Skin of Stars

Got far, far too drunk last night and I’m suffering now. Hell of a party though, we got the dancefloor packed and everybody was going wild. Pretty good going for a quiet campus on the hill.

Tonight is my long deserved break. Tonight (all be it a bit late) is our Halloween party. Halloween is my absolute favourite festival of the year. It includes fancy dress, goth overtones and none of the pressure of Christmas or New Years. Of course, I’m not really likely to get a real break as I’ll inevitably be sorting decorations, working the door and having to answer all sorts of questions even though its not me organising this party… Don’t get me wrong though, I love this kind of stuff. I’d be miffed if I was just sitting in the corner all the time and not being involved.

Collaboration not competition… Jeez, I’m such an OS geek sometimes.

It looks like I’m now going to be sitting on two academic committees as a student representative. Firstly, the Quality Assurance Standards Committee; this is where we discuss possible future courses and ensure that they meet an acceptable standard. Secondly, the Learning, Teaching and Taught Programmes Committee; where the actual standard of teaching is assessed as well as the methods used. I felt that these two were so intertwined that I should probably sit on both.

Ok, enough of this, to the party. Also, as a party worker I get free drinks and we have new ale on that I’m looking forward to trying. Thankfully we are moving out of the summer pale season, which I was becoming a little sick of, this looks like a nice amber type, hope it tastes as good as it looks.

p.s. This Firefox2 has an awesome inbuilt spell checker for forms, I recommend the upgrade. Just need a good grammar checker now. You will all soon be forced to upgrade to IE7 soon anyway which is bloated and ugly, Get Firefox2.

About time for a blog post I guess. Not that I’m forcing myself, I just feel like these are now more letters home. Perhaps I will get more readers where I am, but with the million plus blogs that are available I hardly feel I have enough to say to go out looking for them.

I am now a student rep for my course. I put my name down to be a school rep, only five of us, but I lost in the election. It was hardly surprising though, seeing as I did zero campaigning. The person who won was the one who went round the blocks telling people that there was even an election on and should vote for them. I’m totally happy with the outcome, I have so much work to do and with all the extra events organising that I do for the SU bar I don’t really have the time to take on extra responsibility.

I was shocked to see one of my current favourite bands, The Knife, played on the TV tonight, all be it in the background of some drama scene. I know not what programme it was, I don’t even have a TV myself, just it was on in the pub. Funnily enough, most of you will know the band, all be it indirectly. The sony bravia advert with the bouncing balls had music from Jose Gonzales. Well, that was actually a cover of The Knife. I’m happy to say that I went down to London the other week to seem. I got soooo excited and had so much fun I was jumping around for ages after

Anyway, here is Heartbeats by The Knife for all to enjoy (updated to better sound quality):

Cripes, I almost forgot. Blog my day.

Today I had a lecture in Structured Programming. We examined the use of FOR, WHILE and REPEAT loops in the pascal language. Not very exciting really, but it was a step in learning.

I had a problem with my bus on the way home, we have alot of bus problems here. They are normally several hours late and have a tendency to make you miss lectures (unless your determined like me and arrive hours early). Today though I was waiting to get on my bus home when I turned to speak to a fella next to me. I turned back to see the doors closing. I taped the door and the driver just waved at me and drove off! Talk about adding insult to injury!

Otherwise, I ran around for the evening collecting names for tomorrows pool comp in the SU bar. Since I organised it I’m going to take on the role of referee. I hope to get some white gloves and a bow tie. ^_^

Thought I might talk a little about the changes I have made to my blog. The new layout is pretty obvious, I went for the ultra minimalist theme as thats just what I like to see on webpages. The new tagline, In the City Of Spires, is a (misquoted, should be Dreaming Spires) description of Oxford by a poet called Matthew Arnold in a poem where he harks back to his days of studying in the city:

‘That sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not summer for beauty’s heightening’

I have had a little adjustment to the left hand column. For the time being there are all the usual Thanet blog links, but I suspect that I will also change those in time, no rush though. I have adjusted a section to what is now called buttons, seeing as all the cool kid blogs have them. I’ve included the obligitory ‘get firefox‘ button, as really everyone should. The bird at the top is called the songbird. It is a music player based on the same engines as the firefox browser. Its still in developmental stages so not recommend as a replacemnt for your current player (yet) but is good fun to use and a great way to search for and listen to music on the net.

