Chris Worfolk's Blog

It’s getting towards the end of term and I think we’re all (perhaps with the exception of Mr. Scott Revell) feeling the strain of coursework. In the last two weeks have term we have coursework due in for every single module, indeed, one of which is due in this week (at least for me) and the rest next week (I think). Point is, there is a lot of coursework. I walked in to DEC-10 this morning to find Drew sitting in the same seat he was sitting in when I left last night.

I’ve been more proactive than normal in getting the work done but given I work like 30 hours a week on top of my degree, I’m still going to struggle to get it all done. I’ve now finished my AI21 (though it hasn’t been handed in yet) and have now started on my SE20 coursework. Once that is out the way I still have SY (I’m told it’s easy, it doesn’t look that easy though), DB (that looks like a bit of work though doable) and AI22 (even the courseworkaholics are dreading that one) and I have just over a week to finish them all.

It’s a small world. After last night’s close we were all hanging around outside and somehow got onto the topic of porn. I mentioned I had just launched a new adult site and Johnny got talking about this site they used to go on when they were in high school. I mentioned my first site was launched as a site without any text to get round the filters.

Well, you should be able to see where this is going.

Johnny: “It was called play something or something. What’s yours called?”
Chris: “Girl Session”
Johnny: “Yeah, that was it!

Bare in mind we went to different high schools. Good to see my viral is working :D.

I logged on to Facebook at about 4pm on Wednesday to find I had been invited into a group named “Who burned down Ellerslie Hall?” Details soon emerged that there had been a fire at my hall. Like a proper, real fire with thick black smoke, the fire brigade being called and everything! I was terrified at first that it was the whole hall as I have a lot of computer equipment there as well as most of my hard earned material possessions, all the notes for my degree and generally most of the stuff I own.

Luckily it has just the kitchen that had been roasted and the fire had been put out. It was some what of a shock none the less though. I mean, how easy would it have been for the whole hall to burn down? I know there are a lot of fire doors but still. Also, how bad does this make us? Bodington has had two genuine fires in 40 years according to the warden there and yet in a hall with only 10% of the people we managed to start a fire in 3 months? Not the greatest track record ever. Maybe fires of this size weren’t counted. Still, it’s not good.

I did my first open at work today. The shift starts at 6am which is just a silly time. I mean, it was dark for the first few hours of work. Front counter open is well easy though – ice, cloths, butter, Philadelphia, that’s it. Considering the hours we slave away on closes, opens are just a breeze.

The lack of people is also a little weird as there was only myself, Rob and Joby working for the first few hours. I spent most of the day on window one. It’s always good to be up there on breakfast shifts as I can never remember breakfast kitchens due to how infrequently I do them.

I just got a phone call with the latest hot gossip direct from the lips of an insider informing us that Kieran and Heather are now officially “in a relationship.”

As well as the insider gossip, they also have now changed their Facebook status to “in a relationship” with eath other listed.

Ok, everyone together now, “awwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”

Last night’s activities: two girls, one bed, me and a very little sleep. I’ll leave you to fill in the blanks.

I say that but I’m actually now going to re-count the events of last night. It was awesome, despite so many bails on Wendy (better planning is needed, it’s the same pattern every month pretty much). I started at Graham’s as Sarann, Matt and Kat were heading over there. John came and went and Sophie arrived and we headed off to Wendy at like 11:45ish.

Inside we met Phil who introduced me to his much spoken of friend Alex (who is a really cool guy with amazing hair) and Cara (who seems really cool, I didn’t really get a chance to talk to her but she pulls of the goth outfit fantastically) plus Verity was hanging out with us and I ran into a few other people too. The night went well fast and it was like 2:15 before I knew what was happening.

Afterwards we ended up all going back to Phil’s. Which presented an interesting situation given there was 6 of us and only 2 beds. So myself, Verity and Sophie ended up sharing Phil’s bed. You just can’t beat the feeling of waking up in someone elses bed surrounded by attractive women.

To be fair, it’s about time I went home with Phil and slept in his bed though. Michelle has been endorsing it constantly for ages now. I also finally got added to the height chart which is long overdue. I don’t know where this idea that Phil lives miles away though, I know it’s further than say Sarann’s but not massively and it’s certainly way closer than Headingley.

So we went to Rockstar tonight. We being myself, Michelle, Phil, Alex and John. It was a good night although instead of DJ Chris Martin DJing all night they had a guest DJ Charlotte from The Subways who wasn’t playing quite as good tunes as Rockstar normally offers.

Phil left at midnight as he had a majorly long day although that also meant Michelle had to go because otherwise she would have had to actually sleep in her own bed for once :p. Speaking of bed hot swapping, Alex disappeared and later sent me a text providing a brief outline of why we couldn’t find him. I’m sure you can fill in the blanks.

Myself and John left about 2ish and headed down to Subway. We ran into some assholesi into the queue though that began throwing poorly crafted insults at us. One guy then just pushed straight past us and his mates followed. John asked for his place back and the guys starts cursing and threatening to kill us. I was toying with the idea in engaging with him. We’d have lost, I presume his mates would have jumped in and there was 4 of them against 2 of us. Still we could have done some damage in return, as John is kick-ass at his martial arts which I recon would have been worth the ass kicking. But given the Subway employees weren’t paying attention we would have got screwed over by the police so we would have just basically lost twice.

This kind of stuff should not be happening on a Thursday night though. Of course, it shouldn’t really be happening any night. I would blog on for a bit questioning why people feel the need to be such assholes but we know the general causes and it’s just stating the obvious that either education or genocide would be the most effective solutions. Still, rant over, I just need some time to clear my head and I actually might be able to get a few hours sleep in.

