What can I say? I spent today going to more talks about various things. A brief introduction to the computer systems first at 9 o'clock, then at 11 there was a talk by some careers dude with a little bit of info about the services that his department offers, and also trying to get us thinking about the sorts of careers we plan to get into when we leave the university. He also couldn't stop talking about how wonderful the work placement year is. Lucky I'm doing that then, eh? :p

Then we had about 25 minutes' break before we had a chat from a couple of people from the Students' Union and someone from the Sports Centre. That lot lasted fifteen minutes and the only thing of note was that someone has once tried to register a Beer Society but was refused because the only object of the society was just to get pissed, which the students' union offers already :P

Only a short post today, sorry. I've been painfully busy today and that theme will continue until Friday, I believe.

I woke up feeling rotten again. It was probably nerves but it meant that I couldn't eat breakfast. I hate not having breakfast on a good day. This day just got worse and worse.

Woke up this morning around 8. It was freezing. Really really freezing. Had a shower and promptly discovered my lack of hair brush so my hair is now one hell of a mess. Tried out the Internet connection.. Two good signs: the network activity LEDs on my motherboard flashed when I plugged the cable in, and I was given an IP address happily - albeit in the 10.12.10 range :S. However no web pages would load or anything. About 10:00 it suddenly started working, though I had to register for it first. Apparently it recorded my MAC address etc, but from what I can see they printed out their SQL query to the page instead of sending it to their SQL daemon. Weird. So far (it's now 10:40) Internet access has been dodgy at best, with it cutting out entirely every few minutes. Just enough time to talk to Ben. They gave me a nice list of traffic that is allowed, though I didn't see IRC on that list... MSN Messenger is on it, though, as are FTP, SSH, SOCKS and Unreal Tournament and Half-Life. It looks like they're about 5 years out of date, though, as both UT and HL have sequels, now. It then says "All traffic not specifically listed above my be blocked." It seems that the "may" really is a "may" not a "will" as I had RDC connect, which wasn't listed. I've yet to try any games or IRC as I haven't had enough time of it actually working, yet. Let's hope they get that reliability sorted out ASAP ;)

I also don't yet know if I'll be able to get both my desktop and laptop connected to the network simultaneously. I've got my 8-port ethernet switch with me, but they may not allow multiple computers under the same name. I didn't notice any mention of using a PC as a NAT device or using switches/hubs being forbidden in the Terms & Conditions, though. I suppose I could also use the wifi card in my desktop to connect my laptop to the network wirelessly. We'll see.

Sunday

Well today was the day for me moving into university. For those of you who don't know I'm going to university at Glamorgan (South Wales, not far from Cardiff).Not the best start to the day as I was out drinking last night so woke up around 8am with something of a hangover. Not too bad, but feeling dehydrated as fsck. I really should have finished packing my stuff up last night before I went to bed when I could still think coherently. Oh well, no big deal now. The only things I've forgotten (to the best of my knowledge as I write this on the M4 on the way...) are a backup of the MySQL database on my local server (which isn't really very local now, but still closer than the server this site or Web2Messenger are hosted on are) and cutlery. Obviously the latter is slightly more important as I can just RDC into my server to grab that database backup, but I can't do the same with cutlery, unfortunately - that'll have to be bought in Cardiff when I get there.

Firefox has just had its 50,000,000th download! Congratulations to the Firefox team for such a brilliant product.