I’ll be away at the Christian Union’s house party so I may be out of contact this weekend. I’m hoping I can get phone signal and connect my laptop up via the bluetooth modem but none the less, responses will be a little delayed until next week.
It’s referendum time again. Last year was great. The first round of referendum’s gave us freedom of speech. The second round banned it. So what’s on the plate this year…
Exciting so far huh? But this time we actually have one interesting motion. Hard to believe I know, but true (depending on your outlook).
The item of interest is motion 4 “Nestle Boycott.” Basically, the Nestle Boycott needs to be renewed or the union will once again begin stocking Nestle products. Huzzah! It’s important we stop boycotting Nestle. Why? Because we’re not children. I’m a third year undergraduate at a Russell group university. I am quite capable of making up my own mind as to whether I would like to boycott Nestle or whether I would in fact like to buy their products.
We don’t even stock Nestle baby milk! It’s not even like we are boycotting the product that is (claimed to be) causing problems in the third world, they are completely different arms of the company we are dealing with here. At the moment it’s not even explained why we are boycotting Nestle. Granted the motion resolves to put up posters telling students why there is a boycott but I’m sure the last motion to boycott Nestle did too and where are those posters? Why not put the posters up and still stock Nestle products? We’re all educated adults, we can make up our own minds.
Having seen a recent episode is the new series of QI I was hugely disappointed. It just wasn’t QI. It was jazzed up, garish and just generally not up to the usual standard. That said having just seen another episode, perhaps it was a one off. Not that the standard hasn’t dropped because I still believe it has but there is at least some hope for it yet.
Thursday saw Microsoft’s Premiere Field Engineering section come in to the School of Computing to try and grab some recruits. It started out with a lecture in the morning at which I picked up two t-shirts and a USB stick (as well as several pens though none of them actually worked lol). This was followed by some technical demos, which despite suffering technical problems at every turn was quite interesting.
Finally we hit The Faversham where the conservatory had been reserved along with a bar tap of £400. Disappointingly it took us about two hours to drink our way through it, though not by lack of effort on my part.
Up till now I’ve used a fairly limited taxonomy system. I had three categories – general for my blog posts, video for my video blog posts and gossip for things to be syndicated to SoC Gossip. This dates back to when I was blogging on Nerd Federation and the posts were organised into channels. It’s a bit out dated and not very Web 2.0 these days though so I’ve finally got round to implementing tagging instead of categories.
So from now on posts will be tagged, usually with multiple tags. There are also new URLs, though the old URLs for the categories will still continue to work in that they will redirect to the new URLs.
You can tell when the end of term coursework deadlines are approaching. The days get longer, or at least shifted later. No longer can you go home after lectures, some actual work is required. Work that normally lasts long into the night.
It worries me slightly then that we are still in October and the season has already begun. Last night myself and George left DEC-10 at 2:15am. Granted it wasn’t literally “all night” but when you have to be up the next morning for lectures it’s late enough. I added up all the deadlines we (well, I, it will fluctuate slightly depending on your program of study) have a total of 10 deadlines between now and the end of the term and that isn’t counting all of our FYP work.
It’s going to be an intense year.
My new CPU having arrived for my would-be Windows server arrived yesterday so having 10 minutes or so before uni I decided to install it and boot the machine up. So I took the old CPU out, put the new one in, connected everything back together again and plugged it all in and booted it up. The lights on the front of the case now come on. That’s it. Still no output to the monitor! I’m not entirely sure what could be wrong with it now, I’ve replaced the motherboard, I’ve replaced the CPU, I’ve replaced the memory. That’s basically everything in the machine. What else could be wrong?
Well, another day, another few hundred pounds piled into my file server.
I’m now on my second motherboard, third RAID implementation, waiting for a hard drive to arrive back from CCL, second graphics card, the list goes on.
My new RAID card arrived this morning. I eventually managed to get it installed and wired up. I didn’t want to go in at first because the card was bent (physically) but I managed to get it in. I then booted into the BIOS setup to find my hard drives were registering was SATA-150.
I took them out and after some searching around was told I needed to remove the jumpers on them. Apparently Seagate ship all their hard drives set to run as SATA-150 rather than SATA-300. So I removed the jumpers and put everything back together again.
Booted it up again and created the RAID partition. Booted up into Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop via the Live CD to see what would happen if I tried to install it. It couldn’t detect any drives. So I downloaded Ubuntu 7.10 Server (alternative install) and ran that but that couldn’t detect any drives either.
High Point so supply the source code so that you can compile your own drivers which is what I may end up doing. There are no instructions on how to do this though and most of the people on the Ubuntu forums generally agree that it doesn’t work with Ubuntu. It seems to want me to save it to floppy drive though. I don’t have one. Why would I?
So I could always just give in and install Windows Server 2003, that should be nice and simple right? Well, almost except according to the install instructions on my manual I need to boot into Windows Server 2003 (you know, before I’ve installed it) and run the software to burn the driver to floppy drive (which again, I don’t have).
The moral of the story is this. If you are thinking of building yourself a file server with RAID, to save yourself a lot of hassle, rather than doing it in hardware, simply write down every binary digit by hand onto a writing pad. It’s a lot easier.
Every time I move onto a new computer I realise how some of the default Firefox settings annoy me. Such as it searching Google.com instead of Google.co.uk. Luckily it’s easily fixed by adding Google UK from the huge list of available search engines on the Mozdev page.
It’s strange how much people can change. It’s also perhaps worrying that I am now old enough to have people I haven’t seen in so long to be able to say that. That said, perhaps they haven’t changed at all and if time has done anything, it has simply changed your perception of them. Thus resulting in the discrepancies between your perception and the person themselves.
Last night was Wendy House. It’s been a while since we had a good turn-out to Wendy though last night was really something that would have to be stretched to pass as an old school turnout. Only a small selection of the circle made it down (though a better performance than reason months at least) and of those that did, even less stuck around until the end.
All in all, it was quite an unexpected selection of faces that lasted the night. Gaz decided to come down, who given he is only doing a very limited second year this year, I haven’t seen in uni for many weeks. John’s appearance was also a much welcome one as we haven’t seen each other in a few months so it was good to catch up.
Finally I also ran into Krystina who I haven’t seen since high school. It took me a double take to recognise her as the perception I had of her was similar to that of most people I knew at high school – not a particularly good one given I class most of them as failures with no hope of ever achieving anything with their life. In reality she was looking great and provided some quality gossip, which is really the most important thing. It was great catching up as we had both high school and The D to talk about.
So there you have it. Seeing old friends again, just another great reason to go to Wendy.