Houses are like buses. Their wheels go round and round?

The bus analogy has been used many a time for various things, like women, jobs, and er… buses. But, it seems very appropriate in this situation.

Houses are like buses. You wait ages for one, and then 3 come along at once.

It’s that time of year when all the university students have to start looking for somewhere to live, and people to live with for next year. Actually, that’s a lie. That time of year was a month ago, but exam stress and general procrastination meant that I put off even thinking about it until all of my friends had already found something. It didn’t help that one of my good friends made a u-turn on the decision that he’d probably like to live with me, but then didn’t tell me until a week later. By this point I’d told my other friends I’d be living with someone else, so they went and found something as well.

Since then, I’ve had trouble finding anyone I know without housing arrangements, and anyone I’ve had found has been even worse than me at looking for anything, so until this week, I’d still found nothing.

I’d started to look around for “housemate wanted” ads, and had seen a few things. One promising opportunity last week fell through, after an initially positive response turned into no response when I made further inquiries. For some reason the person in question thought it’d be more helpful to say “Ok, I’ll talk to the other people” and then not reply to my messages for a week, as I saw other opportunities fly past and be quickly filled.

So this week, I started searching again through the ads, which are now quickly decreasing in numbers as deadlines approach, and positions are filled. I posted my own ad saying I was looking for a room, and awaited in hope for some sort of response. By this point I’d probably be happy to live with a transgender axe murderer, and had pretty much given up hope of finding a place/people to my liking. When a response came in from a group of stereotypical student alcoholic clubgoers, I was about to accept, despite the fact that I enjoy dancing to loud club music about as much as an alaskan enjoys an ice-cold bath (in as much as it’s immensely unenjoyable, but there’s often little choice in the situation).

However, as I was typing out an email in return, I spotted an ad on Facebook posted by someone on my uni course. It turned out that someone I knew had a space in their house, and needed someone asap. So I deleted the email to generic partygoers, and rattled one off to the other one.

But not an hour later, one of my current flatmates knocked on my door. It turned out they had fallen out with the other flatmates (who were all planning to live together) and that they were now looking for something else. Of course this meant there would be a free space with people I knew, and that someone would have to be found pretty quickly as the contract was due to be signed next wednesday.

Of course, when she then told the others that she didn’t want to live with them any more, there was a fallout of epic proportions, with plenty of choice words thrown about. Conveniently (and in a somewhat planned fashion), I was there to fill the space, and was promptly caught in the middle of the argument. Though it had started to become apparent that I had known all along what was going on, and was neatly lined up to take the spare room in the house, they were too busy hating eachother to worry much.

It was quite interesting as I sat in the kitchen and they each wandered in and out, and I got to hear them complain about eachother. I always try to be a neutral party in arguments, and especially in this as it was thanks to both sides that I now had somewhere to live next year. But it was hard not to just agree to each persons complaints about the other, despite the fact that I had no problem with either. I’m sure they’ll all be over it in a few weeks anyway, and realise that this is the best situation for everyone involved. Not just me either, as it’s fairly obvious that it’s better that they not live together if they hate eachother and always talk behind eachothers backs. While my housemates-to-be failed to see this and stated that the leaving person was a “selfish bitch” for not considering the possible problems of losing the contract, it turned out that they had in fact considered it, and they really were probably making the best decision for everyone, rather than launching into a year-long contract to be 10 meters away from someone you hate.

This raises a slight issue though. The contract has to be signed by my parents at some point (well, the deadline was weeks ago. I’m not entirely sure what happens now) and I have to pay £400 by wednesday. With my parents staying with my grandad in hospital for the next week, and my bank balance ever-low, this could turn out to be a problem.

Hopefully, all’s well that ends well.

Vote for me, I’ll give you sweets!

So, this week at University is Election Week. Also known as Annoy Everyone on Campus week, or “Go away I’m late for my lecture” week.

It’s the week where voting is held for who will be on the student guild committee next year, complete with lies, slander, and non-stop campaigning. The student guild is sort of like a mini government of the university, and the committee has a number of positions which are held by students (or possibly ex-students, I’m not entirely sure) who rule over the university, make decisions, and get paid for it. Much like a normal government, they have a President and Deputy President, some positions for specific areas of the university, such as Education and Sports secretaries, and then a few odd other positions, and what they do is anybodies guess.

I’m generally really one for politics – international, national, or local; though sometimes it does raise my interest a bit. At least, I certainly don’t claim to know anything about on any level. My opinions are probably pretty much on a level with the average person (eg. George Bush is stupid) possibly with some differences, but no particular reasons to justify or argue them. Oddly the American election race has been raising my interests a bit recently, if only because it’s impossible to avoid coming across links and references to it when you use the internet as much as I do.

