31/10/06 Much merriment

Went to a forum meet at the Eaton Cottage tonight. Originally I'd said I'd only be there for an hour, two maximum (due to coursework), but in the end I stayed until about midnight. Much beer was drunk and much laughter was had etc. Fitz claimed he wasn't drunk before turning up but after his first pint was over he was slurring words and making a humourous idiot out of himself ... I think Fitz is always a little bit drunk anyway.

Managed to do a fair bit of coursework today but I still have a lot to do. Think I'll be spending most of the day in the Hive tomorrow as usual. After I've sorted out the thing with the water company of course.

Posted by Alex at 12:35 AM

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30/10/06 LOL!

Last night was funny. We won third place in the pub quiz thanks to some amazing flukes and quite a few questions I could actually answer. Although I still insist I'm right that it was Harold the FIRST who defeated the Norweigans at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, not Harold the Second.

I have also discovered at first-hand how violent Grace can be ... although I don't have any actual bruises there is skin missing from the back of my right hand. Remember, if you try to steal my shoes OR my watch again you will be tickled.

We're planning on a coursework marathon in the Hive today. I have masses of work due in on Thursday, the dreaded essay no less, and there is a great deal of work left to be done. Also have the dreaded Systems Analysis piece coming up in a week. Really got to get my act together with these I think!

Posted by Alex at 10:30 AM

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27/10/06 I am NOT happy

First buses put their prices up again, and are no longer issuing return tickets within the city. Bastards. How can they expect students to afford to pay £4 (yes, that's four pounds sterling) for two single tickets to the city centre and back?? A one-way ticket from my house to the uni now costs a quid, for a journey of just under a mile. It's bloody ridiculous. The fares were already too expensive. I'm glad I tend to walk everywhere these days....

Anyway. In half an hour I have the tedious Systems Analysis seminar, then I'm getting picked up by my parents and heading back to Suffolk for a day. WIll be back in sunny Norwich for Saturday afternoon (Frankie: I hope I will be able to make it into work for an hour to help you finish up; and Grace: I'll send you a text before coming over ).

On a lighter note I have discovered that there is a wireless signal in the Square, which is a better location to play the stalking game than the Hive these days, since everyone knows Grace and I now live in there during our waking hours. Tis a bit chilly this afternoon tho.

I'm looking forward to Sunday evening but next week's going to be hectic. Need to get some serious sleeping done over the weekend.

Posted by Alex at 9:00 PM

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26/10/06 "Hi, I'm Alex, and I'm a Hiveaholic"

Had a rather boring two-hour lecture this morning in which we covered sorting algorithms--a topic we did to death in the first year. Then proceeded to spend six hours in the Hive. I really do seem to live there most of the time now ... as someone I know said the other day, they'll have to start charging me rent!

Did some more reading for my essay (which is due in six days now ), drank some coffee, got whacked on the head by Grace wielding a rolled-up newspaper, and ended up lamenting the state of modern mountaineering with Inigo after reading the shocking news that Todd Skinner was killed while big wall climbing in Yosemite.

It's been an odd couple of days generally. Am not particularly looking forward to next week due to the amount of work I'll have to do. Will probably miss out on piratesoc on Wednesday due to the forum meet at the Eaton Cottage on Monday ... can't really justify more than one night out (on top of the pub quiz on Sunday) with a deadline coming up on Thursday.

Posted by Alex at 9:00 PM

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25/10/06 Funny old day

It's turning out to be one of those weird days today. Found out that the Societies office had basically screwed us over with regards to getting Piratesoc through Union Council, resulting in much flapping around and signing of forms this morning which we didn't even know we had to sign.

I have no lectures today but am currently crashed in the Hive with Grace and Frankie, and have been here since just after ten this morning. We'll probably be here for another hour before heading off home and finishing the filming. The filming we did on Monday evening was ... weird. Fun, but weird! I ended up climbing a tree and hooting like an owl, Grace dressed up as some kind of semi-evil Chinese geisha. This evening we're filming Bex who will be dressed up as the sun.

