UA Meet 13

This Bank Holiday Weekend has mostly consisted of sitting in a pub with fellow spodders from UA…

Friday

Due to lectures and examples classes being cancelled, I ended up with Friday off this week. Unfortunately I found out in the morning that someone had beaten me to my first choice of third year projects so I had been given my third choice instead. Given that I hadn’t really looked at this (I was the only person to have chosen that project until about 12 hours before the deadline for making decisions, plus I was the only person as far as I was aware to have made any effort to find out more about it, so I thought I’d get it) but picked it as a backup option instead, I decided to go in and find the supervisor responsible to see what I could salvage from this. Unfortunately he wasn’t in, and given that I couldn’t be bothered going back to the house I popped into Bury instead and had a look around as well as popping back to the Oxfam shop to say hello to people and of course enjoy a “well-earned” brew, before coming back to Manchester and grabbing something to eat.

About ten minutes before I was about to set off for Kro I saw a new thread on Rogue Students saying that Matt Ferny (one of my friends from college) had died in a motorbike accident last week. At first I wasn’t sure whether it was someone playing a sick joke, but after speaking to Danny (who knew Matt better than I did) I found out that Ferny had indeed passed away. Apparently it was just a freak accident, there were no other vehicles invovled and he wasn’t speeding. Hearing the news did jolt me quite a lot (it’s the first time anyone I’ve known well had passed away since about five or six years ago), which was probably why I was fairly quiet when I arrived at Kro.

The pub was pretty busy when I got there, fortunately though I knew most of the people already although I met Trav and Topper for the first time. People seemed to clear off fairly quickly from upstairs so it wasn’t long before we took up residence there. I drank more than I usually would and ended up being broken by the Warped crew as usual before somehow managing to stagger home. I honestly can’t remember a great deal beyond a certain point that night, although apparently before going to bed I managed to login to UA and change my status message to “bugger fuckity fuck” for some reason (probably because I was drunk and annoyed—never a good combination :).

Saturday

Saturday started off quite well, somehow I managed to avoid having a hangover which was pretty good. First stop was the Hog’s Head on Deansgate, where the manager behind the bar decided to ask me for ID even though I was only buying a pint of coke and a jacket potato, which caused much amusement for everyone else present. In contrast nowhere else over the weekend even raised the question of my age, regardless of what I was drinking, and the girl who was originally serving me though I was old enough as well, so it was probably more the manager being a pain more than anything else.

We stayed at the pub for a while before heading off to the AMC cinema to watch the film of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’d already seen it earlier in the week and hadn’t been too impressed, and a second showing didn’t really restore my faith. Marvin was cute and funny, but Moz Dev was appalling as Ford Prefect and I wasn’t too impressed by Sam Rockwell’s performance as Zophod Beeblebrox either. Having said that, they couldn’t have made a better choice than Stephen Fry for the voice of the book and Martin Freeman did a reasonable job as Arthur Dent. Overall I’d probably give it 4 or 5 out of 10—it’s watchable but not all that enjoyable.

After the film we headed down to The Knott for more drinking. The pub wasn’t all that big so people spent a lot of time standing around or crushed into corners (or at least I did) but I met some more new people and got on with pretty much everyone.

The most amusing part of the evening was probably when I’d just sat down in one of the comfy leather chairs when suddenly I heard someone shout “it’s pwaring!”, which turned out to be Gareth who, along with Jim, managed to spend the next hour or so being “friendly” to me. According to Kate I looked absolutely terrified throughout, but they were both really nice chaps and I got bought beer so no complaints on that front. 🙂

I don’t know how long the Knott kept serving until, but once it got to 11pm I decided it was time to make a move, as did Vlad (who went to get a kebab or something 🙂 and Lizzy. This happened to coincide with everyone being turfed out of the pubs and into the clubs which meant a lot of meandering about avoiding loud and abrasive drunken people—not the best time to be in the centre of Manchester!

