Arcoarena

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Goddammit I don’t want to

Who would vote for….

Who would vote for…. -

Ameet Bahkta when he can’t even keep cool in a council meeting!

[Gary Ewer]

Gary’s must have just encoded the Minidisc from the council meeting then. I quite agree to be honest.

Motivation and stuff

It’s been a while since I wrote anything - so what’s happened.
Not much really, people are looking to buy a new Theatre Lighting desk
to replace the Arri. We went too look at a Strand 300 Series and we
think that might be good but we still need to look at others before
ruling them out.

We had a Dramsoc social in the Holland club on Tuesday. I went home on
Wednesday and did very little and on Thursday I went to Union
Council. I went to council to set up radio Mic’s and record it onto
mini-disc (for Dramsoc rather than my own personal pleasure). Since I
was there I decided to stay there and observe. It was interesting (in
a slightly weird way). This council was a bit of a fight really as
most of the candidates were there to ‘add’ to the discussion on the
recent election events. It’s quite surprising what some people will do
in order to get elected.

Being my own site - here are my own views. I would express them on
Live! but I wouldn’t want to
give the Editors any more of a headache from Editing comments.

Darius (a candidate for Felix Editor) complained about the recent
articles in Felix on the Bike racks and 24/7 hr Libraries. Dave
Edwards (another candidate) wrote these. Darius complianed basically
that they were political and affected the election. He seemed eager to
point out that his own articles and those of the third candidate were
a-political and not connected to the election - pretty much what one
would expect of a Science or Puzzle section really, but not of a News
section. In my opinion it was nothing more than attempt to
disadvantage another candidate.

There were also complaints from various people connected to the
candidates belonging to the Socialist Wanorkers Group. Colin
Smith seemed to be trying to get Mustafa disqualified from the
elections leaving his mate Ameet Bahkta the only candidate standing
for President. What Mustafa wrote in Felix was maybe foolish but I
don’t believe it was with malice or an attempt to gain an unfair
advantage.

Ameet was also at the meeting. He was quite forceful during the
meeting and seemed to know what he was doing. I couldn’t follow his
line of thought though. He appeared to be arguing some very strange
combinations of points. He also got quite worked up. The meeting
dragged on and eventually most things were resolved. One last issue
remained but at around 11:30 when they were about to vote on this last
issue Andrew Smith (a former DPE&W himself) asked about Quorum. As it
turned out there was one too few people and the meeting was
finished. Ameet seemed miffed to say the least. So much so that he
called Andrew Smith “f**king *nal” through the Microphones (and as it
happens the minidisc was still recording too). Not particularly
impressive for a potential President. Long reign Mustafa is what I say
(well one more year anyway).

Now on the the topic of this post - Motivation of several kinds.

Firstly I really need to get on with my final year project. Today went
well in that sense. I have been finding doing any work on it quite
hard but I’m starting to make progress and I’m getting to the point
where I’ve got something to work with rather than a blank (electronic)
page.

Secondly - why am I writing the blog (as a whole, rather than just
this entry)? I got asked this by Mark in the Holland Club on Tuesday. The opinion was expressed
that people that kept blogs used to keep diaries but were disappointed
no-body read them. I have tried on several occasions to keep diaries
to very little success. As one of my first post may or may not have
said every single diary without fail lasted less than a few entries. I
normally decided that everything I had written was pretentious rubbish
and tore it up. I’m not quite sure why this has lasted so long. Ah
well, never mind, I’m sure it’ll go soon.

Fogma

Gary appears to be trying to use up his webspace. Quick everyone - use up his bandwidth

Network Rail

Oh and while I think about it they want to interview me, which I suspect doesn’t mean much as they must interview loads of people. It looks quite cool though - biiiiiggg power systems.

HMGCC

I appear to be getting quite a few hits from people due to my HMGCC refereneces

Somebody at Warwick must have been more lucky (or just better than me) as they looked at my site today after searching google for HMGCC Interview

It’s quite scary - random people looking at my site - go away - all of you ;-). Somebody was searching for Do people walk in circles for some reason possibly best left unknown.

Anyway by far the scariest is this host - mail.hmgcc.gov.uk who searched for stephen jeapes. And after they rejected my - huh, the cheek of it :-D.

International Night and the Weekend

International Night

I don’t really need to say much more about this as other’s have written about it. All I can say is that it is really annoying to explain to someone the safety risks etc. for that request (or demand to be more accurate) to be blatantly ignored.