Other than that I don't have a great deal of stuff to do today. Except the essay of course. Did some work towards that yesterday until Grace and I were chucked out of the Hive at 5:30 but the papers I have to read are not the easiest to understand.

Posted by Alex at 11:30 AM

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23/10/06 "KREEEE!! Jaffa kree. Or jaffa cakes."

Had a reasonably good weekend. Spent Saturday mostly lounging around and not doing any work, which suited my mood. Watched The Guns of Navarone and had a laff with Grace (who was also watching it, in her house) over MSN at all the silly bits in it. Listened to Frankie's radio show in the evening and sent in lots of silly messages to the studio. On Sunday we had work, which was hectic due to the retarded supervisor not having ordered anything in the previous day, so we had no bread to prep up.

Then I went over to Grace's house for a bit, taking the Caltrop Fairy with me (), followed by the pub quiz. We didn't do too badly compared to last week, but poor Grace was knackered and ended up falling asleep half way through.

Am currently having a coffee in teh Hive with her trying to wake up after a terminally boring Systems Analysis lecture. I damn nearly lapsed into a coma. Hopefully we can wake up sufficiently for this evening: Frankie will be filming a short film for her course, in which I am playing an owl, Grace will be playing the moon, Bex the sun, Mikey a fox etc. Still not certain what the general plot is but it sounds ... interesting. I get to climb trees!

Posted by Alex at 10:40 AM

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21/10/06 Fun stuff

Grace came over to our house last night to play some Mariokart and watch some Stargate SG-1. The silly girl was in a rather strange mood which she put down to a constantly saturated caffeine level in her bloodstream--or, as we like to say, the red blood cell count in her caffeine stream was way down! We were nearly run over by a maniac in a car when I was walking her home. I'm not sure why all the suicidally reckless drivers seem to hang out in the Dereham Road area at 11 at night.

Anyway I have a day off today so I need to get some laundry done and also make a start on my essay, the deadline for which is starting to creep up on me, as they do. Tomorrow I've got work followed by the piratesoc pub quiz. I'm hoping we can do better these week.

The big piece of good news is that Howard Jeffs has sent me a flyer outlining his winter skills courses for the coming year. I'm excited to see that a foundation winter climbing course is on the list. Cost is £75 for the weekend, which includes accomodation and tuition, but not transport. It might turn out to be an expensive trip if I get on the list but it'll be worth it ... a solid grounding in the basics of winter climbing will be invaluable prior to the trip to Glencoe / Glen Nevis in April. And thus far my knowledge of winter climbing is almost entirely theoretical.

Posted by Alex at 10:05 AM

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19/10/06 Milestones galore!

At this point in time, the website is coming up on a year old, has almost forty thousand hits, and 199 blog posts. Despite my own short-sightedness making the website hard to update, there's a lot of content on here already and I've received a great deal of positive feedback. Time for me to say a great big THANK YOU! to my dedicated readers. Especially Grace, because she's wonderful. And she'll hurt me with laser-guided rice puddings if I don't acknowledge her.

Speaking of which, I am currently--guess where!--in the Hive playing the stalking game again. Isn't going too well today. I've only seen Jack Shannon and CKH ... who actually came up to my table and said hello, despite many months of remaining incognito, being hunted by Grace, the master ninja stalker. She'll be along in about fifteen minutes I think. Hopefully we'll be able to amass a better count than yesterday, although I do have to pop into town later on.

This morning was Boooooooring with a capital B and lots of laboured 'o's. Our lecturer kept forgetting what he was talking about and the seminar leader was a complete tard who can't speak properly. Grrrr.

Anyway back to the main topic of the post, I'm pretty chuffed when I think of how far I've come in the past year. This time last year I had yet to experience any winter mountaineering and was still very much developing as a scrambler (I would now consider myself very competant at the modest grades I tend to stick to). At this point in time I seem to have an obsession with ice axes and am putting serious thought and time into planning two big, serious expeditions next year ... ice climbing in Scotland and climbing 4000m mountains in the Alps. It'll only get better from this point on.

