Friday 7th October

I woke up after 6 hours' sleep and got dressed. I felt surprisingly refreshed and happy and then got a phonecall from mum, at which point 6 hours' sleep hit me like a wet brick and I felt like going back to bed. After discussing with her about life, the universe, and Dementia, I headed off to the main common room to have some brekkers.

Now, there are two things I noticed in this breakfast session. Firstly, the best invention seriously is sliced bread, because if you try to slice bread with a steak knife you get one of three eventualities:

• Bread wafers, that could theretically be rolled up to make reconstituted breadrolls.
• Jagged, mis-shapen slices that make good blunt weapons.
• Slices thicker than my arm, and almost bigger than my mouth, which is quite a feat.

I settled on the latter. At least that didn't waste bread! I had marmite and home-made plum jam on my bread. At once. Nummy nummy. I settled down on the chairs and watched TV for a few moments before realising that my braincells were slowly being rotted away by a very Americanistic entertainment banality, and I asked if the channel was MTV. Apparently not, it was Channel 4. The show I was watching was about a bunch of people who went joyriding and the organisation you can get behind street-racing and the like.

I retreated to my room to recover some of the braincells I was missing by chatting computing on #compsoc. I couldn't, they were lost forever. Channel 4 should put health warnings on their products! In the conversation I managed to discuss some web developer, get put on the #compsoc technical team, and ask some random person ('Tozak') to meet me outside the Computer Science building before the stats lecture. They agreed.

I headed out half an hour before determined to find a more optimal route to the Computer Science building than crossing a field and walking along the wrong road for around 100 metres. I managed to walk through a bunch of graduate accommodation before finding myself at a carpark. Undeterred, I walked in a straight line towards the carpark, and bounced off it. I decided I may have to compromise in my alternate, direct route a tad and navigated around it, over a bridge and found myself at the Computer Science building, where I waited. And waited. I got asked by Olga who I was waiting for, I said I didn't know. She shrugged and headed off to the lecture. I eventually followed, and got into the lecture.

The lecture was OK, but I'd covered it all before. The lecturer was very friendly, with a persistant and clear voice, with a habit of shouting 'wakey wakey!' if someone fell asleep: so napping proved to be somewhat sporadic. Luckily, I had directly after a lecture of Mathematics for Computer Scientists, and en route I bought a fizzy drink which made me hyper. Although that lecture is always easy to sleep through, the drink and the new subject matter plotted against my desires and I had to pay some attention some of the way through! In the rest of it I showed off Olga the cool features of MacOS, like inverting colours and zooming in and minimising windows whilst they're playing video. You know, useful stuff.

From there I headed with Olga to a Programming for Computer Scientists seminar, trying to navigate the horrendous maze that is Social Studies. We found the room eventually and got registered. I was in a different seminar group. I excused myself and dashed all the way to Computer Science, just as the seminar tutor was closing the door in finality to late entries. I excused myself and asked if I could just sit in the corner and do my coursework. He didn't understand until the 3rd attempt of clarifying myself, and apparently he made quite a few mistakes in his teachings, according to conversations I had directly after.

Afterwards I managed to latch on to a really, really, really tall guy who needed some assistance. I couldn't help him so I went down to the Computer Science laboratory and chatted with him a bit whilst doing some admin on the machines. We compared our answers for the exams and talked a bit, though I was a bit tired and prone to sound a bit irritable, so I don't think I made a very good impression. We parted ways and he said he'd be at the gaming session later on. I headed back to the accommodation via my new, almost optimum route (damn carpark!) and grabbed a sandwich before retreating to my room to attempt napping. It failed. I ended up talking on the chatroom with everyone and getting way too distracted to talk. I arranged with Dementia to go and have some food before the gaming session.

I padded off to the kitchen and lay done in there, trying to use the rhythmical drone of the voices and the TV to get an hour's kip. It didn't work as Will being very friendly checked I was OK. I said yes, and that I was tired, and went back to my room to get some shuteye. It worked, I went to sleep straight away, but after an hour I woke up feeling incredibly tired – I felt like I'd been woken up after an hour's sleep as opposed to feeling refreshed after a nap. I managed to drag myself over to the Bar and sat around waiting for the others to come.

Most of the CompSoc people I recognised arrived, but Dementia was late. When he got there we ordered a pizza between us and scoffed it, before heading over to the gaming session.

The gaming session was very interesting. The CompSoc had coded their own front end system that downloaded and installed games from a central server and ran them, however the interface was very buggy and you had to do lots of 'h4x' and tricks to get around 'speshul' aspects of the system. Dementia and I had fun:

• Playing Quake III (bang bang)
• Playing Tetrinet (the noises that made.. it's the most brutal puzzle game around, you could hear people yelling from the other room when you did a nasty move)
• Random hugs that scared people around, though oddly they just thought that it was Dementia's corrupting influence.

Dementia left, so I started to go back home, but decided against it on a whim and I'm glad I did. I went back and eight of us played a tactical shooter until 04:30 AM, having a great time. I got a reputation as a bit of a teamkiller as my shooting style was 'anything that moves'. I wandered back to halls with some of the people there and wondered what to do as if I slept I'd mess my timezone, if I didn't I'd be completely zombified the next day. I eventually decided I'd sleep, as long as my body wanted.

: 08 Oct 2005 05:16 |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem