Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

While most blogs contained this post like a week ago I unfortunately did not have that luxury. I finished my final exam yesterday, Principles of Corporate Strategy. I was annoyed by the exam, I got everything except one question which was really basic stuff that I should have known. Unfortunately I was missing a lecture or two worth of slides (I don’t know why I was missing the week 3 one was I turned up to that, the Rationalist Week one I genuinely missed) but even so, I’ve done SWOT analysis before, prior to my arrival at uni.

I’m a bit disappointed I don’t really feel any relief though, it’s not a “oh it feels so good for them to be over and done with.” I just feel like I always do. I suppose it’s because I know it’s not going to get any better. I am working in labs next week then at The D with double the amount of shifts (probably) the week after, then after that it’s back to full time so I’m not really having a break between exams finishing and working. Indeed, having finished my exams yesterday I am going to work later today),

Overall it’s been an alright exam period I guess. I’ve done well on 5 out of 6 exams but I’ve almost certainly failed one of them. While I scored highly on the coursework I need to mass the module because I need it for my third year program and also I got a 38 and a 44 last semester so I really can’t get any bad module marks as they need to drag everything up.

It’s been a while since I used to walk into a lab and it would be totally empty. The last time I can really remember it happening (though it’s probably happened since) was last summer when I would walk into Eniac in like the middle of July. While summer has once again returned it’s still June, term time June in fact. Having just walked into DEC-10 though I find I’m the only person here. These freshers are just rubbish :p.

It worried me how much my life resembles Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Ok so I went to place the order for my new computer with CCL last night. However it still had my invoice address set as Bodington Hall and you can’t change it online. So this morning I rang customer services. They updated it to my home address for me but because my card is registered to my university address they told me that I would have to phone sales up and order it manually.

So I phoned sales up and went through all the components over the phone. They told me they were having credit card problems and passed me through to accounts (as expected) who went through a few details with me and told me that my credit card was being declined and I had to phone Egg up.

I phoned Egg up who told me the reason it had been declined was the order was more than my available balance. Indeed the amount of the purchase was more than it was showing on my shopping cart.

Now I had a problem. I didn’t have enough money on my Egg card to make the purchase. I didn’t have enough money left in my bank account because I had moved it all over to my Egg card to pay for the computer though. It’s my sound system all over again. At least I didn’t think I had enough money in the account, I couldn’t check my bank account because my laptop is dead. At least it would allow me to take a photo of the error – or it would if my camera would let me take any photos but it won’t.

I phone CCL back and explain the problem and they eventually realise that it is because the over the phone orders use trade counter prices rather than internet prices and I have to order via the internet to get the discount price.

I eventually make it on to my bank account to find I have some money spare which allows me to make the purchase on my Lloyds TSB credit card but will need to move some more funds into my bank account as soon as possible to make sure it covers it. Also I was trying not to use my Llyods TSB card as I’m not sure the direct debit is setup yet and it means I will probably have too much money on my Egg card as they will probably take a direct debit payment anyway and there is no easy slash free way to transfer money back to my bank account from my Egg card.

After them declining my Llyods TSB credit card once they finally accept it and I reach the confirm your order screen which informs me that my invoice address hasn’t changed and still says Bodington Hall. I’m back on the phone with CCL customer services.

After 10 minutes on hold I decide to put my phone on speaker phone disrupting my speaker system so I have to turn it off. 19 minutes on hold and someone finally answers. They explain that whoever updated my billing address when I called before actually messed it up so it didn’t update properly. He sorts it for me and tells me to give it 5 minutes for it to update and then go through the checkout again.

So I give it 5 minutes and head to the checkout system again. At which point I come accross a server error preventing me from going any further. On the upside it’s now displayed on the rogues gallery on Server Problems Maybe?

Giving it 10 minutes to fix itself, I’m still getting. I take a closer look at the error and it seems to be a database fault. My suspicion is that when they cancelled my phone order they either also cancelled my basket order online or just wiped all the pending orders on my account or something. I log in using Internet Explorer, choose a new product in my empty basket and try to go through the checkout – it works.

So I go back to Firefox, open up all the product pages, empty my basket and begin adding everything again. I then refresh my basket. It’s empty again. I work out it’s because it has logged me out so I logged back in and it all re-appears. Finally it lets me go to the checkout. You have to appreciate that each step is taking quite a while because CCL is going strangly slow in recent times.

I finally click confirm, it should finally be all done!

It’s not. I get some ClickSafe registration from Llyods TSB. It’s non-optional. I go through this and open up my email client because it told me it needed email activation. No email came. However, I did get an order confirmation email from CCL so hopefully it’s finally gone through! And all it took me was 2 hours on the phone to people.

It’s been a long week. I had IS23 on Tuesday morning which went quite well, followed by GI21 yesterday which I probably failed (ha, probably, I almost certainly failed the exam which is worth 60% of the module so I’m screwed) then I had SE24 today which was a breeze. I found it slightly harder than expected but I think most people found it harder than expected (probably more so than I did) which is probably a positive sign. Just one more exam to go now!

I normally avoid swearing on my blog as I like to maintain an open audience policy but I think this is probably worth it. It’s a voicemail I found when I came out of work last night.

