Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Student Night is Evil, Part II

To con­clude the tale of woe: I went for an x-ray and it turns out I did indeed end up with a frac­ture :-P. So much for my nineteen-year record. The fifth (little toe) meta­tarsal is frac­tured towards the back, from the force of the ten­don yank­ing appar­ently. Six days on and I can pretty much walk nor­mally on it, but it still hurts. Mmm, painkillers.

2

Student Night is Evil

So last night was Student Night at Varsity, a pub/bar just down the road from here, the upshot of which is that entry is a mere £1, with a selec­tion of 20-some drinks cost­ing only £1 apiece too. It beats the hell out of their “Student Night” offers of last term, so we tend to head along. Last night was no excep­tion; I was feel­ing rough, and con­cluded that the best way to solve this was to drink lots. Gotta love my thinking.

So we have din­ner, knock back a couple of glasses of red, then I break out the death juice that was given to me before I came up for this term — mainly to get it out of our house, I think. This stuff had been sit­ting in my par­ents’ drinks cup­board for some time — ten to fif­teen years allegedly — and has no labelling other than “KOUM QUAT — Corfu Liqueur” on the out­side. It’s orange, and it tastes like a mix of cointr­eau and cough medi­cine. The Cypriot mem­ber of our flat informs us that he has heard of the stuff, and that appar­ently people have turned blind from drink­ing too much of it. We grin. We all do a shot of this, chased with the last of the red wine, and then decide our dress code for the night is going to be shirts, ties and hats. We head out.

We arrive and enter. The place is rammed; we fight to get to the bar. We glance at the £1 drinks menu and spon­tan­eously order shots, three each — JD, Malibu and vodka — with bottle beers and J2O to fol­low. The bar­maid looks wor­ried. We grin. We get a table out­side and arrange the shots. Toasts are made, shots are downed. Vodka goes first, fol­lowed by Malibu, fol­lowed by JD. Wince, grin, wince. Chase with beer/J2O. We start singing. Random people at neigh­bour­ing tables join in sporad­ic­ally. We are loved.

At some point later we head back inside for refuel­ling. Jendrik and I get chat­ting to the bar­maid, who accused us on an earlier visit of hav­ing “the gay­est con­ver­sa­tion I have ever heard” when she caught us talk­ing about hair. I tell her we need more drinks; for some reason I choose Aftershock. She picks green for me and dark blue/purple for Jendrik. We down them and I real­ise where the name comes from. I glare at her. We order seconds.

At some point we all tra­verse the bar and end up on the far side, where a few of the games machines are. I have fun push­ing bottles off the tops of the machines. We get talk­ing to girls of vari­ous nation­al­it­ies, includ­ing French, Spanish and Italian. I fail to keep track of which is which and have to be cor­rec­ted in my choice of lan­guage sev­eral times. At some point two more Aftershocks are con­sumed, one of which I snaffled off the bar think­ing it was the one I ordered. Someone rings me — I for­get who (just one of sev­eral phone inter­ac­tions that I can’t remem­ber from that even­ing) — and I go out­side to talk to them. When I come back, the group has moved back to the other side of the bar, and Absinthe is being ordered. Josh orders five shots, the bar­maid does a double take, and asks him if he is going to drink them all him­self. The shots are dis­trib­uted, sugar added, and we down them. I’d love to say that it was the most won­der­ful spirit I’ve ever tasted, but sadly I really can’t remem­ber any­thing about it, except that the sugar in the bot­tom was nice.

Not long after that, me and Josh make a spon­tan­eous, unspoken decision to leave, and do so. He is shit-housed; we stag­ger back towards our flat. He wanders into the road; I retrieve him from the road. He lays down on the pave­ment; I retrieve him from the pave­ment. We move closer to the flat. Off the main road, just before the secur­ity gates on the road to our flat, for some unex­plained reason he breaks into a run, and I fol­low. I make it three steps before my coordin­a­tion fails and I mis­step, and land hard on the out­side edge of my left foot. It twists; sear­ing pain. I stag­ger around before real­iz­a­tion sets in that some­thing is badly wrong, and I sit down on the edge of the pave­ment. I lay back and say bad words. People walk past and give me funny looks. Josh is some way up ahead and I shout at him. I get up and start to walk towards him, and real­ise that every time I step on my left foot, it really hurts. I con­vince him that he needs to go round and open the win­dow of our ground-floor kit­chen, so that I can climb in rather than walk all the way round. Somehow I climb in through the win­dow. I get into my room, throw my clothes around, and get into bed, clear in my mind that everything will be alright after some sleep.

