foolfillment: the blog

dotSCO - The Campaign for a .SCO Internet Domain

Sorry about the lack of content here recently, and the abrupt disappearance of the whole site over the last few days. I’ve been snowed under with work for my design course - it actually starts counting towards my degree from here on in so I’ve been putting more hours in.

I took the site down because I was approaching my limit for this month’s bandwidth - there have been a lot of photos viewed over on the caving club site, should all be resolved now because we’ve moved over to flickr.

I still have a presentation to prepare for Monday and I’ll be away to Derbyshire with the club so it’s more than likely ther’ll be another period of silence but I might take the time to prewrite some posts.

a good example of why flash can be ‘a bad thing’: Zaha Hadid

A short sessionon Materials and Processes, a little useful, good to have a chance to do some of the stuff I haven’t done since school.

Written far too long after the day, lots done, Tech and Soc a bit of a waste of time, just a chat really. Graphics was a while on measured perspective, then some time on design.

Another wasted day at Cardonald, really achieved very little. In metalwork we’re swapping over next week so any models will be left unfinished - which meant there was not much point doing much today. Woodwork took a long time to get started aswell. Oh well, tomorrow will be busy.

Education first thing, covering equal opportunities and inequalities in relation to gender, hurrah! To give you the just of it, girls are better than boys and that’s that. Live with it.
And the a short design meeting, who’s initial ideas are the best? I work in a different way to my partner, my ideas sheets are just filled with little scrappy sketches and lots of annotation, whereas hers are much more focussed. I’m not saying one way is better than the other but there is a definite difference in the sheets, which will be very stark in the the folio for anyone outside of the process.

Teaching Technology presentation next - Low tech in the classroom, excellent, got to look at NetOp sometime. Didn’t get chance at the time because we got collared by people wanting to see out ideas. We seem to be ahead of the rest of the class, but to be honest I feel as though we’re a long way behind where we should be, so I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.

Education and Assessment lecture got cancelled because her laptop broke or something, which left us with two hours to kill before the joyous event that is Understanding Energy. So off to the snooker hall in the GUU. I refuse to play, I’m far too bad at any game like that, but it killed the time quite well watching Craig get comprehensively beaten by Derrick.

And then Understanding Energy, I’ll say little. It was disappointing to see only 9 people turn up, but that wasn’t helped by the cancelled lecture earlier. The topic has the potential to be really involving but the way it is presented if rather disengaging, and the amount of lecture time compared to the number of credits doesn’t really work out in a way that makes you want to go all that often. Oh well, at least we were out before 5, gave me time to get to STA travel and book our flights to New Zealand!

I’m rubbish at regular updates, I thought that by promising a daily bit about Peru it would make me actually do it and for a while I was quite good, writing up a few days at a time and post dating them, I was even managing my PDF, but recently I’ve just lost the thread a bit with uni work and personal commitments.

I’ll rectify that tonight I hope.

As we arranged, or rather had arranged for us forcibly by our host, we got up pretty early and made our way to the hotel reception and waited for our bus - we were going down to the docks to start our boat tour. We were feeling a lot better by now and were ready to eat some tasty food, we bought a big bottle of water and some snickers bars (really expensive out there - Peruvians don’t seem to eat chocolate so it’s all imported, which is funny when you realise it’s one of the main producers of the coca plant). Unfortunately we left our water on the bus when we got out so we can’t have been that much better.

Once one the boat we got ourselves comfortable inside out of the sun which we knew would get too strong for us as the day went on, and besides a big group of Dutch people had already nabbed the best seats on the roof. A couple of hours later we arrived at the Floating Islands - home of the Uros people. These are small islands, artificially made out of the reeds that grow in the lake. Each island is home to about 8 families, the largest island is Uros island and is considered the ‘capital’ complete with an post office and international telephone. You can eat the reeds as well as build with them - they’re not full of flavour but do taste a little sweet and similar in texture to celery, maybe a little more chewy.

Next we went on towards the Bolivian border but stopped at Amantani, another island, this one more traditional in that it was solid ground and you could walk without wobbling. We stayed the night here with a host family, they seemed very friendly and not used to having visitors - groups usually stay at another village on the other side of the island - and having been performed to by their children (and the obligitory hat held out for money) we were taken off to the main square and then up to the top of the island where there are two temples. As usual these were relating to birth of the earth, Pachamama and Pachatata - Mother Earth and Father Earth. The sunset was superb as we were up there, but by the time we got back to the town it was pitch black and of course, whene else would my torch choose to break!

When we got back to the house we were brought dinner, mostly a vegetable and quinoa soup with some potatoes, yet another different type, this time they were sweet. I polished mine off then had Morven’s who was struggling again, feeling cold and with a bad stomache. Again it was probably mostly down to the altitude, muna tea helped a little. Muna is a native herb that tastes a little like mint in hot water and smelled quite nice too, eased breathing. We tried to go to the toilet before bed but it just wasn’t worth it, the less said about the smell there the better. We did take a photo of it in the morning though.

The next day we got up, had some breakfast and then got back on the boat, had a quick look around Tacquile - another island - but there wasn’t really much to do. By now we were growing tired of being ill all the time and not having anything to do when we were on the boat. It was a long time before we got back to Puno in horribly strong sun. We were grateful to be back at our hotel, even through our new room wasn’t as good as the last one. We again braved the outside world for dinner, Morven though stuck with a pizza while I tried some trout. It tasted delicious, but for the first time I had to make a few trips to the bathroom in the night. We spent the next day in Puno again, but without anything to do. All we did was wander round, at least we had a nice breakfast and we were able to eat it. The day went downhill from there though, everywere we got accosted by shoeshiners and people just asking for money. One boy though almost fooled us - he came up and fancied that we spoke english, eh couldn;t have been more than 6 but came out with ‘where are you from?’ and when we sai Britain he asked ‘What moeny do you have there?’ at which point we wised up and sent him on his way. With nothing to do we got very fed up, very bored, and couldn;t wait till the following day, when we could finally justify going to bed for the night we were very happy. We were on our way to Cusco the next day!

This post will cover the whole weekend actually, not just Friday.

Materials and Processes class, did some calculations on stress and strain, it’s good to know I can still do them. Then a little discussion about how we’re going to split the presentation up which is due in February sometime.

Weekend was mostly written off by M’s visiting father, but I did get some initial ideas drawn up on Monday, which was a relief as I had to have them done by Tuesday, also set out the PDS into a more readable form. and that was that. good eh?