So, blogs

I have one of those things, huh?

“Why haven’t you blogged in a month!?” I hear you all (mostly James) cry. Why indeed. I suppose I could say I’ve been too busy, or I’ve had nothing to say. Neither of which would be entirely true, but at least some sort of “fuzzy true” which allows them to be somewhat relevant to the subject. They are at least 0.5 true, perhaps.

I suppose the fact that I’m referencing my studies means I am actually doing some, although still probably still not as much as I should. Since coming back to college after easter, I had a deluge of coursework rain down upon me, much like the water than was simultaneously raining down on me at every single moment for almost every day in March. Ever present and really frustrating.

Unfortunately that’s where the similarity between coursework and english rain ends. While the rain just sort of drips down on you, generally annoying you at a fairly constant rate, my coursework suddenly jumps up and punches me in the face, much like some drunken chav who thinks you stole their hat. That does lead me to believe that perhaps I DID steal my lecturers hat, as the force behind the coursework’s punch was pretty heavy.

It’s entirely self-inflicted though. I’ve known right from the start of the year that there’d be a large amount of deadlines within a few weeks at the end of the year, and I’d been set all but one of those before easter. I then had 5 weeks to procrastinate, sleep, and generally do any activity but work over easter. To be fair, I did spend the majority of those 3 weeks staying with friends and without the time or resources to do any work, but once I got to my parents house, I indulged in absolute laziness for 2 weeks.

When I returned to college and suddenly realised I had a programming project and a maths paper due in the next week, and an essay the week after, I paniced a bit. I had no idea how to do half of it. My worries were at least relieved a bit when I discovered that neither did anyone else. For the programming project we’d been set the task of creating a network based voting system. Not an overly complex concept, but when you consider that weeks earlier we’d been making relatively simple programs to count the number of words in a document, it is. Especially when you consider that we really haven’t been taught networking very well (or, at all). To put it in real world terms, it’s like a baby going from being taught to walk, to being taught to a backwards triple somersault. By someone with no legs.

Along with being a generally incompetent lecturer with the teaching skills of a oxygen-deprived monkey, it appears that he doesn’t even know how to program himself. While considered “generally a nice guy” by those in his tutor group, he manages to surpass his incompetency in every lecture. Last week, he showed us a diagram that proved that the internet does in fact, DO SOMETHING.

Maybe it’s not his fault. Maybe the university has hastily thrown him into a role that he’s not ready for. But as he’s in charge of one of the subjects, I have to think that he must be adequately qualified to teach these things. In one programming example he gave us, he gave us some code that didn’t actually work. A group of us spend 3 days trying to work out how to get this code to work, because we needed to understand it to the project. After eventually giving up on it and searching the internet, I actually came across the code he’d given us. It wasn’t code he’d written at all, he’d taken it off of some website. What’s worse is, he didn’t even copy it correctly. He copied about half of it, then threw together some of his own code, which didn’t work at all. When confronted about this, his reply was “Well, I’m still learning too”. When I paid £3000 to come to university, I expected to be taught by professionals, and not have to find out all I need to know on the internet (Which I could have just done by staying at home)

I suppose I should cut him some slack here since his background is in business, not computing, but if this is the case, then why is he teaching a module which involves a large amount of programming. I still can’t quite decide if it is because the university made him teach something he doesn’t understand, or if he does actually know the subject and is just an awful teacher. Even when it is a subject that’s supposed to be his area of expertise though, he’s no good at teaching it. When he has an hour to go through a 20 slide presentation, he usually gets through around 10.

It appears that, as usual, I have rambled on for far longer than intended about a subject I didn’t really mean to talk about. To cut a long story short, we all complained that we hadn’t been taught the coursework material, and the deadline was extended. By the time we actually got our head around the code which he apparently couldn’t, it was actually relatively simple.

The real problems began when we were set a massive team project with only 2 weeks to complete it, including complicated programming, a design document, and a presentation. It’s a bit odd when you get 5 weeks to write a 2000 word essay, but only 2 weeks to do the biggest project of the year. I guess that’s part of the challenge. Fortunately I ended up with a good team, and one of the few where everyone actually did work. But with this short deadline and 3 others creeping up on me, I ended up with a pretty hectic few weeks.