Sunday

On Sunday I caught up on the latest Doctor Who episode, entitled simply “Dalek”, hopefully I’ll get round to posting a review at some point. Graham also drove round bearing gifts of free hardware for Compsoc which I think we’re going to convert into a proper backup solution (yes, you read that right, Compsoc has a backup strategy that is actually being implemented!). I still have to find a way of getting the machine from our living room to the office, which means I’ll probably end up carrying it on the bus on Thursday on my way towards going back to vote in Bury.

We ended up in the Rampant Lion for the rest of the day, and in my usual style of appalling oreinteering skills I managed to go all the way round where the pub was and end up going through Longsight before I realised where I’d gone wrong. In my defence the pub is down as being on Anson Road, which is the “middle section” of Upper Brook Street and Birchfields Road, so although you’re on the same road (the A34) it’s actually got three different names on the same stretch. Anyway, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. 🙂

Not much happened in the pub, except that UA Oscars were given out and I accepted Lewis’ certificate for “The Phaedrus Award for Best Drama (Queen)” seeing as he wasn’t there to collect it in person. I only stayed around until 5:30pm, as it was Jon’s (from the Megalomaniacs) birthday meal so I had to set off early in order to get there in time.

We had booked a table at Live Bait (a fish restaurant just opposite the Town Hall in Albert Square), and thankfully all fifteen people turned up more or less on time (it’s always a worry with a group of that size that someone will be late/won’t turn up). The food was very nice, although it took a long time until they got all our orders right which was a bit unprofessional given that we’d told them what we were having to eat in advance. I had tuna steak, which was delicious (although it played havoc with my digestive system this morning) and a bit unusual because normally you expect tuna to come in a tin and be relatively cheap fish whereas this was obviously much higher quality (I should hope so too considering the price!). Other than the mix up with the orders it was a good meal out and not too far beyond student budgets.

After the meal I realised I didn’t have time to head back to the pub where UA were, so we headed off to the Salisbury instead. Thankfully this time I didn’t get some random chavette draping herself over me, although with it being a Sunday there was only time for one drink before I caught the bus back with Gareth, Jon and Allison.

Photos

A lot of photos were taken at the meet, here’s some that have been uplooded so far:

• Tom
• Chris
• Cez
• John and Cicci
• Beth
• Jason and Ali

There aren’t many of me, which is probably a good thing because I’m horribly unphotogenic. I do quite like this photo though, which is me standing next to Jason (the UA Sysop), as I actually look somewhat reasonable on it. Apparently I look like Jason which is why that shot was setup, and there’s a long-running joke about how he looks about twelve and given that I am four years younger that makes me eight (this all stems from Tigger and Sally’s wedding and a comment made by Graham about my apparent age).

Some more photos where I appear:

• Starting as I mean to go on
• Leaning against the wall
• Falling asleep
• Relaxing in a comfy chair
• Trying to balance a pint on my knee?
• Time for a refill methinks
• Accepting Lewis’ oscar
• Refuting the allegations of a likeness to Jason

New phone

I also managed to get Kirk to part with his Ericsson T610 on Thursday (in exchange for cold hard cash before anyone thinks I convinced him to let me have it for free). I’ve been in need of a new phone for a while now, mainly because the buttons on my old one are beginning to get stuck because they’ve been hammered so much. I don’t really text or call people that much so I didn’t need anything sophisticated but I do like the fact that this one automatically saves outgoing text messages so I can see what I’ve sent, which is always useful when someone replies a day later and you can’t remember what the original question was. I can also store more than ten messages at a time, although I rarely went over that limit anyway because I tend to delete texts fairly soon after receiving them.

All in all it’s been a bit of a crazy week to say the least, with some major downs but a generally chilled weekend in which I met a lot of interesting people, all of whom are a lot nicer in real life than they appear online. It was great to be able to just sit in the pub and try and relax for a bit rather than worry about work, although I do have a lot of stuff to catch up on now and only four days in which to do so which means I’ll probably have to skip going to the Manchester FreeBSD group meeting tomorrow evening.

As for tonight, I will be heading off to the pub for the fifth night running for Warped, no doubt a post will appear at some point if anything out of the ordinary happens. I think I’ve rambled on for long enough now then so until next time I hope everyone enjoys what’s left of the Bank Holiday Weekend.