Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I headed to uni today for the international fresher’s fair. I met loads of people I haven’t seen for ages, people off my course, A-Soc people, union people. I got there and met more people. Every conversation was the same. “Hows it going?” “Not bad.”

I fully understand it’s like an automatic response to just say you’re fine. But you would think you eventually reach some distance from fine where you stop just telling people that you’re “not too bad.” Apparently not. Still, when you have a society to run and it’s literally days before the new term starts, braver faces are in order.

Quite a few of us have blogs now. It’s great to see people blogging, uni involes far too much face to face contact for my liking. I don’t want to have to leave my room to find out what you did today. Blogs are the solution. I feel we’re slightly under utilising them though. We could be pinging each other like crazy.

For instance, I could make a quick comment on the fact that George has auctioned himself off as a human pet when only two months ago when I offered to purchase him in a deal for his liver, he declined my offer.

So in the spirit of cross-circle blog linkage, tell me what you are up to in the final week or so before the start of the new academic year. How do you feel about coming back to uni, what are you planning to do this year, etc, etc.

Personally, I don’t really know where I’m at. I didn’t really think about it for most of summer, then I didn’t really want the new term to arrive. Then I started to. Now I don’t really know how I feel. I can’t say I’m looking forward to the work and the general hecticness that uni brings. With work I can generally go home and stop worrying about it (to an extent at least) whereas at uni it’s never really off your mind as you always have something to think about.

I still haven’t really set a plan in stone as what I’m doing yet. I’m going to start moving my gear in any day now but I can’t really be bothered to be honest. It’s just more upheaval and stress and to be honest, I have other things on my mind. Indeed, other things on my mind than university as a whole.

I’ve had a post entitled season 2 sitting in my drafts for a long time ago. Since last September I believe. The top paragraph of it it explains how this is a redraft because it’s been sat in there for so long. Well, I’m just rewriting it all from the start. With a whole new approach. I need I need a little more explanation.

After the success of my post, season finale which is one of three posts I am really proud of, I decided to continue the theme to look and see what themes we may see this year based on the second season of Dawson’s Creek.

The season is 60 seconds consists of Dawson and Joey getting together then soon breaking up again and ending with Joey’s dad returning from prison but Dawson finds out he is involved with drugs again and he ends up going back to jail with Joey blaiming Dawson. Abby dies, Andie enters the storyline and dates our renegade hero Pacey, Jack, the future gay guy and 5th main character comes in, Tamara briefly returns to remind us of the past.

I never got round to publishing the original post because I couldn’t really make the pieces fit. While Si really entered the storyline this year he turned out to be heterosexual, or at least, hasn’t come out in time. Our will they won’t they couple never officially got together. Nobody died. The symmetry just wasn’t falling into place.

Then a few weeks ago I had a thought. A spark of possibility appeared before me. Perhaps the season didn’t have to run from the start of term time to the end of term time. Perhaps it ran from the start of term to the start of next year’s term – in which case it isn’t over yet.

If you include the summer period then a hole host of possibilites open up. Our will they won’t they couple have been seperated albeit under different circumstances. Break ups, make ups, sex, lies, the drama has flown thick and fast over the summer. All we really need is a season finale. Some big event to leave us on edge for the start of the new academic year. And we have two weeks to get it.

So why am I writing all this now? Why after all this time of the post sitting in my drafts is it finally seeing daylight? Well, I think I may have found one. Maybe, just maybe.

Hmm, to go to bed or not to go to bed. I went to bed at like this time yesterday. Having finally got to sleep at 2:30am and gotten up for work at 4:30am. Still I’m back on nights tomorrow and Monday before being on an open again on Wednesday. Then a close again on Thursday.

As term draws near I don’t know whether I should be quoting Natalie Imbruglia’s Counting Down the Days or Muse’s Our Time Is Running Out. It’s been a long summer. It feels like a moment ago but the conscience mind but my body is finally starting to feel the strain. It’s been an interesting summer and I think I’ve managed to set quite a few personal records – 2 open closes, 7 closes in a row, 16 consecutive days at work, 17 consecutive shifts at work.

Beat that, the real Leanne!

