Full Rant from: Tuesday 8th November 2005

In which Wes (muddily) saves the day.. :: [22:06:08]
Tonight I went to a physics talk (yes, voluntarily) on Brane World cosmology and particle physics, along with Jonty.

The journey to the lecture theatre turned a bit dire as the heavens decided to open wide and give us all they've got..and believe me, the heavens have got quite a bit. We had foolhardily forgotten to make a note of the location of said talk and ended up running across the university campus at full pace while getting absolutely cats-'un-dogs wetted, it was during this sprint that I managed to do my Jesus "walking on water" impression, if Jesus had tried doing his trick while it was raining, and on some wet grass outside of a university library in the middle of the night dressed all in black, as I'm sure all Christianity philosophers will tell you was Christ's #2 past-time.

Yes, that's right, I landed right on my arse (and quite a bit of my side too) on the muddy grass, in fact I damn well slid. As finally got inside our department building, wherein lay the posters for the aforementioned talk, we found that the building (post- telephone call to someone who actually had a bloody clue where the building was) was in fact right at the other side of the campus, just where we'd started off.
Huzzah!
Quick sprint (well, more of an apathetic slosh by this point, and slosh is exactly what our clothes had decided they most wanted to do in the whole while world underneath all the water descending upon them) back to the other side, and we made our way into the lecture theatre to part-take off some free tea/coffee and biccies to boot. Nothing like a good tea and biccy to make you feel better, and there's most certainly nothing like a free one..erm, well, perhaps another free one, but that's just being pedantic isn't it?

After I grabbed my heart-warming beverage and soul-enhancing custard cream, I was beckoned by Jonty to go help the organisers of the talk with their "Mac problem".
Fully expecting at this point that they'd probably forgotten, or neglected to realise they even needed, the DVI-to-VGA converter needed to hook a PowerBook up to a VGA projector, I unhurridly put my tea down and half-heartedly went to enquire.
As it turned out, they had forgotten how to display the Mac's screen onto the projector ("Detect Displays" etc. in the Display settings), and this was all that really needed doing. I had done this out of the way in another lecture theatre, and so had escaped any fuss when returning to the main theatre where the talk was.
However when they brought the PowerBook through they now needed to mirror the display, up I hope in full Super-Wes mode and save the day..err..*ahem*, that is I walked up to the stage and selected "Mirror Display" for the nice woman giving the talk, and was treated to a little round of an applause on the way back.

Apart from all this frivolity, the talk was very interesting (although in some parts very much not only in orbit from my head, but extra-terrestrial in comparison). I won't try to explain what it was about, but I will say the speaker (if I can find her name somewhere I'll append this post), whom I believe was from Durham University, had a very good lecturing style and kept peoples interest throughout.

It's a mini-adventure..