So, freshers week is finally over (more or less) and the new students are settling in for their first – or possibly second in some cases – weekend in the glorious city of Manchester.
Monday
First day back in the department, with three of the eleven sessions we have to attend over the course of the week. So boring that I can’t even remember what they were about without looking at the notes, which I can’t be bothered to do, although we were given an assignment to create a poster on the subject of RFID.
In the evening Warped were back in the Burlington for the first time in ages. I managed to start the year in the customary style by losing miserably at pool, but the beer is about a pound a pint cheaper than at Kro so that consoled me somewhat. Gemma is also doing a great job of organising things so I don’t have to worry about anything, not even the mailing list.
Tuesday
Spent a good chunk of the morning at freshers fair, bouncing in between People and Planet, Warped and the Megalomaniacs. The Megs had a great banner courtesy of Chloe, and you could find (or avoid!) our stall from the entrance as a result. Warped was opposite Fuse FM, with their three identikit blondes and blokes who think they’re cool because they spike their hair and wear sunglasses (I can’t stand those kind of people) trying to convince people to cough up five pounds for what is only a month of broadcasting.
Wednesday
Managed to register with both the department and university fairly quickly, which also meant that my student loan got paid in. I went straight over to freshers fair to help set up some of the stalls only to find out that the Megs didn’t actually have a stall! Why we’d been singled out I don’t know (Warped had a stall on all three days, as did the Liberal Democrats and they’re not even a society), but after Justine and I jumping up and down and yelling at the useless Communications Officer we eventually got ourselves a table.
Jennie also turned up to run People and Planet, which was cool as we’ve not seen her for ages. She even managed to twist my arm enough to sign up for the mailing list. 🙂
Thursday
After spending two incredibly boring hours in more lectures about how to write properly (or something like that), I headed off to freshers fair for the final time. I ended up covering the Warped stall with Eddy, which was good fun and we got some people who seemed really interested. It was amusing watching the looks on the faces of plastic blondes and other people who think anything to do with sci-fi is geeky, some of them looked positively disgusted that such a stall could be allowed in the Academy.
Thursday night was the first Megs event of the year, which basically consisted of getting a big group of people meeting in the union then off to Kro for a few drinks before heading off for a curry. There was a guy in Kro trying to give out free pints of Fosters and Strongbow who seemed to be under the impression that if you didn’t like either of those then you must be tee-total. The freshers seemed quite happy with the concept of free “beer” though. 🙂
After Kro we eventually made it to Al Nawaz for a curry. Unfortunately we ended up splitting into two groups on different tables, which meant one half got served well before the others, but it was a good meal and came to less than ten pounds per head even though the bar bill for our table alone was over twenty five pounds. After the curry a group of the freshers wanted to go off drinking but all the veteran members disappeared home because we’re all too old to stay up until the wee hours of the morning when tomorrow is a weekday.
Friday
Mr Tall, the main Compsoc server through which mail and DNS goes through at some point, decided to fall over on Thursday night, so on Friday Vlad and I headed over to the union to take a look at it. The machine was still working but seeing as we’d been asked to move it at some point anyway due to the temperature in the room we decided now was as good as time as any and dragged it back to the office. Vlad managed to get everything up and running again without too many problems, the only issue left is that the machine now has a different IP address, which means that DNS is slightly broken (it either works or it doesn’t, depending on which of the nameservers you query) and outgoing mail won’t work because Manchester Computing will only relay mail for specific IP addresses.
Warped’s first event, sci-fi Pictionary, was also on that afternoon, and we seemed to have a fairly good turnout. After messing round with Compsoc and other things that had annoyed me I wasn’t really in the mood to throw myself into it though, and to be honest I’m not really that much of a sci-fi fan – I certainly can’t guess any of the more obscure stuff.
We realised after a while that there was no space at Kro to go for drinks and the Burlington wasn’t going to be open for some time, so an impromptu decision was made to go for curry instead. We lost a lot of the freshers at this point, but hopefully some of them will return on Monday. Justine and I also bumped into Urwen on the way to the curry house and had a bit of a chat whilst she was waiting for our lucky number 157 bus.
I also spent ages that evening trying to get my washing machine to work; eventually found out that the plumber had forgotten to turn the water tap for the pipe to the machine on so it was stalling on any wash cycle once water was required. After a bit of fiddling round the back of the machine (it’s very dark and no room to manouvre because the boiler is just above it) I managed to switch the tap on and the next time I tried it all worked so I can now wash stuff instead of dragging it all the way back to Bury each weekend. Woohoo!
As for the rest of the week, I’ve spent most of the weekend feeling ill with a sore throat and a cold, which no doubt I’ve picked up off someone. 🙁