And it’s in a pretty similar vain that I’ve started to become slightly interested in the university guild elections, albeit the day before the voting closes. You can’t leave your room and not have the elections thrust upon you in some way or other, be it from large colorful posters, people forcing fliers on you, or bribes of sweets. In fact, I would give someone a prize if they managed to get from their room to a lecture without someone trying to influence their vote in some way. A pretty valuable prize in fact, as I’m so certain that’s impossible. So, probably around £10, because for one, I’m never very confident in bets, and also, that’s pretty much all I have at the moment.

The campaigning started off a week ago, with a few candidates getting out there ahead of the crowds. At this point, I wasn’t really sure what was going on when a group of students wearing T-shirts stating “Vote John Stevens” quoted their shirts to passers by, just in case they couldn’t read it already. Of course, they didn’t actually offer any reason as to -why- we should vote for this John guy, or even what he was running for. Over the next few days, other similar campaigners started appearing over campus, and “election fever” gripped the university. This separated students into 2 distinct categories – Those that wanted to tell you who to vote for, and those that didn’t want to be told who to vote for. Every busy corner would be packed full of people in various hand-made t-shirts, and massive banners proclaiming who you should vote for. Whenever you passed by, they’d shout out the name of some candidate to vote for, or pass on a flier with someone’s picture on. Some would even give you reasons why, but they’d pretty much go in one ear and out the other, as I had enough trouble even remembering the names of all these people, let alone which ones wanted to reduce fees, and which wanted to increase recycling.

Initially, my voting process was to be a simple one – I’d simple vote for the first people who told me to vote for them. This would have worked in the first few days, when the number of campaigners were low and a few select names fresh in my memory. However, procrastination made me put of voting, and by that time there were multiple people telling me to vote them in to the same position, so I’d have to make some choices. My next approach was to vote for the person with the best looking posters, which did give me a few sure winners – the person with the shiny poster was definitely getting priority over the guy who’d just mass printed some word-art.

But then, an unpredicted complication occurred. They started handing out sweets! So now the competition was really hotting up. Who would give me the best sweets!? One gave me popcorn, another gave me a lollypop, and a 3rd gave me some jelly. It was a hard choice. At one point, a friend and I even had to go as far as asking a potential presidential candidate why we should vote for them. It was becoming a hard decision.

Based on a combination of these methods, I did manage to decide who to vote for for all but the main President position, which had the most candidates. For this, I had to go to unimaginable lengths to decide. I had to read the reasons to vote for them. This turned up some interesting things, mostly that they were all planning to do exactly the same things, and I’d imagine these are exactly the same things that candidates in previous years have said. Pretty much all of them said (in various different ways) that they would listen to the views of students more.

In the end, the true nature of the election was revealed, and I voted for the person I knew. Ironically, the first person I met from Exeter Uni, when I was on the train there.

Ah, politics. In the end, it’s all just a popularity contest.

Poh Tay Toes

My potatoes are growing roots. Is this normal?

That is, packaged potatoes that I bought from a supermarket last week. Ok, so they -are- 2 days out of date now, but this didn’t happen before. A few weeks ago, I ate some potatoes that were a whole 4 days out of date! I never really worried too much about use-by dates, at least not to the point where I throw something out the day it goes out of date. When you’re a student living on a very low amount of money, you have to buy cheap stuff where you can find it, and often that means stuff that’s reduced because it needs to be used soon. And it’s not very easy/convenient to go shopping every day.

And anyway, these use-by dates are more guidelines that rules. It’s not like there’s some sort of bacterial time-bomb sitting inside, ready to explode as soon as it rolls over to midnight on the day after the use-by date. At least, I don’t think so.

Generally, if it looks fine and smells fine, I consider it safe to eat, and I haven’t made myself ill yet. Sure, I wouldn’t do that with raw meat or if I was cooking for anyone other than myself, but it’s worked for me anyway.

But still, I’m not really sure what to do about these roots growing out of my potatoes. I mean, they’re not mold. Is it ok to just cut them off and cook as normal? Will little potato trees start growing out of my mouth if I eat them? Funny, I remember that when I was younger, I thought that would happen if you ate seeds from any fruit.

I’m quite tempted to just leave them there and see just how big the roots grow. I could give the potatoes names. At the moment there are just little stumps sticking out of each of the potatoes, but in time they could grow into whole plants! I’m not really sure how well that would work in my cold, dark, dry cupboard though.