I’ve discovered (or at least, proven) that I can only do work when a deadline is so close it could head butt me. For 3 out of 4 of those deadlines I was working on the coursework all night, and finished around 6-8am the day that it was due in (and had to be handed in by 12pm). Having made the mistake before of trying to take a nap before then (and sleeping past the deadline), I ended up staying up until the university was open so I could go and hand it in. I then came back, collapsed, and slept most of the day. The only reason I didn’t make it 4/4 on all-nighters on deadlines was because I couldn’t really make the rest of the group work on my weird schedule. Though I did actually do the majority of my individual work towards it the night before we were having a team meeting, finishing it at 9am before the 10am meeting.

In the end though, it all worked out fine, and I got the work done. So now I’ve done all of my coursework for the year, and I’m relaxing… for now. But with exams only a month away, I’ll probably be back to panic stations pretty soon.

(Woo, 1200 words…)

Rickrolled since the day I was born

My blog’s being negleted as usual. It’s not that I don’t have anything to write; in fact I have too much to write, and can’t decide what to write.

For now, I’ll just post this little item

Find the #1 song on the day you were born

So, I clicked through to find mine…

“Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley

My birthday got Rickrolled.

(If you don’t know what a Rickroll is – Wiki it)

It seems pretty appropriate that I’d be on the internet so much when one of the biggest/most annoying internet pranks was started on the day I was born.

(Of course this is actually based on the US chart, but that’s not the point…)

Real post coming tomorrow… maybe.

April Yays

I probably should have posted some sort of April Fools blog yesterday. I could have said I was posting from beyond the grave after being killed in a freak accident involving Nathan’s rats. I’m sure in such a situation I would take the opportunity to blog about it, as it’s certainly a newsworthy occasion, and at least a more amusing story than I seem to come up with most of the time lately, and I’m sure Heaven/Hell/The Lifestream has wireless internet. On the other hand, perhaps a fairytale story of romance would have been an even more unbelievable April Fools post.

I didn’t even realise it was April Fools day until quite late in the day either, and with limited internet access via Greg’s laptop. This depends on both when Greg lets me use the laptop, when his router feels like working, and when Virgin internet doesn’t suck. It’s sort of like reading your star signs, when Mars and Saturn are in alignment or something. I have no idea what actually DOES happen when Mars and Saturn are in allignment. I suppose there’s an eclipse on Jupiter, which could result in some cold aliens or something. As a result they invade Earth and we all DIE. So, I suppose if your star signs do tell you that Mars and Saturn are in alignment then you better go hide under the stairs and wear a tinfoil cap or something. Don’t hide in the subway though, as according to Cloverfield, this is a popular hiding place for explosion-inducing aliens.

So I am, of course, rambling. I thought I’d take a break from serious real life things, as that’s just not funny enough. I started off pretty well with this blog with lighthearted humor, and then LIFE got in the way of me having fun. Lately it’s just been turning into a bit of a more sophisticated version of my old Livejournal’s teen angst. The problem is though, it’s just too easy to complain about stuff. Maybe I’m just a pessimistic person or something, but I find it a lot easier to find things to complain about than I do to  talk about happy events. It’s not that good things don’t happen, it’s just not as interesting to talk about them. I guess I’ll give it a try though!

Top of the bill for good news is, my grandad is recovering well now. Obviously there’s still plenty of complaining to do about him being put in this situation in the first place, but after visiting him last week I was able to see that he’s getting on pretty well now. Hospitals are weird places, and I’m glad I haven’t had to spend much time in any before. I had to dress up in plastic overalls and scrub my hands until they were more sore than a honey-covered guy in a swarm of bees. I also had to put my bag in a bag for some reason and leave that outside, which was a bit worrying when I practically care my LIFE around in a bag with me these days (Seriously, I’d die without my bag. I’m also a bit like a Snail, carrying my house around on my back.) But beyond sounding like some cross between Darth Vader and a Dalek with all these tubes attatched, and liquid being pumped in and out of him faster than a water cooler on a hot summer’s day, he looked and sounded like he was doing well.

Another bit of good news for me is that I managed to get a ticket for Reading Festival, along with a few friends. I had a great weekend there with 1 friend a couple of years ago, and the bands playing there this year look at least as good. With a whole group of us going too, it should be a lot of fun. I was pretty lucky to find a working link to buy tickets too, as practically every ticket selling site was down due to being bombarded by thousands of eager festival-goers spamming Refresh on the page 2 hours before the tickets were on sale. In the end I got hold of a link that worked though, so everyone was able to get tickets.

