Laurence’s Blog

I had quite a mix of responses to my previous post, which was hardly unexpected (although the large volume of resonses was). Interestingly all of the comments were made to me in person with noone leaving commants on the blog.

Unfortunately I can summerise all of the comments made as one of four categories, having heard exactly the same things over and over again from diferent people. There were a number of people who wholehartedly agreed with what I said (worryingly this includes quite a few (ex-)exec members), others agreed there were some issues to be resolved but things are not as bad as I think. The others either thought there was nothing wrong (in fact, I count just one person who expressed this opinion to me) and a further group who completely misunderstood what I was talking about and tried to read between the lines where there was nothing to read.

As a direct result of the feed back recieved (and this was supported, in part, by an incident involving an exec member since my post) I sent an email to the exec proposing that the issues raised by members to me be discussed at the next exec meeting. The responses by two of the exec have been less than encouraging, and I suspect would be quite damaging to the members faith in the exec should the comments made get back to the people who had expressed the views in question. Fortunately an ex-exec member has got his head screwed on right and has given some useful insight, as well as trying to calm the involved parties down somewhat.

On an unrelated note, I found this titbit in my IRC awaylog this morning:

00:44:44 $member1@ >> However you dress it up, Laurence and $member2 suddenly coming out of the woodwork is suspicious and seems to me a power grab, especially given the discussions in #wuglug when $LUG_exec_member wasn’t there

I have been an active member of the LUG since my first year, so I fail to see continuing to be one as a “comming out the woodwork”. As far as I can recall the only thing I’ve really actively done, aside from continuing to attend the meethings, is agree to create a Wiki page listing the comparative commands for various package managers. This clearly an attempt to seize power – I could start editing existing pages next! Aside from which I have not recently been involved in any discussions in #wuglug, ignoring it in favour of #lug which had more activity. It would seem that attending meetings and agreeding to create wiki pages is now a sign of trying to seize power. Imagine if someone in the government ever turned up to Westminister and then agreed to do some work. They would obviously be trying to take over as a dictator.

This was in the middle of a discussion about the change of irc channel, which although it was voted upon and minuted at the last meeting some people were not happy about. As I recall I was the only one who did not vote in favour of changing to #wuglug (I abseined as I do not think the channel name makes any difference, but everyone else was in favour). Clearly I’m power mad.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything on my blog. To a great extent I’ve just been far too busy (this hasn’t changed, but being back at Uni there is noone watching me from behind to see if I’m not working) and during the holidays I do not get the oportunity to use a computer much outside of work due to a lack of time.

Three important things have happened since my last blog entry;

Firstly, I’ve had surgery on my mouth to remove two of my existing teeth and have implants placed into my jaw which will, when healed in 3 to 6months time will support four false teeth in their place. I am missing a significant number of teeth (which I’ve never had) and the problem seems to be genetic – my mother has a large number of teeth missing as did her father. The ongoing appointments for this are proving quite disruptive and I an ending up missing lectures quite regularly at the moment (co-incidentally the lectures always seem to be for the ‘Compiler Design’ course, dispite me missing them on different days and at different times.

Secondly, The deadline for handing in my third year project specification was last Thurday. While I managed to hand in the required work before the deadline, the work I handed in contained a number of errors which I should have spotted. The main reason for this was that I made a mistake and overwrote the latest version of the specification with an older version which ment I then had to waste a lot of time recovering the newer copy. Had this not happened I would probably have had an extra 3-4hours to spend on getting it right and would not have rushed and handed in an erroneous version.

Finally, Over the holiday I have reached the conclusion that CompSoc, as a group of people, suck. The ideas on which CompSoc is founded, as an academic society who provide support, guest lectures and tutorials for people who like computers are great and like a number of people in CompSoc I simply love computers, however CompSoc is increasingly being taken over by two types of people. One of these is the gaming types, whose sole interest is playing games at every opportunity and are of the opinion that anyone who doesn’t want to play games all the time is not worthy of being in the society. The other group are the type who simply moan all the time about everything. They seem to complain for the sake of complaining and are completely unwilling to do anything productive to fix the problems they moan about.

I for one am sick to the back teeth(well, sick to what back teeth I have) of people moaning and bitching at people needlessly. This is the reason I have left, and do not intend to return to, the #compsoc irc channel on their irc network which is where all of the active members tend to spend their time. Since leaving #compsoc I have noticed no unjustified moaning occuring in any of the other 13 channels I am in on CompSoc’s IRC network. The thing that really gets to me is people bitching non-stop about things which other members have put a significant amount of their time and effort into and get nothing in return. Members have no obligation to take part and do stuff for CompSoc, like the website, the IRC bot, helping manage the servers and setup LANs the least they could expect is not to be bitched at constantly for something they have given time and effort for, entirely volunterially.

There was a suggestion that the Warwick Linux User’s Group could part from CompSoc and form its own society. This idea was quickly shouted down as, among other things, it might spell the end for CompSoc. I’m not sure that this would have been a bad idea. If the LUG had left, at least CompSoc might have been forced to get its arse in gear and stop being the ‘gamers and bitchers’ society.

If it weren’t for my multiple obligations to the society and the fact that I know a grand total of about 0 people outside of CompSoc I would seriously consider having nothing more to do with them. Thankfully the LUG, which has not had any of these issues, is continuing to move in the direction it was 2 years ago with semi-regular tutorials planned and maintaining the social atmosphere of their meetings. Had the LUG left CompSoc, it would have been a much better society than that which CompSoc has become.