The gig was awesome. She is really good live. Her set was a little predictable, but with five albums now there are not that many variations she can make. The encore epitomised the predictability as she sent out dancers before she appeared, removing any hint of spontaneity. The music was good though and Avril commands the stage like few others. She may only be my age but she definitely is a star.

As the date approached, however, it became clear that the brewing would clash with my new job at O2. It turned out alright in the end though - the brewing would take place from 6am - 4pm and I would work from 5.30pm - 9.30pm at O2. You just have to love the seventeen hour days!

The 4.40am alarm went off on the morning of the brew and I rushed myself a breakfast and headed over to Kieran’s to pick him up ready to be in Elland, near Halifax, by 6am. Armed with a bottle of Kick and a change of clothes we arrived at E&S eager to start our day’s work and what a day’s work it turned out to be!

The brewer’s day is a long one. Often at work by 6am, lots of manual labour and careful scientific work, then hours of waiting around they don’t leave until well into the evening. It is highly rewarding though.

We started off by loading a quarter of a ton malt and wheat into a hopper ready to go into the mash ‘tun, this was then mixed with hot water to make the ‘mash’ which was then left to stand for an hour or so. This ‘wort’ was then drained off and piped into the copper, basically a giant kettle, and was then boiled for an hour. We added the hops and some other ingredients and set about clearing the masher. We had to shovel by hand the original quarter ton of malt (now much heavier as it was soaking wet) out of the mash tun for the cows to eat. We then hosed, scrubbed and polished the inside of the mash tun ready for the next brew. We managed a quick lunch before we had to start pumping the wort from the copper into the fermenter where we could add the yeast and start turning it into ale. When the copper was empty we set about cleaning it, removing all the hops and other debris. This is actually done by climbing into the copper and shovelling it out again.

A hard day’s work, but well worth it in every day. Roll on graduation day so I can taste it!

A big thank you to all at Elland Brewery for letting us play in their factory and also to fellow volunteers Kieran and Tony.

They now own my services! Yep, I now work for O2 part-time in their technical support department for the newly launched O2 Home Broadband. I am currently in training, which should last for another 6 weeks but it seems like a decent enough job. I am only first line support at the moment, basically a phone monkey, but hopefully some vacancies will open up in second line support soon enough. It is a good place top work in all honetsy, relaxed dress code, good perks and a good bunch of people.

Now, the reason I had to go out and get a job. I have a new house! We signed for it last week and move in around the 23rd June, just after Chris and I get back from the Secular COnference in Edinburgh. It is a really nice house with plenty of room, which is a bugger for wiring it up with networking cable. At the moment it is looking like a good couple of hundred metres!

I will upload some pics of the new house just as soon as I get them off my phone.

Congratulations to all the Computing lot too, they all graduated!

It is an excellent piece of kit, I have the 1TB version (2x 500GB drives) in white. It took less than two minutes to set up once I had thrown the MioNet software out the window and just plugged it directly into my switch on the house network. It is a tidy bit of kit, all the wires tuck away nicely and it comes with all the cables you would need - a power cable, a 1m Cat.5e cable and a USB connector to connect further external units to this one. My Windows network picked it up straight away and my linux machine recognises it (as you would expect).

It is a brilliant piece of kit and I would recommend it to anyone that wants any extra network storage!

I have two exams this week, which are the two hardest of the ones I’m taking, so not much opportunity for relaxing. However, our main houseparty is on Friday so that should be good. Just need to learn all the Avril lyrics now so that I am not outdone by the ten year olds at the gig!!

First things first, I am now the president of A-Soc, which means you can rest assured that there will be a plethora of A-Soc related psots appearing here and I will be linking to far more over at our offical website (shameless plugging for the win) and the new national site currently based at SecularPortal.com. The A-Soc AGM went really well, we now have a good sized committee with hopefully enough enthusiastic members that we can really grow up this year and develop into the society that we should be. Our aim is to be the third biggest, by numbers and attendence, faith and cultiral society by the end of 2009/2010 which is quite ambitious, but achievable I think if we work hard and putt the effort in.

