Probably Moving Home

My blog may be moving home at some point in the near future, although I'm unsure when. I've decided that the Aberystwyh servers are not the place to host this and am currently looking for alternatives. I could very well move it to my business website address, but I don't want my work and personal life in the same place. Current options are:

A free shell acount and homepage on a Linux server in Germany.

A $5 one-time contribution to validate a shell with freeshell, or,

A $36 one-time fee to get a lifetime membership to freeshell with extra webspace and stuff.

I'll give as much advanced warning as possible before moving the site, and I'll keep this page here with a redirect to the new location. The move will also be an opportunity to add a few features to the blog that I overlooked originally.

Apology accepted

In response to my blog titled "Free Reading Lessons for #Aber Members" I have received an apology by email from a member of #Aber. I'm not one to hold a grudge, so Apology accepted.

The Weekend

Liz came to Aberystwyth for the weekend. She arrived on Friday around 7:30 which meant I had to do a hell of a lot of cleaning between 4:30 and 7:30 (I worked through my lunch-break so that I could leave early) so that the flat was actually inhabitable when she arrived.

She'd not been here an hour before we were setting out to hit the pubs with my colleagues. It was a bit of an OLU piss-up starting in Wetherspoons and then heading towards the pier. Yes, the pier. Lowey went to the pier. While we were in Wetherspoons someone mentioned that I was expected to dance in the Pier, which I point-blank refused to do. It's something I never do. I hate dancing. Can't dance won't dance, that's me. Well, unless my weakness is found.

Many attempts to get me to dance failed. If only they'd known my secret weakness. I shall now reveal that weakness so that it may be read, acknowledged and stored for future reference: I only dance when I am sober, or at least only had one or two pints at the most, and excellent music playing. Plus I hate ridiculously busy dance-floors, or music that's so loud that you can't hear. Meet those conditions, twist my arm, and I might just dance. Might.

Saturday morning we got up fairly early with the intention of gettng a bus to Devil's Bridge and then walking back. That plan went out the window as we were both a little worse for wear after a night in the Pier. While we were pondering what to do the flat began to shake with the sound of strangely tribal-like drums. Eventually I worked out that this was coming from the street and so called Liz to the front of the flat where a huge procession of peace protesters were marching down the road banging on huge drums and blowing whistles.

It was great. Most protests these days seem to be far too unorganised, where as this one had a huge following and seemed very well organised. After they'd passed Liz and I looked at each other and agreed we should go join them, so we hastily put shoes on, grabbed coats, and chased after them.

There was a bit of a weird symbollic gesture on the sea-front of tying ribbons to the prom and then we headed on to Pen Dinas castle. There we stood in the gale force winds and listened to 3 prominent speakers discuss the legalities and ethics of the war.

While we were there, strangely, I had a sudden flash of inspiration for a piece of amateur dramatics.

After protesting for a while we walked home and lazed around for most of the rest of the day, nursing hangovers etc. We went charity-shop shopping because Liz wanted some new trousers, and we went to Woolworths too so I could buy a much needed second cereal bowl, seive and potato peeler.

Later on we met Burt and went to Rummers for a drink. Passing The Mill on the way we decided to stop off for a paddywhack* and I realised I'd not got money on me. D'oh. Ran back to the bank while Liz and Burt went to Rummers. After a beer in Rummers we moved on to The Ship and Castle where we have our ring's twisted. That is, we sampled the delights of the beer "Twisted Ring". It's not bad. A bit weird. It's as black as Guinness, but it has a very strange head on it that eventually begins to look like sewage. Still I enjoyed it none the less. We then headed on to the Bay.

This morning was devoted to recovery. Genius that I am I forgot to drink some water before going to sleep and so awoke this morning with a raging thirst and a headache to reckon with.

We were going to go for a walk up Constitution hill, but that fell through when we got onto the seafront and the wind was blowing so hard it drove the rain into the skull and through any non-waterproofed clothing. Instead we just chilled for the day.

...Now to get on with various CGI scripts.

Blogaholic

Try this simple test. Search Google's Image Search for the keywords English Flag and take a look at the results. Looking at the first page I count:

12 union flags,

4 St. George crosses,

4 irrelevant results. (as is expected)

Since when was the Union flag the flag for England? The answer is it isn't, nor has it ever been. The Union flag is a flag to represent the United Kingdom,

England,

Wales,

Scotland,

Northern Ireland.

