with the TKD social. Managing to get an entire drink in there my lack of conscience got the better of me and I headed down to Wire. Got there at 11 and left at 1ish, so it wasn’t too bad, I just dislike how much indie I don’t recognise. All in all, not a bad night.

Having come off a weekend of non-stop fun from the student activities conference during the day to closes at work during the night (neither of which saw us get out before 3am) it’s been a long weekend. Indeed a long few weeks. Thankfully I managed to get home for around 10 last night and after having done a few important jobs I pretty much went to bed and got a good night’s sleep in which seems to have recharged my batteries.

Getting down to some work though it really occurs to me just how much we have to do – so far we have coursework for GI31, DB32 and SY33 as well as 3 GI31 labs and 7 SY33 labs. Granted this has been over the last three weeks as a lot of it is weekly lab exercises but this is as well as all our PD31 work and our final year projects (which also has a big deadline this week!). While I’m already wading through most of the exercises, it;’s a scary thought to think just how much work could build up if you don’t keep on top of it.

With my life quickly being drained of any reason to live, the A-Soc social was cancelled so I headed over to Christianity Explored. Half way through or so some random guy, looked about 35-40ish, comes in who didn’t really know what was goining on and decided to sit at the back rather than actually join in (is that not a bit strange?).

As things drew to a close he started chatting to me. I engaged him in conversation and we talked about various things. He asked me to come out while he had a cigarette but I decided given it was cold. The session ended and I headed for the exit. We got outside and he started talking again.

Andrew: “Are you bisexual?”

Andrew: “Have you ever tried it?”

Andrew: “Maybe you would like it if you tried it”

I’m sure you can see where this conversation is going…

I’m at DEC-10 at the moment. It’s 2pm and I’ve been here for over an hour. And it’s been dead. There are like a dozen people here at most. Other than when a lab session is on, this seems to be fairly normal these days. Kind of removes any come back we have for them cutting down on labs and computers when nobody actually uses them.

Got two interesting pieces of news at work today.

First of all, my long, long awaited (and some would say long overdue :D) promotion to staff trainer is finally official. I scored a rather disappointing 42 out of 50 on my exam but given, a) you only need 40 to pass and b) I beat Neil by one mark, I guess that will suffice. So I should finally be on a half decent rate of pay which will be nice. Ha, I’ll need it with the amount of time I’ve booked off work over the next few months.

Secondly, today I had “the talk” from Kath. It was in the rumour mill that myself and Neil were going to be offered it which I’m quite glad about as it gave me a little time to think about what my response would be even if it was only for a hypothetical situation. Basically, I’ve been offered the job of shift running manager.

I told her I would need a week to think about it but to be honest, I think I have already made up my mind.