Ben Francis

The morning after the night before

I woke up this morning at 8:30am and I was in Coventry. I had been out clubbing until 3:30am, woke up at 8:30am and had a lab at 10:00am – I actually made it! I think I’m getting good at travelling by train now, I’ve done enough of it, I just sort of think about where I need to go and end up there without realising.

I’d like to say that programming in assembler and trying to do set theory questions is *not* a good combination when you’re still drunk from the night before. My state of mind this morning wasn’t great and the world wasn’t making much sense. It wasn’t helped by Tom trying to convince me that he’d eaten the stuffed toy dog I bought for 99p the day before, I actually started to believe him and was relieved when it turned up unharmed. I was giggly and silly, was severely struggling to concentrate and tried to figure out why there was a very narrow door on the fifth floor that you could only get through if you walked sideways and were reasonably slim. By lunchtime things were getting very surreal as I ran around the Guild of Students trying to find out where the free candyfloss was and I started to worry that I was eventually going to hit the hangover, but instead I just felt very very tired.

I finally got back to my flat at 5:10pm, the second time this week I’ve left my flat in the evening and not returned until the following evening – I am dog tired and really need to touch base, wherever that is. I’m going home this weekend for the first time this term so more train travel tomorrow.

The night before the morning after

Last night I really had an amazingly good time. We started off at a pub called Jumping Jacks where the Guinness was £1.25, two legendary showmen tried to run a Kareoke with 15 people and the barmaids danced on the bar (in a non-saucy way). We were then supposed to go home after last orders but instead we agreed to go on to a club where we consumed copius amounts of liquid (and it wasn’t water). I think there are only two reasons why I think I didn’t have a hangover this morning a) I drank lots of water before I went to bed and b) I was actually still drunk when I woke up.

The stuff I remember about what happened last night was bad enough and I know there’s stuff I don’t remember. I know at one point I was stood in lauperr‘s kitchen with all her flatmates having chips thrown to me, not wearing many clothes and being drawn all over in biro.

The evening after the morning after the night before

When I got back to my flat at 5:30pm I checked my emails and went to bed for a 20 minute nap, I’ve only just woken up at gone 11pm and I’m hungry.

The perpetual webmaster

So much web to weave, so little time. The BurnFM Website went down well yesterday, I have “urgent” changes to make for a choir’s website I look after, it’s about time the Twisted Lemon splash page turned into a Twisted Lemon Website and I have a nice queue of web sites to do for work.

BurnFM starts our month long FM broadcast tomorrow (23rd). You can listen on 107.3FM in and around Birmingham University or listen online via the web site I knocked up in a week – burnfm.com. I didn’t design the logo.

It’s time to burn.

For the first time in a very long time, I grabbed my guitar and got up in front of an audience last night to sing a set. It was the open mic night at OC’s in Digbeth High Street, I did a small 20 minute set and I’m pleased to say it went down pretty well 🙂 I think I’m finally getting back into music, Tom is interested in doing a duet with me and they want me to play again.

I sang one of my own songs which went down particularly well. I can’t believe I wrote it over four years ago, I need some more material.

After last orders I got on a train and in a last minute drunken decision decided it would be a good idea to go back to a flat in Selly Oak for an after party. I was still there at 4:30am talking to people I’d never met before and ended up sleeping in Tom’s flat and still managed to turn up to labs this morning. I’m still wearing the same clothes I was wearing yesterday and I had to take my guitar to all my lectures today, but I feel happy 🙂

Last night I went to an Indie night the Indie society put on which was cool. However, by the end of the night (well, 2am) my drunk flatmate was taking chunks out of my door with a saucepan. At least he wasn’t brandishing a knife this time. One of the girls came down from upstairs to complain about the noise and nearly got a nasty saucepan injury in reply.