Perhaps I should be slightly less cryptic. So maybe I will talk about my view of what happened

I’ve been crewing International Night, which could be said to have been badly organized (it seemed it from our point of view as we didn’t get anything in time and we had to keep pushing for anything to happen - IC Conferences agreed and came quite close to canceling themselves). Anyway I’ve been helping with the lighting and being a general runner on the night

During the Technical rehearsal the Cypriot Society had a drum (much like the Irish bodhran a wooden hoop with skin stretched over) in which they placed a glass (or two as the case may be) and spun it around their heads - very impressive. That is until the glass dropped and smashed onto the stage. We cleared the glass up and explained to the act organizer in the control room that it couldn’t happen again and they would have to find something that wouldn’t break. After protesting (along the lines of “he’s never dropped it before”) it seemed and agreement was reached. In the Dress Rehearsal the next night a plastic ‘glass’ was produced. On the night they produced something disturbingly reflective. We were going to get Rich Jordan (who was stage managing at the time) to check them after the act and give them a massive telling-off (to put it politely) if they were glass. This wasn’t necessary however as once they act had finished they took their bows and the glass fell and smashed on stage. I’m not impressed - neither were IC Dance Company who were a little uncertain about dancing (barefoot) on-stage after-wards, all we could say was ‘we’ve tried as hard as we can to clear it up - it’s your call’.

I shouldn’t go on too much about it as it was - other than that a good night. We didn’t make any massive mistakes. The only thing that people appeared to notice wasn’t even our fault it was a case of ‘that’s was tech rehearsals are there for guys’ it’s just a bit annoying when people then think it was our mistake

Some of the dances were cool though. There were quite a few topical and even funny skecthes too. JapSoc managed to produce something the seemed very Japanese -that is to say a bit wierd but good all the same. Both the Arabic society and Bangladeshi Soc managed to have funny sketches with topical references (Kilroy-Silk, Head-scarves in french schools etc).

Other Things

I have surprisingly been doing other things too - although I really need to do some more final project work.

I went to Newcastle to see Andrea (it was 14th Feb) and had a nice relaxing weekend, a good Chinese and a nice bottle of wine. I also saw her flatmate for the first time in ages. According to one of her lecturers the definition of family has changed over the years making me part of hers. Scarey - it isnt’ just one person claiming I’m nearly married

I did however get some work done on the train. I’ve got an algorithm designed for one of my functions and I’ve sorted out my data-structures and signatures (think public declarations in C++ classes)for my files.

Can’t think what else has happened - ’till later

Catching Up

It’s been a long few days. I’ve been helping with International night a lot more than I expected. I have found out one useful thing though. A rig with only 2 stage scans in is very hard to do anything with. One always says something along the lines of ‘and then I can just add a strobe effect…..oh no I can’t the scans are already projecting a gobo…..damn

Apart from doing too much Dramsoc and not enough work that’s most of my life really. I didn’t get invited back for a second interview for a job but that’s not great surprise really. I’m not sure I really wanted the job anyway. Do I sound like I’m trying to convince myself. As long as I get a job I’d like to do I’m happy. I mean, if The Adam Langley get’s rejections for summer jobs what chance of I got!

The Net

To follow Gary and Ant’s lead: Mastershite

And in other news…..
I’m using Lynx on a Sun Machine, that should completly skew Gary’s web stats

Furthermore, I’ve actually got some Final Year Project stuff done, mainly because I came in for a lecture at 10 that was actually at 11 so I’ve sat in labs and done some work.

Virus

I’ve just got this email twice in one afternoon

From: MS Program Security Section

To: Consumer
Subject: Microsoft Critical Patch
Atttachments: 2 Update8283.exe application/x-msdownload 142.32 KB

Now how stupid do they think I am. The body of the email talks about some security flaw in Outlook and Internet Explorer and advises me to run the attachment.

Hmmmm, that doesn’t sound at all dodgy. Look at the email addresses for Christ’s sake. Plus I never connect my Windows 98 installation to the internet anyway, and my computer at home is a Linux PC and I’ve read this on a UNIX workstation with a webmail interface (although I am using Mozilla which is almost as bad as Internet Explorer, particularly the 0.9 version running on the departments Linux PCs). Why would I need to install it in the first place?