Admittedly all the websites that have erroneously called the Union flag the English flag are foreign websites, but that's not excuse as far as I'm concerned.

The most shocking result actually comes from a Boys Brigade (now renamed to Boys and Girls Brigade) website. This is a para-military organisation that prides itself on its knowledge of flags of countries and nautical flags.

Another great error message from the Microsoft Office suite:

I have no problems with the design of the error message or box, I was just a little miffed by the message 'another user'. Which "other" user? There's plenty of them around!

Free Reading Lessons for #Aber Members

I've changed my mind about the extremely long blog and have instead decided to opt for a smaller simpler blog and save the draft I wrote for another purpose. All will, eventually, become clear :)

Various channel members of #Aber were very effective in proving their inability to read by making snide remarks and pompous arrogant claims with regard to my blog the other day titled "Oh for fuck's sakes". Examples of quotes include

To which I can only say that nobody is forcing them to read my blog. I must add though that it is a terrible shame that I am starting to grate, they of course don't grate at all with their in-your-face exuberant luxuries and general fortunes that continually and habitually moan about taxes who are

In the future please send all back-stabbing remarks to mtl1@aber.ac.uk where they will be responded to promptly and professionally, just like the email about council tax was.

I invite other points of view and perspectives on my writings, I don't claim to be perfect nor to be the final word on any subject. I merely write what I think.

This is the last blog I will write about #Aber. I intend to put that part of my life behind me and move on. Joining was a mistake, I realised the mistake and I found somewhere much better to spend my time.

I have a nice long blog drafted and ready for tomorrow, but it needs proof-reading and spell-checking before I put it live, and considering I have just got back from the pub I am in not fit state to do it right now.

My RF cable for the dreamcast arrived this morning which means I have been able to play Crazy Taxi this evening :-D My initial attempts were crap (class "B" and "C" licenses) because I've not played it for a while. However around 6 I managed to set my highest score ever - over $8,000 and a ranking of 1st. Yes, 1st. Oh yes.

Right, I'm off to bed safe in the knowledge that I have managed to get FUCK ALL done on my list of things to do. Great.

It would seem my MTL Web Design bandwidth useage has sky-rocketed this month and last. It would seem that searching on the Image Google Search for almost any variety of Nokia phone lists my website right there at the top with lovely crystal-clear pictures. Then, various bandwidth leaching bottom feeding scum have been hotlinking directly to the images on my server - using my bandwidth for their own needs. Well, that's going to change tonight. Lots of scum sucking leaches are going to get MTL Web Design advertising dumped straight into the middle of their web pages...

...and they will only have theirselves to blame.

Burt has made a good point. The University have been with-holding a major service - in fact, probably their main service - of releasing exam results. So why the hell are they so actively reclaiming debts?

And just for the record, the Uni can cut this account off but that won't silence me. I have a right to freedom of speech and I damn well intend on exercising that right, no matter how much the Uni dislike it. I'm not allowed to portray the University in a bad way, but surely if the University goes to such lengths to make themselves look bad and I merely report on it then that is the University's problem - not mine?

Oh for fuck's sakes

Not sure what happened there, somehow the blog submitted itself without me doing anything. So, as I was saying...

My UWA account has been locked for not paying my tuition fees.

Last month I got a letter warning me that if I didn't pay my then overdue fees my computing facilities would be locked. Ok, that's understandable. What I didn't understand was how I had not been told prior to that letter when my fees were due by. If I don't know when to pay them, how can they expect me to? I didn't even know how to pay.

So I rang them and had an argument with someone in the Finance department. I pointed out I didn't have £550 to simply throw away at that moment in time, what with not having had a chance to budget or anything. She agreed to extend it to the start of March when, I said, I might be able to pay it. Problem is that they insist that I send them the full payment, which is bankrupting. That's most of my monthly pay cheque - and being in the finance department they should know that too.

Well at the start of the month I couldn't really afford to pay, and so I didn't. My plan was to pay at the start of next month - I've had to keep a VERY tight grip on my finances all month so that next month I can afford to pay for the privellage of being a student that works for the Uni, and who gets taught nothing for a year.

