Normal service resumed

So, like I said, things seem better now. The world seemed a better place after an Empire pizza and the consumption of a few biscuits. And I've completed another song, but ModArchive haven't updated in fully one month now. In addition, ModPlug has been offline for a few days. This is quite worrying.

After a slight panic about the requirements specification, with OpenOffice suddenly deciding that it was 14 pages long instead of 12, it was handed in, and Alan the Dearle led the junior honours class around the Jack Cole building.

The first thing that strikes you as you go in is that the layout of the walls is slightly akin to something you'd only expect to see in Wonka's Chocolate Factory. The inner doors at the entrance are at about a thirty degree angle to the outer doors, and inside, one wall is at 90 degrees to one of the doors and the other is at 90 degrees to the other. It's as if the architect used the wrong kind of set square when designing the layout, and the effect is quite disorienting. And the pattern on the entrance floor, immortalised forever, the result of the competition that ran last year, is... a squiggle. A black line that meanders around the corridor. It does have a proper name, and is something to do with compression algorithms, but that doesn't stop it being wholly unimpressive. And the builders even got bits of the pattern wrong.

Moving further in to the building it calms down a bit, but still looks rather daunting with the ghostly blue lights in the walls. It's all very clean and futuristic, with room numbers that start at 0 and look like version numbers. The honours labs have a mobile wall in between them, which can be pulled out in sections using a rail on the ceiling. That'll probably be broken within the first week of moving in.

The best bit, though, is that there are no light switches in the labs. Instead there are little computer terminals on the walls from which you can control the light intensity, frequency, I don't know. Whatever it does, it's the most hilariously over-the-top thing that I've ever seen.

After that I made a quick trip in to town to get the last of the things I needed for America, then visited the Union, where I found Steveo and Duncan, who was busily placing an eBay bid on someone's soul. Steveo's getting pretty good at DDR very quickly - it's quite frightening.

The next time I'll update this I'll most likely be in America (or at an airport terminal in Amsterdam, hammering at a metal keyboard in a futile fashion). Have a good Reading Week. And if anyone recognises the number 020409-140 and has any idea why I might have written it on a note and stuck it to the side of my monitor, please let me know.