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Last night (well, Wednesday night, it’s 2am) was Reg’s birthday night out. We started up at Butler — without Reg, I might add — before moving along the hill and then down to Varsity for a bit of drinking and table dancing (Ste, Jon) and finally Love Shack. A select few had gone to the effort of making tank tops (beaters, if you will) with some excellent pictures of Reg and themselves… see the pictures for examples!

I must say I was impressed with Ste and Jon’s acoustic stuff in Mary’s, as we’d been drinking for a couple of hours then, and I know that when I have even the odd drink my guitar-playing skills end up at sausage-finger level!

View pictures of the evening

Andy and Jay finished their Engineering project yesterday. And Lara got her Physics project in. And I did half her Physics project. So we were all out to celebrate!

A few Bailey bars, we didn’t even make it to Cuth’s though — finished at 24’s with one of the most annoying train-station games… Thanks to Andy and Jay!

And then… six quid to get to get into Planet of Sound! Six quid!

Good night though! Must say there was a bit of cheating around the pool table, with a few too many distractions from Aimee…

View pictures of the evening

I have just got back from my trip to Val Thorens with Collingwood College Skiing & Snowboarding Club. It was great! The snow was much better than Val d’Isère, at least for the first part of the week. The last couple of days weren’t so good, but I missed out on the penultimate day so that was all right!

The reason that I missed out on a day was that we found an amazing closed red run that had the best powder — and late on one day, when the light was low and flat, I hit an invisible kicker and flew unsuspecting to land on my coccyx on a rock. Ouch! I then had to crawl out of the bowl I’d just landed in…

Apart for one minor injury, the holiday was brilliant, the après-ski was great if a little expensive, and the accommodation was indeed very accommodating!

View pictures of the trip

Happy Christmas!

Now that Christmas has arrived, I can released this project onto the Media Network. I was waiting so that my parents wouldn’t get a sneak preview of their present!

There is more information on the project page, but basically I converted an old laptop into a digital picture frame and gave it to my parents as a Christmas present. It connects to our network drive and shows all of my parent’s pictures in a slide show. I’m quite happy with the finished product!

You can also view pictures of the project.

Heavy night…

The idea was to hit every college bar, including Stockton, and despite a few closures we made it! We headed over to Stockton in the afternoon and after wandering around for a while we found the bar — closed! It made it all the funnier that Mark had needed the toilet since Durham, and we doubled back on ourselves whilst finding the place… We went to a pub called the Dubliner instead, which was showing the match on what seemed to be Arabian Sky.

We got the bus back and decided never to return to Stockton again — anyone who’s thinking of doing a full college bar crawl, just have an extra drink in Durham! It’s not worth the time and effort!

Before we got going around the college bars, there was time for food (and, of course, drink) in the DSU. Good food, but not so great at getting the orders right? Oh well, on to Hild Bede for a quick shot, then Castle and tripling up in 24’s (since both Hatfield and Chad’s were shut).

Then it was time for John’s, Cuth’s, and then on to the hill, not without the obligatory fence jumping! Glad to see I can still make it!

My recollection of the order of the hill bars is as hazy as usual, but it started with Mary’s and ended with Trev’s, and had some bars in the middle. It was rather strange to see Alan and Pauline up at the burger van outside Butler!

A return to the DSU, then, to finish off an awesome night! A couple of facts from Nick: we had 30 units comprising 2500 calories, and were 150% over the binge drinking limit!

View pictures of the bar crawl

I finally managed to make the Leap of Faith!

I tried it on Friday, and managed to touch the pocket, something I’d never thought possible until that moment! So today, I just went for it, and managed to keep hold before finishing the route.

As is the way with these things, the video of the second attempt wasn’t half as smooth as the first, but you can still get an idea. On that videos page is another pockets route that had evaded me since first year, and after that I was so pleased with myself that I decided to mess around (video 3)!

View pictures of the day

Damn server down-time. Here’s the reason:

It wasn’t me downloading too much stuff such that all the disk space was used up, STOP SPREADING LIES!

Jon Powell

Hehe.

Have been back from the Cotswolds for a couple of days now. To be honest, IMHO once you’ve seen one market town you’ve seen them all, so I was surprised at how enjoyable the weekend was. I was really surprised to find so many pubs with Wi-Fi access points!

On the one rainy day, we visited the Cotswold Motor Museum in the picturesque village of Bourton-on-the-Water, the home of the wonderful Brum. Apparently Bourton also has a model village of itself, and within that is a model village of itself, which contains — I’m not sure when it stops exactly, but I wish I’d seen it!

View pictures of the holiday

We did the Angel quiz last night, and whilst we were convinced of our total failure, we came only four points from the winning team. Maybe with a little more practice…

What a night…

“Night of Mayhem” was an accurate description for the event on Facebook (mixed feelings about the changes by the way). It started off slow — in fact, I started on my own in Wetherspoons! After that it started to grow, with Jay, Tex, Joe and Reg finding me in there, followed by a trip to The Ship and The Angel, where we found Hannah and Keasey.

This was followed by a trip up to Walkabout, and some got food whilst Reg and I walked out to find Caitlin and Katie, who managed to find their own way to Walkabout!

Jenna, Joe, Holmes, Olly and Helen (having been driven in by my Dad) arrived before we headed over Carpe Diem for some unbelievably dire pool-playing on my part.

Now it becomes a bit hazy.

From Carpe Diem, we moved on to Varsity, where there don’t seem to be any pictures. Varsity was quickly followed by Oceana to finish the night. I have no idea what the drink was that people bought me, but it was fun to drink! Thanks guys!

On the way home, another taxi driver tried to mess everyone around — I think I’m seeing some kind of pattern here… Thankfully, no messing around was completed, but we did have to walk back from the other side of Scholes!

Thanks again for a wicked night!

View pictures of the evening

So, Brown’s is a posh place, eh?

Chucky would disagree! Here’s me turning up in shirt and tie (alluding to the olden days) when I spy Chucky at the other side of the restaurant in a sweatshirt and jeans. He might as well be mocking my attire, but everyone knows that’s simply not possible…

Browns is followed by many a drink at Revolution, before finding Cat and Kat, and completing my night of meeting legends by complete surprise! Having apologised profusely to Cat because I thought I wouldn’t see her before she jetted off to sunny Russia, I manage to pick her out in a crowd in Revolution!

And to finish the evening, the taxi driver completely failed to screw us over — felt very happy about that!

View pictures of the evening

I got back from Leeds Festival last night. I would have made a separate post about the Lake District trip, but I pretty much went straight to the festival after that!

The Lake District was mostly dry and warm, except for a bit of rain — oh, and when I went swimming from the lakeside!

We found some quality watering holes in Bowness-on-Windermere, including Churchill’s and The Old John Peel Inn. Food and drink were as expensive as to be expected in them though!

We even managed to get in a bit of crazy golf on the second day, as well as a swim in the marina’s indoor swimming pool. It was a lot warmer than the lake!

View pictures of the Lake District

We got back and I went straight to Tex’s, and a rainy evening meant the scheduled barbecue was moved into the garage. Backed up the car for a bit of quality music!

And on to Leeds Festival. After a long walk in from the road to avoid the queues, we pitched up among everyone else and set about getting with the festival atmosphere with, erm, brie and crackers. Good idea Olly!

All in all we saw about thirty bands, I haven’t yet worked out the exact number, but I’m working on finding all the set lists and putting together my virtual festival.

Both phone and camera batteries gave up the ghost early on in the weekend, so some of the pictures were taken on disposable cameras. We shall have to see how those come out.

View pictures of the festival

A quality few days then!