Archive for May, 2007

Sound system

Sunday, May 6th, 2007 | Tech

I promised a while back that I would post pictures of the PA system I got for Rationalist Week. Now I’ve finally got my phone transfering Bluetooth files again here they are. The first two are obviously one of the speakers (with a 500ml coke bottle for size reference) and the other two are the mixing deck and amplifier.

Speaker Speaker

Mixing Deck Amplifier

Robbery of the highest degree

Sunday, May 6th, 2007 | Humanism

Friday night was The Riley’s which are the unions awards for societies. Having burned it down to Bretton Hall and back to see Claire’s cool art displays we almost made it back on time. A-Soc was shortlisted for only one of the three awards we were initially nominated for (how could we not be shortlisted for best society?!?) and we ended up losing to Bretton Music Society (is anyone else thinking who?) so that was a bit of a bust. We were sooooo robbed.

Afterwards we headed into Fruity after picking up a John and proceeded to dance the night away in Stylus. It’s been ages since I’ve been to Fruity and so it was good to finally get another one in as it was a decent night in the end.

Skeptics Anonymous

Sunday, May 6th, 2007 | Humanism

Having met Joanna who works at the chaplaincy during Rationalist Week I decided to take her up on her invite to come down to Skeptics Anonymous on Friday. It basically consists of having lunch and sitting round chatting about religiously biased philosophical topics. There was quite an interesting range of people there, indeed there were quite a few Christians. As seems to be the way with these events, the audience generally seems to be slightly eccentric postgrads rather than undergrads.

The conversation mostly followed the lines of going round the circle with each person saying where they stand. As points came up we would then drift off and discuss a point more in depth. All in all it was a slightly strange but never the less fairly interesting event and I think I will probably drop by again.

It’s not been the greatest day

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 | Life

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.

Insomnia

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 | Life

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).

Tales from the weekend

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 | Life

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.