Chris Worfolk's Blog

After feeling ill on Wednesday night I went to bed at 10 and got a decent night’s sleep in though I did have to get up at 6:30 for work. Work itself was alright, I saw the “day shift” for the first time since Chrismukka which will likely be the only time between now and summer that I will see them unless their is a company social or whatever.

Then in the evening I headed back to town to meet Michelle and Rosie before we headed down to Bourbon to meet Phil and eventually Sarann (who turned up about an hour and a half late). It was cool to actually talk to Rosie given she has been up for a week and the only time I’ve seen her is for like an hour in Walkabout on Saturday. You can tell she is Michelle’s sister (or at least from Jersey) in the fact that she thought my job was really cool because I get to wear a hat.

Now I’m back home once again and due at work. I’m quite liking home at the moment though, my parents went on holiday yesterday and my sister doesn’t get back until today so for the night I had the house to myself which I enjoy, it seems somewhat removed from the pressures of uni. While coursework and Rationalist Week are still playing on my mind hear, I do at least have cable TV to attempt to drown it out with.

Am I stressed?

I’ve been taking a battering from insomnia recently. When I’m at uni I normally get to sleep fast enough but it’s taking me hours. When I’m at home on the close at work I’m usually so tired by the time I get home that I just fall straight to sleep as soon as a lie down. But even then I’m struggling to drift off.

I’m even struggling to fall back to sleep when my alarm goes off on a morning and I reset it for an hour later which I can normally do for an entire day.

It’s not normal for me. Sure I have those nights when I just can’t sleep but most of the time I don’t have a problem, I certainly don’t go through prolonged periods of insomnia yet I seem to have been unable to sleep for about two weeks now. It’s going to kill me if it keeps up, I have coursework to do, not to mention work and A-Soc and all the things I never got time to do during term time.

We topped ourselves last night with the 3rd Rationalist Week planning meeting lasting 3 hours 20 minutes which is 20 minutes longer than normal. That involved some quality debate and discussion as well as planning though. Things are finally coming together, we now have the plan pretty much set out, though to be on schedule we should have by now. I guess that means we are pretty much on schedule though that would seem weird as everything students ever do is done at the last minute.

I’ve already had a busy today – after grabbing breakfast with Norm I went down to Maplins to buy some electronic gear, went to the bank, came back to place some orders, went to speak to Kay in the union, went to the cash office and I’ve been down to media services to get the posters printed. Oh I also went down to the office to get my deliveries as well, the megaphone has arrived.

I maintain that some kind of deity is watching over the events and trying to smite us though. As I shall explain.

Ordering the PA system
Last Thursday night / Friday morning I started an electronic fund transfer to move the money I needed to buy the PA system onto my credit card. I takes 4 working days given it was after 4pm on Thursday which resulted in it going into my account today.

So after 5 days of waiting I logged on at midnight last night to see if it had been sorted. It took an hour or so but eventually went through and the money was on my account! This was after the payment had appeared in my account but my balance had not updated at which point I phoned Egg to find out what was going on and was assured my balance would update soon (which it did).

I went through the shopping cart and came across a notice saying they could only deliver to the card holder’s address. My Egg card is my one thing I have registered to my uni address! And I can’t get it delivered to uni as the office closes tomorrow which is when it would be delivered so there would be nobody to sign for it (even if I could get them to contact me, I would be at work) which is why I spoke to my parents and asked them to sign for it when I got it sent home.

This had screwed me over, I needed to get it sent home so I would get it in any decent amount of time. Plan B was to use my other credit card registered at home – but the credit limit on that one isn’t high enough for me to make the purchase.

Plan C, use my debit card, but I couldn’t do that as I didn’t have enough money in my overdraft. Why you may ask? Because I transfered the money over to my Egg card to pay for it. Plan D was to split the items, max out my HSBC credit card and put the rest on my debit card as I had enough in each account to do it so that if I balanced it right I would still get free shipping on both orders.

Except they don’t accept Maestro debit cards.

So Plan E I ordered the first half on my credit card last night, then this morning I went down to the bank, drew money out of my overdraft and paid it onto my Lloyds TSB debit card which is a Visa and I did it in person so that it would go on my account straight away (at 10am because unlike every over weekday, they open at 10am instead of 9am) and then went home and ordered the second half of my order using the money I had just put onto my Visa debit card.

Then finally today I came to move the money back from my credit card to my bank account that I no longer needed on my credit card and found no option to do it. Neither Egg nor HSBC’s online banking allow me to make transfers that way. Maybe they are not configured right or haven’t been setup to do that but I can do it the other way.

So now I’m left with a credit card with loads of money on and an overdraft that is almost maxed out with a massive credit card bill from my other credit card heading it’s way. Perfect.

The Llama have a new crazy ass menu. They are not actually enforcing the new pricing structure so it costs £6 for the 2 for 1 meals which there are now a limited selection of – chicken melt has been moved to the steaks section so it costs £6 on it’s own and burgers now only seem to be on the beer and burger for £5 deal though they may still be on the 2 for 1, we didn’t ask for clarification. All in all though, not a good change.

I found out why my Dell didn’t update the time properly – it was running quite out already. A month out in fact, it thought it was April.

