memorable

Paul Is The Most Fucking Random Person In The World

Paul M: fucking nutter. The most random person you’re ever likely to meet. But you’ve got to love his sincerity.

This morning, I’m happily sat at my workstation, staring, as I do, at program code and pausing from time to time to check the RSS feeds of the usual crew, when the phone rings: Matt answers it; it’s Technium reception – they’ve got a parcel for us. Ooh; that’s exciting, but Matt’s deeply involved in some code so I offer to go and collect it. The arrangement here among us lazy folks is that the receptionist puts the parcel in the lift, and one of us toddles along the corridor and takes it out of the lift on this floor.

I stood outside the lift and listened as it came up to the first floor. The door opened, and I lifted out the parcel… and that’s when I noticed the first strange thing: the parcel was addressed to me, personally (which is very unusual) and the address was written entirely in marker pen (rather than being a printed label, as most goods delivered to us here are). I’m not expecting anything; least of all at work: I never give my work address to anybody. Who could have sent this?

I opened it and laughed out loud. It took just a second to realise what was going on, as I recalled a conversation in the RockMonkey ChatRoom yesterday lunchtime…

[11:38] * Ava_Work goes to nuke food
[11:38] <Ava_Work> Hmm… spaghetti hoops on toast for me, methinks…
[11:39] <Pacifist_049> You’re microwaving spaghetti hoops?
[11:41] <Ava_Work> Yup.
[11:41] <Ava_Work> Why?
[11:41] <Pacifist_049> Philistine
[11:41] <Ava_Work> So…
[11:41] <Ava_Work> …how else can I do it?
[11:41] <Ava_Work> And think carefully now…
[11:41] <Pacifist_049> Pan
[11:41] <Ava_Work> A pan. Which I don’t have. But let’s pretend I did. How would I heat it?
[11:41] <Pacifist_049> I know you don’t have a cooker at work, but that’s not the issue here. It’s the principle, damnit!
[11:42] <Ava_Work> So; as it pisses YOU off so much, feel free to bring me a pan and a cooker. Then I’ll do it your way, which is – in the end – preferable.
[11:42] <Ava_Work> However, it doesn’t piss ME off enough that I’ll go hungry rather than nuke spaghetti hoops.

Click on images for larger versions.

The parcel, as shown above, contains a pan, wooden spoon, loaf of bread, tin of spaghetti hoops, and a strangely familiar electric hob.

Which is a fab gesture, although if I use it for my lunch today I’ll have to do so on the sly, on account of the fact that the Technium facilities manager is in today and this particular piece of electrical equipment has not been electrically safety-tested.

Electrical safety test sticker.

What the fuck. Thank you, Paul!

Troma Night Makes International News

If you come to Troma Night tonight, I’ll explain the above picture (click for a larger version). It’s got something to do with this new account on the web site.

Fucking marvellous.

Tsunami Relief Concert

On Saturday night, Claire and I went to the Tsunami Relief concert at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, which was pretty fab. We arrived at about 3:15pm, just as things were starting to kick off – on one of the many park and ride services being operated especially for the event. The buses and their fuel were both donated for the evening, and the bus drivers were working as volunteers (but taking donations towards the fund in tubs at the door). We had some confusion over the gate we needed to enter by, which only increased our relief at getting in out of the driving rain. It wasn’t much warmer inside, but huddling with a crowd pushing their way towards the stage quickly warmed us up. The Millennium Stadium is huge. It’s amazing to wander down onto the floor, with tens of thousands of people looking back across it.

The concert was really good – a lot of acts I’d looked forward to seeing: the Manic Street Preachers, Feeder, Eric Clapton and Keane were all fantastic. But between these were a lot of other acts which were surprisingly good – Katherine Jenkins, who performed first, was absolutely wonderful: her rendition of “Amazing Grace” brought tears to my eyes. Lulu was wonderful, Kelly Jones of the Stereophonics was just stunning… even Craig David was more than tolerable as he performed a slow and easy acoustic set. And polishing it off with Jools Holland’s Ryhthm & Blues Orchestra and Eric Clapton jamming away together made a great finish to the evening.

We were both exhausted from about 11 hours on our feet, but it was a great show well-worth seeing. I pity those of you who tried to get tickets but were too late – you missed out.

Sadly, we both lost a point on Bryn’s Challenge – disallowed as we were from taking food or drink into the stadium, we had to resort to the fast food available on-site. We settled for merely having a hot dog each, while the folks we watched on the Troma Night webcam tucked into their pizza, but it’s still disappointing that we had to do so. Ah well.