…I’m hungry. Sorry Derek the Potato, you’re getting cooked.

Re-e-e-e-wind Pt 2

And now, the thrilling conclusion of my week in tasty blog form. Now with added vitamins.

So, up until this point my weekend had been quite a drain on my funds. They say that money can’t buy happiness, but when you’re a student and you have £25 left to live on for 2 weeks, just a little bit of money could bring quite a lot of happiness. For example, if I hadn’t been given a bit of extra money by my parents, then I wouldn’t have been able to have an enjoyable weekend visiting my friends.

In another minor example of money bringing some happiness – When we went to see Cloverfield, I bought a drink. It cost £2.90, and I gave them a £10 note. I was given £6.10 change. Noticing this, I pointed out that they needed to give me another £1 change. I guess the checkout person wasn’t paying much attention, or didn’t hear me right, or just saw that I had £1 in my hand and had already pocketed the £5 note. Either way, they then gave me another £5 note instead of the £1 which I required. Attempting to quickly wipe the confused look off of my face, I accepted it and made a quick exit before they realised their mistake. So in the end, I started with £10, and finished with £11.10 and a drink. Can’t complain there. Of course, a day later I realised I’d left my student railcard at home, and had to pay the full price of £8 instead of £5 for my train ticket, so that kinda cancelled that out. Oh well.

In comparison though, if £5 brought happiness, the next day brought ecstatic joy. After the night out with Greg and friends, I left early the next morning to go to my grandparents 60th wedding anniversary celebration. Later that afternoon we were planning to take my grandparents to a fancy expensive place for “Afternoon Tea”. This all sounds very posh and incredibly english, but I guess that’s what old people like, and anything bigger than this would have probably set my grandad off into another panic attack. First of all we had to head over to my grandparents house though, which I hadn’t seen in a a while, or at least not stopped in there for more than 5 minutes in quite a few years now.

I suppose I had a fairly typical relationship with my grandparents growing up. While they didn’t live really close by in the same town, they lived around 10 miles away, and I’d visit them fairly often when I was younger. Especially in the time between my parents breaking up, and my Mum marrying my Step Dad, I’d spend quite a lot of time with them, as it was quite hard for my Mum to look after me entirely on her own. I’d often spend weekends at their house, or go on short breaks with them to their small holiday home in a seaside town, which I enjoyed a lot. While they weren’t as great of an influence on my upbringing as my parents (all 3 of them), their somewhat old fashioned views and ideologies where quite different to those of my parents, and their comparatively strict manner probably did help to drill home a few important facts of life.

But anyway, back to the (near) present, and it had probably been about 6 months since I’d seen them, the last time being at my cousin’s wedding last year. The usual conversations ensued, ranging from how my Maths course is going (“No, I’m doing Computer Science, not Maths. Yes, computers. They’re… never mind, Maths is great”), how great my new haircut is (They certainly weren’t fans of early 2007’s shoulder length hair), and how Grandad thought minor heart surgery was going to kill him (Which he repeated about 10 times within an hour). But still, this isn’t the same as my previous complaints about distant relatives. These are much closer family, who have been a big part of my life since I’ve been born, and have done a lot for me in the past 20 years. While I don’t see them so often any more, and making conversation can be somewhat awkward at times, I have no problem with spending some time with them every now and then.

No sooner had we sat down for a cup of tea and some biscuits, we were straight out of the door again, to the “mystery destination” of their celebrations. Upon arriving at the venue (an expensive looking place in the countryside near Winchester), we were shown to a room containing another 10 close relatives. It’s a fairly rare occasion that we manage to gather all of the family in one place at the same time, so that alone was cause for celebration. While these weren’t all the closest of relatives to me, they were still people who I’d known as long as I can remember, so it was nice to see them all again, since it usually happens once a year at most these days, with everyone moving to various corners of the country now.

The big shock of the day occurred a few hours later though. I’m not sure if they misunderstood the occasion, or if they just decided they were tired of receiving things after so many years, but my grandparents decided to give out some gifts to everyone else who was there, in the form of a cheque for each person. Everyone’s reaction was something along the lines of what can only be represented on the internet as “omg”. Being in the lower tiers of the generations there and receiving £200, I can’t imagine what the older generations there received, but my Uncle’s shocked face lasted for quite a while.

