I’m at DEC-10 at the moment. It’s 2pm and I’ve been here for over an hour. And it’s been dead. There are like a dozen people here at most. Other than when a lab session is on, this seems to be fairly normal these days. Kind of removes any come back we have for them cutting down on labs and computers when nobody actually uses them.
Today’s A-Soc meeting got a decent turn out. Gerry Hannant’s “Scientific standards: does religion measure up?” didn’t attract a massive crowd but it brought in a larger one than usual and one that if we could attract to every meeting would probably make running the society worthwhile.
Let’s hope so anyway as I feel like I’m going A-Soc crazy at the moment. Next week I have like 6 A-Soc events! We’re putting together a faith and belief survey, we’re getting the stage production planning underway, we have two debates, a social and a lunch time talk.
People are finally signing up for London too. We took several hundred pounds in today from people reserving their places so if you are looking for a bargain trip to London I would hurry up as places are going fast.
Got two interesting pieces of news at work today.
First of all, my long, long awaited (and some would say long overdue :D) promotion to staff trainer is finally official. I scored a rather disappointing 42 out of 50 on my exam but given, a) you only need 40 to pass and b) I beat Neil by one mark, I guess that will suffice. So I should finally be on a half decent rate of pay which will be nice. Ha, I’ll need it with the amount of time I’ve booked off work over the next few months.
Secondly, today I had “the talk” from Kath. It was in the rumour mill that myself and Neil were going to be offered it which I’m quite glad about as it gave me a little time to think about what my response would be even if it was only for a hypothetical situation. Basically, I’ve been offered the job of shift running manager.
I told her I would need a week to think about it but to be honest, I think I have already made up my mind.
I’ve finally made some changes to my blogroll. With Raby getting his blog started I decided it was finally time to make some changes. So I took a few blogs off that I either don’t read any more or people simply weren’t posting on them anymore which annoys me as the way I read blogs is to go to my blog roll, hold ctrl and click every link. I’ve also added a few more blogs.
The A-Soc intro meeting having been a mixed result, I couldn’t really help thinking about the poor turnout. Sure we had an amazing conversation rate and now have enough members to constitute a society as well as a bit cash too but it was a struggle to even get what we did. I put my faith in a better turnout for the lunch time talk on Thursday, after all, people will have gone home by 8pm whereas they can spare an hour of their day.
Turns out, they can’t.
We got 5 people, including myself and Norm. Maybe there was a lack of promotion. Though it did go out to the mailing list, was mentioned at the intro events, put it on LUU Online and handed two dozen flyers out (that really isn’t that much to be fair). Maybe people had lectures – Sarann and Jack both spoke to me later saying they couldn’t come because of lectures and several people gave the same reason on Facebook.
The fact could well be though, that nobody cares. Atheism is a magnet for apathy. Maybe it’s time to finally accept Jesus Christ as our lord and saviour.
My mouse having given up on my recently I’ve ordered a new set of peripherals. It started with my getting sick and tired of not being able to play WoW in the dark so I was umming and arring (what, those are real verbs!) over getting a backlit keyboard. I narrowed it down to the Logitech G15 or the Microsoft Razer Reclusa.
So when my house packed up on me I decided I might as well get a decent one and replace my keyboard while I was at it. In the end I went with the Reclusa as although the G15 has the cool LCD screen and better macro programming, the Reclusa is a bit more comfortable and better suited to non-gaming applications. Add to that the Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 3000 and I have a nicely branded package :D. I’m interested to see if the 4-way scrolling feature is any use. Probably not but I don’t feel that detracts from it’s coolness.
Finally, I also threw in a Logitech 2.4Ghz Cordpress Presenter for when I am giving speeches and presentations (which with A-Soc’s timetable this year is a lot!).
Hmm, I need to blog more about this (and life in general) in length. 1:30am when I need to be up at a reasonable time for uni is not the time to it. But I wish share my preliminary thoughts with you.