We had a “standards commitee” meeting today for our software engineering project. One of the people in the meeting wasn’t happy with a group decision and proceeded to stand up and declare that everyone in the group was incompetent and tried to leave the room. The postgraduate teaching assistant refused to let them leave so they sat and sulked for the rest of the session.

I’ve now set up a froody subversion repository with trac as a front end for use with the project, though I had to read a book about subversion first.

After some interesting… contract problems, I’m now developing a web site for BurnFM in the next three weeks, so more work to keep me busy!

I think I might be addicted to reading. I know I’m technically “reading” for a degree, but I can’t seem to stop it.

When I got up this morning I was reading the course notes for my software engineering project. I decided I wanted to try and use a version tracking system so I was read the installation instructions for trac, then realised I needed to know about subversion first, so I’ve been skimreading the SVN Book. I got bored of that after a few hours so I decided to read the news in my RSS reader. I realised that I needed a break from my screen so I sat on my bed and read a chapter of “The Invisible Computer” by Donald A. Norman. Then I realised I hadn’t left my room for most of the day apart from coffee making, so I went to the Kitchen and talked to my housemate but was distracted by the University Newspaper he was reading, stole it from under his nose and started to peruse the articles.

Now it’s dark outside and I’m reading what I’ve just written.

I think I may have a problem and I feel sorry for my eyes.

“Journalists”, listen to me and listen hard. Something written on a public wiki and marked as “braindump” is *not* fact.

News articles on Linux Today and PC Pro stated (as fact) that “The makers of Ubuntu Linux are planning to develop an equivalent to Apple’s .Mac service.”

This is not true. I’ll tell you why I know this isn’t true, because I *wrote* most of that frelling wiki page *myself* and I have nothing to do with Ubuntu or Canonical short of being a user of their products. It is not officially endorsed in any way and is clearly marked as a “brain dump” on the corresponding launchpad page.

The articles stated that the proposed name, “Ubuntu.Mac” is a name which Apple’s lawyers are unlikely to allow to stand. I actually put a comment on the page suggesting that it be moved to wiki.ubuntu.com/TribeLife (the actual suggested name for the service), but someone kindly removed my comment yesterday.

Journalists – *think* before you write something, check your sources.

Rant over.

It’s official, I’m loved so much by the Guinness brewery that they’ve recorded a video Happy Birthday message especially for me! OK, so it’s a few days premature (birthday’s on the 17th) but I guess they were just really keen to start celebrating. I know I drink a lot of Guinness and everything, but this was an unexpected suprise! I’m obviously a very valued customer 😉

In other news…

Finished all my post-christmas exams yesterday which is a *massive* weight off my shoulders. Maths went better than expected, but I’ve realised that the “average of 60%” I need to maintain my scholarship (you know, the one which pays for my food) isn’t quite as easy as it first seemed!

Just got my psychology assignment to hand in on Monday and then I can launch into our froody Software Engineering project. Watch out Martians – the Birmingham EECE department are coming your way with their Mars Rover, and they’ve only been programming in C for a few months!

Back in Brum
The hippygeek is back in the city, rotting his mind with boolean algebra. At least this time I have a decent sized bottle of single malt. Wait, maybe it’s not the algebra after all…

What actually happened at CES
So, Google Pack was what the fuss was all about, a sort of linux-esque package management for Windows. And the adoption of DRM of course, I guess that answers the question of whether AOL is now 5% less evil or Google is more evil. C’mon guys, you know as well as we do that DRM is fundamentally flawed, don’t play along. The video I want to search for is the video of Larry’s keynote to see the bits with Robin Williams in and the interesting stuff about common standards.

Why is yahoo writing phone-specific software to access their web services? It’s going to take a while to write software for every model of mobile phone out there… there are much better ways.

Is it me or has Bill Gates lost his interest in IT?

Intel and Yahoo pushing XP Media Centre Edition, oh well.

New Year
2005 was a year of planning, 2006 is a year of action, then hopefully 2007 will be a year of great things to follow.