We got back into Aber at about 3am: Claire took a lie-in on Sunday morning after a sterling driving effort (albeit less of a “sterling driving effort” than when she drove to Stirling, but hey).

BBC “Talking Point” about the concert
BBC News: “Tsunami gig auction to raise more”
Claire buys the tickets on 8th January.

A Merry Little Christmas

All in all, that was a fantastic little Christmas Day – less disasters, fights, fires or cats-eating-decorations than a typical Christmas with my family, but no less fun for it.

Our landlords, who run the cafe below our flat, were kind enough to lend us use of their kitchen over the festive period (mmm… catering-grade cooking gear…), which actually enabled us to meaningfully cook a Christmas dinner – just trying to fit a joint of turkey into our (borrowed]) mini oven, here, would have been a joke, never mind the stuffing, potatoes, parsnips, and pigs in blankets (which I’ll demonstrate to Paul is a British colloquialism, not an American one, as he claimed yesterday)! The three of us – Paul, Claire and I, managed to finish all of the sherry while preparing food, and began on the strawberry wine not long thereafter… a very drunk Christmas was had by all.

Gifts were exchanged… Claire’s been spending a good deal of time playing with her new concertina and has taken a ten-minute degree. I’ve been learning how to deal with a zombie invasion and discovering the 50 crappest towns in the UK (impressively, Preston comes in at number 30 – more crap than both Bedford and Croydon). On other gift-related notes, it looks like the pair of us are going to be particularly busy next June – with Claire’s birthday on the 16th, an REM concert in Manchester (40th crappest) on the 17th, then a Green Day concert in Milton Keynes (35th crappest) on the 18th. Non-interesting factoid: I’ve just noticed that both Green Day and The Goo Goo Dolls use Slender Fungus as their web designers for their official sites.

Oh; and a special thanks to Kit and Fiona, up in Scotland – also spending their first respective Christmases “away from home” for the home-made soaps, which we’re trying to identify (mostly by smell) now. By our reckoning, mine’s mint, Claire’s is poppy-seed, and Paul’s is lime. Lucky guess?

So; despite the fact that we made enough food to be a feast for six, which made the three of us very full, and that Claire got horribly drunk on wine in the evening and didn’t even survive the entirety of our special Troma Night Christmas Edition, it was still a great day. And better yet, I’ve just noticed that there’s one caramel bell left hanging on the tree… mmm… breakfast…

A Great Wedding Was Had By All

Bryn, Paul, Claire and I went to Kit and Fiona‘s wedding this weekend. Despite the hideously long drive (almost 11 hours, with driver/navigator pairs driving and sleeping in shifts in order to maintain progress) throughout Friday night – and the equally long journey back on Sunday, it was a most fantastic and memorable experience.

The event took place in Aberlour and Knockando, which is pretty much as far North as you can get in the United Kingdom and still recognise people as being human. It’s actually only about 50 miles from Inverness, where I was born, set in a beautiful string of valleys North of the Grampian mountains.

The service was great – despite a few early setbacks (such as the bride arriving and wondering where the groom was… he hadn’t run away, it turns out, but was with the best man and the reverend, sorting out some of the mandatory paperwork…) – the Knockando church is built in the style of the 700-year old one that stood there until six years ago, when it burnt to the ground. Fiona looked fantastic, everybody sang along to silly Christian verse, Steve didn’t lose the rings, and nobody fluffed their wedding vows. That said, when the vicar who was officiating the ceremony asked Fiona to repeat, “And I promise this in the name of God, the father, the son, and the holy ghost,” she looked shocked for a moment – having just forgotten the first bit – and said, “Umm… help?” to request that he prompted her again. Which was sweet, in it’s own special way.

The reception was held at a lovely hotel in Aberlour – The Dowans Hotel – which, to the joy of Bryn and I – hosted an impressive 80 different varieties of whiskey, including treats like Oban, McAllans, and the very palatable locally-distilled Aberlour. The area is deep in whiskey country and Bryn and I had tried earlier in the day to visit one of the distilleries, without success (seemed to be closed for the winter, despite signs to the contrary, so we instead went and bought four kilos of shortbread, which will keep Paul happy for some time). Kit’s speech – which, as is traditional, spoke of how he and Fiona met – was particularly touching, describing the fascinating story of how they came together, and gave thanks to the project I did for my dissertation, which was in fact what Kit was giving a presentation on (in my absence) when they first met! Steve – the best man – also delivered a good speech: fighting against a moderately-obvious fear of talking to an entire room at once in order to take apart some of Kit’s more obvious flaws, such as his ability to get lose even given a map (he later gave them very carefully-delivered and well-described directions to their honeymoon venue, perhaps just to rub it in).