Tonight was the A-Soc launch meeting for this academic year. Basically, nobody turned up.
That’s not really true. But turnout was poor. At the Film Making Soc intro meeting last year we got like 100 people. You can put the A-Soc turn out down to the fact the meeting wasn’t until 8pm, the fact that we were only in the Riley Smith Hall for one day plugging the society or the fact that nobody wants to be part of A-Soc, any way you look at it, I was ready to cry at 8:15 when only a handful of people had turned up.
We ended up with a little over a dozen people at the meeting, a far cry from what I was expecting and indeed what most other societies get. Never the less the talk was delivered in full. And people signed up. We got an amazing conversation rate. Something like 86% of the non-members at the meeting signed up to become paid members. Given the turnout that isn’t that many members but it is amazing conversation rate – given normally you would expect sometime like 10-20% at best.
We ended up in the pub with the usual suspects and a few new members as well. Hopefully we will pick some more up on Thursday and a few more in the coming weeks too. Hopefully we will pick up enough to actually make it worth the effort that goes in.
My sister has just got a new computer so trying to get a few things up and running on it for her I got playing around with Vista.
It’s an interesting experience. I realise that a lot of the problems caused are just due to the fact that I’ve never used Vista before – for example trying to find my way around the computer settings would take equally as long if I was using any version of Windows for the first time. Also, we are a species, generally don’t like change. So I tried to bare these in mind when complaining.
First of all, Windows prompts you for everything. It’s not enough to say that you want to manage the user accounts on the system. Once you’ve tried to go to that screen you then have to tell Windows you give it permission to show you that screen. While I’m sure this has security advances, I think the fact I have just clicked “manage user accounts” indicates I would like to manage user accounts.
Secondly, when saving a file from the internet you are given what is basically a small web browser rather than the standard Windows file save dialog. You get an address bar with the C:\Wherever as you would expect. You do not however get any kind of folder navigation and if you click the drop down arrow to find the other locations on your computer you will in fact find it is actually just a web address bar and will be presented with your most recent URLs. How quite you save a file to http://www.google.co.uk/ I don’t know but that appears to be what Windows is suggesting. It then moans if you try it and you need to switch to the folder browsing mode instead.
Things generally seem to take a bit longer. I can’t just hit control alt delete and access my task manager. I’m then taken to a sub-menu where it thinks I want to log off where I then have to select task manager. The start menu no longer appears nicely spaced out across the screen, it’s now all stuffed into a corner with an expanding tree still menu.
That said there are some nice touches to it. When alt tab’ing through the windows the desktop is now included in the list so you can easily hide all your programs to get access to your desktop icons. Also if you hover over anything on your task bar it will show you a thumbnail of the window.
What address was this email sent to?
It sounds like a simple question but one I can’t find the answer to. If someone knows how then please let me know.
I have an email sitting in my inbox which I myself sent out from the A-Soc email account an hour ago. It’s To: address is sent back to the A-Soc email account and all the addresses are done via blank carbon copy. Therefore there is no record in the headers as to which address the email is sent.
So later on my mail client goes and checks all my mailboxes, downloads the email and puts them into my inbox. But doesn’t say which account it got the email from. It simply expects that information to be obtained from the email headers. Thunderbird and Outlook Express are both guilty of it. You would think in the days of such frequent phishing scams that much up emails to mail boxes would be a pretty standard feature. Apparently not.
No more Mental Mondays? You have to being joking! This is so much more of an injustice than the Iraq war! We should be out on the streets protesting this, it’s an outrage. I loved that night, it was never a bad atmosphere, everyone left peacefully, what was the problem?
Still while it’s goodbye to Mental Mondays, it is hello to a healthier looking bank balance. Having got paid today I checked my statement to find I was actually in credit! By around £4 but I don’t think that is too bad. I have my credit card to come out of what which is quite a bit but less than half my student loan which has taken the balance of my other account over £1,000. While it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to move £1,000 to my savings account as hoped I should still have some funds free to put away.