We’re On The Move

Always a fan of double meanings.

This weekend, Claire, JTA, Binky and I are going over to the Real Ale Ramble in Llanwrtyd Wells. It’ll be fun. I just have to find some warm clothes and wash them, first.

But we’re also “on the move” in that Claire and I are going to have to move out of The Flat in January. Suppose we’d better increase our househunting efforts, then.

Any suggestions for a “Final Troma Night @ The Flat” themed party would be much appreciated. Get your thinking caps on.

And on that note, I’ll upload this weekend’s Dan & Alex comics and get “on the move”…

O what a beautiful moooooorniiiiing…

This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.

Ruth wrote:

So, after raining for both my days off, it’s now sunny again. I don’t mind though. Friday I got rained on, had lunch at MGs, got rained on some more, did laundry, went for a bike ride and got rained on. In the evening JTA and I went to geek night and got rained on, but it was fun. We played Man O’ War and Scotland Yard, a couple of games that Dan found. I discovered how to make Scotland Yard a lot harder for the ‘baddy’ by maths. mwa ha ha.

Saturday was going to be the day Dan, Claire, JTA and I went down the Rheidol in a little plastic boat as the tide went out, but somebody’s spilt raw sewage into the river and polluted the bay, so we didn’t do that after all. Instead, I came home and did some reading, drank some tea, generally loafed about. When I made supper there were pigeons in the kitchen, which was a bit weird but apparently it’s a hazard of living on the sea-front.

Troma night in the evening. It was quite a quiet one, initially just Dan, Claire, JTA and I, although we were later joined by Bryn and Jon and a frazzled looking Matt P. We watched Ocean’s 12, which was much better than I expected, and then Teenagers From Space, which was enjoyably awful.

And now I’m going to spend this beautiful day working… Meh.

Claire’s Birthday, and Preston

Well, Claire and I are in Preston. We travelled up here last night (after a few false starts, including getting to Mach before realising we’d left the Green Day tickets blu-tacked to the wall “so we don’t forget them” in Aber and having to turn back). Claire’s been made out to be a bookworm again, with a heap of new reading material to keep her occupied for the coming year.

Visited my mum’s house. My sisters are typically hilarious. They’ve got a new chicken (after the last ones were eaten by foxes) + chicks, and a new guinea pig (called Pork Chop, which I think is a fantastic name for a guinea pig), and the puppies have grown up so it’s complete mayhem of the excitable 3-month-old doggy variety. They’d decorated a cake for Claire’s birthday, which read “Happy Birfday [sic] Mini Melton” and had an (anatomically correct) picture of her, with an arrow and the word “You” pointing to it.

This evening, we’re off to see Feeder and R.E.M. at the Old Trafford Cricket Ground, which’ll be fab, and then tomorrow, we’re travelling down to Milton Keynes to see Green Day (& friends), then we’ll spend Sunday in London before returning to Aber. This puts Troma Night in the hands of those of you still in Aber. Bryn has a key to the flat, and I’ve changed my password on Duality to something you’ll be able to guess: to determine it, look at the large yellow sign in the kitchen – there is a mis-spelling on it, and there is a number on it. Type the mis-spelled word (in lowercase) as it appears on the sign, followed by the number. If you have any trouble, text me. And if somebody could record/download the Dr. Who episode (as Claire and I will miss it), that’d be great.

I mentioned to my family that the computer game that’s occupied me most of late is Microsoft Train Simulator. My dad seemed pleased, but the rest of my family seem to want to award me an anorak. Once she’d checked to see that I wasn’t joking, the dialogue with Becky went as follows:

Bex: Microsoft Train Simulator?
Dan: Yup.
Bex: Trains?
Dan: Uh-huh.
Bex: So… what? You plan train routes, manage finances, that kind of thing…
Dan: No, it’s not like Transport Tycoon. You drive trains.
Bex: You… drive trains.
Dan: Yeah; you drive different kinds of trains along real-world routes to a schedule.
Bex: So… do you like; earn money and you can buy better trains? Or unlock secret areas?
Dan: No.
Bex: Wh… bu… <disapproving silence>

Well; I’m guessing she won’t be wanting a copy, then.

Productive Weekend… Perhaps

This post has been censored at the request of S******. See: all censored posts, all posts censored by request of S******.

