Archive for January, 2007

Part two I guess. I’m blogging live from the societies fair again as I think it’s “hip” that I can blog wirelessly at something approximating a convention as if you go to the proper tech conventions about such topics as Web 2.0 everyone is just sat around blogging on their laptops. It’s quite cool to see there are plenty of laptops here anyway, give it another few years and everyone will have laptops in here I recon.

Today has been a little more dead than yesterday but we’ve had a few more mailing list sign-ups and I’ve given my contact details out to the C.U. with the hope of inspiring some debate. I’ve also signed up to the Assassins Guild which should be fun.

It’s now a matter of hours until the launch party, it’s going to be fun.

Life is tiring.

Very tiring.

I got a lie in on Saturday morning at least. Probably my last decent night’s sleep until next Saturday morning. Before another two weekend closes at work. Interestingly enough my store has applied for extended opening hours – till 1am Sunday-Thursday and till 5am Friday and Saturday.

We’re not sure why. Apparently they didn’t tell our store manager, head office just phoned him up and told him to stick a sign in the window. I don’t see the point really, we do hardly any sales last thing at night. And how are we supposed to staff the place throughout the entire night? We have enough problems now. Plus if we are open until 5am and open again at 6:30am, what’s the point in closing? We might as well go 24 hour.

I’m still majorly stressing about housing next year. Nobody else seems in any kind of hurry to get things sorted though so I fail to see why I need to lead the charge. Something tells me that next years living arrangements isn’t finished damaging our social circle quite yet.

So today is the day before the Atheist Soc launch party. Well technically it’s now later today. I should be pretty excited. I am. But I’m also very tired. Saturday’s close finished at 4:30 and I got a decent night’s sleep but it was sensible not preferable (as in I got like 7 hours or something, ideally I need a good 11). Did a bit of shopping then went to work last night followed by driving over to uni to drop my shopping off and going home and to bed. I ended up getting to sleep a little after 4 and got up at 8 to get to uni for the societies fair.

I picked up breakfast on the way including a coffee which unfortunatly I still hate but I’m all about trying new things at uni. Spent most of the day at the societies fair except for dropping by a lecture and a lab session. SE24 is going to be a right pain I think. Went to Michelle’s for dinner then went home to check my emails before heading out to the Old Bar. Except that I kind of fell asleep and by the time I set off everyone was leaving so I made a hasty retreat back to my room.

Oh, with regards to the internet outage suffered by those of us in halls this weekend, I was become some ‘tard working on the refurbishment of The Refectory caused a power cut that took out the university’s two data centres. While they do have backup power it is apparently not designed to keep the whole network online.

I’m blogging from my laptop in the Riley Smith Hall in the first day of a two day re-freshers fair including societies stalls. I’m currently running the Atheist Soc stall as well as managing the Jazz and Blues society stall while Kieran is at a lab session. I’m all about the multi-tasking. Even after getting less than four hours sleep last night. But I’ll expand when I have time to blog properly.

It’s not been bad, given I was expecting pretty much nothing we’ve had a few proper sign-ups and a handful of mailing list sign-ups on top of that plus I’ve talked to a few key people so it’s all good. Kieran has been blasting out jazz all day as he was the first to play any music and has just basically kept it going. Too bar for lsrfm.com :p.

Once again I find myself next to LS:TV for some reason. They have a silly amount of staff milling around and an endless parade of laptops to show their stuff on too. I’ve been talking with Andy from J&B along with Kieran for a bit and he seems like a really sorted guy. I’ve exchanged a few words with the Green Action Group as well who, while all being hippies, are pretty cool people none the less.

GoDaddy recently pulled another site for publishing content they disagree with. SecLists.org got a message saying they had “been suspended for violation of the GoDaddy.com Abuse Policy”

Basically, it’s a security site who published some details on one of the MySpace security problems. MySpace weren’t happy about it and had a moan to GoDaddy who, as they now have a reputation for, pulled the domain. At least it’s not the nameservers for a datacenter this time.

I’m sorry but GoDaddy really is a joke. Their terms of use include, and I quote, the forbidding of “morally objectionable activities.” I find it amusing that a country that claims to cling so much to the idea of freedom of speech often so easily abandons it, especially when it contradicts the morals of a Christian nation which is supposed to be prevented from having a state religion by it’s constitution.

Last month Worfolk Online forgot to celebrate five years online.

Five years!

