Chris’ Blog

… and only succeeds in giving himself facial lacerations.

On Thursday 22nd of May a man from Plymouth detonated a device in a café toilet in the newly redeveloped Princesshay shopping area of Exeter. The device was apparently so pathetic some customers in the café did not even hear it. Police sealed off the surrounding area including the High street and the bus station, the main train station (St. David’s) had armed police deployed with all toilet and waiting room facilities locked.

Further news coverage:

• BBC News: Man held after city centre blast
• BBC News: Blast suspect was ‘radicalised’
• X-Media Online: Explosion in Exeter
• Exeposé: Bomb Explodes in Princesshay
• XTV: X-News Flash: Exeter Bombing

… about this. Well more likely is I am just being too lazy. But it has been quite a while since I wrote anything of much substance up here, currently I am unable to sleep which sucks somewhat. I’ve been very busy as of late, I’ve finished my quite frankly ludicrous 5 week “Easter” “break” where I did not much but work, bum around, and drove places. So I am back at the grindstone that is university, ploughing through coursework at such a rate I guess I could describe as “relaxed” but that maybe pushing definition boundaries. I’m looking forward to next week when the last of my coursework is handed in and I am free to revise for exams, oh heck!

I’ve had a new desktop for the latter part of April inspired by a trip to Weston’s Cider of Much Marcle, Herefordshire over me holiday.

I am moving towards a landmark on last.fm, 100 000 tracks played. Not decided what will be my 100 000th track hopefully I don’t go over it by mistake with something non-worthy.

I leave you with the thought, why would a dairy company write “Allergy information: contains milk” on the side of a bottle of milk? Surely that is the whole idea? Or maybe I am missing something…

I have been away from my blog for quite a while, general laziness on my behalf. I’ve been fairly ‘busy’ by my own standards working part time, doing some project work, playing games, sleeping and socialising. My summer is panning out quite nicely, and I am now wanting to return to Exeter for my second year, the sooner the better. I am just about to apply the Wordpress upgrade that has been released in my absence, and reading the dumper truck load of e-mails that I have received. Fun.

I have been neglecting my blog over the past couple of weeks, really a combination of laziness, forgetfulness, and other signs of uselessness. Saying that though, I now have a job, working at Tesco, oh the joys! Although it will probably help me loose weight scanning food all day kinda does the opposite of what I expected it would. Some of the things customers purchase are rather off putting, they are generally wet, slimey and should be in the sea. Also discovered Indian newspapers are somewhat biased but just ever so slightly! I also got my degree results for my first year 2:1 whoop!

Free! Finally all three of my exams are over, a little earlier than expected but no matter still happy! Shame I felt so ill last night, didn’t go out and get smashed Oh well there is always tonight!

So, at home currently rather than at university, this poses a problem when trying to connect to some resources, such as internal machines and private resources. I know Network Manager in Ubuntu has VPN support but I had never tried it out, so, I gave it a go. Issue the following command to install the required package, provides Microsoft VPN support to Network Manager.

$ sudo aptitude install network-manager-pptp

Now you can load my configuration by downloading the configuration file and click on the network manager applet, find the VPN Connections sub menu and hit Configure VPN…. Hit Forward, from the list choose PPTP tunnel, press Forward again and now press Import Saved Configuration…. Find the configuration file I told you to download and select it, now press Forward and then click Apply. Bingo!

I have missed thee.

You see I have had no ResNet (the network connection in my room) access today, from 11am till ~5:20pm, rising time till end of Blue Peter. The problem effected our block only and was quite severe, no contact with anything at all! More annoyingly I set aside today to do work I needed to catch up on which required network access. So I had to trek to the, with its crap Dell keyboards and Windows, and program on them. *sigh*

In other news … went to the Cinema and saw Hot Fuzz amazing film, stupidly comical and outrageously well written. Loved it.

So, today is the day of room inspections the termly wonder that we are treated to on a termly basis, usually. They check to make sure we are not trashing Lafrowda, some say its design is inspired by a Swedish prison and that the corridors are so thin because the architects forgot to take into account the width of the bricks, all we know is it’s home! So anyway… I was leaving for my lecture at 9:45 and the room inspector had just finished the room next to mine. I was in the kitchen getting a quick sip of liquid before I went to go and be lectured about XHMTL, as I was leaving the kitchen I noticed the inspector woman knocking on my door (#13 of 12 [don't ask]). I shouted down the corridor “there is nobody in.” she asked how I knew “I said it is my room and I just locked it!”. To that she replied “Can I go in?”, was that rhetorical?

Maybe they hide people under the bed? *goes to check*

…finished! Woo! I start my second semester next week, which is bound to be interesting no more artificial intelligence lectures which were boring to the nth degree.

Yup, I am being sued for damages etc. along with the 14 000 other students here at the University of Exeter who are member of the Student’s Guild. Somebody from the Evangelical Christian Union have filed papers at the Hight Court against the members Guild, the Guild president and the University. Should be interesting.