After all the festivities hand ended, and we’d all eaten more sandwiches than we could make room for, I headed back to my grandparents house with my parents, where I was going to stay the night. Having a bit more time there now, I had a look around the house, which I hadn’t seen properly in at least 5 years now. I wasn’t sure if I’d stepped into a timewarp, but everything looks exactly the same as it did 5 years, or even 15 years ago. I even recognized a teddy-bear shaped sponge in the bathroom which I used to use when I stayed there in my childhood years. Nothing really seemed to have aged or weathered though, it was all just an exact replica of the house I’d visited many a time for as long as I can remember. The pictures on the tables were the same, the furniture in the living room was the same (though they had upgraded to a newer TV and even a DVD player), and even the cups and plates were all the same, yet somehow they’d retained the same patterns without any wear for at least 20 years.

Ah, nostalgia. I was quickly snapped out of my daydreaming by the realization that I had to wake up at 6am the next day though, and went to sleep on an inflatable bed in the living room, dreaming of yesteryear.

Re-e-e-e-wind!

As usual I seem unable to spread my productivity over everything. While this week I have been surprisingly productive with my university work, and done my programming project an entire -week- earlier than I have to, as a consequence I’ve been a bit too distracted by life to spend my entire evenings (and most of the night) sitting on the internet. While I’ve not exactly been in a whirl of activity, it is at least quite a bit by my standards, and I’ve come to the sudden realization that you can’t stay up gaming til 5am when you have a lecture at 9am. A realization you would have thought I’d have made a few years ago, or at least by the time I started university. But, better late than never as they say, and I do seem to have finally got myself on the right track with getting work done.

As a result of this, I haven’t been blogging. Again. Shock, horror, disaster. So, to please my adoring fan(s?), I better go back and catch up on the events of last weekend – a rather eventful and enjoyable one by my standards. Which isn’t saying much since most of the time my weekends involve me sitting right here writing blogs or killing dragons.

Anyway, my weekend started last thursday. Shut up, I don’t care if that’s not the weekend. I had to make my way to Southampton by Sunday to go and see my grandparents at a big old fashioned family gathering. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity of having a trip back to the homelands paid for by my parents, I decided to leave Exeter a few days early, and make a few visits on the way, and see a few friends. I don’t get to do this nearly as often as I like, as my student budget barely allows for me to feed myself 3 times a day, let alone go on 100 mile return train journeys at the weekends.

My first stop was Bournemouth, where I was visiting my besterest blogging buddy James. He’d been saying I should come visit his flat in Bournemouth (or the polish outskirts of it at least) for quite some time now, so now seemed like a perfect time to take up on the offer. As I only had 2 days there, we had quite a busy 2 days. On thursday night, shortly after arriving there, we went back out again to see the new movie Cloverfield. Overall, it was a pretty good, enjoyable film (though perhaps not for anyone with motion sickness of fear of large alien beasts). I’ll probably go into more detail about the film in another post anyway.

After that, I got to experience Guitar Hero for the first time. I’m now addicted.

The next day, I was given the choice of staying in his flat alone with his games collection, or going to his Interactive Media classes with him. I chose the latter, and I’m still not entirely sure why since it meant that we had to leave at 9am (in fact, we actually woke up at 9:15am). But in the end, it turned out to be a pretty interesting day. Fortunately I happened to be sitting in on what was apparently their best class of the year so far, and I was introduced to Macromedia Director, and we were tasked with creating a game. Director is an interesting program, which falls somewhere between Flash and Programming. Knowing nothing about the program and with no artistic talent whatsoever, I launched headfirst into programming a game of Pong in all the wrong ways, but somehow with the right results. In the end, James and I combined forces and created the greatest game of Pong ever (probably), greatly impressing his classmates and teacher (possibly).

After some more late night gaming and a small amount of sleep (which turned into a large amount of sleep) I had to get up quite early to get a train to Southampton the next day. In the end I actually got the 3pm train, which made my busy schedule quite hard to stick to. I did however manage to stop by my Dad’s house for a couple of hours, jump back on another train, and get to Greg’s house. We then had a tasty meal, and a confusing conversation with his Dad about ears and learning, and got back on yet -another- train back into Southampton. Here, the plan was to meet up with some other friends and go to a club. I’m not really sure what I was thinking when I agreed to this, as I generally do not enjoy the flashy lights and annoying dance music of night clubs. However, it meant a night out with some friends so I consented to it in the end. And it was actually ok. After being shocked by the first £3 drink, I was very thirsty for the rest of the night, and they were playing the usual mix of awful pop music and generic dance music. When I decided to just relax and try to enjoy the night though, I actually did, and in the end it was a decent night, and I got to see a few friends.

Well, I’ve somehow managed to reach 900 words and I still have a day of the weekend left to go, so I guess I’ll leave it at that for today.

