Kevin Carmody: machines, media & miscellanea

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. ^_^

Today is the day to blog. In an attempt to take a snapshot in time, the National Trust is asking that everone blog a littel about their day. I’ll come back later to do mine, for now here is the beeb link.

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:
<blockquote>‘That sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not summer for beauty’s heightening’</blockquote>
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.

Is there a point to blogging? I think there is perhaps even a beauty to it. It is an opportunity to express yourself with added bonus that people may actually hear your words. It makes such a difference to ranting to your walls, which instantly absorb and forget. The words hang in the air for others to view for months, or even years down the line. Though you can be sure that you are only remember you by the last thing you utter. I remember posting a youtube of myself doing diablo work on here and one of the comments I recieved was the statment ‘not sure if your into girls or boys’ (I paraphrase), yet only a couple of posts earlier I was talking about my g/f (girlfriend in J17 talk). Its like the classic, people replying to forum threads with the words ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read the whole thing, so I just read the last post’.

None the less, blogging is a very personal and in its own way very satisfying thing. You say what you want to get of your chest and damn the rest. I type because it makes me happy, not because it make you happy.

Oh my god! Webcameron, you have got to be kidding. The latest propaganda tool from the conservatives is the ‘personal’ video blog of their illustrious leader. Extra homely realism is provided with him washing up and background screaming children. I’m sure there was always an unspoken rule of not using your kids as political tools, but this man is really pulling out all the stops. They’ve clearly tried to stop it from seeming to be a propoganda by branding the whole thing in pink, but the videos are so obviously staged. Little clipped references to recycling, etc. This is clearly aimed at the YouTube generation, but frankly its all a little sickening, especially when you think about the amount of time and money that must have gone into the programming and building of it. Its not based at blogger, thats for sure. He goes on about how ‘shaky’ it all is (cue cameraman wobble, or is that cameronman) and to top it off with true web2.0 aspirations, its not just called webcameron, its Webcameron BETA! I mean, really, does he think we were born last week?