Not quite so productive a weekend as I might have hoped, but still – plenty got done. Geek Night on Friday is best described by Ruth. Saturday saw me interviewed by some Theatre, Film & TV students who are doing a documentary on Nice ‘n’ Naughty, having seen my blog entry reviewing the shop. And then, joined by Ruth, JTA, Bryn, Claire, Liz and Paul, I found myself in front of the camera again, this time in a full afternoon’s rehearsal of many of the “group” scenes for The Great Free Publicity Campaign, a film we’re hoping to start shooting before the month is out.

Troma Night was particularly good – the so-called themed “Bogart Night”. We watched The Maltese Falcon (I’d seen it as a child, once, but been too young to actually appreciate it), Casablanca (still fab), and the MST3K cover of Overdrawn At The Memory Bank. The latter stars… and I use the term loosely… Raul Julia, who later went on to become Gomez in The Addams Family before once again losing his credibility by appearing in Street Fighter (the movie – not Street Figher: The Movie, the game: I kid you not). In the film, Raul plays a guy in a future in which people take short vacations by transplanting their personalities into wild animals: while inhabiting a baboon called Daisy, his real body goes missing and his personality has to be moved to the mainframe computer for safekeeping, which he breaks into. What’s that got to do with Humphrey Bogart, you ask? Well, it repeatedly references Casablanca, including footage taken from it… or, as Crow T. Robot put it, “Never show a good movie in the middle of your crappy movie.”

Paul’s got some odd plan for next week’s Troma Night, involving formally inviting people [!]. Not sure what that’s all about.

And on Sunday evening JTA, Ruth, Claire and I – joined by Jimmy, who’s back in town, and briefly by Sundeep, who was busily pirating music – watched most of the third series of Blackadder, before JTA started falling asleep and had to retire.

Apart from that: got a little work done on the research for a report I need to write, but not enough to really call it “progress”. Got a little work done on some code I needed to write to allow a project I’m working on to be multilingual, but not to any great depth. Hmm… doesn’t sound like such a productive weekend, anymore…

Edit: Oh; and there’s now a little bit of publicly-available information about TheFilm.

Edit2 – 19 September 2017: certain details were removed at Sundeep’s request.

A Weekend Of Lockpicking

Following up the arrival of my new lockpicks, I’ve spent the weekend picking pretty much every lock I’ve come across (and helping to teach JTA and Bryn how to do it for themselves). The result: six of nine attempted locks picked, feeling significantly more well-practiced, and very, very sore fingers. I need to get some rubber sleeves or something for these picks, ‘cos holding them for several hours in a day actually begins to bruise.

In other good news, I’m aware that there’s a planned RockMonkey social in which RockMonkey people will go out for drinks and take photos of the various locations featured in TromaNightAdventure. Sounds like a giggle to me, if ever I heard one.

Weekend

I seem to spend most of my time on this blog posting retrospectively about what I did on any given weekend. Will try to spice things up with a little more thought and debateworthy stuff in the future – I’ve got some ideas. In any case:

Friday was Andy’s gig – not as good as the last one I went to, but still a fab show (and, in particular, some great guitarwork this time around). Claire couldn’t come – she was in Gregynog on a Computer Science away-half-weekend (the replacement for what used to be the “second Aberdyfi weekend” that we used to have in the first year).

Saturday was Troma Night. Rory (visiting) and not-gay Gareth (recently discovered to be in Aberystwyth) came along, as did Claire’s friend Ruth, and a good time was had by all.

And, of course, Sunday was Geek Night. We played Hacker for the first time in ages, as well as a little Fluxx. Matt seems to be a huge fan of the latter – perhaps it apppeals to the mathematician inside him.

Oh, and: Yay!

Not-Gay Gareth

Not-Gay Gareth Is Back In Town!

By sheer coincidence, I bumped into not-gay Gareth, a friend of mine from my second year, who studied Film & TV while working as a projectionist at the Arts Centre cinema. It’s him who introduced me to both Troma and Studio Ghibli, and therefore him who’s (inadvertently) been a huge influence on the appearance of Troma Night – after all; without him, I may never have had that conversation with Paul that led to the decision to have Troma Night One.

So… I invited him along to this Saturday’s Troma Night.

