When I first ventured out of the house on Sunday I was dreading braving the weather. It was raining and the wind was howling around the eves of the house to the extent I feared I might be blown clean off my feet once outside.

While the wind did make walking to campus difficult, there was something strangely beautiful about the way it blew the tree branches around, already with few or no leaves on them. I guess the phrase to use would be wild, and despite being in pretty much the centre of Leeds, for a brief few moment I was somewhere else entirely. Has to be one of the bonuses of wintery weather 🙂

Taking a browse over the latest updates over on Halifax Online yesterday I noticed that the nominations for next years executive committee are through and that no one has applied for web officer. This is slightly disheartening as it means that clearly someone doesn’t want to take on the running of the unique CMS system I wrote to power the college website. It also means that the brilliant resource the site has become for college students will be without an admin to keep it ticking over which could mean its regular updates and indeed use by college students may well decline.

All I can say is if you are a Halifax college student and are technically minded, please consider running for the position. I’d love to see the site continue to be a success, after all its still the best college website at the University of York and you wouldn’t want Goodricke to get ahead now would you 😉

I’m not entirely sure how we got onto this topic of discussion in DEC-10 today but Matt and I ended up talking about dating a like-minded, interested in computers type of person. I’m blogging about this because I’ve had thoughts on this for a while and when I found views that were almost opposite to mine I decided that I had to mention it.

Basically I would never date a girl who was into computers, code and other techie things. Why I hear you ask, well the reason is that computers are my life, my computer is where I run to when the world hates me, code is what I write when I’m depressed and need to get it out of my system. To share that part of my life with a significant other (which would be inevitable if they were into that kind of thing too) would be to invade the one part of my life that I like to keep just for me. Jazz I’ll share, love of the outdoors I’ll share, even my deepest feelings I’ll share, but the contents of my text editor is just between me and the screen on which I’m viewing it. It sounds crazy I know, but sometimes my work in the computing world is the only thing that keeps me sane.

Matt’s point was that to date a techie would mean them not getting bored when you talked to them about your joy at getting a program working or your latest project, but my view is that with a whole world out there full of discussion topics and common ground, why does talking about technical stuff matter with your significant other, in fact, surely having a break from the screen and it’s contents is just what the average techie needs. Nope, I’m sticking with my unwritten rule – I wouldn’t date a techie.

For some time now I’ve been resisting blogging about this for fear that my somewhat synical attitude to this kind of thing was just getting in the way, but after reading a few posts on the BBCs have your say I realise that I’m not alone in this, far from it, so I’m going to rock the boat a little bit.

The bottom line is I think that the law and society as a whole has far too soft a touch when it comes to dealing with yob culture and kids on the street that just don’t know how to behave. I really feel for the people who have been posting in have your say; they see a problem, have the presence of mind to tackle it but receive no support from the law. It has to stop.

Kids soon realise that if they lose out due to bad behaviour they shouldn’t misbehave. The thing is what disincentives do we have today? School teachers can’t even yell at misbehaving pupils anymore – there are laws against it that cause teachers to go through enquiries and be threatened with losing their jobs, members of the public who intervene when youths are causing trouble either risk being beaten up or stabbed by the youths in question, or picked up by the police later with a charge of assult on the basis of the say-so of a youth who cannot be charged under law with the vandalism they have just committed. So paying a home visit we hope that perhaps the parents can help, well no, the law stops that too. Smacking children has been banned and parents are threatened with social services by their own children. Even the police are reluctant to tackle youth crime because convictions are rare due to the age of many youth gangs.

We need to move away from the books of law and out onto the street to tackle this problem. Police need to be given the rights to stop paper pushing and deal directly with the issue, being given a ride in a police car isn’t enough, a clip round the ear is what these kids need to bring them into line. Parents need their rights back. While I accept that child abuse does go on and its shocking and needs to be dealt with, there is a huge difference between the good discipline of out of control teenagers and abuse. We need to ensure parents have the rights and are given the confidence by the police and the law to tackle the problem of yob culture directly – in the home. Then we have members of the public. It shouldn’t be their responsibility to approach youths causing trouble, but if they choose to they should be in the right under the law. It’s insane to charge a resident with asault on a youth when that youth is a part of a gang vandalising property all night every night – it’s common sense to see whos in the wrong here.