Next on the list is moving house. After three very good years here, we are looking to move onwards and upwards - mainly down to the fact that Chris, Sarann and Michelle are graduating and want a better house with more space and generally something more resembling a real life house. We have got as far as generating a shortlist and narrowing down our search criteria, but I think the bulk of the work will be carried out after this round of exams (the last round of exams for our graduates). Watch this space!

Talking of exams, I have a few this time round. I managed a lot of revision whilst at home this week, but I’m still only 80% confidant. It seems the older I get the less good at winging exams I get. This is a little bit of a worry as I have always relied on my adaptability and ability to get to the answer without necessarily knowing the answer. I suppose it just means that I will have to really knuckle down this time round.

Chris, the retiring president, wrote this account of the week, well worth checking out. My version of the week follows here.

The week got off to a bad start, the tent was late and the generator needed fetching, and we were late starting. There were hiccups during the rest of the week, not least of them me being ill, but in general the week got better. A lot better.

We signed up a lot of people, didn’t lose too much money and our events ran smoothly for an A-Soc event but the ultimate success came from within the society. We finally got people involved, found leaders from within our ranks, something we have been sorely lacking the past two years.

We reached a lot of people during the week, I would estimate that we probably developed our brand to over a thousand staff, students and members of the public during the week and that we physically spoke to well over a hundred (excluding all night debate) and signed up a quarter of those that came into the tent. The membership numbers now rival our competitors and should hopefully mean we can start playing with the big boys in terms of politics and campaigning as well as securing some decent funding for the year!

The highlights for me included the CU debate, where again we out argued the opposition and should have come away with the victory had the crowd not been partisan, and the internal debate on the Flying Spaghetti Monster where the key flaws in religious argument were highlighted and exposed. In fact, most of the events went well - especially the evening ones. Once again Mike Lake was excellent and converted some fence sitters.

My personal highlight however, was the friends and friendships that I forged and strengthened during the week. The improved ties we developed with the CU and other societies. The fact that I think our message got across. Atheist Society is not about religion bashing or telling people they are wrong, but to offer an alternative that wasn’t available.

It was a success that didn’t kill us financially.

We finally pulled off an event that was worthy of the work that went into it.

Well done all!

My first reaction was to put these posts down to late night musings and a touch of emo behaviour that is particularly noticeable in the two individuals in question. I would even go so far as to dismiss them. However, on deeper contemplationa and a second reading I came to a different conclusion. There is an element of honesty here that is raw - I imagine that neither piece really outlines the true fears and hopes of the authors but there is definitelyan insight into something worth seeing. Both of the writers are close to me in some way and so there will always be something personal to see in these kind of pieces but I think there is something more here, a more basic human need. At the moment, the exact nature of that need eludes me, but these pieces - after initially falling into the crappy Facebook notes category - have touched me in a way I really wasn’t expecting.

I don’t know if it is the end of era type emotions that come with this time of year, especially as there definitely is going to be an end of an era when most of my university friends graduate and head off into the world of whatever they choose to do, or whether it is the general aging process that I seem to be feeling more and more these days but there is definitely a cloud of self analysis around a lot of people at the moment and I think it might end up being an important thing.

A full post will follow just as soon as I have shaken off this horrendous bout of tonsillitis!

Learning how things work brings such an enormous sense of satisfaction that I genuinely cannot understand people’s attitude of well if it works it works and if it doesn’t it doesn’t. I think that people who think like that are missing out on so much of life and its wonders. It is one of the main points I will take away from my university experience - we are expected to have that desire, that need to understand what we do and why we do it and how that impacts on our lives.

I think today’s experience has led me to want to carry on learning about web development and how I can go about improving this site and maybe making more.