While a night in front of the idiot box watching Lost or Prison Break may provide sufficient intellectual stimulation for people like Mr. O’Shea or Miss Le Breton, I personally have a slightly higher cultural taste. With that in mind I headed off to the Grand Theatre this evening to see a stage show of the hit BBC Radio 4 show “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue” of which I am a big fan.

The show featured most of the long running members of the radio show with Humphrey Lyttelton taking on his role as the chairman, Colin Sell at the piano and Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Barry Cryer making up the original contestants with Jeremy Hardy taking the place of the now late Willie Rushton.

The Grand was rennovated a year or two ago adding in air conditioning and better seats as well as restoring it’s fabulous beauty. Once you add to that a very funny show and you have a winning night out. Most of the best rounds from the show appeared including one song to the tune of another, sound charades and of course, Mornington Crescent.

All in all, an enjoyable night out.

Is it really so hard to publish current information on a website?

Having just got off the phone from Argos who have lost my order (not the order contents but actually any record of the order ever being made) I headed off to Tesco’s website to find out when they are open as today is a bank holiday. But they have actually taken the information off! Last time I was on there I could find out all about the holiday opening hours but it’s not available anymore. They’ve done away with the “when is Tesco open this week” section and replaced it with standard static opening times text.

This was something I was thinking about earlier with regards to the union. Would it be so hard for them to have a page listing what is open when? They occasionally publish the term time and non-term time opening hours on each page for the shop or bar but it’s never in any kind of easily accessible fashion. Nor is it usually that accurate.

Things like when the union closes for the day. This never appears on the website. They have a sign on the front door saying “closed.” The website still claims The Old Bar is open. Still claims The Terrace is open till 12:30. Has no information on Extras out of term time opening hours. It has no information on when The ARC is open, when the cash office is open, hell, when the union building itself is open.

Is it really so much to ask for a bit of current information?

It’s August 27th! In 5 days it will be September. Where did summer go?

I still have loads of unsolved items on my to do list. My room is still a tip (not that it will be a major issue once I move out as it will all move out with me and I can sort it then). My server still isn’t working. The network in the house still isn’t setup properly.

I don’t know what the situation is really. Will I have more time during term time? I work 50-60 hour weeks at the moment. When term time starts again I’ll go back up to anywhere from 60-80 hour weeks so will I really have more time to solve things?

Do you know how much money I got in my last pay cheque? £370! 12 out of the 14 days of that pay period I worked and all I came away with was £370. I think I must have been raped by tax because I was on over £400 pre-tax before my last shift.

All in all I’m realising how much of a bad shape my overdraft is in. Once my credit cards are paid off it’s going to take 4 or 5 weeks to clear it on full time pay and I have about 3 weeks left. While I still have my student loan to come in, I have rent going out and I got hit by a massive phone bill from when I was sorting out our BT line and internet for the house.

Still hopefully I should be able to generate some kind of decent pay cheque next time. At the moment I need to pick up some more shifts to fill my days off but I made a good start today – I clocked into work at 05:45 in the morning and I’ve just got home now. Open closes for the win.

Currently my VPS is going down every 10-15 minutes! Neither me nor my host can work out what is going on.

The end result is, after continued problems with my VPS I’ve ordered a new one with ServInt. I am going to be migrating a lot of my important sites over to that and then those remain will ever stay on my current VPS or will me migrated over to a new VPS with PowerVPS and the old one cancelled depending on whether I can stabilise it or not.

It’s 10:30 and I should have been in bed 2 hours ago. I wasn’t though as I needed to rush over to my new house and carry out some more testing in order to try and get this hideous networking up and running properly. I need to speak to Linksys before I can really do anything else and I don’t think I’m going to like the answer to be honest.

Once I had home I had to fire off a couple of emails as well as test some stuff I got off eBay. My inbox is rapidly filling up with items that need attention though not to mention the fact I can’t see my floor and it’s not just from having too much stuff anymore, it’s actually important things need sorting. I need to phone several different people, email dozens of different people, come up with some CompSoc literature in the next week, sort the A-Soc summer work, organise some meetings, do a million other things on my to do list, re-do my budget, the list goes on. And when is my next day off? Next Thursday. Might need to cut down on this whole sleep thing. The 5 hours at best I’m going to get tonight it just too much apparently.