Not-gay Gareth is also the guy “behind the camera” for Team CompSci’s “The Matrix”, the spoof that won Rory, John, Dom, Huw and I the “Best Presentation” award (and a nice cash prize) at the 2001 Student Skills Competition – a spectacular feat still talked about within Aber’s Department of Computer Science. With Claire, Paul and Ruth competing on behalf of Comp. Sci in the 2005 competition, I suddenly feel very old again. =o/

In other news, I’ve developed WikiBridgePuzzle on RockMonkey, a re-interpretation of a classic puzzle.

Catch ye all later!

Update – 12 October 2018: This blog post was also crossposted to the Troma Night website at the time, where I added:

As I’ve just recently mentioned on my blog, not-gay Gareth is back in town. This is relevant because it’s this guy – who I lived with in my second year – that gave me my initial interest in Troma and in Studio Ghibli. In fact; were it not for him, it’s unlikely that I’d ever have had the conversation with Paul that led to the creation of the very first Troma Night.

In any case, I’ve invited him along to an upcoming Troma Night. I’m sure you’ll all give him the welcome he deserves…

Things That Have Been Happening

I’ve had a couple of moderately hectic days, and somehow haven’t found time to tell you all about them yet. Let’s see what I can remember:

The Tale Of Troma Night 50
Troma Night 50 was a success: a chance to re-watch some of the films that made Troma Night’s 1 and 2 so… bizarre. And it was great to see folks like JTA, Andy, and Liz returning once more to the enlightened watchers of awful films (Liz reports favourably on Troma Night 50).

The Tale In Which Geek Night Returns
And just to make the weekend that little bit more fun, we had a (long-missed) Geek Night on Sunday night: two games of Chez Geek and one of Carcassonne. Sadly, my copy of Munchkin hasn’t arrived yet. The idiots who were supposed to be sending it to me addressed the package as follows:

Daniel Huntley
The Flat
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 XYZ

…completely missing the address line. And then they were surprised when the package was returned to them by the post office. Grr.

The Tale Of Kit And The “Awwww” Chain
It’s kind of sweet that Kit’s posted a declaration of love onto his blog. And now everybody’s posting a whole chain of “Awwww” responses. Looks like I’m not the only one who found this a happy little uplifting post. It’s the little things, really.

The Tale Of The Students Who Couldn’t Use A Bus
Yesterday, riding my usual bus to work (the 526 to Penryncoch) we stopped, as usual, as the bus stop on North Parade. At this time of year, all the students have returned and a lot of them can be seen at this bus stop waiting for the morning ‘university service’ bus to take them up the hill. Obviously these particular students are unable to read, because events unfolded a little like this:

First Student: Up to the university, please.
Bus Driver: This bus doesn’t go to the university.
<university service bus pulls up behind>
First Student: Oh. Can I just go up the hill then?
Bus Driver: No; this bus isn’t going up the hill. This bus is going to Penryncoch.
First Student: Oh.
<first student gets off bus again, making room for second student – stood behind first student – to step up to the driver. meanwhile, students are getting on the double-decker parked behind, which has the words “University Service” on the front. second student puts a ten pound note in the cash tray and stares at the driver>
Bus Driver: Where are you going?
<second student spends two or three seconds staring at the driver with a look on her face that implies that she’s never heard of buses going anywhere other than to her destination>
Second Student: To the university!
<the university service bus pulls out and overtakes us, and starts going up the hill>
Bus Driver: No. This bus does not go to the university. This bus does not go up Penglais Hill at all. This bus is going to Penryncoch. That’s why the large luminescent letters on the front of the bus say… Penryncoch.

How difficult can it be? You’re probably a second year or above, now (by the fact that you’re presumably living in town) – pull your finger out.

The Tale Of Claire Getting A Job
I found myself in Game a couple of days ago, where a student was applying for a position working for them in the run-up to Christmas. They turned him down flat, of course, because he was planning to leave town as soon as term finished – 18th December, or thereabouts – which kind-of defeats of the object of Christmas staff. But “a-ha”, I thought, and grabbed an application form for Claire, who applied and was subsequently snapped-up. So Claire’s got a job again, which is nice.

The major side effect of this is that it’s very liklely that we’ll both be spending Christmas in Aberystwyth. Which is unusual and kind-of scary. Still; we’ve agreed that we’ll try and zip around the country and visit our respective families the following week, if we can’t manage to do so otherwise (Claire will be working on both Christmas Eve and Boxing Day). Hmm… Nothing more to add to that at the moment, so “Hmm” will do.

