Ok, this may seem a little strange, but I’ve got Capital Radio playing beside me, and there was an advert on for using condoms, and so I thought that I’d have a look at their website (as I said before, I’m still waiting on the nightbuses starting up). Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t mind hard hitting adverts. But taking the ‘sex lottery’ quiz to see whether I could have picked up an STD by guessing which woman I wanted to, ahem, fuck, was a bit of a waste of time. For a few reasons – firstly, out of 13 attempts, I apparently picked a woman with a genital disease 11 times. Which is a bit crazy, since 4 of them apparently had genital warts, although a quick bit of googling showed that the infection rate is around 4 percent. So although the NHS is trying to get a point across, it’s rather over-egging the pudding, and so loses the impact (and anyway, I’ll eat my hat, coat and muddy rugby shorts when I next have the choice of three woman to shag).

But absolutely unbelievably, I need to leave. Cause for the first time ever, I’ve been sprung by Security. I honestly can’t believe it. Damn. I didn’t think they even came up this far in the building. Time to go home, I guess.

Well, I guess I’m just a sucker for a ‘good deal’. It was another Bar Footsie night in the Union tonight, where most of the drinks’ prices are projected onto a convienient wall, and vary through the night, flucuating and crashing as if it were a real stockmarket (funnily enough, there was no inexorable slide towards a sensible price/earnings ratio, but now I’m just being a smartarse). Once again Dave Parry (our Union Finance Manager) was fascinated by the price fluctuations, since it gives him ‘good ideas’ as to what drinks are underpriced in the Union. Needless to say, the price of Lowenbrau is unlikely to rise, but I digress.

As an aside, you’ve really no idea how hard this is to type.

So I decided that, based on last term’s experience, I’ll have a nice sober evening. Although I’m generally fairly good at getting served, I struggle during the crashes, and am too tempted by just buying expensive beer due to cronic impatience. So all was going well, until the point that I won (ably abeited by Mona) the paper aeroplane competition – with a helicopter. You’ve no idea how much that makes me chuckle. Nevertheless, all of a sudden there were lots of things that seems a ‘good deal’, since I could get served whenever I felt like it – courtesy of The Hat. And the idea of having a vaguely sober night (since I got pissed on Tuesday {hi Ginny, hi DramSoc}, and on Wednesday {hi Gardeners}, and am planning on getting pissed Friday and Saturday {hi Dan and hi Nia respectively}) went straight out the window.

As an aside, I think I’ve used the delete key twice for every character typed here.

So now I’m trying to waste away the forty five minutes between the number 49 bus finishing and the N207 starting, by typing this in the DramSoc storeroom. Which doubles as my own personal cloakroom when I feel the need (and when I have the keys to the building). Sad really, if you think about it. I try not to.

So the question on everybody’s lips (well, perhaps not quite everyone) is whether or not ‘Prince Albert’ was being satirical with this Live! article. A few people (including Sam and Someone Else) seem to have taken it at face value – that some insanely arrogant prick really thinks this kind of thing (fair enough, since arrogance is a known problem round here). Others responded to the article congratulating the author on a well made attempt to cause such a reaction – known around the web as a troll posting. Myself, I’m not too sure which is the case. I’ve a feeling that the author will be thinking that he was being satirical (or will be thinking that he’s being ironic, but only if he doesn’t know what ironic means), yet I suspect that deep down he actually believes this kind of thing. Perhaps not to the same extreme as he has written – when someone I know recently said "Oh, just bomb them all, they all look the same to me" (free pint to the first to guess who was talking about Iraq), he was only joking – but that doesn’t mean he’s a holier-than-thou foreigner hugger.

I’d like to take this opportunity to clear up a few misconceptions about what went on at Ed’s party last night. Namely;

• I did not get very, very drunk
• I did not drink a whole load of wine, a whole load of (greenish) vodka, and some beer for extra measure
• I did not fight with the majority of my flatmates present
• I did not spout crap all night
• I did not have really, really geeky conversations about the information density of DNA
• I did not redecorate Putney high street on the way home
• I did not take five different night bus routes to get myself home
• I did not wish death upon the bird that was twittering outside my window this morning
• I did not wake up with a really, really sore head

So there.

I saw another Australian road safety commercials last night on Tarrant on TV, and unfortunately haven’t been able to track it down online to link to it. The Australians have a no-holds-barred attitude when it comes to making harrowing adverts – just watching this one had me on the verge of tears, even though I knew perfectly well that it was just actors. Anything that you think is harrowing on British TV just doesn’t measure up to the Australians. Instead of the usual shakey cam, quick cut away from an impending accident or a fade to the take-home message, this advert showed a car slamming into a flat-bed truck, killing the drivers fiancé and leaving him screaming in agony; cutting to girl’s father talking about never forgetting about picking his daughters coffin, and then back to paramedics dragging the dead woman out of the car while the driver was screaming in physical and emotional agony – but I can’t do the advert justice by describing it here. This was the second Australian road safety advert I’ve seen, the first showed five people being burnt alive in an overturned car, again pretty harrowing.

