Dan Q
Take a look at the thread on Train Girl Fantasies that Andy has accidentally started. Participate! Tell us all about your Train Girl Fantasies. We all know you’ve had them.
Last night I fixed eight or so of the bugs that Paul and Kit found in my software project the night before. They’ve promised not to find any more before I’ve had a chance to fix these ones.
I agree with Kit’s rant:
I learn today that the funding may be cut *again* to the Nightline here is Aberystwyth. I don’t care what the reasoning is – cutting the funding anymore is plain dangerous.Its lie after lie in the Union. I have seen little in five long years that has actually impressed me about the way it operates or the people involved (bar a few notable exceptions). Its a lie and an illusion to sit and pretend that cutting all budgets evenly is fair. Its actually lazy. That’s all – its the simplest “no brainer” approach to finance ever. I mean look at it another way – would a company do that? I know some have – but clever ones do not. They look where the money is being spent, and they look toward efficiencies. They also look for people who are misusing, under-using or inappropriately / inefficiently using their funds. You don’t simply hack money from everyone and expect them to cope.
Until now we have simply been a soft target. Time and time again they have cut our funds and received nothing but us working harder and harder to make ends meet. We have ended up funding things ourselves, supplying our own resources or equipment. This has to stop here and now. We are going to have to fight and push this back. The tide needs stopping here and now – as else we are simply not going to exist anymore.
Words are easy, action more difficult – but we have a load of strengths the union hasn’t got. We need to persuade them to cut somewhere else instead of us – yes its that bad, but I am afraid I see an even straight line cut as being an insult to the 2600 hours of open time (let alone meeting and organisational time) we put in. No other club and society is open *anything* like that long, or does anything for every other student.
I am bloody annoyed.
Current Mood:infuriated
Current Music: My fishtank filtration units
From my understanding, Nightline provides a listening ear to every student at the university for at least 12 hours, every night during termtime, run entirely by volunteer students – the money is spent on such necessities as a phone bill and publicity materials. No other student-run organisation on campus: the sports teams, the clubs and societies, etc., provides a service which is accessible to all, and saves lives. It’s outrageous that the Union don’t see the importance of things like this until they’re gone.
Bugger. Now I’m pissed-off, too.
A must-read! An excellently-written and concise article in dot.life about the falling sales of CDs being blamed on file-swappers, playing devil’s advocate. Go read it, people!
Did anybody see the story about the American who had their house stolen this weekend? That’s a fantastic theft to pull off. Wish I’d thought of it first. Ah well.
Also this weekend, a man is killed in a collision between a car and a train. Not particularly noteworthy under normal circumstances, I know, but the train in question is a tourist attraction – a one-third scale steam train with a top speed of 15mph, and the car was a Ford Escort, probably about the same size as the steam engine and weighing about half as much. It takes a special kind of bad driver to get struck on a level crossing at which the trains go barely fast enough to outrun a sprinting child.
Enough newssurfing – back to work;
As if Adam’s Bike Saddle Problems weren’t bad enough, somebody’s stolen mine! While left parked outside my house, somebody came along in the night and swiped the seat of my bike! I’m not in the slightest bit pleased.
Claire‘s not feeling well. Kit and I are keeping our eyes out for any good placebos. I need to go in to the office today. And, yes, I am aware that it’s Sunday. If Claire’s not up to it, I might have to find an alternative that bumming a lift from her. Hmm…
Edit, 17th September 2007: This post seems to be a hot blogspam target, presumably because it’s the fourth Google hit when searching for “bumming saddles” or some other nonsense reason. Comments closed.
It seems that NatWest now only open during the hours at which I am at work. Yet somehow I’m expected to deposit my paycheque. This makes no sense.
Mostly, I’ve been watching Futurama and drinking good beer. On Saturday, Claire and I went up to a forest North of Dolgellau and ate sandwiches and failed to find climbable trees. And I twisted my ankle. In any case, after a week of working late and coming home to evenings with everybody-in-Aber-I-know, it was good to spend some time alone with her.
I should be coding Three Rings, or Kit will shout at me. Better get on.
This report by the BBC, published yesterday, gives evidence that we science/engineering graduates live longer than our artsy opposite numbers. Made my day.
Yawny morning.
Got to sleep eventually. Basically, my friend’s problems can’t be solved by anybody but themselves. I’m going to offer to be there, be supportive, and to help them in any way they can, but in the end, what’s troubling them can’t be solved by anybody else. Will try to get a chance to speak to them later today.
For now, however, I have a deadline to wage war with.
I can’t sleep.
For the last week or so, I’ve talked a little every day or two with a really good friend of mine who is, unfortunately, going through some problems at the moment. They’d been quite understating and evasive about talking about them at length until yesterday, when they suddenly revealed to me quite how difficult they’re finding their life, of late.
What scared me more than how bad their situation is is that I honestly don’t know what I can do or say to help them. I’ve tried everything I can think of and it’s beginning to upset me that I don’t know what else to try.
I still can’t sleep.
