Run away, run away!

For someone who’s supposed to be on “holiday”, I seem to be remarkably busy…

Trip to Birmingham

Andy, one of my best friends from college, got in touch with me on Thursday saying that he’d be down in Birmingham on Friday if I wanted to meet up. Given that I had nothing else planned and it would be a great opportunity to meet up with someone I hadn’t seen for over a year, I got the train out on Friday morning and met up at Birmingham New Street station.

First order of the day was the obligatory coffee in Starbucks, with the usual discussions about university life and women (I think Andy’s conclusion was: “relationships are generally not worth the trouble” :). We then headed off to the local Wetherspoons in search of a pub lunch, although as you can see from my comments on BITE, the food wasn’t very good and although the staff weren’t impolite they weren’t exactly overly friendly either. Suffice to say that if I’m in Birmingham again I probably won’t be dining at Wetherspoons.

Lunch was followed by a stroll around town in search of new shoes for Andy, plus a look around the bookshops. We eventually ended up in Borders which had a Starbucks on the top floor so naturally another coffee was called for. Amongst other things I was told that I need to dress down more (all this nonsense about being too smart for a student) and we had a good laugh about Andy doing well in his exams because he was a science student at heart but doing an arts subject so he had the best of both worlds in that he doesn’t have much in the way of a timetable but at the same time he also knows how to work outside of lectures (a skill which many arts students seem unable to grasp).

Finally we had a quick look around the remaining bookshops to try and track down a couple of theology books for Andy, but to no avail. I got the train back to Manchester at about 5pm, and I was so glad when I got back to Bury because I’d been sweltering all day. The weather has been really nice recently but for the last few days it’s been so hot that it’s just uncomfortable rather than enjoyable, and having hayfever probably doesn’t help matters. Apart from the extremely high temperatures and humidity, it was great to see someone from college again and just relax for a day whilst catching up on the news.

ManLUG and Compsoc

The new Compsoc server fell over for the first time ever on Friday evening (the only times it’s been unavailable before have been because of network problems outside of our control) due to a kernel panic, so I had to set off somewhat earlier than usual in order to kick it back into action. Fortunately it came straight back up after a reboot and, after a couple of tweaks to the init scripts, it was all running smoothly again. It also turned out that I’d stumbled into the middle of a university open day, so the department and the computer cluster were fairly busy with potential students, most of whom looked either bored out of their minds or kept gawping aimlessly as if they’d never seen a computer room before. As usual the student guides in Manchester Computing were rambling on as if they knew what they were talking about when they quite clearly didn’t—one guy seemed to be under the impression that you couldn’t use a normal mouse with a laptop. sigh

ManLUG was interesting as usual, with talks on wireless networking and how to take/manage notes (which sounds really boring as a topic when you first hear it but in fact it was very interesting and incredibly useful). I also managed to pick up some copies of Linux Journal that Owen was clearing out of his office, although I’ve realised that I’ve now got far too many magazines taking up space in my room so I’ll probably have to get rid of some eventually or move them up into the loft.

Dungeons and Dragons

(*Warning:* If you think roleplaying people are sad, boring individuals, you’ll probably find this section very dull, so just skip over it 🙂

Roleplaying started this week, seeing as the only regular members of Warped still hanging around seems to consist mainly of the non-students who now have jobs (Tom, Juliette, David, Jon and Lucy is almost in this group), Rachel (who is often at work on Mondays), Sarah and Eddy (who don’t seem too interested in roleplaying), Kate, and, erm, me. I’ve never really got into roleplaying before (it depends whether you count Games Workshop stuff or not really—some people do but I get the impression that those sort of games are frowned up by true roleplayers as not being “proper roleplaying”), so it was a bit of a new experience for me. I’ve always been interested in D&D, but finding a group of five or six other people to play with was always the problem—the good thing about university is that as the size of the group of people you interact with grows, there’s more and more chance of someone else being interested in the same sort of things.

Anyway, during the initial character generation process last week, I chose to play an Elven sorceror called Dínendal Helyanwë (don’t worry, I’m not one of those sad people who learns Elfish or anything, this was just what came out of the Elfish Name Generator when I put my real name in). For those of you who don’t know, sorcerors are similar to wizards in their magical powers except that sorcerors are born with the ability to cast magic whereas wizards have to learn it. As a result, sorcerors learn spells at a slower rate than wizards and generally only know a small subset of spells, but on the other hand they can cast spells at will without having to have memorised them and they can also cast more spells per day which makes them quite formidable at later levels. Sorcerors take a while to develop and for the first few games they’re vulnerable to close range attacks due to their low number of hit points, but once they start picking up more powerful spells they can round off a group quite well, and assuming that no-one decides to dual-class later on I’m the only true magic user in the group (Kate’s cleric can cast spells, but they’re mostly priest spells related to things like healing).

I won’t get into the details of the game that followed, seeing as it won’t really make sense if you weren’t there. Selected highlights though include my character managing to offend the barman by saying his conversation was boring and also miscasting a spell that lead to a hole being drilled by acid into an NPC’s armour. Kate’s gnome spent a lot of the time dishing out sarcastic comments whilst cowering in the background, David managed to get into the forefront of almost every fight (at one point he stood alone because everyone else had sensibly decided to run back and regroup downstairs) and my elf ran at top speed sceaming like a little girl when he realised that he was a couple of feet away from an enemy whilst holding very few hit points.

All in all it was a good laugh, and probably a better way to spend the evening than just sitting in the pub getting drunk (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it does get a little bit repetitive after a while, especially when you’re doing it at least twice a week). Kudos to Jon for being a great DM and keeping us all entertained whilst gently pushing us in the right direction.

House hunting

Will be doing more of this tomorrow (or rather today) in the continuing effort to find somewhere to live for the next twelve months. Fortunately there’s a Homes4u branch in Withington so I don’t have to look far, plus there are quite a few other agencies offering student housing and I’ve got the numbers of one or two landlords to chase up as well. If I’m lucky I’ll get this sorted by the end of this week, as it’ll be a big weight off my mind once I know where I’m living (plus I know at least one person is having a barbeque/party in the next couple of weeks and I’d like to be around for those). Anyway, I’m usually fairly good at pulling things out of the hat at the last minute, so hopefully I’ll manage to find a couple of potential places tomorrow that I can go and look round later in the week.

As well as all this stuff I’ve also been continuing work on commercial sites, plus I’m working on one or two of my own ideas, although at the moment I’m more interested in securing a house than developing my personal sites. However, I have a busy day/week ahead (exam results are released on Wednesday as well, which I’m dreading, really hope no resits are required for me or anyone else who I know was worrying about them) so it’s bed for now.