Alex Harries's diary

It's half one in the morning, and I'm standing in the glare of a spotlight so bright, people watching me should be able to tell what I had for breakfast (a healthy sandwich, by the way. Who needs cereal?). In front of me, four boys and four girls are downing pints in a battle of the sexes boat race, and to my left, DJ Mark and Sidekick (sorry, don't know his name) are egging them on.

Yes, I'm back playing ents monkey - doing a bit of sound engineering/light operating/DJing/whatever-it-takes-to-make-it-work - for one night only.

Back to the present and, of course, responsible licensing being what it is - and for added comedy value - the teams are downing pints of non-alcoholic soda water - useful as a mixer in your vodka and soda, and highly effective at cleaning bars at the end of a particularly messy night. Oh, and it's low in calories... ;o)

Looking out over the crowd, I realise this is a variation of a scene I've probably witnessed almost 200 times since I've worked in the Union to help pay my way through my degree. It's also one of the last times I'll be seeing it as a student, with the end of the year fast approaching, and I can't help feeling a tiny bit of nostalgia. Granted, being up on stage is just a bit isolated sometimes, but only if you stop long enough to worry about it, and given the in-built self-destruct mechanisms of the kit in use, there's always something to be fixed, bodged, gaffer-taped or knitted back together.

Next year, while I'm playing Sabb and upsetting more people than I ever though possible (one of my best in-built abilities is winding people up, usually unintentionally), I hope I'll have a chance to do some shifts on ents and maybe even the bar because they're both two of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever worked, even if they won't make me rich, and even if I actually have to do work. If I do work some shifts, it'll also be a good opportunity to meet the students who pay my wages as a Sabb face-to-face, even if they just want to hurl abuse at me. ;o) To give them their due, the bar and ents staff who work at the Union do a bloody good - and a very hard - job: I never slept better than I did after a shift on the Lux bar in my first year.

I'm looking forward to the end of the year - and my degree - for many reasons, but a long summer without a Union full of fun-loving students is going to be pretty boring. Luckily, PWs DJ Alistair Ritchie has just the solution - join up, you know you want to...

/al

p.s. The boys won the boat race, although I think more soda water ended up on the floor than in their mouths... 

I was interested to read that the use of the so-called "Date Rape" drugs is a lot less widespread than the hype would suggest, with the ACPO study suggesting that the biggest cause of alleged sexual assaults being alcohol.

I'm the last person to blow the Union's trumpet, but I think it's fair to say that UPSU and UPEL have gone - and hopefully always will go -  out of their collective ways to avoid promotion of binge drinking, and to ensure people are looked after if they get themselves into drink- or drug-related trouble while they're at the Union or at a Union-run event.

Right, enough of the sycophantic behaviour. Tomorrow I'll mainly be trying to get some Pugwash done...

(The tooth is out. I'll refrain from posting the picture of the remains since there's little point apart from the "ewww" factor which you could probably find easily enough elsewhere on the 'net...!)

It's Friday night. It's 6pm. Somewhere in the Balearics, Pete Tong is going out to the world live on air, playing - almost certainly - to an adoring crowd of sun-kissed Ibiza clubbers gearing up for possibly their biggest Friday night out of the year. It reminds me of something I wrote last summer, and I reckon it's almost time for me to pop my Ibiza cherry - anyone want to tag along? (I'll need someone to carry my records... ;o) ).

Meanwhile, back in reality (or at least, "Portsmouth-without-the-students"), I'm sitting in the Union preparing to babysit a sound system for The Listening Company (you may not know the name, but you've probably dealt with them on the 'phone at some point in your life, whether you like it or not...!) while six hundred-or-so Italian summer language school kids get fed and watered by our catering bods, upstairs in Lux.

Although I can't say I enjoy the music - apparently it's going to be a fairly rocky night - I do enjoy the babysitting work I do with UPSU Ents. Usually I work the Friday night babysit in Lux and CO2, which for the last year or so has also seen me on the decks for a brief spell most nights (my apologies to anyone unfortunate enough to have had to listen to me playing on abusing the soundsystem on a Friday night - who'dathunk I've been bedroom DJing since I was fifteen, a good 7 years ago. And yup, I'm really that old mature .... no, I definitely meant old).

Sadly, for me at least, I don't know whether I'll be able to play in the Union at all next year, as the line-up on most nights is being "tweaked" (as happens every year). I don't know if anything is changing or not, but the bosses will naturally be taking an ever closer look at how things are run on the nights to make sure things are at their best, and naturally having a relatively unknown person behind the decks like myself might not exactly thrill them to bits. I don't know; this is just speculation.

In any case, the whole point of this post is simply that October can't get here soon enough - Pompey's pretty dull during the summer, so short of me managing to escape the country and get out to Ibiza, or hooking up with some house music lovers, or even moving into Fabric London, I'm probably just going to have to become a workaholic to pass the time until the fun begins again (along with, of course, the small matter of my much-delayed final year of my degree needing attention then as well - argh, work!).