We ate a great meal, and then took part in several traditional highland dances – embarrassingly, all alien to me, but we soon discovered that the best approach was simply to ask a local to join you in a dance, and you’d soon understand what was going on… or fall over trying. Bryn, in particular, seemed to enjoy dancing with several pretty Scottish lasses, and was actually really quite good (lesson of the day: despite his protests, Bryn is actually a good dancer!). Between the alcohol, the company, and the dancing, Bryn seemed to have a fantastic time – I’ve not seen him quite so happy in many months! Restricted by tight-fitting trousers (I really should have gotten myself a kilt in the Huntley tartan before the wedding) I did a little less well, but still really enjoyed drinking myself silly then whirling around with random party guests.

Kit and Fiona left for their honeymoon in the northern isles (the mad fools!) in style, sent off by a cheer from the hotel courtyard and with tin cans trailing behind their car, and – a few drinks later – we made our excuses to leave, too: we had, it must be remembered, not slept properly since the previous morning, as we’d spent all of the last night travelling up there! Breaking with Scottish wedding tradition, nobody got involved in a fight (although Paul and Steve almost did at one point, and I’m pretty sure that if I’d have worn the Huntley tartan, some long-forgotten inter-clan battle would have begun again after centuries of peace). We retired to our (also lovely) bed and breakfast down in the town, taking turns to carry Claire (who’s feet, squeezed into quite impractical shoes, were hurting pretty badly).

All in all, a fantastic event. I’m really glad that I made it up there to see Kit and Fiona get married, and the party thereafter was wonderful too. Well worth the drive.

Related Links

One Thousand, Two Thousand, Three Thousand… Check Canopy!

Wow: a most memorable weekend. As you’ll remember, I spent the last weekend on a crash-course in parachuting in Lancashire. Having spent plenty of time in light aircraft or coasting around in a paraglider, I thought I had it sized: but it turned out to be even more spectacular (and scary) than I could have possibly predicted.

Saturday consisted of an exhausting seven hours or so of training: standing around in a field, doing such activities as demonstrating that we can arch our backs into the “stable position” and shouting “One thousand, two thousand, three thousand… check canopy!”, only to have some instructor shout “Malfunction!” and therefore have to go through our emergency process (“Look, locate, peel, pull, punch, arch!”) for the seventy-somethingth time… or lying on our bellies on overgrown skateboards, wiggling our bodies into strange contortions in order to simulate airflow (somewhat reminiscent of the idea of learning to swim by lying on a bench and practising strokes – little real value)… or clambering into a mock-up wooden aircraft (imagination required), climbing out onto the wing, and preparing to jump… or hanging in suspended harnesses, fumbling with the controls of make-believe parachutes…

I made my first jump on Saturday, early in the evening. Despite having been cool as a cucumber for the entire training process, I was very apprehensive by now. But this apprehension drifted gently away to be replaced with blind panic the moment we’d spiralled up to 3500 feet and the instructor opened the door, filling our faces with a 50mph wind. The plane was a small four-seater single-screw affair, with all but the pilot’s seat surgically removed so as to squeeze five parachutists (four students and an instructor, in this case) at a time into it, kneeling down and getting pins and needles in their feet. The instructor tapped the pilot on the shoulder: “Cut,” he shouted, and the pilot obliged, cutting engine power to a fraction and causing the plane to lurch downwards in a stomach-gulping manner. Before I knew it, it was my turn to jump.

“Feet out!” shouted the instructor, unsympathetically, slapping my on the shoulder and making a last check of my static line (the device that automatically deploys your parachute – essentially a long nylon strap attaching your ripcord to the pilot’s seat). I knew the drill by heart, having practised it to death on the ground: I grasped each side of the aeroplane’s door and put my right foot out onto the step. Then, that secure (considering the head wind), I reached out with my left hand and held the wing support beam. Then my right hand. Then, finally, I moved my left foot out and precariously swapped it with my right, leaving my right dangling above a 3500 foot hole. I couldn’t help but look down, and see fields stretching out, little cars moving along the roads, and occasional stray clouds meandering by. I looked back into the plane to signify my readiness…

“Go!” shouted the instructor. I let go.

At that moment, I forgot everything that I had spent so long learning. For some time to come, I was unable to remember the four seconds that followed. I was later to learn (and, later still, to remember) that I let go gracefully, but then – instead of forming the stable ‘arch’ position (important, as it keeps your back facing ‘up’, allowing your parachute to deploy correctly) – I put my hands by my sides, causing me to fall head-first until my ‘chute deployed. I remembered hanging onto the wing, and I remembered my parachute opening, but the rest was completely missing for the next half-hour.