The police and the law need to put things into perspective. The resident who tries to stop yobs vandalising their car is not the criminal, the yobs are. This needs to be a clear point of law and one on which the power is put back into the hands of the victims of this kind of crime. The time has come for the police to stop reaching for the pen and get out onto the street. Its the only way we’re going to get back the kind of local communities we want to live in rather than the lunacy we have to put up with now.

Over the summer the Leeds student union main shop had a few changes made to it, mainly where shelves were positioned and where this tills were. The problem is that this shift around has caused vast increases in the length of queues in the shop. At peak time at lunch it can now take nearly 15 minutes between joining the queue to pay and leaving the shop. The length of the queue is so severe that it prevents you getting to some of the shelves because the queue is snaking between them. Annoyingly the most frequent set of shelves to be encroached on by the queue are the sandwich shelves and this causes a huge bottleneck.

I miss the days when getting a sandwich and a newspaper in the union was a quick 5 minute job and I’m sure many other students feel the same. Bring back the old design!

This is just a quick rant really. Normally sites have more uptime than downtime, especially small ones with not much traffic. Why is it then that the Xilo forum is almost always not available for one reason or another? In the last 2 months it has literally had almost 2/3 downtime. Thankfully their actual customer servers are superb on uptime, but not having the forum for most of the time is really starting to get on my nerves.

VBulletin is one of the best paid for forum systems out there. Why do they have so many problems with it? I’d have less problems with an out of date phpbb install on a home server with all its ports open and some trojans on board. Sort it out folks.

Update: The Xilo forums are now up 99.9% of the time so it seems like these issues were just teething troubles. A good community of helpful people has now built up on the forums so they are well worth a look.

Matt has already blogged about this and pretty much said everything I wanted to say on the subject, but if you haven’t read the post yet, pop on over and read about it now 😉

Ok, so today in my business lecture we focused on the importance of communication and understanding the role of personalities in the workplace. In the seminar afterwards we had to do a little activity aimed at allowing us to discover the roots of some of our personal traits and preferences; essentially what fundamental things cause us to act and respond in a certain way in given situations.

Get to the point I hear you say! Well, the point is that to do this we were asked to write a short story about something we did yesterday which we would then pull apart and analyse to achieve the above. I found myself sitting there with pen over paper wondering what on earth I could write. Then I suddenly realised that this was extremely odd; I blog and never have any trouble coming up with content or writing about things I have done so why then when asked to essentially write a paper blog entry was I unable to think of a single word? It would appear that writing in the same style of an electronic blog but on a piece of paper is actually much harder than its computer counterpart.

I’m not going to spend ages dwelling on possible reasons but if anyone has any ideas I’d be interested hear about them 🙂

Recently I’ve had a few discussions with friends which have had a leaning towards life and decision making, future plans etc. It was with interest then that this morning in my BBC news feed I saw an article on a statistical survey that seems to indicate that despite what main stream media seem to indicate, people do actually want to get married and settle down earlier. You can read the article here.

I find this interesting because every day we are seeing peoples lives changing focus. Once the focus was on settling down, starting a family and finding stability in your life, now that focus has very much shifted onto further study, career prospects and other such bits and pieces. The reason I found the article interesting though is not because we might be getting a leaning one way or the other as a society, or indeed because I want to blow a trumpet one way or the other but its that despite what we are told by media, careers advisors, financial advisors and even our teachers when we leave school, people still have and idea in their own head about what they want, and are holding onto it and looking to achieve it.

Speaking to students on a university campus, even those of us who have been there are while, reveals little information on what their aspirations are when it comes to their personal life and yet, it would certainly seem anyway, most have given it some quite serious thought. So when a student tells you they don’t want to settle down yet, it might just be because they can’t see themselves meeting the right person yet, not because they actually don’t want to. Obviously you will find some exceptions to the rule, but in a world where the career focus amongst the young is increasingly strong its certainly food for thought anyway. It seems it might be time for those folk who are saying that the young aren’t grounded and have a fear of commitment to try thinking again.

I think all of us could benefit by reading this article on Trickle Theory. Don’t be put off by the name; its an article that shows you how to get over the mental leap that is getting started on and feeling positive about a task which, at the outset, seems impossible. Also offered is some advice on how to cope with very large but boring tasks.