Ah... Boss has just informed me that TLC want a karaoke machine running tonight. So much for a quiet one...(!)

P.s. big thanks to a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, for the text last night - while I was doing some laundry - letting me know she and her friends had just blagged VIP guest list at Ibiza's Amnesia. I spent the rest of the night drafting plans for an escape tunnel from my house to the White Isle...

An upda...

We have another new toy on the site. It's something that's been in the "planning" (i.e. the "thought about it, never got round to doing anything with it") stage for a while now - a one-click way of subscribing to, and unsubscribing from, a newsletter feed.

On UPSU.net we run a few different newsletter lists; the JobShop and Social:Life ones are two of the most commonly-used lists, and the compulsory list (which is used to send urgent broadcast messages to everyone) sees about one message every two months.

With our mass mailing lists that can be opted-in to, e.g. the JobShop, you used to have to go to your profile, edit it, and tick a box, then save it and wait for someone to e-mail you.

Now, we have a toy we can sit on whatever page we like (for the JobShop, it's under the menu on the right on every page apart from the job listings pages - check for yourself if you like ;o).

This toy tells you if you're subscribed to whichever list that particular block of code is looking after, and a button you can click on the subscribe or unsubscribe. Clicking the button takes you straight back to the same page, so you don't end up lost in a sea of back-button clicking just to sign up.

I'm also planning a re-jig of the Social:Life homepage to coincide with the new academic year, so we'll hopefully be adding one of these buttons for the Social:Life mailing list to that page as well... Soonish... Maybe...

I'm doing a spot of work-avoidance at the moment - I'm supposed to be working out how the NUS card sign-up system is going to work (and, at some point in the next month or so, actually making it happen: cry...) - so, to avoid having to start it today, I'm sketching out some ideas for a "My RSS" box on UPSU.net's new homepage (err, coming soon...).

The idea with My RSS is to give all members of the site a way of adding RSS headlines (from any website) to their UPSU.net homepage (i.e. the page they see when they sign into the site, on any computer). Users provide the URL of the RSS feed, choose how many headlines to show, and say whether they want to see the first few words of the description as well (... and if they want to see HTML or plain text? Or is that too complicated?), and voila, someone else's news on our website...!

It really is good stuff, and if/when it's running, will probably cause me to switch from using UPSUuuuugle as my homepage. The only potential problem is that, like a lot of things, it uses a tiny bit of Javascript to show/hide options menus; I know a (small) number of the University's PCs don't even support javascript, so this will mean another feature which some of the site's more technologically-limited visitors will have to live without.

Of course (without wanting to sound like I'm jumping on a passing bandwagon), it's a fairly Web 2.0 thing (although members will only see their own RSS choices), and - more importantly - it's another way of UPSU.net encouraging people to set UPSU.net as their homepage, which would be rather flattering!

A while back, one of the more technically-minded members of the UPSU team mentioned that there were people using MSN Messenger as a way of sending out advertisements. Naturally I assumed the worst and - choking on my instant coffee - decried it as a cheap way of spamming users of instant messenger programs, and another intrusion on peoples' privacy.

As usual, I slightly jumped the gun.

The way this works is this; say the Union wanted to send out "what's on" information through MSN Messenger. We would set up an MSN "bot", which is simply a computer program with an MSN Messenger account that "talks" to people on it's MSN contacts list.

To join up to the service, I would simply add the bot's e-mail address to my MSN contacts list - e.g. sociallife@upsu.net. The bot would automagically accept my e-mail address into it's contacts list and send out a message through MSNM (assuming I'm online) saying something like,

"This is the UPSU.net Social:Life messenger bot. I send out what's on information every 24 hours.

To join up to this service and receive this information, please type 'join'. To cancel, please type 'cancel', or simply close this conversation window and delete me from your contacts list.

Remember you can cancel this service at any time simply by typing 'cancel'."


Seems simple enough doesn't it?

The bot would then keep an eye out for you and when it sees you're online and you haven't been sent the latest updates for at least 24 hours, it sends out a mini-summary of what's on, e.g.

"Tonight at the Union - Mr. Scruff in Lux 9pm to 2am (dance music) - more info click here
Tomorrow at the Union - ....
Drinks offers - Bud 2-4-£3 - Carling £1.40 - ...
Food - the new summer menu is online. See it here..."

Two of the most important things about this service:
1. Your e-mail address won't be sold, harvested or whatever other horrible things they do to e-mail addresses these days. No spam - not ever; not from us or anyone else.
2. Anyone can sign up to the service, and your e-mail address won't be used for any other promotional purposes in or outside the Union - it's purely there because the IM services (e.g. MSNM, AIM, etc) need it to work.

The only e-mail you would ever get from this system (that I can think of) would be a confirmation that you'd signed up to the service, what it offers, and how to cancel (just in case a "mate" of yours signs you up when you're not looking).

So, would an instant messenger news bot be a good or a bad suggestion? You can add your comments below.