~bma / journal / tags / uni

Okay, usually I ignore Student Union politics, since it rarely gets anywhere useful. However, one poster in the union caught my eye–Darren Jones, Presidential candidate, you are a pillock.

The policy of his to which I am referring is "Cheaper Membership to Clubs and Societies". Now, I’m not going to say that there are no societies which are overcharging for membership. I do know, though, that many societies get a substantial amount of their annual income from membership fees; TermiSoc, certainly, is always trying to find the balance between charging as little as possible for membership, and charging enough that we have money for maintenance and hardware repairs. I suspect that other societies have similar–or, likely, greater–problems, and mandating a maximum membership fee is just going to make things worse unless societies are provided with a reasonable income from the union (all societies, that is, not just the ones who bring prestige to the union–i.e., a couple of the sports teams).

This is yet another case, I suspect, of someone proposing changes that are bound to be popular with the majority of students, without actually looking into the situation and considering the consequences.

So, as I mentioned recently, I had an interview for a placement at Plymouth Marine Laboratory. I heard back from them a couple of days ago, and so from July I’ll be working in the Remote Sensing and Modelling groups. I’ll be developing software to deal with scientific data, I think mostly satellite images of Europe and the north Atlantic, for measuring things like ocean surface temperature, chlorophyll levels, etc. Rather cool stuff, and I’m looking forward to it.

It’s that time of year again; I’ve got two exams coming up, plus one I’ve already taken. Not as many as some people, but still. Of course, life would be much easier if not for the fact that the only way to find this out was by getting the list of exams and grepping for modules I’m taking. Despite having spent craploads of money on the new portal, the exam timetable is a big HTML file containing a list of every exam in every faculty. Last year, it was an Excel spreadsheet. Is this progress?

The thing is, the portal knows what modules you’re enrolled on; surely there’s some way of telling it "this module has this exam", and then having it notify people as appropriate?

So, the last piece of coursework is out of the way and, barring two exams and a demo, that’s the end of another academic year. Whether I’ve passed or not remains to be seen, of course.

On Monday I have an interview at Plymouth Marine Labs, for a year-long work placement with the Remote Sensing and Modelling groups. If I get the place, I’ll be developing software to deal with various scientific data. They use mostly GNU/Linux, which will be a nice change from the Uni’s Microsoft-whoredom (they use Fedora Core 6, from the looks of their mail headers, but it’s better than nothing :).

If I don’t get it, I’ll just get a temp job over the summer again and carry on to my final year, but it’d be cool to work there and good to get a break from academic work for a while.

On the 30th of April, I’m planning to head up to Cambridge to hear a lecture by Richard Stallman; details here, or TermiSoc plans here. Since I’ve never been to Cambridge before, and getting from the station to the building in which the lecture is to be held involves a 3+ mile trek across the city, I predict fun times to be had for all.

On the 1st of May, I take over as TermiPresident. Scary. I have plans for the society over the coming year, but they’re sekrit. TermiSoc’s end-of-term celebration is the 18th of May, though we’re not completely decided what’s going on. It will likely involve a) beach, b) drinking, c) music, d) burning of foodstuffs, or e) any or all of the above. Attendance is mandatory for TermiSoc members, except for the bit where that was a lie. Non-members are also welcome to come along, though why you’d want to is beyond me. :)

As far as techie stuff goes: I want to get vox populi into a useful state, and get termibot past the prototype stage. I’ve had ideas for a few other things I could do; more details forthcoming once I have slightly more concrete plans for them.

An email I just sent to the University’s Equality and Diversity Office (intranet link, sorry):

I’d like to express my concern tha, although posters around the campus warn that racism and homophobia will not be tolerated, they make no mention of sexism. Does the University believe that sexism is not a problem any more, or that it’s less important than racism or homophobia?

While racism and homophobia are, of course, serious issues, and the University’s policy towards them is admirable, sexism is also a serious issue and should be taken just as seriously.

Let’s see what they say.

