Archive for March, 2007

I need a bigger credit limit! Whenever I want to buy a large purcahse on my credit card I have to move money over to my credit card. Looking back, I should have probably just bought it with my debit card and given up on the cash back. But anyway, it takes 3 working days for the money to clear – let’s count that. Today is Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and we’re on day one, Tuesday day two, Wednesday it should finally be in there. That’s like a week from now!

If I wasn’t using online banking it would be sooooooooooooo much faster. I would simply go down to my account and draw the money out and go to the other bank or whatever and pay it in and it would be available instantly. But because I’m using debit card payments and electronic fund transfers (more usually) it takes forever to do anything. I mean 3 working days! Why do computers need the weekend off?!?

It actually is a 6 days. I say it’s Friday, it’s currently Thursday night for me but if you don’t get it sorted before 2pm it’s actually 4 working days which is why it’s effectively Friday in terms of timing. But in my time it’s going to be 6 days. I don’t even seem to be able to change my mind about transfering the money now.

Despite getting to bed as late as usual last night I managed to drag my ass out of bed and make it down to The D for breakfast. Didn’t quite wake me up as much as I had hoped though, I think my spirit was all beaten down by the miserable weather. I did manage to get some productive work done though, I posted my student loan application form off, did a bit of shopping then made it to DEC-10 to finish off the A-Soc posters and do a very small amount of SY23 and SE24.

Speaking of the posters, curtesy of Izzy we now have two of them printed and they are looking pretty cool! Let’s just hope that everything on them is typo and error free as I only had time to proof them on screen so nobody else has proofed them and it wasn’t even a printed out copy, though to my credit I did read through everything as it was copied over from Writer to PowerPoint which I normally wouldn’t bother to do. Still though, I’m going to have to use a few of the stockpile of faith points that I haven’t really invested anywhere else ;).

Having said I would be in the lab yesterday I actually managed to drag my ass out of bed to get in there for 12 after another night of insomnia and get some coursework done. We’ve made a start on both SY22 and SY23 which I am quite pleased about. This compares to today when I managed to get a decent night’s sleep in and still I’m not quite up :(.

The evening consisted of another three hour planning meeting for Rationalist Week – at the moment we’re not looking too much over budget if you work the figures out the right way. Moz bought the tents and I’m buying the PA system so if you don’t count those and you don’t count all the food and drink which we’re again funding ourselves because the union won’t cover those costs (even though we wouldn’t have enough money to cover them anyway) we are only £7 over budget! That is of course before we upgrade to a bigger generator.

Everything seems to be falling nicely into place though, there is still a lot of work to do but I think we have the timescale to do it in and once we get a few more things finalised I will even pretty set. Once the event is rubberstamped by the university and we have the generator sorted I think are the main concerns at the moment. Although I’m sure it’s going to be nerve racking throughout the build-up to the event.

Later that evening we hit The Terrace to chillax for a little. It closed at 11 though, they are just not hardcore.

Apparently my desktop didn’t take heed when I posted about DST. I thought I was going to get to bed a little after 3 and get in a good 8 hours – I’ve been robbed! My computer hasn’t re-adjusted itself automatically! Windows 95 could do that!

Seriously though, there is something wrong with Dell computers and telling the time. My desktop will sycronise itself and then within a few days it will be a minute or two out again. It’s turned on all the time so it’s not like it’s without power or even turned off but it can’t hold the time. Nor does it apparently know when DST changes happen as it’s set to automatically update with DST changes.

Got out of work Saturday night and got to sleep at gone 6am due to having problems sleeping. I then got woken up at about 10:30 by the sound of drilling. Awesome. So working on about 4 hours sleep I spent my time going round Argos and Tesco picking up garden furniture for Rationalist Week – I now have 12 plastic stacking chairs and 3 flat pack round tables in my bedroom and there is more to come.

I then went to work at 2pm for unit classes before my normal 5-close. Evil. Unit classes ended up running for 5 hours so I got to do nothing for the first 2 hours of my close plus as soon as I walked into the kitchen at 7 I got sent on my break. To be fair though I was on a really long shift and little sleep so I don’t feel too bad about spending 5 hours sitting around. Plus I past all the test so I should have three stars on their way.

Liz (the shift runner) turned up and was promptly sent home sick so Jay ran the shift who was supposed to be part of the closing team, hence we were down a closer and resulted in me being by myself in the kitchen from 9pm onwards. Again evil. We got out at about 2:30 though due to the fact the kitchen was left in a somewhat shocking state (by my standards anyway, that would be a normal close for some people and by some people I mean Rich lol).

I ended up going back to Amanda for a bit and we ended up watching the first half of Hot Shots. I then headed home and got to bed at like 5 or something. I intended to get up at 2 but kept going back to sleep and ended up getting up at 5:40. Had some dinner at home and then headed back to uni to join everyone in The Terrace.

End result, day one of my coursework blitz so no coursework get done. But to be fair, I was expecting most of today to be a write-off. Let’s home tomorrow is a bit more successful.

