Thursday, 13th October

Before bed I tried ordering my brother a birthday present, but all the online sites rejected my Electron. So I went back to bed in a bit of a mope. I decided I'd not go to the Thursday Statistics seminar in order to sleep in. I decided to take the Friday one instead.

I woke up, completely exhausted again. Another rough night. However, when I woke up I was alerted to the fact there were some clean sheets in the room on top of my bag that hadn't been in there the night before! It surprised me enough to go outside and check if there were sheets outside or the like, but there weren't, so I just replaced the sheets on my bed and resolved to ask the others what to do with the old ones. I got into the shower and tried ot relax, but the water speed was being very variable (though the temperature was pretty much constant). I headed off the to the kitchen to make some toast, and left it toasting whilst I went back to my room to check out #compsoc for a while. I ended up talking with some people about the chores I had to do for the LAN party:

• Help set it up.
• Work on the music server.
• Help distribute out cabling and power.
• Be a 'person in charge'

However, at this point all Internet access froze, completely blocking me off from everything. I decided to phone my mother, but the signal died. I tried again, but it died again. I went outside, and the signal still died. I went right outside into the open, and got three bars signal. Mum told me I could use their credit card to make my order and gave me a number to get an electron card converted to a proper visa debit (the number was 08453000000). She also seemed upset that I hadn't responded/read her email she'd sent, but I the internet had been down for a while. I promised to read it when I got to somewhere the Internet was working.

I had to run to my lecture, so my toast got forgotten. Instead I bought a breakfast/lunch sandwich and pack of crisps from the Arts Centre café. I caught up with Olga outside and her apparent friend who was quite friendly. I then went into the lecture, absolutely determined to stay awake and to understand the contents. I got prodded awake by the person next to me who told me that I'd been seen dozing by the lecturer. I immediately went to maximum alertness and even put my hand up to answer the next question. I really wish this didn't keep happening. I need to do well in Boolean Calculus and I find it very tricky.

After the lecture I headed to the Computer Science room where I worked on my Boolean Calculus (jargon time: and set up XFCE to run from my home directory on the computers there). I also tried a modern game quickly on my iBook G4 to see how well it did, it was playable. We all had to depart to a Programming lecture pretty smartly.

The Programming lecture was funny as usual, with one episode of note where the person next to me corrected Dr Jarvis and Dr Jarvis seemed to think it was me who'd corrected him from then on. (Serves me right for almost getting my iBook out mid-way through to check something.) However, what happened next was very interesting. Someone came in and asked for SSLC candidates. The SSLC is the liason committee between people doing a subject subject and the staff. They needed three, I volunteered as I like political things. There were five, so we all had to give a speech and go to a show of hands vote. I said, "I worked in industry for a year so I know how hard it is for the little guy to not get heard. I'd try to be easily accessible for concerns." It was the most political of the three. I got voted in, interestingly by most of the girls in the room!

Afterwards we headed back to the Computer Science room, were just about to do something when in came Sadiq and some pals with a supercharged remote control car that sped around like a demented gerbil. Everyone got a go and much fun was to be had. The time flew, and we headed off together to meet up someone else, but we had to get to a Philosophy lecture so parted ways.

The Philosophy lecture was interesting, debating various aspects of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God:

• God is perfect.
• If God didn't exist, he wouldn't be perfect.
• Therefore, God Exists.

The lecturer was a bit long winded explaining things, but I gather the strongest argument against this is:

• Is existence a property?

I also managed to send a couple of silly pictures to some random person via Bluetooth for no reason whatsoever in that lecture whilst he was preparing slides.

After that I went to the DDR or 'dance mat' society's social session for a laugh, which consists of loads of people crowded around the single DDR machine and each paying a pound and getting five games. It was the first time I'd played DDR properly. I could get B on 1 foot and 2 foot songs, D and E on anything higher. Apparently that's OK, some poeple fall over on their first go. At the time there was a tribute act being done to John Peel, so we couldn't actually hear the machine and were working solely on sight whilst trying to ignore the loud beat in the room. After that I headed with Dementia (who was at Dance Mat) back to halls.

He rested for a bit as he'd danced himself to extreme as I'd accidentally picked him a 10 foot tune (he got D on it). He tried playing Poker on my Linux box but it was buggered. I sorted out a few things on the Internet and headed to the kitchen. He had to go. Just before I left I saw the BBC article on bird 'flu. That disease is somewhat worrying.

This is where my day got boring. Apart from reheating a pizza and having some salad, the rest of the evening was spent doing the Mathematics/Logic/Boolean Colculus sheet for 4 hours. I'd already spent 3 and a half hours on it the day before and 1 hour the day before that. I couldn't do two questions and I swear the rest were a bit dodgy. The only interesting thing that happened is someone mentioned for a while there had been a collection of rubber ducks in the fountain in front of Arthur Vick before they cleared the water of the bubble bath (and the ducks, evidently).

At 23:20 I called it quits, and decided to relax for a bit, have a drink and go to bed.

: 13 Oct 2005 23:30 |  Comments (3) |  Report a problem