So, my student loan was meant to be paid in a few days ago. It’s actually paid in two batches per term: about £1400 of loan, and £333 of grant (more in the summer term, since it needs to last longer). When I checked my account, though, only the £333 had been paid.

Turns out that, because the loan was more than I’d expected, it took me over the £3000/year limit of the account I’d gien them the details of. Cue endless faffing around trying to get them to make the payment again, random error messages from their website, and so on.

Not that it wasn’t my own fault, of course. I’d meant to give them my new account details before Christmas, but couldn’t find the form and couldn’t face trying to do it online.

I was in the Student Union earlier on, and bloody hell it’s gone downhill. The Union magazine, Fly, was a reasonably well-done publication a few years back; nowaday’s it’s a single piece of A4 paper folded in half, and the middle "pages" consist of the so-called ‘events’ over the coming week–i.e., the inane reasons they’ve come up with for people to get drunk (half of which aren’t even at the Union, they’re at some random nightclubs in town–what was the point of spending millions of pounds which they don’t have (since they’re in debt to the Univorsity) on doing up the place if they’re going to encourage everyone to go elsewhere?). On the back "page" was the ‘Union News’: half a page of sports results.

Some student unions actually do things; they help their students, they make a difference. Ours seems to exist solely to get its members (of which I am not one this year, since they make it more and more difficult to join for less and less benefit) to spend money on alcohol.

I expect people are going to tell me that since I’m not a member of the Union I have no right to complain. This is bollocks; I’m not a member because of the problems, which have been getting worse and worse in the three years since I started university here.

Something else that really irritates me is the music; they have some crappy music channel playing all day, on all the screens that’re dotted around the place, and over the sound system. Now, musical preferences aside (do people actually enjoy listening to that shit?), it would seem to run counter to the Union’s "Safe Space" policy (which, among other things, bans any sexist behaviour on Union property) to have videos of women being sexually objectified on a big screen in the main room all day every day. Though, come to think of it, the posters I’ve seen mention homophobia and racism, but not sexism; presumably they think that sexism isn’t an issue?

Well, after weeks of waiting, I got confirmation from my LEA that they’ll be giving me money as usual (well, lending). Usefully, they sent it to my parents’ address, despite the last letter they sent me (to tell me my application had been received and was being processed) being sent to the correct address.

Luckily, the university finance department couldn’t care less that what I showed them was a scanned, emailed, and printed copy and not the official one. As long as I can survive the next week on the money I have left, I’m all set.

My first purchase when it comes through: pizza. Or doughnuts, or any of the other things I haven’t let myself have because I’d be blowing several days’ budget on a few minutes/hours of sugary goodness. I’ll also finally be able to look at repairing daltrey, and maybe replacing gilmour’s hard drive (though I’ve had no problems in the last month now, so that can wait a while–appropriate backups are being kept should it go tits-up anyway).

(Just as an aside: I’ve always thought that maybe there was something lost in the translation of ABBA’s song Money Money Money; why must it be funny? Is it some Scandinavian pun that the rest of the world has no hope of ever understanding?)

Just received the results of my third (and final) attempt to pass the first-year Computing module IT & Media Tools. Thankfully, this time I managed it; if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been allowed to repeat the module again.

As of September, after three years as a first-year, I will be a second-year.

Let’s just hope I have enough money to last that long…

To log into part of the University of Plymouth website, you must not only provide your username and password, but some extra details as well–presumably they want to be extra-careful, since this area allows access to, and modification of, personal details (including financial details, I believe). Accordingly, this second login page has the following warning:

• Do not disclose your passwords to anyone else, you are responsible for them.
• This system provides access to personal information about you which can be changed.
• The University takes no responsibility for information that is changed due to unauthorised access as a result of your passwords being disclosed.

All very well, with one small snag: “your passwords”, for this section, consist of your date of birth and your middle name–hardly something that you’d feel the need to keep secret and, in fact, something that you can’t keep secret in a lot of cases (“sorry, Passport Office, I can’t give you my date of birth, my university told me to keep it secret…”).