There is also a particularily interesting button on there for anyone who wants to just read all their favourite webpages in a glance, thats netvibes. Netvibes is essentially a web rss reader, but it has many other cool tricks under its belt. I will be honest, its through netvibes that I now read everyones blogs and has been the case for some time. It informs me when there is a new post on any one of a number of blogs I have listed on it and gives me the ability to read the post without ever having to visit the blog. It saves lots of time and effort. If there is something I want to comment on then a handy link is provided to the post. Alas, I can’t see Tony’s pics on it, but I have always had trouble with his feed, so thats nothing new for me.

Below the button section we have my del.icio.us tags. Del.icio.us is a service that I use to bookmark webpages that I find interesting or useful. It is also possible for others to view those bookmarks I make. Tags are simply the categories that those links come under.

I live in a campus called Harcourt Hill which has suffered severe under-representation within the student union. Tonight I have worked with a lady called Hannah and done some maths.

Harcourt represents 15% of (max)2600 students that live on campus. That is four whole weeks (28 days) out of twenty seven of contribution that we deserve from all societies within the university.

Why do I point this out? Because while speaking with a Rock Society representative I was laughed at when I asked what events we would be getting at Harcourt Hill. My first reaction was to simply create events that mocked the society (which I have paid money to join) but I now intened to approach them, as well as other societies, demanding representation. Lets hope this doesn’t become a mockery in what is supposed to be a democratic organisation.

I’ve been having problems with the painfully slow internet service we have here in halls. I’ve been trying to download a personal copy of delphi from the manufacturers (free for educational), but my download speed is the sort of rate I haven’t seen since 28k dial-up! The main problem with this is that it has a tendancy to pause for long periods and then timeout. Thats not something you want on a 50mb file thats halfway there. So being the very frustrated bunny I am I decide to grab it on a torrent. Though this is normally a very effective method for picking up large files it makes little difference here. Well, there is one difference I found it makes. It gets you banned from the halls network. I had to remove all p2p software I had on my machine before they would let me back on! I was only doing it for educational purposes!

Seems I’m not the only person who has been having problems though. My neighbour has found that with the continual connection his computer is turning itself back on in the middle of the night. I said I wasn’t sure why but I found out today from one of my lecturers. It seems microsoft will remotely switch your computer back on to gather information in its own time. The cheek of it!

Today has pretty much been my first lecture. I had one yesterday in human communication, but frankly that was a condesending insult, so I will just count this one. Today I learnt my first bit of the pascal coding language and wrote my first program. To be honest, i didn’t really feel like I had learnt it as it was more copying than anything, but its a start.

The main problem I have had though is getting a copy of delphi (the programming enviroment) for myself. I finally managed to pick one up on this thread via polish site. Still setting it up at the moment, but all seems fine. I really wanted to have a version that worked in a linux enviroment, but it seems they stopped developing that some time ago, so I guess I will have to leave that and come back to the tux when I move on to C & Unix in the next semester.

I will say though, its great to be learning again, even if alot of it goes over my head

This week has been damn crazy. I seem to be missing loads of messages by leaving the msnm on, so if I’ve missed you, I’m sorry. I’m having to follow two programmes doing the combined, so when I see the guys from the comp soc, I don’t know as I’m mainly based in Harcourt. I’ll have to just leave notes on the wiki or something for now.

So far as the Thanet crew goes, I guess its time I was removed from the Thanet Blog List. Hopefully whoever runs that will note this, as well as the guys who are commenting themselves in on the primary listing post.

Get back soon I hope.
Kevin

Thought I’d give my blog the overhaul since my life is experiencing the same. I’m now staying at Harcourt Halls at the Westminster Institute at Oxford Brookes. Its still freshers week at the moment so not a lot of studying is going on. On the other hand, a hell of a lot of drinking is going on. I’ve only discovered one local ale so far called Village Idiot. The brewer is a Wychwood spinoff and the beer is a classic summer pale. I’m sure with a bit of hunting I’ll find some more. Though I’ve picked up the freshers vibe I’m not strictly following the classic fresher trail for this town. I’m not doing all the set evening activities and I’ve no intention of going to the fresher ball. Instead I’ve found myself in a group of older, though perhaps not wiser students and we’ve been hitting local bars and clubs. Tonight though is maybe going to be a bit quieter with a casual night at the campus student union bar. I’ll come back later and tell of the probably more serious aspects of academia and my intened covert operation of sneaking into Oxford University proper to check out the more affluent side (I hear their halls are furnished with antiques).