Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

The Humanist Society of West Yorkshire was holding a talk entitled “In the Wake of Darwin” last night so me and a few follow society members went down to the talk. It was really enjoyable, Judith Hart who was giving the door talked us through his life during the Voyage of the Beagle when he did the key work that got him thinking about this whole creationism thing.

Afterwards the few of us that were left headed down to Joseph’s Well for a few drinks. It seemed like an alright place though the live bands aren’t great when you’re not there to listen to them.

I logged on to Savastore.com, the online branch of Watford Electronics which is one of the best online computer parts retailers around to find it had closed down. This sucks, Watford was ace; way better than Dabs, eBuyer or CCL for most stuff and I used it more than any other online retailer for buying computer related stuff.

It’s apparently only closed temporarily while their new owner, Globally Ltd takes over and has done a “full review of both business and technological processes.” There is a letter about it here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The letter has been removed, so I have removed the link.

Monday’s can only mean one thing. It’s Monday. However as usual we also headed down to The Old Bar for a drinking session. There was only a few of us (namely me, Michelle, Norm, Kieran and Si) which was nice as it’s about the optimum level between holding a good conversation and still being able to include everyone. Having taken my laptop I also got in some coding too so it’s all good.

We ended up staying until kicking out time (with the exception of Si) and then headed to mine via the takeaway. What followed was some even more in-depth debates on subjects such as people who like to role-play rape, my impending marriage to Laurie Anne, depression, phyological disorders, the adult industry and a range of other topics. Good old fashioned post-pub conversation.

I’ve recently begun monitoring my servers using WatchMouse. Among the many, many cool features of this site monitoring service is the weekly report they email you letting you know the uptime of each of the services you are monitoring and a log and when it all went wrong.

My VPS which is normally really unreliable managed a 99.74% uptime on http and a 100% uptime for the mail server. It will be interesting to see what uptime it maintains over the coming weeks. I’ve also now started monitoring two servers that I have sites hosted on to see how they compare.

Happy birthday to Charles Darwin who is 198 today! Or at least he would be if he hadn’t done that whole dieing thing. Being the LUU Atheist Society we had to do something for it though. So we did. We spent the day outside the union shouting at people, handing out literature (well we never actually handed it out, we let people take it themselves) and running around in an ape suite.

Unfortunately we got rained off in the afternoon and so we were only out there from around 1:30ish. Still we made out point which is the important thing. No media coverage easier but oh well.

Let’s review the weekend shall we. That was a rhetorical question, you’re mutters of “no” are not appreciated. It’s my blog and if you don’t like it you can just keep reading until you find something you do like (you’re not allowed to leave).

Saturday did the close, wasb’t too bad, we got out at a half decent time with a pretty much spotless kitchen too. Sunday was my first close with Gary since he got back (he’d been off since November) and Johnny had phoned in sick so Norm came in. It was all going so well, pretty much perfect until midnight and we were on for a pre-1am close but then it all went horribly wrong and it was 1:45 by the time we walked out.

Got to bed at 4 after taking a trip to Amanda’s and then got up at 7 this morning for the Darwin Day deal. So as you can imagine, I’m rather tired now.

Finally, one of the major corporations has had a good idea. The problem for the big established companies is that all the new start-ups have the good ideas and so being unable to complete on innovation, companies such as Yahoo and Google are forced to buy out all the start-ups in order to get their hands on some fresh thinking.

Noticing this Yahoo are launching a new division of their company named Yahoo Brickhouse which will attempt to replicate the innovation culture found in the small start-ups. Whether it will actually work is a whole different matter but I’ll be very interested to see if it does.

Had my second session yesterday. A full two hours two. They mixed us in with everyone else so a lot of it was guess work. It was really tiring and my muscles are not feeling their greatest though it’s not as bad as I was expecting, they just seem to be aching a bit. That said, I haven’t really got out of bed yet.

They were teaching the beginners a new pattern yesterday but the problem with that is that some of us were also learning other new stuff – like punches for example. We also did this thing where there were like eighteen stations and you moved round them doing various things. Which is fine except we didn’t know most of the stuff and also had to hold the pads while the blackbelts knocked us several feet back with a single palm strike.

Afterwards I headed over to the Christian Union tent for the final night of Mission Week. They had a guy in who used to be a terrorist in Nothern Ireland and then became a Christian in prison. I found it interesting though maybe a little odd that he came out of what was basically a religious conflict (though I know many people would argue differently) because of religion.

I then headed over to the Quilted Llama for the drinking session (the one I organised and then turned up very late to given I was delayed at the CU deal – the talk was late as they blew the generator) to which Kieran, Heather (yes you missed her – that will teach you to go running off to London), Matt, Kat, Norm, Sophie and Verity turned up to. We ended up leaving at around 10:30ish though because they were closing early. I finally got dinner at like midnight though.

Some would say running two socities, holding down three jobs, running an online business and trying to hold together some sort of social life doesn’t leave much time for you to fail your degree. Yet somehow I’m finding the time. I wandered down to get my exam results this afternoon to find I had failed AI22. As in, the entire module. That well sucks. I was expecting to have failed the exam but my coursework wasn’t that bad. If only they carried equal weighting.

As for my other results I managed a 45 in AI21, 57-58 or something in DB21, 68 in SY21 and 72 in my SE20 double module. So they leave a lot to be desired. If I can resit AI22 and actually make a decent go at it then it should pull my grade average back up to something respectable though.

This semester doesn’t look too promising though. SE24 is going to be a total headache and SY23 and IS23, being the same module and both very vague and so the exams are probably going to be ones in which the BSing wafflers thrive so putting in the work isn’t necessarily a path to success.

I finally have VNC working! After months, probably years of trying to configure it to work with my Linksys network equipment I have finally got it working. Now I can easily VNC into my desktop from my laptop – this means that I will never have to get off my bed and walk all the way over to my computer to answer that MSN message or change my music again :D.

Also I finally gave in and added a blog to Worfolk Online. It will mainly be used for reporting site issues, server outages, planned maintenance, new site launches and other website network stuff.

I might as well have a talk about today’s activities too (well, yesterdays now). I went to the CU Lunchbar – grill a Christian today though only caught the end as I was coming from home. Then in the evening I went to see Jay Smith give a talk on the historical accuracy of the Bible.

He said a lot of it was supported by historical evidence though Michelle challenged him with the very good question of take say Independence Day, the film. 10,000 years in the future people are going to look back and say “yeah, this film accurately represented New York City at the time it was set” and indeed it would but this does not mean that what happened in the film would actually have taken place – whereas thinking along the lines of the argument Jay was making would lead them to believe that the historically accurate context inferred the events were true also.

Anyway after this I went on to the Old Bar for Old Bar Idol. Ant was fantastic as a presenter as usual and Drew made a valient attempt at singing and made it down to the final three of the night as well. It was great to see so many people out too as there were loads of computing folk. This was followed by getting take-away and going back to a very drunk Kieran’s house who has promised several hundred lines of code and no less than three blog posts tonight – I’m still waiting on those though I’m not holding my breath :P.