Raith Against The Machine

Surely, though, if you have a preventer, then that's it prevented. You don't need any of that other guff...

eBay the first three, use the last one. Job done. Actually, a "reliever" sounds fun, send that to me.

I walked the five minutes to McDonalds the other week and it started to hose down just as I got there. In the time it took me to walk back, the rain managed to completely dissolve my paper bag, the bottom of which gave way just as I got my key in the front door. Thankfully, due to my ninja-esque reflections, I managed to catch both Big Mac and fries in the same hand, before they got anywhere near the floor.

Bit harsh... there's nothing there to say that the accident didn't happen at half 7 last night, and he's been in the hospital with his pal til 1am before coming home for his kip.

Yup, I went in as well. It only costs me £1.30, but it was the only thing I had today. And it's raining!

I can't, but... What are you going to Uni to do? And how come you've come down to a straight choice between Abertay and Napier?

Aye, "webmail" is a crock of shit. I've got an assignment to be in today, and the girl who's in charge of handing it in texted me to say that she needs my student number, but she doesn't have the other guy's number, and webmail is humped. I've no idea if it's resolved itself or not. I better not lose marks over it though, I don't have that many to spare!

I've got a bible in my University owned, but off-campus, halls-of-residence style flat. Out of the six in my flat, I think four have been vandalised quite significantly. As for the question at the top of the page, stay in halls first year, definitely. It's only 9 months, and it's not that expensive, and the worst thing that can happen is you have to live with some people you don't really like for a while, but you can go home at the weekend and see your pals. Then at the end of first year, you write it off as a poor experiment and start commuting from home for second year onwards. It's more likely that you'll have a whale of a time in first year halls though, and you'll make friends who you can then either decide to live with in 2nd year, or you can still commute but also have friends in Edinburgh/Dundee too. I think you should definitely live in halls for first year.

Does anybody else still call Tesco "Willie Low's", or is it just my parents?

I hadn't seen him in about a year, but then I read your post last night and he was on my bus today! Aye, he sits in the first proper seats, behind the foldy down ones, and says "Hiya, how ye doin'?" to everyone who walks past. Usually has his tape deck with him, too. He's a nice enough bloke, but it's just awkward talking to him. He asks you loads of questions, and doesn't answer the ones you ask him...

Not hot enough to get undeserving marks from me!

I thought that was brilliant telly. Proper "Oh, fuck!" moment.

Aye, I sent him a couple of e-mails earlier basically about the issues I mentioned in this thread, and he replied as quickly as can be expected, properly explaining a few things. He was saying that although it's not ideal to have groups of 3 and 4, there isn't a massive advantage to either, because it's harder to coordinate between 4, and harder to make it seem like one complete report, rather than just 4 separate ones. If the reports come in and the groups of 4 are scoring higher than the groups of 3, then he'll take another look at it and maybe take some action. He's a stand-up bloke, even if he is Welsh.

Aye. I'm fucking sick of Parcelforce.

Well, you'd have to left foot brake, and that results in you slamming the pedal to the floor in a ridiculous manner. I imagine the car would skid out of control, although if you were going in a straight line, it wouldn't be too bad, you'd probably just skid to a stop. If you were going round any sort of bend though, it'd be pretty messy.

I've now found out that there are "Group Peer Assessments". Essentially, I get 2 points to divide amongst the other two folk in the group. I think I'll probably go to about 1.25 to the other guy, and about 0.75 to the girl, because he's been to more of the tutorials, and has been e-mailing me about the work, and I've been doing the same. She has a much bigger workload for her other classes though, so I don't want to just say she's not done anything, because she has. There's every possibility that the two of them could collude and give each other 2s and me 0. They won't, of course, but you can see how it can easily be skewed. Group work doesn't work.

The best lecturers tend to be like that. They don't actually tell you anything you need to know, they just go off on tangents about other interesting stuff. Like being lectured on Total Quality Management by Stephen Fry. You're going to spend an hour absolutely enthralled and at the end of it you know tons of stuff you didn't an hour before, but you still don't have a fucking clue what a Quality Circle is.

Join the club. I might actually set up a club. Procrastination, ho!

I'm not sure, but I'm going to e-mail him at some point soon just to ask him about the whole thing, because he is a decent guy who e-mails back and answers questions properly. He's said that the reflective piece isn't there so that you can say "the other folk in my group are lazy fuckers and I did it all", but then I don't really understand it's purpose. To be honest, that wouldn't bother me at all, mainly because I went to all the classes, and did all the work. If it was just that sort of thing, I would be perfectly honest in mine and say "The other two in my group didn't attend all the classes, but I wasn't bothered because I knew that they were putting the work in, and they both told me if they weren't going to be there." I might e-mail him now, actually. Basically, because I'm procrastinating instead of doing the actual original assignment

Indeed. Think I'll actually fill out a module evaluation sheet for the first time, because there's a few things that have been pretty shambolic. The guy running the module is actually a really decent guy, and I'd like to believe that the shite stuff is out of his control... For example, the assignment has four distinct areas, and all of the tutorials except mine and one other are split into groups of four. Because there's only three of us, we have to try and work out who's going to do this other section, whilst also doing the work on our own one. Essentially, we're doing a third more work than the other groups, with no extra marks or anything. We'll actually probably end up with a lower grade. It's not the actual amount of work that bothers me, I'd rather do the 5000 words on my own than any sort of group work, but it just seems like it's grossly unfair.

Has anyone ever done much in the way of reflective pieces of work before? I've got a group assignment in for this week, 5000 words between the three of us, but then for the week after I have to hand in a 1000 word individual reflective piece that centres on how we worked as a group and what went on, how we divided up the work, etc I haven't actually even thought about it yet, but it's 10% of my grade, and it just seems odd, if anything. Has anyone done anything similar?

Because girls have low self-esteem, whereas guys have mates who slag them off if they start pumping a munter.

Don't ever try to open a bottle off the end of your parents' brand new marble-esque kitchen worktop. Ever.

No, he shits in his big fancy hat. Here to help.

But you haven't been there...