Silly Games
Silly Games seemed to go down well last night, even though we started late and didn’t play as many of the games as we have done in previous years. New people outnumbered the elders for once though, which is always encouraging! I am mildly annoyed that my team’s record for Sticky Toffee was broken, but I put that down to complete apathy in pulling the other people apart. Several of the new people said they had fun though, and one guy specifically came over and asked if he could be kept up to date with what we were doing, so I guess that’s a result! Plus I was complimented on my cape on several occasions. 🙂
Databases seminar
This morning I had to get up at four o’clock to get to London for the UKUUG databases seminar, which has left me pretty shattered as I couldn’t get to sleep last night anyway. Despite Virgin Trains selling me the wrong ticket online (for some reason they wanted me to go via Chesterfield), I managed to get there and back without too much difficulty. All of the talks were interesting and from people who clearly knew what they were talking about, but at the same time they were really friendly and happy to chat with everyone (I hate it when speakers rush off straight after their presentation and don’t talk to people). I helped in the minor but apparently much appreciated capacity of ‘person who ensures that Powerpoint/OpenOffice slides work properly and display using the projector’, so I feel I made a contribution on the day. I think I’ll be writing something about the event in the newsletter as well, so that’s another (albeit minor and non-academic) publication to add to my list.
In other news, I got paid on the spot for my work on Monday, and I have four hours of lab demonstrating and training tomorrow, so I still feel slightly like a real person—and everyone who I have spoken to recently but haven’t seen for a while thinks I have a job anyway for some reason…
Damnit! I wanted to go to that databases seminar, particularly the HA mysql talk. But my bosses didn’t approve it in time.
Don’t suppose there are any presentations online or anything?
I think all the speakers agreed to have their presentations put online (this is something UKUUG tries to encourage) so they should be on the website towards the end of the week. If you want to ask any questions in the meantime, I took quite a lot of notes, especially on the MySQL talk.