I saw on the news last week that there are actors in cinemas in London involved in a new campain. During the adverts at the start of the film, an ‘usher’ comes in and tells a ‘member of the audience’ (both actors) that her husband has been killed in a car crash – the audience only find out afterwards that it is staged. One member of the public’s reaction was that they shouldn’t do this kind of thing – she was upset since this was every person’s nightmare to hear that a loved one has died in a road accident. Yet there are still too many people speeding on the roads and drink driving (one of my friends is currently banned for being twice the limit), and neither threats of taking away your license or going to jail seem to deter enough people to prevent the thousands of deaths per year on the roads. So I’m definitely in favour of the hard-hitting style; make these adverts as harrowing as you like, and maybe some more people will take notice.

Well, I was trying my best today to piss some people off, athough they probably misinterpreted me when I walked into a room full of sabbaticals and student officers watching a live broadcast from the House of Commons. Realising what our esteemed leader (Mr Blair, that is) was talking about, I declared loudly "Oh, it’s all this tuition fee bollocks again", and walked back out. Now what I didn’t make clear was that I think the issue of tution fees is very important, but that I think the Union are doing a fantastic job of cocking up our policy.

The primary channel for informing the student body has been a marvelous set of "press releases". From the overly hurried Student Fees – Union’s Response (response to what exactly? I know the answer, but that’s not a good press release), moving on through the unanimous rejection of tuition fees, through a wonderful MORI poll (given the choice of certain death or a kick in the teeth, 70% of the UK population asked for dental attention), we finally (if only) come to the latest report – Student Reaction to Higher Education White Paper. I saw them drafting this press release, and I think that they must have got confused – surely 28 bullet points, and no paragraphs, would be the draft itself?

I could compare some of the bullet points with the quote by Sen – I got the feeling of déjà vu, but at least Sen used the word ‘compromise’, whereas the official press release uses the phrase ‘dumb down’. I know the release is allegedly written by Sen, but nothing here happens without a committee sticking their oar in, so I’ll not blame the hideous choice of phrase on him alone. The graduate employment section is fabulous – exactly how would I not benefit the UK by working in the City?

I was there when the Union decided that they were absolutely opposed to graduate taxes, and the solution to the funding crises in Higher Education was to convert universities into vocational colleges but keep the same HE budget (and then the solution to the funding crises in Further Education would be…), so what has happened? Instead of continuing the blanket opposition, they are scrabbling around with ideas like you don’t have to pay graduate tax until you earn more than the national average, which, seeing as some people earn an awful lot of money, means that you won’t have to pay for your tuition until you earn more than most people. Huh? Perhaps, as I might have mentioned already, the graduate tax policy that the Union decided on wasn’t thought through properly.

Well, at least some people will be pretty pleased with what the Union has achieved. The students involved obviously will be congratulating each other, but I would reckon that Downing Street will be quite happy with our press release too. I wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it, if I was a government official reading it over and working out a game plan.

And don’t, whatever you do, get me started on the Tuition Fees Working Group Mantra that was attached to Sen’s door for the past few weeks.

I might be causing a bit of controversy here (so it’s just as well nobody reads this) when I say that I’m quite content to see the rebranding going on at Imperial. Saying that I am happy is a different matter (nobody paid me millions to do it, unfortunately), but in contrast to a commonly held attitude among the more vocal of Imperial students, I don’t have much to gripe about.

The name change is fairly reasonable. It’s now "Imperial College London", with the preferred shortened version as simply "Imperial", whereas it used to be either "IC", or "Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine". Or, if you want to keep track of the newest ventures in what is supposed to be a university soley for science and technology, it could have been called "Imperial College of Science, Technology, Medical Sciences, Agriculture Sciences, Business Sciences and Engineering Sciences", or something similar. So long as people don’t use "ICL", or start messing around with punctuation (what a bunch of dipsticks, by the way), then I’ll be fine with it.

As for the visual branding, I didn’t have that much of an issue with the old colours, but I didn’t particularly like the college logo (a coat of arms of some sort). Too old fashioned, too fiddly for webpages and rugby shirts, and should have been kept as a coat of arms or crest, instead of being used as the day to day logo of the University. (For those of you not at Imperial, we’re the second best university in Britain, but like to confuse all and sundry by calling ourselves a college, when we aren’t.) Unfortunately, the new brand doesn’t have a logo at all, which is highly unusual. We really need something for rugby shirts and memorabilia, where just writing "Imperial College London", in Arial, would look a bit lame.

Signage : if people have any complaints about putting ‘sticky backed plastic’ posters over the old signs, then I’m open to suggestions about a better way of doing it. Waiting until each sign needs replacing could take decades and would make the rebranding awfully patchy, replacing every sign immediately would cost thousands. Surely covering over the old signs is a good compromise (and it looks fine to me).