Posted by Alex at 12:45 PM

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18/10/06 Mmmmm.....coffee.

I'm currently sitting in the Hive with Grace, huddled over a cup of coffee. She has introduced me to the evils and pleasures of coffee and I'm finding it an excellent way to wake me up after a long night. I just have to be careful I don't get addicted to it like she has ...

Anyway last night we went to the pirate party at the LCR, which was amazing. Mikey turned up in his full legendary pirate outfit, but he was rivalled by a new society member: Alex Davey, a.k.a. Captain Jack Sparrow (cos he looks just like him and is about 7ft tall). Alex mk.2 went up to the bar and announced "WHY IS THE RUM ALWAYS GONE??" upon which he was handed some rum. He later admitted he doesn't even like it.

Chez later turned up looking rather drunk and bewildered, a giant pirate flag wrapped around her shoulders, but she had no idea where she'd got it from!

We had a grand turnout from the Pirate Society and managed to make some new converts among the many people dressed as pirates who weren't actually members of the society. Also bumped into lots of other people we knew. I ended up staggering home at about midnight, having drunk an unknown number of pints and some JD & coke. Frankie and Richie left early due to Frankie having a swollen throat--she has lost her voice this morning and has been prescribed antibiotics by the doctor.

Was woken up by the postman this morning, who delivered the latest addition to my collection of historic Alpine artifacts: a 1942 Swiss Mountain Troops issue Stubai eispickel (Short model, concave blade, 70cm). In non-technical speak that's a very sexy ice axe, old enough to be a classic but virtually unused and in pristine condition. It's a gorgeous piece of kit and something I'm looking forward to using on future mountaineering trips.

Posted by Alex at 1:10 PM

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16/10/06 Just to satisfy Grace's curiosity ...

Here's a report of everything that has happened today!

9am - Lectures until 1. Meh.
1pm - Hive stalkage as you full know, because you were there! I have been introduced to the evils of coffee and ended up talking nearly as fast as you did.
4pm - Went home after you vanished off to your lecture. Popped over to Somerfields to buy some shopping. Ate pizza.
5:35 until 7:00 - TV. Neighbours followed by the Simpsons followed by Hollyoaks and the News.
7pm until now - Various Stargate (season 3) episodes with occasional textbook reading.

There ... satisfied?? Dan says you're to come round sometime to watch some Stargate.

(To everyone else: updates to the site are still in the pipeline but you're going to have to wait! Am too busy doing work and dossing around in the Hive ... )

Posted by Alex at 10:20 PM

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14/10/06 An interesting couple of days

Yesterday was busy. Frankie and I lounged around in the Hive for a couple of hours playing the stalking game, and to my astonishment--despite being a Friday!--she laid claim to a stonking score of 17. That beats my previous best of 12 hands-down. That's seventeen forum members who passed through the Hive within the space of two hours! I admit most of them came over and said hello to us, but we saw them first.

That evening I had planned to get the train up to Sheringham, bivvy somewhere overnight, then walk back to North Walsham along the clifftops the next day, but I stupidly missed the bus. Ended up going to the forum meet instead. To begin with there were only three of us there but gradually more and more people turned up--new people for a change. I got to meet quite a few people I had 'known' online for some time but had never met. Also got into an, er, interesting discussion with Jam Master Jay about how Frankie is apparently an evil psychopathic sociopath who is hated by 80% of the university "but I'm sure she's nice really". Gave up talking to him after a while. He's still clinging on to his outdated little ideas despite virtually everyone else having finally realised that, actually, she really is a nice person.

The other thing that happened was that Bex, Grace's housemate, was taken to A&E due to an asthma attack in the bar. Nobody really told me what had happened but since I was the only one with Grace's phone number I was basically just told "Bex has been taken to hospital--tell Grace". Apparently Grace was up with her all night without much in the way of caffeine to keep her going and is now feeling like death, poor girl. I managed to convince her to go to bed before tackling reading for her course, though.

Good news is that Bex is okay--was let out of hospital this afternoon, but only on the condition that Grace looked after her.