Then this morning I tried to connect to my "M" drive from my work machine. It failed. No surprises there, it often does that. I try again, it fails again. This goes on for a while, but I can't really be bothered to poke at it right at that moment, so I try to log in to Central to get my email.

Access denied

Hmmm, my typing skills aren't up to scratch this morning then - I must have typed the password wrong. I try it again.

Access denied

Hmmm, clearly I need my early morning cup of tea more than I had originally thought. I type the password again.

Access denied

My first thoughts were that I should not have ignored those emails prompting me to change my password. But then the password wasn't due to expire until April - I'd only received the 2nd of 8 emails so the password couldn't have expired. Then it struck me.

My gaze shifted to the letter to the left of my keyboard where, in bold lettering, were the words

Re: Outstanding Tuition Fees - £550.00

and - even worse still - the words

Fuck.

I rang the helpdesk to try and get this confirmed, but the really weird answerphone message that was in fragments of Welsh followed by English made me dizzy so I rang the Finance Department instead.

One was not amused. One was bloody livid in fact, and I think it may have shown in my voice. I'm a member of staff, I need my computing facilities in order to get on with my job. Ok, I hadn't paid my fees. But they were aware that I was struggling to afford it. I'd made that very clear. They pay me 10k a year, and then take £550 back off me again. Why not just pay me 9.5k? That would actually make my life considerably easier in the long run.

Having now got back into my account I have had discussion with others and they tell me that I should have had various bits of paper at various times - none of which I have seen.

Now this probably is a direct violation of the Information Services terms of use, but I don't care (and I can't even find the terms to check anyway) but I personally think the University has acted in a completely unfair way and in a totally incompetent way.

The £550 I owe. Just what exactly is this fee for? What is the Uni doing for me exactly? I'm not attending lectures. I'm not taking part in practicals. I'm not making use of the Advisory service. I am not using their public workstations. The ONLY service I receive from the University is access to the Internet by way of their Central server - which I am entitled to as a member of staff. Ok, so the University sends a member of staff ONCE in the entire year to see how I am getting on in my placement. So they have expenses to cover. Well I can assure you it does not cost £550 to get from the Penglais campus to the Llanbadarn campus. It costs about a quid on the bus, or you can drive here for probably even less.

So if the average student pays £1100, and I pay £550 then that would suggest that I should be getting approximately half of what the other students are getting. But then the only real service I receive from the University is the Internet access which I require for my job, so the University have a responsibility to ensure I have that. And of course I could just go get a free shell account and that would be FREE. So could someone (preferably from the Uni) please explain why I pay this money anyway. I'm already being paid a pittance to do a technical job. What else do they want from me?

I'm really angry about this. I'm not even convinced they have the right to deny me access to my own private materials. Everything on my userspace is mine, written by me, copyrighted by me. By locking me out they deny me access to my own materials. Surely there are laws against that sort of thing? And surely they are required to give me a warning first?

I'm sick of being the punchbag. One day I'm going to ring the University up and tell them they can stick their fucking qualification up their arse and go get a job.

Ok, so why can I not log onto the UWA systems?

Thank god we're all descendants of Golgafrincham and their telephone sanitisers. Otherwise this article might scare me.

Seriously now, does it really matter? Toilet seats regularly get cleaned with some pretty viscous chemicals - of course they're going to be clean. So what if toilets are cleaner than desks? I know for a fact that my desk isn't all that unclean. I wouldn't be scared to eat food that had been sat on my desk. In fact I have done many times in the past and I'm still not dead.

This is another prime example of the media trying to scare people. For some reason the media seem to enjoy instilling fear in the public. For one thing it has been shown time and time again that living in too clean an environment is actually as detremental as living in a filthy environment, because it lowers the body's tolerance to bacteria. Asthma and Eczma have been linked to households that are cleaned too much.

More importantly the article refers to cold and flu bugs. Everyone gets a cold every now and then, there's nothing that can be done about it. It's just a part of every day life. Disolving your phone, keyboard, mouse and desktop with powerful detergents every day is not going to make that much of a difference to your health.

That said, the keyboards, mice and desktops in some of the computer rooms at UWA really do need this treatment. But they're shared computers - would you use a public loo if it didn't get cleaned on a regular basis?