As if monotheist religions weren’t godless enough, today we took some major steps forward with Atheist Soc. Over a business-y type lunch at the Quilted Llama we finalised the aims and objectives of the society for the petition form and for the constitution. I’ve now dumped it on Jess’s desk so hopefully she will have actually got it and push it forward to the Union Council for consideration and hopefully ratification.

If everyone goes to plan and it does get pushed through and ratified we will officially be affiliated with the Union by the end of the month. There isn’t much after that we can get done and indeed it probably wouldn’t be a good idea given everyone will go home for Christmas and forget about it but it should allow us to get sorted for re-freshers in January/February or whatever.

Plus in order to get Union funding you need to have existed for a semester. If the society is created by the end of this semester, we will have a full semester of existence next semester and should be able to apply for funding for the next academic year. If we can get that we will have some real leverage for activities beyond us sitting round in a meeting room in the ARC (or more probably a bar) saying “yeah, there’s no God.” As fun as that would be, the society has so much more potential.

While the excessive drinking of uni has been great at blocking out the reality of real life over the past 18 months or so, now I’ve hit the big 2-0, it’s no longer working as well. I’m worried sometimes that I am even loosing my love of material posessions. It passes then I go back to planning what I am getting for my next computer (which Christmas work should fund nicely :p). I’m also starting to question why I’m doing a degree when I can’t stand lectures, they are all so very, very boring, clock watching affairs.

The thought of coursework is constantly playing on my mind, as is work. I’m still enjoying it when I’m doing closes and such but they might well get more stressful now our store manager is back (who stresses me out a bit anyway as I can’t figure him out) and I’m doing an open next Wednesday and I don’t like day shifts (anything after 3pm is good, but I don’t like mornings at work) and this weekend is going to be tiring and stressful as I’ve got a close Friday, day shift Saturday then I have to rush back for Wendy and then get back home Sunday for another close.

It seems all I do these days is send emails to people because something isn’t working or there is a problem or just general burocracy and incompetance. Nothing is ever simple, everything is some kind of giant battle for no good reason from running an online empire right down to the hours you have to spend planning when to charge your phone to stop it dieing on you in the middle of day. It’s now gone 2am but I don’t want to sleep because it means I will soon wake up and have to deal with everything in the morning.

With that in mind, I think I need to inject some direction back into my life. I’m not exactly sure how that counteracts most of the above mentioned problems. And it certainly doesn’t counteract the problems that didn’t get mentioned (notably that I’m still single and am losing faith in my very self as the “good guy,” the one characteristic I thought I could fall back on) but I don’t exactly have a plan B right now. I guess it could take my mind off other issues and eventually allow me to quit my job and my degree and do something I actually give a crap about.

So, putting direction back into my life. To me, that means lots and lots of website launches. Makes sense, they are making money quite solidly and the more sites I have the better it seems to be working providing I’m launching the right kind of sites and am focusing on the important issues of various sites (some sites need regularly updated content, some need nothing and you need to know which is which and indeed which of the sites that need the regular content are worth the time and effort).

I want to get some other projects going too. I have one or two ideas for film projects, especially those that form a series of shorts so I can leverage the userbase of sites like YouTube and the social networks.

I’m also toying with the idea of more service orientated projects. I’ve been running my web hosting business down for a while now (I’ve kept it up but not been accepting new clients) as the profit margins for budget hosts are crap and for better hosts, as a massive webmaster myself I know are looking for things like 24x7x365 support which you have to be a big hosting company to provide so I don’t think it’s worth it. Still, once I get my server up and running (which my next computer will be) there are a few directions I could go with that.

Then again, let’s look at what is realistically going to happen. Probably very little. Nothing is going to change, nothing is going to get better and in a few days time, maybe a week I’m going to come back here and blog the situation. It’s inevitably going to play out as generically as a Hollywood screenplay except that quote unquote hero doesn’t get the victory, the girl or the happy ending.

I don’t know why you read this. It’s the same crap I always write. It’s the same crap I wrote 5 days ago. You’ve spent what, 5-10 minutes reading this post? That’s 5-10 minutes of your life you’re never going to get back. It’s an hour or so of my life writing it I’m never going to get back. Is the world somehow richer for it? Is at least my mind even a little clearer for having contemplated it? Take a wild guess, I recon you’ll be pretty accurate. Stop typing Chris. Just stop typing.

I’ve been saying for many months, maybe even a year now that Google is no longer the innovative young company it once was but now a slow moving corporate mass. Well Techcrunch has been talking with a similar attitude pointing out their internal communication resembles that of classic big business. For instance reports of AdSence and AdWords only export to Excel, not Google Spreadsheets.

Speaking of Google Spreadsheets, the Web 2.0 spreadsheets start-up iRows has been bought out and is being merged in to the service. Absorbing technology rather than innovating it perhaps? It’s classic Google these days, let’s face facts, Google Video was awful, that’s why they bought YouTube.

And while I’m on the subject, how useful are Google’s new services anyway? They are putting major effort into their social network Orkut. MySpace and Facebook are still winning. Who uses Google Talk? Nobody, we’re all using Skype. Do you use Google Documents? I’m guessing not. Google Code Search? Google Reader? Google Page Creator? Hell, looking down the Labs list I haven’t even heard of most of it.

I don’t want to turn my blog into a Google bashing blog because their search still rocks. Google Local is still useful, Google Earth is still cool. I still use gMail. They got these services right. But I dislike the way people preach how Google is a nice caring “don’t be evil” company. Those days are gone. It’s not their fault, you just can’t do innovative big business.