Posts Tagged ‘University of Leeds’

I learnt a new word today.

Interestingly, when we were in meeting room 5 for the faith & cultural assembly meeting today the previous group (or a group before them) had left there work on the white board. Which consisted of the terms dogging and cottaging as well as a few other terms. Which leaves me wondering who the last group in that room were. Having mentioned it around, it also appears to have left Kieran wondering what the last group in there were doing? :D.

An important aspect of democracy and voting is that my vote is private. Anyway, here is how I voted…

• Motion 1 – plastic bags. I voted no. Paper bags are rubbish. We already pay for our plastic bags so people use them responsibly anyway. Plastic bags can be made bio-degradable. From what I have heard from union insiders, the union simply don’t want to foot that bill.
• Motion 2 – Jack Straw. I voted yes. His honorary life membership was removed because of a personal disagreement with his politics. Personal disagreement? We’re a union of 30,000 students, how can we have a personal disagreement? Stop being so petite and give him is life membership back.
• Motion 3 – 99p sandwiches. I voted no. Face facts, a 99p sandwich isn’t going to be a very good sandwich.
• Motion 4 – Nestle boycott. I voted no. For many, many reasons. Read them on Facebook. As a quick summary, we’re old enough to make our own decisions we don’t need the union dictating to us. It’s hypocritical as we sell Coca-Cola products and we’re not even preventing Nestle products from being sold on campus so it’s pointless as well.

Feel the burn baby, feel the burn!

It’s 3am and I’m still not in bed yet and I have to be up at about 8ish. I’ve been busy. Yet interestingly enough my to-do list is now running at 6 pages – 3 pages for the main list and 3 sub-lists coming off that.

So who else is feeling the pressure from third year?

One thing that does occur to me though. We have another 3-4 weeks of uni and then we have a month off. It happens again at Easter. And then we have 3 months off over summer (or at least we did, we don’t this year). So why are we ramming all the stress into like half a year when we could spread it out over so much more time.

I mean sure, we’ll get some FYP and revision done over the holiday but not as much as term time. There are no deadlines over the holidays. There are ones for the end true but you don’t have the pressure of term time. You can probably make a case for needing it to work full time to top up the old bank account and there are probably other reasons too, but still – personally, I would trade a little of those 5 months of holiday for a little less stress during term time.

So looks like CompSoc is going to have another stellar year. Attendance for Monday night’s “computing night” at The Old Bar has actually gone down since it started getting plugged as a “CompSoc social.”

There is a more important point here, though.

As Norm mentions on his blog, last Thursday we went bowling which was good to have some kind of circle activity which we haven’t done in a while. I actually had quite a good time and it was a shame I couldn’t get there for the start.

It got me thinking about a few things, though. Circle events have been very much down recently. I’m not entirely sure why. It’s probably a number of reasons. These including the fact that the key organisers of circle events just haven’t been organising events and that people have generally been too busy to turn up. For instance how many people come down to Monday nights at The Old Bar anymore?

This is disappointing because, when it comes down to it, most of us are third years and going to loose contact with each other next year. We’re going to be off doing our own things and if we drift apart now, what hope have we post-graduation? It would be good if we could get some kind of regular Circle social going again beit Monday nights in The Old Bar or perhaps in The Terrace on Tuesdays as me and Norm are there will be loads of us down there anyway. Stop being such hermits people, if I can find time for the pub so can you :D.

I’m starting to feel the strain from coursework a little more than expected. Having done quite a few late nights this week I was hoping I would have somewhat of an easy week this week. That said I didn’t do much coursework last week but I still feel I have loads to do – I have loads of SY to do, I still have some GI to do, there is a fresh let of labs I need to complete on top of that and in the background there is always my FYP plus I have a fresh set of PD tasks to do from yesterday too.

Our SY33 lectures have recently been taken over by Paul Townend which has been an interesting experience. While Karim’s lectures were good lectures, I’m really enoying our currently lectures. This is probably mostly attributable to the subject matter as we have now moved on to talking about web services which really interests me.

It’s been interesting to see other people’s opinions though. One fact that does seem to be becoming apparent is that we are all really getting into our own areas. I have had a lot of people tell me about how boring SY is at the moment. Meanwhile if I was to go off on a rant on how boring some other modules are they would defend them.

Either way it’s quite a nice change to actually be enjoying a lecture or two.

Thursday saw Microsoft’s Premiere Field Engineering section come in to the School of Computing to try and grab some recruits. It started out with a lecture in the morning at which I picked up two t-shirts and a USB stick (as well as several pens though none of them actually worked lol). This was followed by some technical demos, which despite suffering technical problems at every turn was quite interesting.

Finally we hit The Faversham where the conservatory had been reserved along with a bar tap of £400. Disappointingly it took us about two hours to drink our way through it, though not by lack of effort on my part.

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.

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.

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.