This morn­ing my alarm wakes me up at 8.00 (amaz­ingly I had man­aged to set it), but I put it on snooze. It goes off again fif­teen minutes later and I turn it off, telling myself that I won’t fall back asleep. This never works. I wake up again at 9.30. Forgetting that my lec­ture star­ted at 9.00, I start to get out of bed, remem­ber­ing some­thing about a strange dream where I fucked up my left foot. I start to stand up and, sur­prise sur­prise, my left foot is fucked. I swear gently. Hopping across my room (and noti­cing the appear­ance of five shot glasses on my desk), I open the door and pain­fully shuffle down to Josh’s door, where I make lots of noise until I hear move­ment inside. He emerges; foul stenches waft from his room. He informs me that he has covered some of his room and some of him­self in vomit. He shows me a patch at his elbow to con­firm this. I weigh up the choices — go to my lec­tures (solid until 2pm) and then to the health centre, or miss the lec­tures (vital to my con­tin­ued suc­cess on the course) and go to the health centre imme­di­ately. Guess which choice made more sense at the time.

Half an hour later, I have hobbled to my three-hour lab ses­sion, only 20 minutes late, using an umbrella as a walk­ing stick. I am not happy. 2pm even­tu­ally rolls around, and I hobble over to the health centre. I explain my injury. As I don’t have a cough or a cold, she is seem­ingly unable to help me. I am told that I can­not see any­one today, and that they are closed tomor­row, and that I should make my way to the A&E depart­ment of a hos­pital in Coventry. While she is telling me this, a nurse and a doc­tor are stand­ing behind her, idly talk­ing smack, either of whom could have given me five minutes. I am not happy.

I decide to get a late lunch, and then a friend with a car kindly gives me and Dave a lift into Coventry. I can­not loc­ate the hos­pital I was told about in the road atlas, so we head for the Coventry and Warwickshire hos­pital, which looks big and prom­ising on the map. We find ourselves in some walk-in clinic. The walls at the entrance are dom­in­ated by posters about sexual health. Me and Dave, walk­ing in together, appear to attract strange looks. I am con­vinced we are in a sexual health clinic. Dave con­vinces me we are not.

After a 90-minute wait, I am examined by a male nurse. He pokes and prods, pay­ing spe­cial atten­tion to the pain­ful spots (much to Dave’s delight), and informs me that there is a 30% chance my foot is broken, 70% that it is just a sprain. He says the only way to be sure is to have an X-ray, which they can’t do — for that I need to go to… the place I was ori­gin­ally told to go to by the tissue-toting health centre woman. I am not happy. This other place is a long bus ride away, and is sure to be already filling up with Friday night pissheads. I ask the nurse what the treat­ments are either way. He tells me that if it is just a sprain, I should put as much weight on it as pos­sible, and it will heal in a week or so. If it is broken, I should put no weight on it at all, and it will heal in four to six weeks. I have been hob­bling around all day, put­ting weight on it often. I am not happy. I decide to wait until the morn­ing, and we bus home. I munch paink­illers and hope that everything will be alright.

And here I am. Hoping that it will be some­what bet­ter in the morn­ing, oth­er­wise it’s X-ray time, and I don’t want to soil my record of hav­ing never broken a bone. I wish someone had told me alco­hol could be hazardous.

New Pants, Please

Yesterday star­ted badly, inas­much as I woke up at 9.30, sat down at my PC, and found that it had rebooted dur­ing the night. That alone isn’t so abnor­mal — once before Windows Update decided that an update it was apply­ing needed a restart *right* *now*, and so rebooted the machine, but I’d dis­abled that option since. So I log in, and I find that I have no sound. Programs that use sound record­ing (like Skype) are giv­ing errors. There do not appear to be any sound devices present on the machine.

Shit.

I reboot; noth­ing. I rein­stall sound drivers; still nothing.

Shit.

I then hap­pen to glance through the win­dow in my case, and note that the chip­set cool­ing fan and heat­sink is rest­ing peace­fully on the case floor, thor­oughly detached from the chip it is sup­posed to be chilling.

Fuck.

