Kat's blog

February 2009

I know, I know. I'm months behind in my blogs. I'm sorry everyone! Life is more then a bit manic at the moment so I'm going to put 2 months in 1 stupidly long blog while I sit with a cup of tea and eat birthday cake (I actually started writing this on the train at the start of April but that's an April story!). If I can remember anything. My phone is my diary so at least I have notes of what each meeting was on there. Or meetings I wrote down anyway.

So back to Feb. My diary tells me in Feb I had Reading Week at Uni. Why can't I remember that at all?! A note for any future Uni students reading this - reading week (sadly) does not equal a week off. It may look like a holiday on paper with no classes but especially in the final year, it's just a welcome week to work with no distractions of having to get yourself to lectures as it begins to dawn on you just how little time you have to do everything.

There's not a lot to say really as I spent most of my time working on the most annoying piece of coursework to date. It involved building a CD store (with working searches, content management system, checkout and the like) using PHP and MySQL (that's a type of web code and database code for the non-techy types). Now, I'd never used PHP or done much database work (nevermind in MySQL) in my life so suddenly getting a month to build an entire website using them came as a shock to the system. I lost track entirely of the number of hours (and "days off") I spent sat in the computer labs with my friends pleading for their help with concepts they somehow grasped much better then me! Why oh why did I think that would be a good optional module? On the plus side, I now understand some of it and if I managed to copy/paste and edit the right bit of scripts think I might be able to build a functioning basic PHP website on my own. "Think" being the key word. I'm planning on testing that theory out on the division website once I finish Uni.

I did take a break one afternoon to show a fellow SS member around the Uni as she's a potential student there. It was only a quick Guided tour (which included such highlights as "that's the best place to get binding done", "they do really nice bacon butties", "ohh that's where all the cute men sit! Oh, and they have proper sized cups of tea that are cheap too", "look, this is a shortcut most people don't know about" and such other useful facts. Stuff you need to know when moving to Uni!

I'm ashamed to say I can't really remember what the Rangers or Guides did during Feb. I know I started the Plan UK Changing the World project with the Rangers which was interesting but I can't remember if it was still Feb when we planned on doing some cup painting. We have some cheap white mugs we bought from a supermarket and the idea was to decorate them (because we all love a bit of craft every now and then and it gives us more of a chance to chat while doing it!) but when we got to the meeting place and after a thorough search of the meeting place couldn't find any of the paint brushes. We concluded the Guides must have eaten them. They're like that.