Anyway today I did a shorter walk up the North Norfolk Coast, just a four-mile jaunt between Sheringham and Cromer. It's a really nice walk with great variety including a very minor summit (63m Beeston Hill) and spectacular cliff scenery. The train fare is only £3.60 so I suspect this is something I'll end up doing most weeks. I found a fossilised Mammoth bone at the foot of the cliffs and also managed to make a rather good flint dagger. The flint strewn on the beach is of superb quality, nothing like the knobbly lumps you get in Suffolk.

I may be going to watch a film at the cinema tonight, not sure yet. Tomorrow it's work followed by the piratesoc pub quiz. Huzzah!

Posted by Alex at 4:20 PM

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12/10/06 Well that was fun!

It was Wednesday yesterday, which means Piratesoc night! Mikey brought an entirely new drinking game with him (on top of What Would A Pirate Do? and the White Card Game) and many strange and hilarious things happened. These included fighting invisible bears outside in the square (complete with passing strangers saying 'Ah--he must be in piratesoc'), climbing trees and shouting YARRRR!!, and other baffling occurances that are probably not suited to a public journal!

Even Frankie got a bit tipsy and as for Damian, well, he puked all over the floor and had to be dragged home by Security. We had a lot of fun traipsing around campus in an effort to figure out where he'd got to.

Earlier in the day I spent my usual time in the Hive with various people, including Grace who was up to her ears in a confusing-type Law textbook. Then went down to the Eaton Cottage (a very nice pub only two minutes away from my house) for a pint with Gaz, Fitz, Chas, Curly Matt and that lot.

Today I should probably do some work ...

Posted by Alex at 8:15 AM

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09/10/06 Struck down by the Lurgi

I have been hit by a mild version of Fresher's Flu (although so far other people are insisting it's manflu). Went to the Piratesoc pub quiz last night--we lost, but it was still fun--and entered into a rather bizarre paper aeroplane exchange with Damian, who was in the next team ... kept throwing a paper aeroplane back and forth with various messages written on. He has a rather Northern sense of humour that Frankie didn't appreciate, probably because she has the Lurgi as well. So far I think Grace is the only person I know who doesn't have it ... yet.

Work was also very tiring yesterday and afterwards I wandered into town with Grace and Bex, who appeared outside the Co-Op after I got out (fifteen minutes late). The task was to find a container for their giant marrow, plus vast amounts of sugar and yeast. The plan is to make enormous quantities of marrow rum, apparently. I believe the previous one was called "Captain Jack Marrow" in true pirate fashion.

Right now I'm between lectures, in the Hive as usual, staring in bewilderment at my huge new Data Structures and Algorithms in Java textbook, and thinking up reasons not to do work!

Posted by Alex at 10:25 AM

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07/10/06 Fun

I'm starting to do some work for my course now--have decided I can't just sit around waiting for textbooks to arrive, I should be doing work dammit! Spent a few hours in the Hive today typing up lecture notes, doing seminar prep work, and trying to figure out the many subtleties of Selection Sorting algorithms. Frankie and Richie were with me for the first hour to try out the 'stalking game', but we only saw four forum members apart from ourselves. Must be because it's a friday.

After they vanished to lectures and seminars, Rachel and Gaz stopped by at my table for a while. We discussed the phenomenon of Jack Shannon whose name has become a household world at UEA seemingly overnight. A sexist, homophobic, racist, insane lunatic online, he has turned out to be the same in real life as well ... amusingly so. He thinks he's a viking warrior called Jack Shannon when (apparently) his real name is Simon. His catchphrase is "JOGGING IS FOR GIRLS!"

We met him at the deviantsoc pub meet last night and were quite alarmed tbh. He doesn't talk (except to say "I'm Jack Shannon you know"); he communicates through disturbed cartoons scrawled on scraps of paper. I'll admit that if he wants to get his name known then he's done a damn good job. Pretty much everyone knows who he is, even if it's notoriety rather than fame.

Anyway I didn't see most of the Hive regulars. Grace was absent--apparently she was cleaning today--which meant a lack of stalking compatriot for much of the time. Frankie has discovered a certain aptitude for the game but still has much to learn. Will have to catch up with Grace some time next week.

