It really does. We’re like the only people doing anything at the moment it seems.

Despite it now being summer, university having finished and everyone having gone home we are still seeing turns outs of dozens of people for A-Soc’s weekly social event. Take that Buddha!

Despite making several trips in my car during the slight overlap period we have I did my main move along with a lot of the house stuff on Saturday morning and managed to pack out my car, Norm’s car, my parent’s Mondeo estate, the trailer on the back of the Mondeo estate and my parent’s X-Trail. Quite an impressive convoy we had going.

Still things are moving slowly. The lounge is still a mass of boxes as is my bedroom and it’s not getting shifted particularly quickly. While I spend most of my time at home sorting through things, when you work 7 days a week, you’re free time is not actually not much time.

Still, I have some days off coming in December, I can use those to unpack.

I feel I was lied to. I was told Scotland had a road network. It really doesn’t. It’s barely motorway up to Newcastle due to roadworks currently going on and after that it just runs out entirely - some of the A1, the legendary A1, is basically just a country lane.

Still we made it up there in one piece and kicked off the Friday night with introductions, a meal and some late night drinking. It was nice to have some fun as basically what followed was two days of talks, debates and lots of Humanism.

Never the less we have all come away from the event with a new national oranisation - the national federation of atheist, Humanist and secular student studies or A.H.S. for short. So all in all a rather successful weekend.

It was a fairly nice place and the good was good and despite me getting called away for one or two very short phone calls the company was excellent too. Not a bad place to spend an evening.

It was on Sweet Street, the heart of Leeds’ red light district and the “church” was actually an industrial warehouse which seems to be the way to go as far as the new “evangelical” churches go (I use quote marks as they don’t classify themselves as evangelicals, I simply use the term to convay the atmosphere I am guessing most non-Christians would take from that term).

The service was quite good I thought though Norm was less impressed. I was slightly worried when we first walked in as Michelle seemed to know more people than me but that problem soon worked itself out as I began to spot faces.

All in all it was an experiance and I like to think I can offer something in return for the experiance they gave me. So here it is, my golden nugget of information for them - if you’re going to jump around in worship for Jesus, wear a bra that actually gives you some support. It can’t be easy for the guys to be good Christians when you have four limbs reaching for the lord :p.

The internal network is gigabit, the external is fast ethernet all connected up by Linksys equipment. The first image below shows the internal switches and router which connect up to the main network which is connected to the internet via the routers shown in the second image.

These connect all the servers together of about half of which are racked up as shown below. The rest are just in random locations - the server in the other image is currently sitting in the middle of the floor while it is being setup for example.

These are all kept online by a series of UPS devices.

These are all connected by an endless series of cables. I tried to get some pictures to really show how much cableage there is going on but I couldn’t really achieve the affect I was after. Needless to say though, there is a lot of well organised and structured cabling such as below.

To ensure everything stays cool and the air circulates there is an advanced climate control system as shown below.

Finally this is all monitored and controlled via the NOC, complete with an array of no less than 4 monitors and your choice of both wired and wireless peripherals.

The results seem to have been quite good. Check the router’s uptime - 226 days, that is a little over 7 and a half months and I believe the reason that it came up then was because that was when it was taken offline to install the UPS.

Just to pass you on to the BBC website to read more.

Between the endless series of deliveries for things we need for the new house as well, I’m rather scared of looking at my credit card bills. Especially as my wages for the next 6 weeks are basically going to pay for my rent and maybe my petrol :o.