During the three further jumps I performed on Sunday, there was no trace of the fear that had gripped me during the initial phases of my first: and, in fact, I was able to get the hang of assuming the correct position and landing without crippling myself… moreover, I’m now qualified to a level at which I’m permitted to begin DRCP (Dummy Rip-Cord Pull) jumps, in which I would leap from a plane and pull what is effectively a glorified handkerchief from the back of my backpack, symbolising the correct pulling of a rip-cord. Doing this will eventually allow me to do a free-fall, and is a progressive stage towards certification as a skydiver. Which is nice.

I loved it. Everybody in a fit state should do this sometime. Wonderful.

Dan’s Graduation

Also available on:

QTube

Letters After My Name

Results day today, and so I finally get to find out whether or not I get a degree in exchange for my last five years at University. And I do. I’m now entitled to put letters after my name, which is nice.

I’ve got a lower second, which is (I know) less than I’m capable of, but considering my resits and other lark last year, it’s exactly what I expected, so that’s great. Was damn pleased to see that my dissertation got a first.

Now I suppose I’d better get on with the rest of my life.

Back From Malawi

Yay! I’m back in Aberystwyth!

For my next task, I’m going to have to sift through over 7 hours of video footage of my trip, to produce DVDs for the consumption of the cycling team. Which is nice.

It feels good to be back in Aber (it feels good not to be eating nsima!). To give me a proper ‘welcome back’, and really make me feel like I’d returned, Paul greeted me by telling me that the Troma Night web site was broken and that I had lots of work to do. Thanks, Paul. Just what I needed to help cure this jetlag.

18 hours of travelling time is a great way to fuck up your system.

Anyway – you’ll all be hearing much, much more about my Malawian exploits over the next week or so, but for now, I need to start decompressing this video…

Off To Malawi!

I’m off to Malawi!

I’ve found my bus ticket (stupid train strikes), my passport (stupid immigration laws), my juggling balls (stupid… no, wait… juggling is good)… I guess I’m ready to go.

Contrary to my assumption that my bus would be leaving from the bus station, it’s apparently leaving from Plascrug… which is… somewhere… hmm…

Anyway, y’all, take care, have fun without me, blah blah blah, be thinking of you. Will try to update this blog (or at least phone-in an update that can be appended as a comment) while I’m on the road. And sorry I couldn’t get Product ‘X’ working better than it does before I left.

Hugz & kittenz;

Hide & Seek

Claire, Paul, Bryn, Ruth, JTA, Andy and I went to the beach this evening to play frisbee and watch the sunset. We even got Bryn participating, which is somewhat a rarity for any of this fun outings that involve physical activity. Everybody seemed happy to be taking a break from exams. Aber is wonderful this time of year – why must it coincide with exam time?

Paul got some mint-choc-chip ice cream without chocolate chips. Don’t ask.

Afterwards, we all went to the Castle and played hide & seek as it got darker. Paul went first, and I was last to be found – I’d climbed over a wall to a fenced-off area, in which I was very visible, but not in a place anyone would look. I went second, and took ages to find Paul and Ruth. It shouldn’t have taken so long to find Ruth – she was just in the shadows of a tower – but Paul had a brilliant hiding place: inside the ruins of a chimney (how he squeezed in there I’ll never know). For our final game, with Ruth hunting, I hid on top of a tower – with a great view – where I could become completely concealed by lying down. I was found third-from-last, with JTA and Claire remaining hidden for ages (despite many [not particularly helpful] text-messaged clues sent by JTA to Ruth). JTA had wedged himself between two upstanding slabs of rock, and could only be seen from above. Claire, better yet, had lay down and slid herself into what appeared to be an old drainage channel from one of the buildings into the courtyard.

Finally, we all returned to the flat for a game of Chez Geek: Paul won, and deservedly so (despite us all ganging up on him quite brutally at the end).

Time for bed, methinks.

Dissertation Hand-In

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

I handed in my dissertation yesterday. What a farce. Here’s the approximate order of things.

08:30 – Get up. Compile a postscript (.ps) copy of my dissertation, and upload both this and the .tex source files to central.aber.ac.uk. Start walking up to campus (Bryn offers to give me a lift, but I feel energetic, so I bound on up the hill).

09:00 – Reach campus and pay for £5 of printer credit (100 pages). Find a workstation room, log into central, and lpr -Puserarea diss-final.ps (print) it. Marvellous. Pick up the printout.

