Archive for December, 2007

• Ok, even I am willing to admit it’s getting fairly close to Chrismukkah now. We’re getting to the point where I actually might start shopping soon, that is how close it is! Not that I’m excited, I really don’t care. All the good stuff has already happened. Well for the most part. As a general rule from here on in it’s just having to spend time with the family, lots and lots of FYP and annoying song after annoying song.
• My sister is back from uni – and she is already stealing my car!
• Charlotte is back from uni. About time too! I can finally spend some time with my real friends as we would say Michelle would say :D.
• I’m back on the case this week. Last week was my slightly more relaxed lets take a week off. It ended up really busy and with me not getting as much sleep as I would have liked but it was fun anyway. Now it’s time to do some serious work though.
• Before I kick into revision mode next week I’m spending some time on my FYP and I’m pleased to say I think I’ve managed to make a decent indent into it. I’m glad to be doing so. The deadline will be on us before we know. I mean, we graduate in 6 months, how crazy is that!

Is holding “ladies’ nights” at nightclubs descrimation? Apparently so. There is a lawsuit going on in the United States (ha, like I even needed to specify that) where someone has suited several New York nightclubs because he feels descriminated against by the discount entry and drinks offered to women.

It’s an interesting situation as when you look at it, it is descrimination. It’s hard to defend against that. But are their practical real-world limits to removing descrimination?

I ended up on the Wikipedia page for Brass Eye which just presents a brilliant picture of what a show it was.

The Capital Radio DJ “Doctor” Neil Fox, for example, informed viewers that “paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me”, before qualifying his remarks with “Now that is scientific fact – there’s no real evidence for it – but it is scientific fact”. Viewers were also told by the then Labour MP Syd Rapson that paedophiles were using “an area of Internet the size of Ireland”, and by Richard Blackwood that internet paedophiles can make computer keyboards emit noxious fumes in order to subdue children (Blackwood even sniffed a keyboard and claimed to be able to smell the fumes, which he said made him feel “suggestible”); Blackwood also warned watching parents that exposure to the fumes would make their children “smell like hammers”.

You just couldn’t make it up :D. Have a read for yourself. Although if you really want to experience the brilliance of Brass Eye you need to watch it. And remember – cake is a made up drug ;).

Apparently.

That’s the reason my blog, and indeed most of my sites, all my DNS, the list goes on have been down for the past 3 days.

My scripts are fine based on all the checks I have done so I don’t know where the security leak was. So much for managed hosting.

Thursday saw us head down to the Slug & Lettuce on Park Row for the Atheist Society Winter Solstice meal. Despite Jack’s pessimism when I told him I had booked for ten people and the fact that term had ended so a lot of people had gone home, we managed a turn out of eight which isn’t bad at all for an A-Soc social event.

While I was at first skeptical when we stepped into the Slug & Lettuce it turned out to be really good. They seated us quite fast once we had insisted that we actually had made a booking and it started to thin out so service wasn’t affected either. The one criticism that could be made was the music was pretty load but it is half a bar so I guess we can let that one slide.

The food was excellent, I was quite impressed and everyone else I discussed the issue with was also very impressed with their meal. Being two for one on desserts when you order main meals we made our way through quite a bit of food including some amazing chocolate-puddle puddings.

All in all it was a really good night and it was good to have an A-Soc social outside of the pub. Don’t get me wrong, I love the pub visits but it was great to do something a little different and I like to think everyone else enjoyed it too.

Last night, at midnight, the Christmukkah WoW marathon ended. Out of the 72 hours of time in the period, 6 hours was a maintenance window resulting in a total playable hours of 66. I managed Just over 30 which is slightly less than half. Not amazing but given I had to get some sleep (this is the first time I’ve had more than one consecutive day off in months so I want some sleeping time :D) and given I attended events on both Wednesday and Thursday night I don’t think it was too bad.

Progress wasn’t quite as fast as expected, we ended up with myself and Norm on level 20, Michelle on level 18 and George on level 17. I was gutted we never managed to complete The Deadmines but it was fun none the less. We ended the night by getting blind drunk (literally) in the Blue Recluse and heading down to the canal between the Trade District and the Mage Quarter for some good old-fashioned drunken skinny dipping.

So guys, same against next year? 😀

I have a crazy amount of draft posts at the moment. I was never one for leaving drafts to drag on. I had one for my many-times re-drafted “season two” post which I eventually scrapped because I didn’t think I could do the first post justice in the sequel and because of what happened at the end of summer. As a general rule though I have none.

Yet at the moment I have 7 and I’ve just published a draft so I had 8 before that! I guess I just have a lot to say and not enough time to write it at the moment. Not that a lack of time ever stopped me blogging before. I wonder what is different now.

Having got into work last weekend I was suprised to see that the posters for the Christmas party stated the venue was The Chemic Tavern. This was an odd choice of venue given it was literally miles away from our store but most conviently for myself only two streets away from where I live :D.

Despite a very, very modest turn-out it was good to see the people who turned up. Myself and Zoe spent ages catching up as we haven’t seen each other in ages which seems to be a recurrant theme – I hadn’t seen Hannah, Rich, Danny in ages either and the list could probably go on. Plus Kath spent the night handing our free drink tokens so I’m not complaining. Not quite up to last years standards but a good night none the less.

For the past few days, a group of us have been engaged in the Chrismukka WoW marathon. Starting at midnight at the end of Tuesday and finishing on midnight at the end of Friday it is 72 hours of non-stop hardcore World of Warcraft gaming to see what level we can reach. While we’ve had to take some time out to attend various events and even sleep once in a while it’s been fun to get away from reality for a while.

My room is slowly filling with crap as drinks bottles and takeaway line the table tops while clothes and general crap line the floor as well as my to-do list building ever more but right now I feel like I can ignore it and take some time off. At least until Saturday when reality comes crashing back in again. But that is over 24 hours away yet!

On Tuesday we went down to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire’s meeting as they were holding a talk entitled “first offender to old lag – inevitable?” It was delivered by Angie Petit who is head of performance at the HM prison in Leeds.

It turned out to be a really interesting talk. A lot of it centred around what is being done to reform people in prison, what the prison has to deal with and what they actually do in prison though it covered a very broad spectrum. What was really interesting though was the statistics and results.

For example, 60% of people that come into prison have a hard drug problem. 80% have mental health problems. What passes for a mental health problem these days I don’t know (and I suspect that a lot of things do) but it’s still quite a shocking statistic. It was also suprising that short spells in prison, a throw back to the Conservates “short sharp shocks” don’t work and that movement of prisoners from prison to court is now done by a private company who can send a prisoner back to whichever prison they happen to be driving past. Crazy.