Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

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.

I clocked into work at 5:45am yesterday morning. And clocked out at 2:10am this morning.

Long day. You simply can’t beat a good open close. I did the whole thing on only 3-4 bottles of Kick as wel (I brought 12, just in case :D). Having done my open shift which finished at 3, I went home to grab an hour sleep before going back to do a 7-close. It’s the second open close I’ve done though this one was significantly longer than the last one though I worked straight through last time. I can honestly say I’m glad it’s over though.

I’m quite glad to be back in union politics (for lack of a better term). We had the first CompSoc committee meeting today at The Library, nicely arranged to coincide with lunch which I was quite impressed with. It’s standard pub food but then I love standard pub food so it’s all good.

Most of today was just coming up with ideas and working out the plan of who is going to do what, who is going to contact what, etc but it’s good to get the ball rolling. We have an idea of what needs doing before September and what events we want to throw together next year. Hopefully tommorrow’s A-Soc meeting will prove to be productive too.

I have a hole to repair in my wall. You see, somebody hurled a chair across my room because my new server isn’t working. To be honest, the chair had it coming. That’s not true, I love my chair but the server would have got very broken, no matter how much I wanted to hurl it.

Meanwhile, away from my summer house, back in the mean streets of Woodhouse I am still battling with network problems. We’ve been upgraded from the Advanced Troubleshooting Team (which we had previously been upgraded from) to the Ops Team apparently.

I got an email from UK Online last night saying our internet account had gone live. So I headed over to try and get it all configured. I spent a good 2-3 hours battling at in and we got some of the problems resolved but it’s still not working in any way and I’ve added another few hours of calls onto my upcoming phone bill which is probably going to bankrupt me by now.

This morning the missing components from my server arrived back so I stripped down my computer ready to put it all back together. I got so far before discovering that the back plate for my CPU cooler has vanished and so I can’t actually put it back together at all. I’ve no idea where it is, I don’t think I sent it back with the rest of the stuff but it doesn’t appear to be here either. So almost two months after ordering my server it still isn’t up and running.