Cue the fast­est shut­down oper­a­tion in recent his­tory.
I pop open the case and gingerly feel around. I touch the chip in ques­tion, and it’s cool. This is the first good sign, but it goes unnoticed in the gen­eral panic. I curse the bas­tard who designed the cooler (an Akasa AK-210 with a pretty blue LED); for think­ing that a fan and heat­sink could be secured on to a ver­tical chip with only a sticker. I try stick­ing the cooler back on. It stays, until I hit the power but­ton, when the infin­ites­im­ally small jolt of the fan spring­ing into life causes it to detach from the chip once again. I start try­ing to think of ways to attach it. Eventually I decide to try to loc­ate some thermal paste, curs­ing the fact that all my hard­ware bits and bobs are at home. I walk over to Lazer Lizard — what passes for a com­puter shop on cam­pus. I ask the cash­ier, “this may be a long shot, but do you have any thermal paste?” I receive a strange look. “It’s a sort of goo,” I offer, but no, she responds, they don’t.

Walking back, I real­ise that lay­ing the PC on its side will prob­ably work, as the cooler will just sit on the chip, unen­cumbered by grav­ity. Once home, I do this, and it’s work­ing fine so far. Plus all my cool LEDs are pro­jec­ted sky­wards, which looks sweeter than before. After boot­ing up, the sound was work­ing again (it was that chip), so I can only assume that the main­board shuts the chip off if it gets too hot on boot. No last­ing dam­age, thank fuck.

Jerry Springer: The Opera

Having had the mis­for­tune to listen to a local radio “debate” on last night’s BBC2 air­ing of “Jerry Springer: The Opera” while at work today, I thought I might offer some argu­ment to the masses who called for the sched­uled broad­cast to be scrapped, and who are, after the broad­cast, try­ing to hound the BBC still further.

I watched the last hour of the pro­gramme. It amused me in places, and as a piece of theatre was good, but over­all I thought it was poor, like a great deal of American com­edy. That, how­ever, is not rel­ev­ant. What is rel­ev­ant is that the BBC received in excess of 45,000 com­plaints from pro­spect­ive view­ers before the show was even broad­cast. To me that sounds like a whole lot of people “heard” bad things about the show and decided to voice their oppos­i­tion to it. I sin­cerely doubt that the major­ity of those 45,000 com­plain­ants actu­ally bothered to go out and see the stage pro­duc­tion before passing judge­ment on it.

I heard a spokes­per­son from the BBC say the fol­low­ing:

“People say to us ‘why can’t you treat us like adults, it’s our choice, why don’t you let us choose what we see and hear?’”

Newsflash! Guess what? You do have a choice over what you see and hear! This choice mani­fests itself in a device known as a remote con­trol. If you don’t like what’s on BBC2, why not change the chan­nel, or bet­ter still, why not turn the TV off entirely and read pas­sages from the Bible to your chil­dren, if you’re so wor­ried about the pre­ser­va­tion of Christian val­ues. Nobody is stand­ing in your front room with one of your infants in a head­lock, for­cing you to watch BBC2 at 10pm on a Saturday.

Then I hear that some Christian group is now threat­en­ing to take the BBC to court — the alleged offence? Blasphemy. There are a few points that can be raised here:

• There are hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of pro­grammes broad­cast on both tele­vi­sion and radio every single day that con­tain lan­guage con­form­ing to the defin­i­tion of blas­phemy. That is “[the] defam­a­tion of God or gods, and by exten­sion of gross irrev­er­ence towards any per­son or thing worthy of exal­ted esteem,” (source). Bear in mind espe­cially that “Jerry Springer: The Opera” was broad­cast at 10pm, one hour after the sup­posed water­shed. There are not many pro­grammes broad­cast after 9pm that do not con­tain any instances of “blas­phemy,” as defined above.
• The last suc­cess­ful pro­sec­u­tion for blas­phemy in the UK was in 1977. That’s a full 28 years ago. Has soci­ety not moved on just a little since then?
• British law does not require that British cit­izens con­form to Christianity. How, there­fore, can someone be pro­sec­uted for blas­phemy against Christianity, when adop­tion of any non-Christian reli­gion is blas­phemy itself, accord­ing to the Bible?

Then of course there is the usual bri­gade of angry moth­ers, accus­ing the BBC of teach­ing their off­spring bad lan­guage and so on. Point one: no child with any degree of self-respect is going to want to will­ingly watch any­thing with “opera” in the title. Point two: If you’re wor­ried about your kids learn­ing bad lan­guage, what are they doing stay­ing up that late (10pm to 12 mid­night) and watch­ing TV, when the water­shed is offi­cially at 9pm? Stop blam­ing broad­casters for your own poor par­ent­ing. If you don’t want your kids learn­ing bad lan­guage, for­bid them from watch­ing TV past 9pm. Any trans­gres­sion on their part is your fault, not the fault of the broad­casters of the pro­grammes that are not inten­ded for chil­dren in the first place.