Thursday consisted of heading to The Pack Horse for the Computing 50th Jubilee celebrations as they were holding a quiz about the history of computing. All the other teams had a big advantage over us given that they lived through most of it though :p. The celebrations continued on Friday with a giant buffet and free bar consisting of the specially brewed ales for the celebration. The night ended with a short but relaxed drink in The Library.

Saturday marked the arrival of Michelle’s sister Rosie so myself, Michelle, Rosie and Norm headed to Walkabout for lunch. It was (unsuprisingly if we had put any thought into it) a lot noiser than on a weekday and so probably a bad choice of venue but never the less the food was quite good. I had to run off to work the Saturday close soon enough though.

After work we headed off to find a petrol station deciding that Texaco was too expensive so we went to the BP in Crossgates. They were night pay window only though so we headed to the one on Otley Road so that we could go in store. They had closed both sliproads off the inner ring road however so we ended up on the Armley Gyratory! The roadworks are just stupid, closing both sliproads is an absolute joke, it doubles the length of your journey. Anyway, we managed to get a sandwhich in the end and headed back to my halls to eat given we were so close, then headed home.

Sunday I was on the close again, and we were actually fully staffed at least on the closing team which seems to make a refreshing change these days. Monday was yet another close, we were staffed for a normal weekday but because it’s Easter we were fairly busy which was flustrating when I was trying to get the close done. We still got out before 2 though.

Then yesterday I headed back to campus in time to catch a lunch at The Llama as it’s been far too long.

EMI and Apple have just announced a new edition to their offerings – EMI’s entire catalog will now be offered DRM free. For $.129 a track (opposed to the classic $0.99 which is still available) you get your tracks at 256kbps rather than 128kbps and DRM free though they will still be in AAC format.

This is one step closer to making buying music online a good alternative to buying the actual CD, indeed it’s by far the biggest one. You will now be able to move music between devices which was the major problem and it also solves the licences problem (losing them) as you can back up all your music without any problems.

Google launched their new ISP, Google TiSP which offers wireless broadband usage using a network built through the sewerage system. Simply install the kit in your toilet and flush the cable down to connect to the network.

Facebook offered LivePoke, in which they dispatched live people to go and poke your victims, good for the first 100 pokes you made.

Microsoft posted instructions on how to run Mac OS X on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.

The Pirate Bay disclosed plans of the upcoming move to North Korea.

Unfortunatly, Buffy Talk was missing it’s traditional April Fools celebration. I put it down to my life getting in the way, it’s just not on.

I need a bigger credit limit! Whenever I want to buy a large purcahse on my credit card I have to move money over to my credit card. Looking back, I should have probably just bought it with my debit card and given up on the cash back. But anyway, it takes 3 working days for the money to clear – let’s count that. Today is Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and we’re on day one, Tuesday day two, Wednesday it should finally be in there. That’s like a week from now!

If I wasn’t using online banking it would be sooooooooooooo much faster. I would simply go down to my account and draw the money out and go to the other bank or whatever and pay it in and it would be available instantly. But because I’m using debit card payments and electronic fund transfers (more usually) it takes forever to do anything. I mean 3 working days! Why do computers need the weekend off?!?

It actually is a 6 days. I say it’s Friday, it’s currently Thursday night for me but if you don’t get it sorted before 2pm it’s actually 4 working days which is why it’s effectively Friday in terms of timing. But in my time it’s going to be 6 days. I don’t even seem to be able to change my mind about transfering the money now.

Despite getting to bed as late as usual last night I managed to drag my ass out of bed and make it down to The D for breakfast. Didn’t quite wake me up as much as I had hoped though, I think my spirit was all beaten down by the miserable weather. I did manage to get some productive work done though, I posted my student loan application form off, did a bit of shopping then made it to DEC-10 to finish off the A-Soc posters and do a very small amount of SY23 and SE24.

Speaking of the posters, curtesy of Izzy we now have two of them printed and they are looking pretty cool! Let’s just hope that everything on them is typo and error free as I only had time to proof them on screen so nobody else has proofed them and it wasn’t even a printed out copy, though to my credit I did read through everything as it was copied over from Writer to PowerPoint which I normally wouldn’t bother to do. Still though, I’m going to have to use a few of the stockpile of faith points that I haven’t really invested anywhere else ;).

Having said I would be in the lab yesterday I actually managed to drag my ass out of bed to get in there for 12 after another night of insomnia and get some coursework done. We’ve made a start on both SY22 and SY23 which I am quite pleased about. This compares to today when I managed to get a decent night’s sleep in and still I’m not quite up :(.

The evening consisted of another three hour planning meeting for Rationalist Week – at the moment we’re not looking too much over budget if you work the figures out the right way. Moz bought the tents and I’m buying the PA system so if you don’t count those and you don’t count all the food and drink which we’re again funding ourselves because the union won’t cover those costs (even though we wouldn’t have enough money to cover them anyway) we are only £7 over budget! That is of course before we upgrade to a bigger generator.

Everything seems to be falling nicely into place though, there is still a lot of work to do but I think we have the timescale to do it in and once we get a few more things finalised I will even pretty set. Once the event is rubberstamped by the university and we have the generator sorted I think are the main concerns at the moment. Although I’m sure it’s going to be nerve racking throughout the build-up to the event.

Later that evening we hit The Terrace to chillax for a little. It closed at 11 though, they are just not hardcore.