Another nice thing at the moment is the weather. While March was generally being a bit crap and seemed to be having a tantrum and throwing every sort of weather except sunlight and warmth at us, April has been quite nice so far. Some saying goes that “March comes in like a lion, and out like a lamb” I don’t really have a clue what this means, since last time I checked Lions weren’t really very wet or cold. Lambs are quite warm though, so I guess that part does make sense. Another saying starts “April showers”, but I don’t know how the rest of the saying goes, so I’ll just hope that there aren’t any. I’m getting into the summer mood though, as yesterday I ate an ice cream, and today I went out without a jacket and didn’t freeze to death.

The money situation is on the up to, as since I got some money for my birthday, and I’m spending most of this month at my parent’s house, I should have some money left over for my savings at the end of the month. This is pretty well needed after spending £150 on Reading tickets, although since my Mum said she’d still keep giving me some money in the summer, I’m not too worried about having enough money now. I’d still like to do some travelling again, but that’s a bit much to hope for.

There, I did it. I made a post without any complaining, mostly. I think I prefer complaining.

Oh, going back to the start of the post – a selection of April Fools I saw -

BBC Documentary Discovers Flying Penguins
Legend of Zelda Movie
Xbox Virtual Reality Helmet

I did manage to survive April 1st though, which was a tough task on a day which Greg was calling “Rapril Fools Day”.

I caught a train, it was thiiiiiis big

Well, I’m blogging on a train again. I already made comments about not having a magical internet capable notepad last time, so I guess I’ll skip that joke this time. Ah, too late.

This train ride’s just for a day trip though, rather than between homes. I’m going to London to visit my Grandad, who is (as I’ve mentioned a few times recently) in hospital. He went in 3 weeks ago for what was supposed to be a routine operation. Following that though, he got some sort of infection, and the doctors later discovered that there was a hole in his throat (or gullet, or aesophegus or whatever the fancy name is). No one’s entirely sure why, but as doctors have said that it’s very unlikely for a hole to magically burst open at the same time as him having a heart operation, the most likely reason is that they accidentally cut it. I’m not too sure how a trained surgeon manages to cut a hole in someone’s throat when they’re aiming for the heart, but needless to say I’m not too impressed with the health service. With them mistakenly diagnosing my Nan with cancer and giving her an infection in hospital 2 years ago, and now this, I’m not too happy with them. But still, I guess I can’t complain too much about a free health service, and I’ll reserve some amount of judgment until after I’ve seen him.

I quite like London. Some people hate it, and I know most of my family haven’t enjoyed having to go there to visit my Grandad; but then these are old people whose dream home is in the countryside far from any large town. I’m a city person though – my favorite place in the world that I’ve visited is New York, and I just generally like being in busy areas. It’s been a while since I visited London though, and this is the first time I’ve been there on my own. That seems kind of daunting at first, until I remember that I travelled around America with only Julian for company, and I ditched him a few times to explore the busiest places like New York City and Los Angeles. It’s kinda funny to realise that I know more about New York than London, and I’d probably find my way better on the NY Metro than on the London Underground. I think the last time I visited London was with James and Julian, and we went to a games show (Which was fun. We got to pretend to own a games store and play on Metroid Prime 2 and other games before they were released).

Previous to that though, most of my visits were with my Dad. After he and my Mum broke up and he was still recovering from his drinking problem, I wasn’t allowed to stay with him, and I could only see him for a day at a time. Now I think about it, I’m surprised my Mum trusted him to take me to London alone, when at one point I wasn’t even allowed to talk to him on the phone. This was at the height of his drinking problem, when he tried to teach me to drive a van while drunk (I don’t think I got it out of neutral, a problem which would come back to haunt me 15 years later). It’s only now as I start to understand alcohol myself that I realise the severity of his drinking problem at the time – that he allowed it to affect him to the point that he couldn’t even see his son.

But back to the London trips… We used to visit various museums and other attractions in London at weekends. I really enjoyed the trips, though I don’t know if that was because of the sightseeing, or seeing my dad. But still, they were fun, and perhaps that’s part of the reason why I like London now.