TeeVeeReeVeeYou #1 – Sarah Connor Chronicles

I guess I’m inadvertently copying from James again now, because I’m going to do a review of sorts! Or possibly two, depending on how long it takes to write one. In my defense though, I had planned to write this post 3 weeks ago, but a combination of laziness and need to study stopped me.

For the uneducated that don’t recognize the name, The Sarah Connor Chronicles is about the character of the same name form the Terminator series. When I first saw that they were planning to make a TV series based on the Terminator franchise, I was dubious. Of course the trend now is to take any franchise you can find, revive it, remodel it, and make as much money out of it as possible – concequentially turning the old fans against you. Terminator 3 was the prime example of this, bringing back everyone’s favorite monosyllabic robot Arnie against a robot that can melt and make things explode. Beyond that, I don’t really remember much, other than it wasn’t very good.

So naturally, on hearing that 5 years down the line from that disaster, they want to make an entire new series, I wasn’t too hopeful. Fortunately though, The Sarah Connor Chronicles seems to be going in the right direction. The series picks up right back where Terminator 2 left off. It’s basically like they’re saying “Ok, we messed up with that movie, let’s try again”. They even manage to write their way around the somewhat pointless death of Sarah Connor that occurs between the 2nd and 3rd movie, thanks to a nifty time traveling plot device which adds a nice extra element to the now tried, tested, and trashed concept of killer robots.

Initially after watching the 1st episode, I still wasn’t convinced. The actors seemed well cast at least – Summer Glau makes for a pretty good emotionless Terminator, somewhat similar in some aspects to her character in Firefly/Serenity. Thomas Dekker makes a jump from a minor role in Heroes to savior-in-training John Connor, and is pulling off the confused angsty teenager role well enough so far. It’s interesting to see the character of John start to evolve into something more of a hero rather than a kid that always needed protecting, and he does just seem like an older version of the John in T2. I’m not entirely sure what Lena Headey’s been in other than the somewhat minor role of the queen in 300, but she seems perfect as Sarah Connor. Although perhaps purists of the series might not like it, Sarah’s character actually annoyed me a bit in T2, and the new rendition of her in the series seems a lot more human.

While the first episode certainly delivered in the thrills and explosions department, and seeing old characters back in action is nice, I was still wondering where they could go with it. T3 had obviously shown that just rolling out a newer improved robot and blowing up Arnie isn’t going to work any more, and I was hoping they’d realized that themselves. There was every opportunity for them to just make 12 episodes of the crew running away from various murderous robots, they have (fortunately) gone in a rather different direction. It starts off just as you expect – the machines are STILL taking over, they still want to kill John, and a friendly one has been sent back to help from the future. But then, to bridge the gap from 1997, where the series sets off, to the more recognizable modern times of 2007, the new friendly Terminator directs Sarah and John towards a time machine. In one swift move, this puts them in an entirely different setting where they don’t have to keep running from the Terminators, and turns the story around completely.

Of course there’s still the usual story there – they must find the creators of the killer computer network Skynet, and prevent it from being created. Quite how this is possible, I’m not entirely sure. Surely if they’re sending a robot back from the future then it has to be created, as if it is not created, then there’s no evil killer robots to be sent back, so they wouldn’t be able to destroy the network that created them in the first place. I’m not entirely sure how they avoid a paradox like this, as there clearly is an effect from what they’re doing, since they did at least postpone “Judgement Day” in T2. And yet they can still send back robots. I think the most believable theory is some sort of “alternate reality” sort of thing, where whenever they change something, it creates an alternate future. But this still makes it a bit confusing as to how sending things back is going to make a difference anyway.

Still, that’s far too confusing, so back to the main point of this – The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a good series. It’s what T3 should have been, only split down into many bite-sized chunks for easy viewing and more enjoyment. The story has certainly evolved quite a bit over the first 3 episodes which I’ve seen so far, and the added element of time travel can make things interesting. The addition of an extra character – obsessive detective James Ellison could certainly prove to be interesting. Back in 1997, he was trying to track down Sarah since she’d murdered a bunch of people. But he appears to be more than a little intrigued by the things Sarah has said about robots from the future, although he thinks them impossible. Of course, when Sarah and co jump 10 years into the future, they’re assumed dead, so when they pop up in 2007, everyone’s a bit confused. When all sorts of unusual things start appearing around the same time, he’s straight back on the case, determined to find out what’s going on, and getting even more confused by everything. Things could definitely get interesting when he does catch up with them.

So all in all, I like how it’s going, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it’s going to continue over the rest of the series. It’s a refreshing breath of fresh air to the franchise with some great new ideas, but still staying true to the original movies. Here’s hoping they keep it up.