Long weekend

It’s been busy as well as long…

Cez’s leaving do

Friday was Cez’s leaving do, as he’s heading off to Oxford this week, so most of the Warped regulars and some of his workmates were down in Fab Cafe for a few drinks. We were also joined/gatecrashed by some of UA as it was Chris’ birthday celebrations at the same time.

The evening was pretty good, fairly usual sort of night out with drinking and, erm, more drinking. It was most amusing to see a couple of guys try to dance at the same time as Lizzy and Kate before walking off leaving the girls to take in a round of applause from the rest of the room. As seems to be the normal case in Fab now, I got poked and prodded to ask the DJ to play things to dance to. Initially I refused to take orders but eventually I caved in—I’m such a pushover (although I left before they played the requests as I was fairly tired). On the bus back some random person said “hi” to me for no apparent reason, I’m beginning to get a bit worried by the number of people in Manchester who appear to know me but I have no idea who they are…

Barbeque fun

Saturday daytime didn’t involve much, apart from going into town and buying birthday and Father’s Day cards plus a present for my dad. The evening was a bit more eventful, with Cez and David hosting a barbeque at their house. Unfortunately there were only two disposable barbeques so David and I ended up going all the way to Tesco in Didsbury to buy some more. Thankfully they had some in stock, unlike Sainsburys which had completely sold out—I guess being the centre of a student area on a hot day creates rather a large demand for barbeques.

When we got back the barbeque was already in full swing, with some sausages and ribs already turning a nice shade of brown. Endless opportunities for innuendo followed, I’ll let your imaginations think of what can be construed from buns, sausages, big pieces of sweetcorn etc. ahem.

The food was really nice too, although after a while we were all feeling rather bloated and by the time the last ribs were put on no-one could manage to eat another thing—although I was being pushed towards finishing them off in order to put on some weight. 🙂 We then piled the dying barbeques on top of each other to create a impressive inferno and sat there watching the whole thing go up in flames for a while. Cez has some photos available if you want to see the product of our pyromania.

Once the fire had died down a bit we moved inside and quietly chilled for a while, interrupted only by a phone call to Tim that sounded incredibly strange because we could only hear one side of the conversation. Everyone set off home at about 11pm, probably because we all felt so tired after eating so much—I know I felt like nodding off in the chair at one point. I can’t think of a mroe enjoyable way to have spent a Saturday evening though, kudos to Cez and David for being great hosts as always.

Sunday

Fairly quiet day, woke up, did some work, got a lift home to Bury. It was nice to have a day off rather than racing between Bury and Manchester or slaving away at Compsoc and web sites (not that I don’t enjoy that, but even I need some time off occassionally).

Warped

Monday at Warped was a fairly subdued affair, now that all the students have gone home the only people left really are the graduates and little ol’ me. Kro was fairly busy at first, but I’m guessing that was because there was a gig on at the Union (probably in Academy 2, but seeing as I’ve never been to one I don’t know exactly what the deal is). After about 9pm we were the only people in there, apart from the “Magic people” (who usually play the Magic: The Gathering card game in The Burlington on Mondays) and crazy Lee who kept mumbling something about cauliflower cheese. Hmm. Anyway, it was nice not to have a queue at the bar or have to contend with a group of noisy students on the bus home. It does feel sort of weird not seeing huge groups of students around though—like today when it was the first time I’ve ever been on a bus down Oxford Road that hasn’t stopped at UMSU.

As for the rest of this week, so far I’ve mainly been working on Hire Cooling, which is coming along nicely, and I’ve also managed to get Postfix installed on my FreeBSD server so I can run my own mail services instead of relying on my web host. For most people this isn’t a big deal, but for techies like myself who like to run everything themselves it’s interesting and a good way to learn about providing these sorts of services without worrying about breaking anyone else’s account at the same time.

Also, as a result of running my own mail, I’m now using paul@xk7.net as my main email address now, instead of the usual paul@rixort.com. You’ll still be able to get me at either address for an indefinite period, but the xk7.net one works much better as it’s delivered straight to my server and so I can check it more easily, plus I know that if anything goes wrong I’m generally no more than 10 miles away from the machine so I can usually fix it quickly rather than waiting for my web host to get back to me.

Finally, there’s just space left to say Happy Birthday to Lizzy, who has reached the grand “old” age of twenty today and is therefore no longer a teenager, but will undoubtably continue to taunt the older members of Warped about their relative ages for some time to come. 😉