It’s funny how I used to think that the train journeys to London were so slow and boring. I guess the trains have gotten faster, and there seem to be less stops than in the old days. But still, a 1 hour 20 minutes tran ride is nothing compared to the 3-4 hour journeys between Southampton, Exeter, and Cornwall. That’s barely enough times to listen to 2 albums on my iPod, and I’ll probably still be writing this when I get there. I guess those days out were a long time ago though, back when I thought that 10 minutes was a long time, and Winchester was a really long way from Southampton. After you’ve travelled from one side of America to the other, and been on a train for 48 hours, a few hours is nothing.

I’d quite like to have a look around London while I’m there, but I don’t really know where to start. While New York is a far busier city, London seems more widespread, without any particular “center”. That could just be me, comparing an 8 year old’s memory to a 19 year old’s thoughts.

I guess I’ll conclude this now, as it looks like we’re nearing London. Or at least, the buildings are getting taller and closer together. I had planned to sleep on the train after getting only 4 hours sleep, but oddly I’m not tired. Not that I’d be able to sleep anyway, with all of the loud children on the train. I find it annoying that the “quiet zone” on the train says you’re not allowed to listen to music on your headphones. I still am anyway, but that’s not the point – you can’t even hear headphones over the noise of the train engines, let alone over the screaming and shouting of babies, children, and their parents. I think the sign should read “No loud music, phone calls, or children”, then you could actually have a quiet ride. As it is, I have to use my headphones to block out the noise of the children. I wish there would be rules against children sometimes, or at least a specific place for them to scream at eachother. Now I think about it, rules always seemed to be getting the better of us when we WERE kids, now there aren’t enough against them.

I guess 15 years ago I was just another of those screaming children.

I am the eggman

So I go to write a new blog and I realise I never posted the last one. So now you have some light bedtime reading (which will probably last you a few hours) if you read both posts!

It seems to be customary to say “Happy Easter” today, but beyond quote-enclosed statements, I am not going to wish you a “happy easter”.

I’m not sure if I’ve just been trapped in some sort of bubble in previous years, but I don’t remember Easter ever being a particularly big thing for the general population. Even when I was a kid, I enjoyed the giant chocolate eggs and extra time off of school, but I never thought of it as a particularly big occasion.

It may or may not have been mentioned in this blog already, but I’m not a religious person. My family isn’t particularly religious either. My grandparents probably vaguely follow the concepts of Christianity, but that’s just because everyone of that generation did really, and I don’t really recall them mentioning it. My grandad on my dad’s side does go to church, but he seems as quick to point out Christianity’s failings as anyone, and as far as I can tell he just started going to church after his wife died because he was lonely.

The exeption to this would be my dad, who became a buddhist after being divorced from my mum, and recovering from an alcohol addiction. I’m not entirely sure how this chain of events led to buddhism, but needless to say it helped him, and he’s now living a semi-normal life again. Or at least, as normal as a tai chi teaching buddhist who’s living with a woman who’s married to someone else and one of her five boys who wants to go to ballet school can be. Catch all of that? Good. I’m trying to cut down on my word count, so I’m leaving out needless explanation and punctuation.

The point is that as a whole, my family isn’t religious, least of all me. But I think both them and myself are pretty representative of the average family and teenager (wait, damn, I’m not a teenager any more) in terms of religious views. The average family doesn’t go to church these days, and while a few may cling on to the odd religious value because it “just seems right” most teenagers range from vague apathy to a rebelious detestation of religon (And I suppose I fall somewhere in the middle of those extremes).

Yet with all of this, easter is still highlighted on the calandar as some sort of big event. I had an interesting discussion with James and his grandparents the other day about Easter. None of us actually knew what the specific days of easter celebrated, or what Good Friday was really for other than an extra day off work. I know another thing Good Friday is though – the second busiest shopping day of the year (the busiest being before Christmas). And I can confirm that that’s true from working in a supermarket for 3 years. Customers flock to the shops to buy giant chocolate eggs, and apparently half of the shop.

But no one really DOES anything for Easter. Maybe they’ll have a bit of a family get together, but that’s as much because they have the time off to do so as it is anything else. We all pay homage to Christmas still, but that’s because everyone loves presents. At least the Christmas story and all the songs are memorable as well. To the best of my memory, Easter involves a flying baby dying and coming back to life as a giant chocolate egg, which a rabbit decided to distribute to children around the western world.