Come to Wendy, I can’t believe you’re at work! You, Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! You suck! Come to Wendy now! Now! Now! You have no choice mu ha ha ha. I’m not drunk at (…). I’m drunk. I’m clearly very drunk. I love you really. I was going to say I hate you but I don’t, I love you to bits. Come to Wendy. Bye.

Last night I missed Wendy House for the first time ever :(. Well, since I started going. But since I first went in January of 2006 I had, had a perfect addendance record. 16 Wendy House’s in a row. More than anyone else in the circle by a long way. Not that the latter statistic doesn’t still hold as it does but my perfect attendence record is ruined.

It’s probably a good thing, I was getting slightly anal about it which probably wasn’t healthy. I couldn’t win either way really as it was ruin my Wendy attendance record or ruin my work attendance record, both which were perfect until last night. In the end though my responsabilities got the better of me.

As depressing as it is that I missed it, it’s even more depressing how little I care. The recent despondence has given me a lot of time to think and that’s never good. Ever.

Bah.

Two down, four to go. SY23 went really well on Tuesday until we got to The Old Bar afterwards and I realised I had missed a question. 8 marks. Out of 60. That’s over 10% of the paper! I had left it to go back to it later and somehow missed it when I went through everything again.

Then this morning (yesterday morning by now) I had SY22 which went fairly well given everyone else seemed to think it was a bit of a strange paper so I’m not too worried about dropping a few marks here and there. That exam was one of the hard ones along with GI so it’s good to have it out of the way.

I’ve been running around the banks all day. Went down to Halifax to transfer my student account over from HSBC to Halifax for the bigger credit limit. They turned me down. Apparently my credit score wasn’t high enough. I was told that there were no actual problems, there just wasn’t enough there.

That’s kind of strange given I have two credit cards, I’ve previously had another and I have a student overdraft as well. She told me to phone Halifax up as they don’t get much information in the branch. When I phoned them up they told me that basically what the employee in the branch had said didn’t make any sence and they couldn’t actually do anything but contact the credit reference agency (they claimed Halifax used Equifax, the branch earlier today claimed they use Experian).

So now I’m waiting for my PIN number to arrive so I can check my online credit report. Of course if that hasn’t arrived by the weekend it’s going to be the weekend after that I will be able to get hold of it.

I also tried to close my old current account down but they told me I couldn’t do that without my cheque book.

So it would have been a completely wasted trip if I hadn’t also have gone home to vote although frankly that doesn’t really make me feel any better.

I then headed over to HSBC to ask them to raise my interest free overdraft limit. They raised it to £1,250 which is close to half what Halifax is offering and stopped short of saying that should have automatically been done for me in September though it was reasonably obvious it should have been.

I also sent off my application for a Lloyds TSB credit card today which I’m assured by the letter is “guaranteed.” It will be interesting to see if they actually give me it as it comes with a minimum credit limit of £1,000. I already have two credit cards but I’ll be cancelling my existing second card down if I get this one.

As for the rest of the day, I went in to the ARC and Kay apparently isn’t going to be in until next week, I’ve lost the invoice for a product I need to return, my laptop is about to die and needs to go back leaving me with no way to do anything as all my applications are on there and can’t be re-installed and the circle may well be about to be plunged back into hell again. Perfect.

It took me 5 hours to get to sleep last night. 5 hours!

I realise that most of you are like full time insomniacs that take 5 hours to get to sleep every night but it normally takes me like 15 minutes so proportionally, based on it taking 5 hours to get to sleep normally, that’s like you lot not being able to sleep for 4 days (4 days and 4 hours to be exact).

The weekend saw another weekend of work (fun) especially as on Sunday night Gary had overspent on labour so Martin randomly picked a handful of people not to work and they all happened to be on the night sheet – we finished filtering at 1:30 in the morning (normally you know you’re behind when it isn’t done by 8pm). Got out at like 3:30, bit more money though I guess.

Went down to the banks on Monday to move money around and try and move my student account – I’ve got a meeting to sort that out on Thursday. Went to Sarann’s for dinner which was really nice, it ended up getting gatecrashed to twice the size of the original invite list though lol. Phil was there from the start then B was brought followed by Kieran turning up and finally Matt and Kat.

Then today we had a faith and culture assembly – or so I thought, turned out it had been cancelled (nobody told us, though what was I expecting from the union?). We tried to pull together a quick committee meeting and had a main A-Soc meeting too to sum up Rationalist Week. Finished as usual with a trip to The Old Bar.

Something strange is going on. My laptop thought it was May. This might be something to do with the time syncronisation as the same thing happened with my desktop. Strange.

Anyway, I last blogged on Thursday morning. Afterwards I went home and slept before getting up ready for my next all-nighter on SE24. In between getting up and coding I went down to a nice French restaurant in town which I haven’t a hope of spelling for dinner. I wore a shirt and everything, how fancy is that? It was well expensive although the food was fairly nice (not amazing though).

I then spent the night in Eniac and we finally got it finished about 8:30 or something and then headed off to lectures. I finally got to bed just after 3. That evening I crawled out of bed at about 10:30, went to the pub for a few hours and then crawled back into bed and slept some more. It was a facinating insight into what B’s life must be like :D. It’s a really good system to be honest, I might have to try it on a more regular basis.