That isn’t even how long I have had been making websites or how long I’ve had websites online – that’s only since Worfolk Online first appeared (December 20, 2001). There are websites of mine in the Internet Archive dating to the summer of 2001 and who knows how long it took IA to crawl them. It gets worse. Later this year Worfolk Corp will celebrate it’s 12th birthday. 12th! I know kids younger than that. I’m now so old that even my projects are old. This isn’t cool.

Let’s kick off with a quick round up of what has happened of recent. After the fun of Saturday night, I ended up getting up about 2ish but given I didn’t have my room to myself it was far from uninterupted sleep. Sophie discovered her returned bag was missing two phones and her money so it turned out to be somewhat of a mixed blessing getting it back. Worked Sunday night, arrived back Monday and went to my first lecture of the second semester. Lectures suck as ever.

Things are not without hope though. There has been a recent insurge into World of Warcraft which has somewhat rekindled my passion for the game. I started a new Dwarf character and have been busy leveling him up with my mage as well as supplying him with copious amounts of resources in order for him to be able to take on enchanting as a profession.

As ever it is somewhat consuming my life however. I managed to log off just after 3 last night and got up at 8 for a quick breakfast before continuing to play it this morning. I’ve managed to drag myself off briefly to do some work now though. I say do work, I mean blog. But I have got some work done as well so it’s all good.

I missed Britney.

Hmm, it’s been an interesting day. I’ve actually really enjoyed the one day off I’ve had between finishing my exams and starting work again tomorrow. It’s been a day of generally lazing around, in between sleeping for long periods of time. Then at 8 we kicked off with a Wendy pre-party hosted by yours truely. Wasn’t too bad. Limited about of spills and not much broken that I know of.

We hit Wendy about 11 and by this point people were pretty drunk. I mean, even I was feeling it. We got in there and I saw quite a few people including Stefan, Theaks and Jay. I got talking to a few other people that I was going to have a more in-depth chat with (or saw people I was going to have a chat with) but that plan was somewhat curbed by my premature exit.

I also ran into Andy (see this post it’s not exactly in detail but it gives a very brief account) who started by hitting on a very drunk Sophie, started chatting to me and seemed to be alright with me (bare in mind the last time we spoke was when we parted on bad terms in May and his last words were “I’ll never forget this Chris”). I was going to let it go but then Claire comes over and says he has then been badmouthing me to her. Seriously, what is that about?

By this point we had lost Sophie and so myself and Verity spent some time looking for her. She was eventually found passed out in the toilets and so me and Verity took her home. Well, I say home, we took her to mine as I was putting them up for the night. This I can live with but now I’ve lost both halves of by bed, I was hoping to keep hold of one half at least.

While I’m fine with the premature exit as I left Claire to tell everyone that we had made a swift exit to get Sophie out, I did leave quite a few situations trailing loose ends across the dance floor. I had resolved to make sure I had a word with Andy at the end of the night as well as making sure I talked to a few other people which I don’t want to disclose on a public blog but whatever, it happened.

I was reading over the paper about how Windows Vista cripples PCs by increasing system resources, delivering reducing quality video, blocking hardware that doesn’t support DRM and so forth. I’ve never been particularly angry at Microsoft, they are a big evil corporation, that is their job but this is so far beyond that, this is just a joke.

The bottom line is, though: who is going to save us? Where are the nice corporations? I mean, we can all switch to Linux and that would be all good but what distro comes with support for playing DRM’ed DVDs. None that are not in a shady legal position and this is just going to get worse when the Vista problems take hold. The problem is that Linux doesn’t have the corporations to mount any kind of resistance against this. They are all random groups of developers occasionally formed into companies like Redhat and Canonical which are simply drops in the ocean on a worldwide scale.

Apple perhaps? The issue there is they are even worse than Microsoft. Take a look at something like the iTunes copy protection (http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191000408&pgno=3&queryText=). Microsoft forced other people out of the market using various tactics that could be considered underhand but at the end of the day it was market forces – people could choose to go elsewhere, it would just put them at a disadvantage. Apple is just locking people in with iTunes, only they can play it and iPod’s don’t support any other DRM.

I sit here thinking, when I’m the guy at the head of the massive corporation making these decisions, things are going to be different. Of course, right now I have a lot of dreams and only a pittance of success. Did Mr. Gates sit on his bed in his Harvard dorm room and think when he made it, he would get rid of all this crap? How about Mr. Jobs? Howard Stringer or Nobuyuki Idei perhaps (CEO and ex-CEO of Sony, switching over around the notable time that Sony’s optical drive crippling malware was discovered)?

/cheer