I’m not that bothered about the changes from ic.ac.uk to imperial.ac.uk, since it’ll hopefully stop the geeky ick-ack-uck way of saying things – it’s really geeky, since it’s only if you already recognise it that you know what it means. For anyone outside the academic community, then the new one will be easier to remember, since it has more meaning to them. Clapping yourself on the back for spotting obscure occurences of the old form (like in the IC directory) is fairly lame, but it seems that some people think it makes them far better than whoever is trying to organise the huge changeover. Grow up, kiddy-winkles.

On an aside, this is the longest ever weblog entry – I started writing it five hours ago, but got bored half way through, wandered off, and I’ve just finished it now since I’m going to bed. Sweet dreams.

I found a leaflet about the forthcoming congestion charge for taking your car into central London, which starts next month. I think it should be renamed to a £5 stupidity tax, but that’s not really very politically correct. There’s already been threats that vigilante car-lovers will be taking to the streets to try and destroy the cameras that read your registration number. I hope that if they do, they get a right good beating up from the police. But again, not very politically correct.

Basically, what gets on my nerves are the complaints about public transport in London. It’s obviously not perfect, but trust me, if you’ve every tried living out in the west of Scotland, the transport system in London is pretty darned impressive. On Monday, I paid £8.50 for my first bus pass (I’m bored with walking in and out of college) which gets me all zones, unlimited journeys, all services and operators, twenty four hours a day (and the buses do run all night, every night) for seven days. Which is rather good value. The down side is that the buses aren’t particularly fast – although at peak times the nearest bus stop has three routes, two of which have buses at 4 minute intervals (so around 1-2 minutes between buses!), it’s not significantly quicker than walking. That’s because there’s so many cars, each with one or two people in them, crawling along, parking in bus lanes and clogging up the roundabouts. If there were no cars, the buses would go much faster, and would therefore be seriously good. It’s not like the drivers are a major proportion of commuters – less than 10%. Get rid of them, and the 30% of commuters on the buses would end up with a gold plated service, and we’d even let former car drivers come and join us, for much less than they currently pay.

I sincerely hope that the £5 congestion charge is the start of a slippery slope of increasing charges and increasing zone areas, ending up with a few stubborn drivers entirely subsidising the public transport for the rest of us. That would be sweet.

After having stuffed up rotating the server logs earlier this afternoon, I was having a look at the new one to make sure it was working properly, only to find that the webserver itself was requesting pages every few seconds, and in fact, one page in particular. Then I remembered that Sam was pestering me last night about setting up an RSS feed so that he can put links to my weblog on his pages. I said I couldn’t be bothered, so now he’s parsing the archive page every single time anyone looks at any webpage on his site. So it’s just as well that UKShells internal traffic doesn’t get added to my bandwidth, although I might have to rotate my logs more often if he keeps this up…

There’s a few boring website related things planned for the next time I get a chance. I’ll be putting navigation links into the archive pages, so that you can easily read back an forward through them. The front page might get an overhall, and I’ve also been looking at accessibility thanks to Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility guide. I’d been using the abbreviation tag <abbr> to mark up all the abbreviations that I use, but found out that Internet Explorer will only recognise the acronym tag (every other browser recognises both). So rather than splitting hairs over the difference between the two, I’ve changed them all for the underprivileged IE users.

Finally, before I head off to a lecture, a quick hello to another fellow webloger out there. I still haven’t figured out which particular IC Student is responsible for this set of rantings. Honest.

So, I think that just about covers it for the ‘broad brush stroke’ approach to the problems in the Union. There are, however, one or two things that I would like to point out before I move on.

I seem to constantly harp on about my disciplinary, leaving myself open to accusations of a lack of perspective. I want to make it clear that I don’t think it was particularly important in the great scheme of things, but it unfortunately served to highlight a number of flaws in the Union processes. In addition, since I was actually there, I can easily use it to illustrate the points that I’m trying to make; I’m always concerned about just making sweeping accusations with no examples, since that just sounds like unhelpful griping. So it’s not quite as important to me as it can sometimes sound.

What do I want to come from this? I don’t want to go on some sort of crusade, I don’t want anyone else to have to either. What I would like is for some serious consideration to be given to the points that I’ve been making, which will hopefully make the Union a better place in the future. And that’s an important point – I don’t want to dwell on past mistakes, but for the Union to learn from those mistakes, and make sure that the next decision, meeting or discussion is carried out that little bit better.

Finally, I don’t want to be seen as over critical of the way the Union is run. I’ve spent the last few days doing nothing but give heavy criticisms, but there’s plenty to do with the Union that is done properly and fairly. There are some areas that need some work though, and I’ve tried to explain each in turn, in the hope that some out there is willing to listen.