Needless to say I didn’t celebrate Easter. And that’s not in a “Bah, humbug” sort of way, I just wasn’t at all affected by it, and didn’t really realise it was easter until I logged on and saw it plastered over the interweb, and “Happy Easter” in everyone’s MSN names. Did everyone suddenly start having parties for Easter and not invite me? If so, I’m dissapointed. I’m thinking not though. Ironically (and somewhat coincidentally) I have actually seen all of my close family over the easter weekend, the exception being my Grandad who’s in hospital (and now recovering), and I’m going to visit him on tuesday.

My mum informed me that I have a giant chocolate egg waiting for me at home too, I’ve only been deprived of it because I haven’t got round to going home yet. For the same reason, I haven’t really celebrated my birthday on any one specific day, and received half of my cards and presents yesterday (a week late) and a few are still waiting for me at home.

My point (yes, I do make one occasionally) is a fairly simple one in the end, and it’s not exactly original. People are always complaining about people celebrating christmas when they don’t actually care about the religious side of it. But that’s ok, because christmas has presents and cake and it makes kids happy. People celebrate easter without actually celebrating it though, and somehow make a big deal out of it without actually doing anything. In the end, it just confuses me and seems like a bit of a waste of time.

Merry Easterweenmas.

Twenteen

 (Oh wow, I just discovered that I wrote out this post a week ago and didn’t actually post it. Two for the price of one today then.)

 So yeah. I’m twenty.

It sounds awfully old when you say that that’s two decades, or when you consider that at this point in their lives, my grandparents were married, my mum was pregnant, and [insert famous person here] was profoundly rich. I suppose I could complain about not having accomplished as much as I could have in the past 20 years, though I am quite happy at the fact that I’m not pregnant.

Saying that, anyone who gets married at this age is crazy (Hi Nathan!) and anyone who gets rich at this age is just damn lucky. Sure, I could have been a bit more successful, I could have done a few things differently. But overall I’m pretty happy with who, what and where I am. The past 20 years have certainly been a learning experience.

I guess now I’m a big two-zero I have to start acting grown up and mature. Although I think I said something like that when I was 18, and not a whole lot has changed. Maybe that’s why people make a big deal out of 21st birthdays, to give you a years practice after reaching 20.

My birthday’s been pretty disjointed but enjoyable so far. I received my first present 2 weeks early – a shiney new iPod. I swore I’d never give in to Apple’s ever extending grasp on the mp3 market. I tried using other cheaper players. But in the end I happened upon a cheap iPod after my old Creative Zen broke, and I realised that they are in fact… quite good. That then reached the end of it’s life a few months ago, which isn’t all that suprising considering it was second hand and travelled around America with me. So yeah, with the newer iPods within my parents budget, I asked for one for my birthday, and ended up getting it early so I could take it with me on my easter travels. I can’t live without my music.

Other than that, I haven’t really received much in the way of physical presents, though my dad’s buying me some CDs tomorrow. I also gained a pair of jeans when one of mine got soaked in the rain, and I put on some of Nathan’s instead of my own. Surprisingly they fit (I’ve apparently gone down from a 42 to 36 waist in the past 6 months), and in some mixture of generosity and drunken confusion, Nathan said I could keep them. I’ll probably have some money from various relatives waiting for me when I get home eventually too, and other than that, James’ Nan (who I seem to see more than my own grandparents these days) gave me £10, which was nice.

Regardless of what I’ve received though, I’ve had a great weekend thanks to my friends, which looks set to continue this week. It’s always good to be able to catch up with my friends, and it doesn’t happen nearly often enough. Everything seems to have all fit into place nicely this week though, which comes as a big surprise after recent events and general bad luck.

Hopefully this signals the start of a good year, and it does seem to be that things change for the better around my birthday. Winter’s ending, spring’s starting, and there’s a nice amount of time to relax around now. This time last year I was just finishing off work before having a good time with friends and then flying off to America. The year before that I got a girlfriend shortly after my birthday, which was nice at the time, and college ended not long after when exams had finished. Before that my memory is too fuzzy to remember specifics, but the spring is just generally a nice time of year when everything seems to start going well. Karma? My name is Joe.

