Hmm... Today's activities involve an induction to the computer labs which was largely telling me stuff that I had already learnt from the Glamorgan website, a meeting and tour of the campus with my academic tutor (a Welsh lady by the name of Geneen) from which I came away with a post-it note pad as a thank-you for filling out some questionnaire thing. Yay.
I also had an LRC induction in room L310. Now the way room naming goes, the first letter corresponds to the block, the first number (if it's a 3-digit number, else prepend a 0) is the floor number, and the last two numbers are the room number on that floor of that block. So you see the "L", think "Ah, so that's L-block". You look on your map and see that L-block is a tiny single-story building behind Tý Crawshaw. The map gives it the impression of a shed, almost. So anyway I wandered down there (a few minutes early as I thought I'd probably get lost, I usually do) and couldn't even find this mystery building. "What the hell?" I think. Then I decided that it'd be stupid to have an LRC induction on the opposite side of campus to the LRC itself, so I went up there and found a load of people I didn't recognise standing outside it, so I sort of wandered around a bit until I found someone who I did recognise as being from my group and followed him into the library. It turns out that all the rooms in the LRC are also L___. Lovely.
Of course just to make the room naming system even more difficult, some buildings' entrances aren't on the ground floor. The main entrance to J-block (Tâf - the School of Computing and the School of Electronics) is on the first floor. The second floor of J-block joins onto the first floor of H-block (Cynon - looks like business or something takes place in there). They just love confusing people around here.
And then this evening was the wonderful wine & cheese quiz. For obvious reasons - i.e. that only computing students were invited - no questions were related to computers in any way. Thus we had questions about Barbie, Postman Pat, Thunderbirds, ornithology, etc. My team got 32 out of a total of 80, which was fairly average really. Not bad considering our team was so multinational: 1 English (me), 1 Welsh (some dude from a village round the corner), 1 Egyptian, 1 Lithuanian and 2 Portuguese (husband & wife with a kid). A couple of questions that I knew the answers to that stick in my mind are "What is Charlie's surname in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?" - Bucket - and "What is the best-selling UK single?" - Candle In The Wind '97. But we also discovered who approved the patent for the triangular shape of Toblerones.... Albert Einstein :| Just another thing to add to his list of achievements. I should point out that the above statement about Einstein is just according to our quiz. http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/18/1/11 says that he actually didn't (look at question 22, the answers say that it's false), while http://www.yesmag.bc.ca/review/Al.html says that he actually did. I have no idea.
Tomorrow I actually get to relax at last, with no scheduled meetings or talks. There's the freshers' fair in the afternoon, and I really do need to go to Cardiff or Pontypridd sometime.
Tired now so sleepy time :)