nightline

It’s Over

It’s over to you:
I can’t find the answers when you’re gone.
And it’s over to you;
You can’t find the answers where you are.
I won’t tear you down!
I won’t tear you down,
To get into the world you wanted.
I’m kicking through the walls…
No-one can believe in the things that never change.
– “It’s Over”, The Goo Goo Dolls

I can’t sleep. Tomorrow’s a big day and I really oughta get some, and I’m knackered, but hey.

Tomorrow’s the first day of the Fresher’s Fayre. I’ll be selling hot dogs, alongside Kit and Paul, all day, in order to raise money for Nightline. Perhaps I just don’t feel like everything’s sorted yet. This last week I’ve spent most of my working hours at the office, and as a result the amount of planning and preparation that has gone into this three-day event has been a blur to me… perhaps that’s why it doesn’t feel ‘finished’ – because as far as I’m concerned, it never really ‘started’. This project… I’ve not really been a part of.

The plan is to meet up early in the morning and collect the remainder of our supplies – fresh bread, bacon, and other perishables – then go and set up in the Sports Cage on Penglais Campus. Then, having set up all of our stuff, we’ll go and check that the Nightline stand itself has been set up and see if the Nightliners who’ll be running it want a breakfast bacon sandwich.

My Local Education Authority contacted me to tell me that while they’ll offer me my usual student loan for this, my final year in education, they won’t pay my tuition fees. This puts me in a moderately complicated situation, as I’m not able to pay them myself out of my current income. Instead, my current plan – should my appeal to them fail – is to find an unsecured loan I can take out to pay for my studies, and pay it off after my graduation. Hopefully, however, they can be persuaded to pay, and that won’t be necessary.

This town’s fascinating this time of year. So many students reappearing… look down any street and you’ll see two young people struggling to carry a TV into a house. A stark contrast to the two weeks previous, in which it’s been a ghost town, or the weeks before that, when we were infested with tourists.

Claire’s come down with the Freshers’ Flu early – characteristic illness of University towns at that time of year when people from all over the country bring their local illnesses to one place all at once. There should probably be some kind of quarantine process or something. Like out here during the Foot & Mouth outbreak.

I’m going to go fridgesurfing then write some more code to the sound of Goo.

Sleep well, sweet Aberystwyth;

Bovini: A Week Well-Spent

It’s been a busy week. I’ve spent a lot of my time at the office, trying to get the replication model for Bovini working – causing much stress as it failed time and time again. For those of you without a grounding in computer science theory, replication is the art of making data be identical (and editable) in several places at once without the fundamental problems that this goes on to cause, such as data identity conflicts.

In this particular case, we have two master copies of a database, and five smaller copies of a particular one-fifth of the data each (plus a little shared data), split around seven UK sites, and who’s computers can only be made to talk to one another between the hours of midnight and 4am each weekday. So: not only does the program I’ve been writing (and sweating on, crying over, and shouting at, this week) have to pull all the data back together and spread it out, it also has to detect whether two users at different sites edit the same piece of data during the same day, work out who’s most likely to be ‘right’, and ‘fix’ the data accordingly. Or, if it’s not sure, know who to ask for assistance. It’s a clever program.

And now it seems to be done. And working. Great!

Unfortunately, working like a dog on this little project has only taken time (and energy) away from my preferred software project – Three Rings – a program I’m writing for free for National Nightline. I’m likely to have a busy weekend catching up!

Regardless, tonight… will be a night for relaxing – Bryn, Claire, Paul, Kit and I are going to spend the evening in the Ship & Castle, drinking Real Ale and playing Chez Geek. A perfect way to end a week.

Kit’s Rant

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.

Dark Side Of The Moon

Spent last night in a dark room with Paul, Kit and Claire, listening to a DTS-encoded 5.1 surround sound version of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side Of The Moon”. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in a long while. The sound quality was unbelievable – the patterns moved and shifted around and through us. Quite stunning. I felt my heart rate change several times to match the beat

Nobody’s updated their web journal in several days except Kit. That makes my work morning a little boring.

We have a new guy working for us – Daniel – a school leaver who’ll be helping us for the summer. Alex and I are trying to get him talking, without any luck yet.

Suppose I’d better get on with some work, now.

Update (20th March 2012) – crosslinks:

Paul’s post about getting to use his DTS system
Kit’s post about the experience of listening to Dark Side of the Moon with us

Scanning And Zelda

Talked with ICQ-friend Summer for the first time in over six months this afternoon, which was great, because I’ve missed chatting with her. Caught up on each other’s news, then chatted about Love, Sex, and What It All Means for awhile. Refreshing. Made her promise to be online more often in future. We’ll see.

Couldn’t be arsed going to campus to help Kit scan magazines this evening, so I bought a scanner and set it up on Claire’s computer, where he’s now scanning away to his little heart’s content.

Got a little further in Zelda: The Wind Waker on the GameCube this evening – all the way to Ganondorf, the bad nasty guy at the end, but he kicked my arse.

Dreadful Deadlines

Just been working like a demon towards a 13:00 deadline this afternoon, delivering a piece of software to a client. Barely made it, but what a buzz!!! Celebrated with a pub lunch with two colleagues, Lisa (the SQL Queen) and Alex (the CodeMonkey, our office pet).

Claire called from Norfolk to say “Hi!” I’d have liked to chat longer, but I have work to do.

Have promised to scan and archive some old magazines with Kit this evening. Ho hum.

Gender Balance

Rengor wrote:

…

Also an interesting group are the developers, not the ringers, but all the other game developers playing this game, and there’s quite a few of them. Im curious if they can say why they chose this game instead of Sims or Everquest etc?

…

…

I’m a dev. (not a PP dev., of course), and you’ll probably laugh, Rengor, when you hear how I discovered the game…

I’m currently spending way too much of what little free time I have developing a secure online database system, which I’ll be selling at cost price to a network of charities in the UK providing night-time telephone listening and information to students. This system will help these voluntary organisations find and manage volunteers for specific nights of the week, send text messages to them to remind them when they’re due to be ‘on duty’, provide a secure forum, and (eventually) a host of other features.

While the selection of organisations which this system will serve are… somewhat diverse in their policies (much to my horror as the system I develop has to cope with all of them), one thing they all have in common is the amount of time the telephone has to ring before they will answer it: three rings. As a result, my system is called Three Rings.

So; I looked for a domain name for it… threerings.com was already gone. Oh, I thought, I wonder who owns that? So I hopped to the web site and thus found Three Rings Design Inc., and, being a fan of MMORPGs and all things MUD and puzzle games, I signed up for Yohoho!

But what about the rest of you dev’s? I know there’re more tech’s out there than just me, arr!

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #28:

Escape from your hall’s “Punch Party”, and go to a bonfire instead, because you *know* that if you start drinking vast amounts of free sub-cocktail you’ll just *keep* drinking and you’ve got to be up before 9:00am the following morning to continue running a Nightline training session.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #27:

(1) What with being excessivley busy, and a network failure last weekend, fail to get out a “Cool Things”. Feel the need to apologise to everybody (SORRY!), and give them three “Cool Things” to help make up for it.
(2) Be elected Communications Officer for a confidential telephone listening and advice service.
(3) Take your first exam. Gulp. Still – 20 questions, and only 36% required to pass. From the results of people in my class who’ve done it earlier this week, marks range from 30% –> 80%. Remain confident. My result is out on Monday.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.