I’m now going to stretch out my birthday for as long as I can by going out for a meal with friends on friday, and then I’ll go to see my parents and do it all again.

It’ll take more than an alarm clock to make me do work

So as usual I’ve been neglecting my blog thanks to university work. And I’ve been neglecting my university work thanks to… anything but university work really. You know the story by now.

Stress seems to get to me whether or not I realise it, but it certainly has recently. In the past few weeks I’ve had to deal with my grandad being seriously in in hospital for a few weeks, university deadlines sneaking up and flying past me like some sort of insane bat, and the promising prospect of a house turning into a requirement of £400 that I don’t have.

In the end it’s all worked out sort of ok. My grandad is slowly recovering it seems, as he’s now sort of woken up and hasn’t got any unaccounted for holes inside him any more at least. The deadlines have sort of been dealt with in the most inefficient and unsuccessful way possible, but in the end I handed in the work and I only need to get 40% to pass the year anyway. As for the money which I don’t have.. well, I still don’t have the money but I can pretend that’s not a problem for the moment at least, as for now my bank’s allowed me some extra debt, and my parents will give me more money soon.

But still, the stress is well and truly here and messing with my mind. I’m not one to make excuses for things and I’m generally the first to admit that I’m just plain lazy when it comes to getting things done, and it certainly doesn’t feel right to go to my tutor and say “I didn’t do my essay because my grandad’s ill, be sympathetic and let me give you the work next week please”. As I and others have come to notice though, it affects me. While at the start of this year I’d managed to pull a new found positive attitude out of nowhere (hammer space, perhaps), as the terms gone on I’ve steadily fallen back into the pits of lazyness and unproductivity that seems to construct my life. I blame my lack of motivation on lack of sleep, and that means I miss lectures, which makes it hard to get work done, and I miss my deadlines, and then I also make no progress with anything else like the PR site.

The stress becomes most obvious with my sleep though. It’s not really anything new that I have trouble getting to sleep, though it can be even worse when I have a lot of things on my mind. It’s more once I get to sleep that it’s a problem though, as it never seems to last for long when I’m stressed. I often wake up with weird dreams, think there’s something in my room, jump out of bed, or attack my TV or something. These odd severe dreams seem to run in the family, as both my mum and grandad suffer from similar things (although mine seem to be the worst), and there’s not really a lot I can do about them. They’re a lot more frequent when I’m stressed in some way though. I used to get them fairly regularly in school when I was always stressed for the usual teenage reasons, and even more so around exams. When I first moved to university and was struggling to fit in in an unfamiliar place, I was getting them practically every night. Over christmas and in the first month or so of this year, they went away, but they’re back with a vengeance now, with some sort of odd nightmare plaguing most nights sleep.

Of course the lack of sleep can be blamed on many factors, but it doesn’t take advanced pattern recognition (a subject of the essay I handed in today) to tell that my sleep suddenly starts to suffer at the same time as my stress levels rise. In the end it’s all a very nasty circle which tends to totally mess up my life and routine and basically means I become totally useless.

Fortunately thanks to my university’s crazy system they give us 5 weeks off for easter, which couldn’t really come at a better time. Not only because it’s my birthday, but also because if I didn’t get out of this place for a while, I’d probably keep spiraling into demotivation until I started unlearning things, or I just became one with my bed. The latter seems quite likely as it’s becoming increasingly difficult to prise myself away from it every morning (or afternoon, whenever I get up), and alarms just aren’t working. I can set 3 alarms and I’ll still manage to turn them all off and go back to sleep without realising.

And now I’ve mentioned that, I’ve come to a realisation. I have to catch a train in 4 and a half hours now, and I still have a fair few things to do before I leave. It’d probably be a really bad idea to try and sleep now, as I’d probably wake up somewhere around 4pm this evening. Looks like I’m going to be sleeping on the train

Jobs have wheels too

Again with the bus analogy. Much like the house situation, I now seem to be being bombarded with job interviews. Well, ok, two isn’t really a bombardment, but it’s somewhat reassuring when I was starting to give up all hope of having any money left by the summer, as my money seems to be tricking through my hands quicker than some sort of sub-atomic water at the moment.