Claire called me up at work to taunt me about the fact that I’m working late. Well; okay, she didn’t, but she night as well have, because I’m still at the office, slogging away at a chunk of Bovini for a deadline tomorrow, not making much progress, and I only spoke to the client earlier today about how things look like they could go okay… (moral: never get optimistic with clients)
Anyway; to cut a long story short, I don’t expect to get out of here any time soon, and it sounds like everybody’s having a great time without me. <sob>
I want to go home.
Wouldn’t the world be so much better a place if Brits had to go through some kind of vetting procedure – a test of sorts – before they were permitted to go on holiday to Ibiza?
An example extract from an interview might be:
Interviewer : Question twelve: if you were to be granted passage to go to Ibiza, how would you spend your time there?
Applicant : I’d dress up as a girl, go out with my mates, get completely wrecked, make unwanted advances towards women, and take the piss out of the locals.
Interviewer : Okay… I’m afraid we’re going to have to decline your application. Have you considered Antarctica?
This is my third and final attempt to write this journal entry without something terrible happing that causes me to lose it in it’s entirety.
Spent a long weekend (Friday to Tuesday) in the North-West of England, firstly at Andy’s party, then later visiting my folks in Preston, with Claire. Details follow…
ANDY’S PARTY
The weekend started at Andy’s 21st birthday party, in Bury/Bolton/somewhere-in-that-whole-Northern-Greater-Manchester-area. It was an absolutely fantastic party, with beer flowing
freely down our chins and onto the floor, interspersed only with drinking other things, including but not limited to helium from a
great quantity of balloons we shouldn’t have been left near. Now that other people I know are passing the great 21-barrier, I don’t feel quite so old (at 22).
Andy’s speech was beautiful and heartbreaking. The food was great. The company was even better. It was great to see folks who I’d not seen since the end of term (and, in some cases, who I won’t see again for some time). Later, we retired to Andy’s house and lounged around drinking and talking until approaching 5am (I, sadly, fell asleep at about 3:30, as Claire had some hours before).
You can read other accounts of Andy’s party here, and here, and here too. And yes, I know it’s bad practice to make a list of links like this, but I don’t care: this is my third attempt at this entry, okay?
The following morning, we played Mario Party 4, and Claire won!!! With a hangover, no less. This is her first time as the ‘Party Star’, and she seemed glad of it: as my entries on 30th June and 7th July, among others, show, I have a bad case of winning whenever I play. This was, I believe, the first time I’ve ever not won. I came second. Barely. ;-)
MY FAMILY
After this, Claire and I continued to Preston to meet my mum, my sisters, and my gran, who’s visiting from Hartlepool. I hadn’t seen my gran in about a year, and it was good to see her
again… although she still insists – most strangely, somewhat favouritistically, and at least slightly tactlessly, that of her two children and five grandchildren, I am the ‘favourite’ –
the ‘special one’, as she puts it – old people, eh? [photo removed]
Played lots of Super Monkey Ball 2 and Mario Party 4. Sarah, the elder of my two younger sisters, and the self-dubbed ‘white sheep of the family’, is getting to be really good at the former. Spent a great deal of time at the pub. Watched “Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas”, a very well animated and clever cartoon feature film from Dreamworks, with an all-star voice cast. Apart from some confusion over the motivation of the evil goddess Erin, and a little over-frequency of ‘saw it coming’ (probably less of an issue for the children at whom the film is targeted), this is a very good film.
Back in Aber now, and have loads of work to do before a deadline on Friday. Better get on with it.
Aside from the main point of this article, I found it most amusing to find that state-run Indian elephants are fitted with reflectors ‘in an attempt to prevent road accidents’. What does it take to accidentally crash into an elephant?
Good progress at work today, easily catching up on the things I didn’t get done yesterday on account of having been at the Royal Welsh Show.
AbNib is proving itself popular, but I’m still not happy with it: there are a load of really cool features I’d like to add, yet. But that’s a job for another day. I’ll be up in Lancashire this weekend for Andy‘s party and to visit my folks, so I can’t do it then, either.
Claire’s gotten herself temporarily sterilized with a fantastic hyperdermic full of progesterone and with the aid of the nice people at Aberystwyth Family Planning Clinic. Woo and indeed hoo. She’s (theoretically) a lot less likely to forget to have an injection every three months than she is to forget to take the pill: something she’s demonstrated herself to be very proficient at.
I’ve been excessivley stressed for the last 48 or so hours. I think it’s mostly a result of having no money and my paycheque still being a week away, and having to live off my credit card in the meantime (which I don’t like doing). Also that my crisp-wound in my mouth from the other day has developed into a spot which would probably heal faster and hurt less if I could stop playing with it, but I can’t. And that I’m not making nearly as much coding progress on Three Rings as I should be.
I have a strange urge to go for a long walk in the rain this evening. I hope it rains.
I’m writing this from the (badly-protected: just had to go to a page with a particularly funky JavaScript to break out of their front-end browser) BBC Wales bus at the Royal Welsh Show, where Alex and I are working on behalf of SmartData.
Suppose I’d better get back to work and let these kiddies have the ‘net connection back…