In other news, she’ll probably get a staff discount. Yay. =o)

The Tale That Involves The Technium
SmartData is moving by instalments. By this time week-after-next, we ought to be in our shiny new WDA-sponsored office in the newly-built Aber Technium, on the harbour’s edge. This is a win for several reasons:

  • I can walk to work. I mean – I can meaningfully walk to work. A one-hour walk, like where we are not, isn’t “meaningful”.
  • We’ll have a 2Mbit dedicated line, with no contention. I smell DVD downloads.
  • We have a bigger office, shiny new desks, a proper server room, a meeting room of our own, and a balcony.
  • We’ll have a new 0845 phone number, which looks all shiny and professional.
  • If I get my way <big grin>, we’ll also have a digital whiteboard and projector. Toy.

Will keep you posted.

I’m wasting time and I have plenty to get on with, so that’s enough of an update for now. Kittens.

Surprisingly Good Unsigned Artist

I’m actually impressed. My friend Andy’s finally put some songs online, and he’s really good (for one reason or another, I’d never heard anything of his before, and I’m much impressed – for some reason I’d come to the assumption that he’d be shit). Anyway – so long as you’re willing to put up with the (pretty crappy) recordings he’s put online, go listen to B.O.A.T.S. and Straight To Video (and Kofi Annan TV, if you can put up with bad MP3 quality). Then leave him some feedback.

In other news, have made a few minor improvements to Abnib: mostly to better highlight upcoming Troma Night events. On which note – this Saturday is Troma Night 50 – “Return To Firetop Mountain” (well done to Matt for understanding the reference), which I’m much looking forward to.

Troma Night Becomes Locally Famous

While doing a few errands around town, Bryn and I stepped into Pier Video to check whether Paul had already rented the three videos we’re planning to watch at this evening’s themed Troma Night: Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, and Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, and – if he hadn’t – rent them ourselves, ready.

We browsed the shelves a little to see if their copy was still in stock, and, when the lady at the counter was done with the customers she was serving when we entered, we decided to quiz her, to see if she remembered renting out the three Indiana Jones movies to somebody this evening already:

“Hi,” I began, “This is going to sound like a weird request, but some friends and I are having a themed video evening tonight, and I was wondering if…”

“Yes,” she interrupted, “Indiana Jones. He’s already taken them out.”

Scary.

Hot Puppies, Troma Night, And A Fantastic Transcript Of A Speech On DRM

[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]

Went to the castle to see The Hot Puppies yesterday evening. Everything I’d heard was true – they really are very good. They play well, they sing well, they look good… and they exude confidence. A wonderful show.

Troma Night was somewhat shorter than usual, owing to the aforementioned puppi…

Re-Arranging The Flat

Yes, the the rumours you’ve heard are true – The Flat has been rearranged. In a mighty effort (and with the help of Claire, Paul and Bryn), we’ve pretty much ‘mirrored’ the room widthways. This change provides several benefits:

  • Space saved has been reinvested in floor space and room for two sets of shelves.
  • Computer equipment is no longer stored beside the sink.
  • Instead of not being able to reach any of the shelves in the flat, Claire can now not reach merely some of them. =o)
  • Computer monitors are now not affected by the magnetic fields of the stereo speakers.
  • Webcam has a better view of the room, and possibility has been opened for a second webcam to be added (Troma Night veterans beware!).
  • Less stacking of boxes.
  • More space for seating at Troma Night.
  • More space for games on…

[damaged post partially recovered on multiple occasions]

Morning Mysteries 1 – 1 Scatman Dan

I woke up this morning to two mysteries:

1. Why had I set my alarm for 8:30am?

2. Why do I have a nose bleed?

I’ve solved the former: Claire needs to move her car (which is parked on double-yellows outside) or she’ll get ticketed when the morning wardens come by (morning wardens? they’re like traffic wardens, but they put tickets on people who still look half-asleep). The latter? No idea.

Yay; we’re off to the Borth Animalarium today, to look at meerkats! Followed by Troma Night!

My ‘Online Bank’ project isn’t going very well. So far it allows you to add Books to a Cart and get the total cost of them all. Which isn’t terribly useful, because that sounds more like a bookstore to me than an online bank… but I couldn’t find an example online about how to use EJBs to make an online bank, just a bookstore. D’oh.