This evening Gaz game over and played Mario Kart and Smash Bros. with us, which was fun. I actually won several games ... and Frankie didn't lose several!

On the website update front, be patient still. It's coming ... slowly, but it's coming. At the moment my priority is getting an iframe implementation to work so I can sort out the bad coding that's behind the site's structure. Once I get some spare time I'll give further thought to the pitifully late trip reports and other content.

Posted by Alex at 12:15 AM

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04/10/06 What Would A Pirate Do?

Had our first Wednesday weekly Piratesoc meet tonight. Mikey is an absolute legend for inventing the drinking game called "What Would A Pirate Do?" We terrorised the Union Pub for three hours and several of us got quite severely drunk in the process (not me: I'm still banned from spirits, although I did have four or five pints). The game involved a spinner which pointed to things such as "Drink some grog" or "Keelhaul a skallywag" and we drew up a set of rules to govern what people had to do when the pointer selected an item.

I think the entire bar was probably aware of our presence, plus a few unfortunate souls outside in the Square who became the butt of our Truth Or Dare rounds.

Probably the craziest thing that I've done since last ytear.

Earlier in the day I spent a few hours in the Hive with Grace. I'm slipping behind on the 'stalking' game today: only four forum members spotted without them noticing me (and that includes Francis who doesn't really count, because he's always in Union House). It's odd, but Grace pointed out that despite living a mile away from the University this year I'm actually spending more time on campus tahn ever before.

The verdict: UEA rocks!

(Aaarg. I just rememberd I have a 9am lecture tomorrow morning and I'm bound to have a hangoevr when I wake up. Damn. )

Posted by Alex at 11:55 PM

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03/10/06 A fun evening!

Just came back from Richie's 21st birthday party at the Vine tavern, Dove Lane. It's the smallest pub in Norwich and already my favourite. They have all three of the regular varieties of Adnams on tap, plus an intruiging variety of ancient Adnams posters, signs and pictures on the walls. It's almost like a Suffolk coastal pub; made me feel right at home!

We had the pub booked all night and it was an awesome party, complete with champagne, party poppers, and a chocolate fountain. I eneded up chatting with Bex, Inigo and Mikey for most of the night about completely random things, as people tend to do when they;ve had a few drinks. I was of course aware of the fact that Frankie had long ago banned me from drinking strong spirits; I limited myself to four (or possibLy five) Broadside and a glass of champagne.

Prior to that we'd been down the Union bar to meet some of the new people from the UEA forums. I met several new freshers, plus some forum meet fveterans who I hadn't seen in months. Shame we couldn't stay for long, but Richie's birthdya party beckoned!

Apparently Fitz got hammered and started ranting about the Conservatives and Britain in general. Good old Fitz.

If they're doing another one next week, I'm there! As for tomorrow, I suspect I'll spend much of my time in the Hive spying on people with Grace. We have a competition going to see who can 'stalk' the most forum members in one day without them knowing it.

Posted by Alex at 1:25 AM

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02/10/06 First Piratesoc social

We had the first event for this year's Pirate Society this evening. It was the weekly pub quiz in the Blue Bar, and about twenty-odd pirates showed up--about the number of future regulars we expected, out of the full hundred-odd who signed up. It's a well-documented fact that freshers will sign up to all kinds of societies and then never take part in 90% of them.

Everyone who turned up was fun and piratey and it was an awesome evening. Despite them not allowing us to sign up for the quiz initially--something about too many teams (the bar was packed)--we managed to elbow our way into the quiz and ended up winning second place. Our rallying cry of YARRRRRR!!!! was apparently so loud it could be heard in the Grad Bar upstairs!

Tomorrow (blearg ... today by now) is going to be busy for me, with lectures until one in the afternoon, then a trip into town to buy various essential things, eg. a new watch, followed by a brief appearance at the fresher's forum meet at seven, followed by Richie's 21st birthday party at eight. Lots to do! Better get some sleep ...

Posted by Alex at 12:40 AM

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