09:15 – Drop my (printed) dissertation off at the Library to be hardback bound. Everything’s going splendidly. Trek back down town. The hand-in window is 14:00-16:00, so I’ve got loads of time.

13:30 – Arrive back on campus, this time with two CDs (containing the source code and sample data for the project). I buy sticky things from the Union with which to attach them to the inside cover of my dissertation, and then trek to the Library to pick up the masterpiece.

13:45 – Hmm. The binding office seems to be closed. Guess they’re on lunch. I go to return a library book from the Physical Sciences Library, …

Update, 11 January 2020: As the tail-end of this post appears to be lost forever, I’ll fill in the essence of it from memory: after a leisurely morning/early afternoon of getting my dissertation printed and bound for delivery, well-ahead of the deadline later in the day and thus avoiding the mad rush for the printers and binders later in the day, I arrived at the hand-in point only to be told I was supposed to be handing over two copies, not one, and so I ended up caught up in the mad rush I’d been smugly avoiding after all.

Dan, A Vamp Babe, And A Tarantula

This picture just appeared on the new May Ball site.

Yes; it’s me, tied to a wooden board by a vampire babe, stripped of my tux, and being scampered around on by a tarantula.

[picture removed]

What happens at ‘Troma Night’?

The following post originally appeared on the then-newly-revamped Troma Night website. This archive copy is copied back here for posterity:

This document was originally published on the first Troma Night web site. Changes made during this re-posting are shown in italics.

What happens at ‘Troma Night’?

The weekly ‘Troma Night’ is organised, rougly, by the following stages:

Hype

The first stage of any week’s ‘Troma Night’ is the build-up of hype amongst the stars. It usually starts three or four days in advance, and is characterised by people suggesting films and generally getting excited about what they are soon to experience.

Claire getting excited about the prospect of watching ‘Caution: Children at Play’

Cleaning

Dan & Claire’s flat almost always looks like a bomb has hit it. As a result, one of the first things that needs to happen is a good tidying session. Kit’s always good for this, as he’s pretty much treated as slave labour all the time and being allowed to watch DVDs in exchange for his help is the highlight of the week.

Kit tries to start the vacuum cleaner without also starting a fire – Claire and Dan’s vacuum cleaner is a little unsafe…

Booze

Alec undoubtedly arrives later than everybody else, having phoned-in from the off-license to check if anybody wants anything while he’s there. Kit mumbles that he wouldn’t say no to free beer. Sometimes, other people place requests. Once everybody arrives and the drinking and conversation have begun, the party is underway. Adam brings another six pack of Fosters and drinks four cans of it, thereby slowly adding to the stacks of the stuff in Dan & Claire’s fridge, which nobody but him drinks. Either everybody brings Pringles, and we’re all stuffed before the pizza arrives, or nobody does, and we complain at their absence.

Pringles and beer

Pizza

We usually get as far as the first DVD menu before somebody suggests that we order pizzas. Unfortunately this means that we have to listen to the theme music from some Troma film (which, almost without exception, is tacky) on a loop until we’ve all agreed what pizzas we’re getting and ordered them. This track then remains embedded within our brains for all time, clogging them and preventing more valuable information from entering, in a similar manner to carbon monoxide in red blood cells

Stacks of pizza boxes after Troma Night VIII

Eventually the pizzas arrive, and we eat them. This is a good thing. Paul, despite being a vegetarian, eats the pepperoni one.

Mmm… pizza…

Movies

Kit and Dan show their appreciation for good beer and bad films

With the DVD player(s) hooked up, we begin the screenings. We typically watch two or three movies in a single sitting, back to back, seperated by a 15-minute break for those who wish to go to the toilet or engage in idle chit-chat. A third movie tends to put us at about 1:30am, by which time we’re usually exhausted. And if not… there’s always more alcohol!

Engrossed in the film

Troma Night

[this post was damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has not been possible to recover it]

[this post was partially recovered on 12 October 2018]

Troma Night last night was a success, as was the Troma Night WebCam (Alpha Test), through which Paul could participate, despite his unfortunate absence.

We watched three Studio Ghibli flicks – Spirited Away (hadn’t seen this before: really quite impressive, but not quite a Totoro-beater), Tonari no Totoro itself, and Princess Mononoke. Everybody and his dog brought beer, so we all got pleasantly sloshed; the pizza was great, we still have mountains of Pringles (mmm… revision food), and altogether the night was just fab.

Ruth brought her boyfriend: GBH, or TNT, or something like that. I’m pretty sure we called him every three letter acronym under the sun during the course of the evening. He’s now the third Troma Night Partner to be brought along: let’s see if he ever comes back (none of the others – Kit’s …