I got a call at 9:30am this morning from an unknown number. I promptly ignored it and went back to sleep, ad any hour with single digits is either far too early for me to be talking to people, or far too late for other people to be talking to me. When I got another 30 minutes later at 10am, I grudgingly answered it, trying my best not to sound like I’d just fallen out of bed (which was quite challenging).

The thing is with my phone is, the alarm sounds exactly the same as a phone call. I did recall setting an alarm for some time around 10, so I assumed that was it. I got up to turn it off, only to see a call on the screen. I have frequently done the opposite though, and greeted my alarm with a drowsy “Hello?” at 8 in the morning while I’m still coming to my senses.

But anyway, it was the people from a job I’d applied to last week, calling to offer me an interview. Unfortunately their offer of an interview at 10am the next day just wouldn’t do, as I had a 9am lecture and a coursework deadline at 12. In the end we went for 11am on monday. at least I think it was 11am, I really hope so anyway. Ithen went straight back to sleep for that “half an hour more” sleep I needed, and was woken up at 12pm by another phone call. Turns out this was from a job I’d applied for a few weeks ago, and had given up hope on hearing back from. Typical. So now I have an interview for that at 1pm tomorrow.

Now I’m faced with a potential dilemma. What do I do if they both offer me a job? Job A is a data entry job, with a pretty nice rate of pay (£8/hour) and should be flexible hours. Job B is working in a call center, around £5.50, and unknown hours. However, Job A is fixed term up until the summer, while I could potentially keep Job B when I come back next year. Hmm.

Of course, this is assuming I have a chance at either job, let alone both. And I get the feeling that if that did come up, whatever choice I’d make I’d regret it a week later. This is also hoping that they don’t want me to start next week and have no holiday, as I already have a train ticket back to Southampton booked, and I need to visit my parents at some point in the 5 week break too. And I’d rather not be alone in a big house for 5 weeks either.

Regardless, I just want money right now. The £120 I got from work I did last month has all but vanished before I really knew I had it, and the steady stream of food and bills are quickly eating away at this month’s money before it’s even started. I’ve spent somewhere around £300 in the past week, with another £400 to come next week. Sure, £160 of that was an iPod which I was given the money for as an early birthday present, and £475 is housing costs which my parents will hopefully pay back, but it all adds up and keeps sapping away at my bank account, and it all gets very confusing. With my parents unable to get any money to be in the foreseeable future while they’re in London, I’m probably going to be on the bones of my overdraft by the time I get to Southampton. And once I’m into my overdraft, I’ll have no idea how much money is left, and probably spend way more than I can afford to.

I hate debt. While I’m often complaining about lack of money, I probably am still doing better than the majority of students. A lot of them manage to “afford” to go out every night, buy nice food, and get expensive treats like CDs and DVDs all the time, but for most of them it’s probably coming out of their ever increasing overdraft. I was talking to someone the other day who appeared to be in a similar situation to me, with £10 left to last them until the end of the month. But while I meant £10 of actual money above 0 in my account, they meant £10 until they reached the absolute £1200 overdraft limit on their account, which they’ve managed to hit in the space of 6 months at university.

And it’s hardly surprising when the banks are so willing to gives us students so much debt. I had to go into the bank yesterday to get my overdraft raised, as £200 wasn’t going to be enough to cover the housing deposit before my parents could get money to me. So I went in and explained the situation, and they happily raised my overdraft up to £1000. And gave me a credit card. So now as well as the ever rising Student Loans debt which will reach some £20,000 by the time I leave university, I’m now equipped to get myself into a further £2000 of debt on whatever I want. And of course, they’d raise that further if I wanted. My dad’s frequently on the limit of his debts, but as soon as he reached £2000 on his credit card, they offered him £10,000.

Overdrafts and credit cards are of course useful when used in the right situation. My overdraft-less account got me into a bit of trouble with the bank last year, when I had no choice but to withdraw money I didn’t have in america to be able to live. On another occasion, some sort of mistake I made on paypal resulted in money coming out of the wrong (and empty) account. It was all very confusing as I wasn’t sure why they were charging me for spending money I didn’t have, when I was well aware I didn’t have it and that was precisely the reason I had no overdraft, so I could not spend money I didn’t have. Last time I checked, when you went up to a cash point and asked for money you didn’t have, it said “you don’t have any money” and refused. I’m not sure when this changed with regards to the internet. Banks suck.

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.