Alex Harries's diary

This year's been a record-breaker for the Grad Ball - apparently (and I'm happy to be proven wrong on this...), the Grad Ball has never sold out before. Not ever.

So, for tickets to sell out in under two days isn't bad going by anybody's standards. Which just makes my next bit of non-news all the more likely to turn my hair entirely grey; this afternoon while playing on the decks, Boss ('Angry Ginge' - a term of endearment believe it or not...) saunters up and announces that I'm allowed to warm up for the Scratch Perverts at the Grad Ball "if I want to".

Honestly, I considered my reply for all of half a second... ;o)

So there's going to be a threesome of scruffy, unshaven chaps scrambling around behind the decks before the threesome of Scratch Perverts come on stage at your Grad Ball this year - Ben "Gonzo/Rane" West (I wish he'd make his mind up what he wants to call himself), Adrian "Professa" Testa, and myself (I'm still trying to come up with a better name than Exhale - suggestions on a £20 note as usual please...).

Along with Pure:FM dealing with the after-Pervert deck duties, this Grad Ball is looking better and better as we approach the day.

The only downside is that, unless I can get myself sacked between now and then, I'll have to work all day in the run up to the ball before I can go on the decks - exciting stuff, but being of a naturally lazy persuasion, I'm less than keen on doing anything even vaguely resembling effort. Still, you've got to take the lows with the highs... Or words to that effect.

As for UPSU.net, I'm trialling a basic mailer script as an extension to our news system which lets us add a basic form to any news article or web page asking for things like e-mail address, age, name, comment/suggesion, etc - fill it out, hit "send" and it (should) fire off an e-mail to us with the information you tell us. This is interesting for two reasons - it means we can quickly and easily ask for your feedback on a range of subjects - great for those of you who reckon we could do things better, or just differently - and it also means we can also tie some survey functionality into the site without sending you off to a massively complex survey tool when we only need to ask you a couple of questions.

I've also listed the various projects and work I've lined up for myself over the summer; finishing the blogs, the RSS system, updates to the galleries, "Ask UPSU a question", making page URLs more logical, tidying up the design of the forums, rebuilding the JobShop system, rewriting the search engine, and extending the NUS Registration system to handle the new NUS Extra and NUS Democracy cards, should see my workload pretty constant until... About 9pm on September 24th.

If anybody'd be so good as to send me a card for my birthday on September 5th, that would be lovely... :o)

Enough rambling for one day. I would have gone back and added a load of links but, to be honest, I'm sure you wouldn't be bothered about clicking them any more than I am about creating them in the first place - feel free to disagree, but it would just prove you're really bored, aren't you?