I never blogged about Friday night. I can’t remember most of it now. It involved The Terrace though.

The day started with a trip down to Weatherspoon’s for breakfast (I had suggested we go to try and sort out our sleeping patterns and Phil took me up on the idea) so at the early time of 10am for students who normally sleep until dinner time we grabbed some along with Michelle and Cara who had just arrived in Leeds.

The afternoon consisted of me getting a bit of productive work done before hitting The Terrace at 8. As it was Friday they had the DJ in, much to most people’s disappointment though I wasn’t too bothered. Kat turned up on the one night they had loud music :D. I don’t know how she does it, it’s like when she turns up to the Llama and that is the day when they take ages to bring us our food. I think Allah is on a mission to make her jaded. John also turned up which was cool as I haven’t seen him in a while and I feel he’s become a bit disconnected from the circle.

I was up for heading into Fruity afterwards due to Easter being one of the few opportunities it wouldn’t be packed but there was only myself and Michelle left by the end of the evening and she wasn’t particularly feeling up for it so we headed for food and back to mine.

Don’t forget gang, the clocks have just gone forward an hour. I found out this morning that my phone with it’s duel modes for standard time and daylight savings time is great except you have to actually tell it when you’re changing. So it’s just as difficult as just adjusting your time automatically. Interesting. Another time saving feature from Sony Ericsson.

The time gap explains why I’m getting in at 4am. That said I got in later than this last Sunday due to our mini roadtrip to Castleford. Not that we came straight home, we sat around outside talking for quite a while about a strange variety of topics. Kayleigh may not be as low as 8 people from work after all (don’t worry if you don’t get the context, this joke was not meant for you). Looks like I might be doing a 5 hour pattern tonight, need to be up early to go buy random stuff.

In an effort to expand our places of lunching, today’s destination was Walkabout. Due to everyone being rubbish the turnout was just myself and Michelle but that’s everyone else’s loss as it was really good. It’s only mildly more expensive than The Llama (£3.50 a meal and they are individually priced it’s not 2 for 1 so saves all the hassle of getting an even number of people) plus the drinks are cheaper than the union (only marginally more expensive than The Llama, cheaper for spirits).

I tried the chicken and chips basket meal which actually did come in a basket which was cool. They actually followed through on their Check 25 policy as well which I was quite impressed with given several places claim to use it but I clearly don’t look over 25. The sofas were quite decent although they went a little far back.

After lunch we headed up to the Brotherton Library (I had to show Michelle were it was) and on getting in there she found out she had to go to the Edward Boyle library so we then trecked down there at which point Michelle checked something out of the library for the first time. Only 3/5’s of the way through her degree.

The evening ended with a gathering in The Terrace. Again people are being rubbish, nobody else turned up until 8:20 at which point Adam arrived (who said in his text he would arrive at that time) with nobody else making an appearance for another 15-20 minutes. It’s really nice in The Terrace at the moment as they aren’t blasting out music and it’s nice and quiet over Easter. I’ve always liked The Terrace when it’s like that so I think I’ll be making full use out of it over the next few weeks.

“Come back to mine and I’ll show you my pretty underwear” Kat says to Norm.

It’s fill in your own context as usual.

Wednesday night was chilli night up at Bodington hosted by Maths Chris accompanied by his rice cooking assistant B. We made three seperate ones, a totally plain no chilli one, a mild one and a really, really strong one. While several people chowed down on the latter, Michelle somehow found the one which didn’t actually have any chilli in and therefore in no way could it be hot, too hot for her tastes. That girl amuses me.

All in all I was quite impressed. Given I don’t actually like chilli (or rice for that matter) I actually quite enjoyed dinner. And it puts me the cost of a meal closer to getting an overpowered sound system so everybody wins.

Everyone loves open source. Everyone being most of the hippies in SoC. Many people don’t. But that is besides the point. It’s being hailed as the next great shift or whatever, many people argue that everything should be open source. I recently ran into a major problem while thinking about this model however.

The bottom line is, proprietary software makes more money than open source. Yes you can sell support licences on top of that, it’s seperate from the product and indeed even Microsoft sell support licences on top of their proprietary products. It doesn’t make the money. Selling the software makes the money. And you can’t do this effectively with GPL open source.

So what, the corporations are just generating huge profits and can lose a bit of money anyway right? Well, take for example office software. Microsoft put $6,000,000,000 into research and development. That’s not just for office but that’s a massive figure – six billion dollars per year go into R&D. That is money spent on making their product better.

Do you think OpenOffice.org are putting those kind of resources in? Of course not, they don’t have those kind of resources. What OpenOffice.org have done is produced a clone, a bad clone, of MS Office. But without the money invested into R&D by Microsoft they wouldn’t have a fantastic office suite to make a clone of. They rely on the investment made by Microsoft in order to clone it for their open source version.

If everything was open source, who is going to be providing these kind of resources?