Yes he did...

Fire alarm!

So was in the library about half an hour back, and the fire alarm goes off... My first fire alarm / fire drill - Yay me!

Nothing really aprt from the sheer novelty of the experience. Got out of the library, and parket my bum on the stone steps of Alexander square - just outside the library and ate a sandwhich while waiting for the bell to stop ringing. Which, it did in about fifteen minutes... After which I headed back into the library...

More embedded videos :) One of the newer MJ commercials

And Sara h Palin won!!!

Well today, watched a Balloon debate featuring the members of the exec committee at Lancaster University Debating society

The basic premise being that the contestants are on a baloon and have to justify why they be the one allowed to stay on the baloon and eventually get saved...

You have multiple rounds, and in each round one of the contestants gets voted out by the memebers of the audience... Among the contestants today, there were:

Sarah Palin
John Mccain
Bristol (Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter - yes she has a name surprisingly enough )
Doctor Who

Was quite the interesting 'show' Totally irreverent and highly obnoxious but good fun... almost all the characters hit on 'governor' Palin cos of her booooooooooooobies... The best part being that the character of governor Palin was played by a guy... So that was quite the corny spectacle...

Needless to say the guy who was in character of Palin, down to her screetchy accent, had the audience in splits most of the time, and so eventually won the right to stay on the baloon...

Of six foot Lepricorns and a coven of witches

So

I had my first Halloween outside of the country...

Was pretty low key on the whole, didn't get up to much... Since the previous night had been a bit of a late one, and the few days before that had been pretty hectic as well, Halloween was quite the subdued event for most of the MBA class...

There was an Irish band in the grad bar, but they were mostly playing rather doleful, slowish and generally old music... So, we drifted away from that pub to another one on campus - an undergrad pub. Where, thankfully most of the undergads had moved on to town, leaving the dance floor quite empty. The notable sights of the night included a huge number of witches, some with flourescent orange steeped witches hats... There was also a six foot tall bouncer type bloke dressed as a lepricorn - possibly the worst costume choice ever...

For the last 10-15mins the dj reverted to some 70s and 80s jive music so got on the dance floor and shook a leg...

Unfortunately the music stopped just as we were getting warmed up and enthusiastic about the whole thing... so we decided to take the party to a friend's place across campus... didn't really do much of the dancing, but did a fair bit of talking and generally catching up over a few beers at the classmate's place...

On the whole was an evening well spent...

Putumayo

Putumayo World Music - EPK from Putumayo World Music on Vimeo.

Pepper beef!

Yesterday was on the whole rather exhausting. Had to submit an organisational behaviour essay which supposedly accounted for 30% of the marks for the entire course... spent most of the night in a mental blank, somehow ideas only started flowing post 1.30 in the morning... as a result of which I woke up lateish, and figured that given the options of going into class and sleeping or just sleeping off in the room, the room and my bed was definitly more comfortable... So just slept in and missed the first lecture...

I finally finished the essay in the afternoon and dropped it off but given the short time frame we had to complete it, is definitly not an essay that I can say am particularly satisfied with. Nevertheless that's what you need to get used to in the MBA - adhereing to the deadlines, even if it means you aren't going to give in your 'best' possible work...

On the whole I had two high points today, well it's all relative I guess... but I had fun...

The first one involved joining the ballroom dance society here at Lancaster, and having my first class today... was pretty good fun, did the basics of the Waltz and the Rumba. The rumba was completely new, and the particular steps we learnt in the waltz were also kinda new...

The second one, is a lot more important to my future wellbeing - I discovered, that I'm not half bad when it comes to cooking :) This was my first experience of actually cooking any meat, and I managed a pretty good pepper beef with onions albeit a little oily. But still quite tasty, and it went really well as a filling for the tortillas I already had... So ate quite well tonight, and it was rather satisfying to have cooked something actually edible.

So time to sign off, with a Happy video - Manu Chao - Me Gustas tu ( I love you )

And in other news...

Had my first go at British Parliamentary Debating earlier today... As part of the introduction to parlimentary debating, conducted by the Lancaster University Debating Society (LUDS) ... long story shot, I sucked... Totally lost the thread of my argument towards the end, and actually had a good rebuttal to a point of information, but didn't follow through on it...

I need loads more practice of this format, and I definitely need to get a lot more structured.

Last week when I had come and seen these people debating on stage, one of them with a pint can of guinness on his desk, I kind of got the feeling it wouldn't be all that hard... So the irony is pretty harsh atm... I definitly had fun doing it and I wasn't nervous, just utterly blank by the end of it and grasping at straws by the end of it...

There's a lot to learn though, and when the people teaching you happen to be 2nd and third yera law students, you get a few pretty good tips

Thats about it for now I guess

Oh inspirational video time! One of my all time favourite adds



In case you haven't figured... I like embedding chit in my blog now...

Quantum of Solace

So the premier of the new bond movie is around the corner... Have heard the theme song by Jack white (Lead singer of White stripe) and Alicia Keys. Have to say, kind of expected better from both artists, song isn't half as good as the one from the last bond film. Granted it is an unusual and different mix, but can't say it's particularly appealing, at least on first listen...

The Bear Story

So we had this pretty cool management workshop by this group called Coverdale about two weeks back now, and one of the things they stressed was the importance of hearing out all possible ideas during a brain storming process...

Irrespective of how crazy the ideas might seem at the time, try and follow the idea to a finite conclusion, to better assess its worth.

To illustrate this point, the session leader narrated this story of a Canadian telecom company, spent millions on cabling every winter. The main reaon for this was the huge piles of snow used to weigh down the phone lines and cause so much strain on the cables that they would snap. Leaving large portions of the northern half of the country without service, and also a huge repair bill...

The company had a brainstorming session, where one of the ideas floated was about as far out as you can get.... We should get the bears to shake the poles and then the snow would also fall off the wires...

Thankfully the CEO of the company was wiser than to just shoot the person who passed such a seemingly thoughtless comment. He asked the person to elaborate - and the person replied that bears liked honey, so if they should put honey at the top of each telephone post, the bears in their attempt to get at the honey would shake the post enough to dislodge all the snow piled on the wires...

The next obvious question was how were they supposed to get the honey on those posts, and the person replied by lowering down jars of honey onto the posts by helicopter...

At about this point of time, light bulbs began flashing in the heads of others around the room... they quickly realised that the wake of a helicopter's spinning blades as it attempted to lower the aforementioned bottle, would cause the snow piles to be dislodged, in effect giving them the best possible solution.

So, to this day, in the deep of winter, helicopters are flown for hundreds of miles along the telephone lines in Canada, and the wake of their passing blows away all the snow from the lines...

The 'bear' idea actually turning into a productive and useful solution...

The height of culinary achievement...

... I just managed to crack open my third consecutive egg without disturbing the yolk or having shell fragments and yolk all over my hand! Yes I know I set low standards... but when you're as bad a cook as I am, you take what you can get... On the flip side, I've now realized that you need to probably boil potatoes for a while before trying to fry them alongside your egg, unless you want incredibly burnt and incredibly crunchy potatoes...

Ah well as Douglas Adams once said, 'You live and learn... at any rate you live...'

Long story short, we had a pleasant team building treasure hunt kind of a quiz yesterday. Where, we had to walk around the town and get some trivia of local landmarks and generally learn to navigate our way around the various sections of what is increasiningly apparent to be a tiny blip of an English countryside town... There are some very quaint buildings all over the town, but the Lancaster castle is really tiny, not a patch on some of the monstrosities you'd find in India... Unfortunately we didn't win the treasure hunt, the top 4 teams were separated by a total of 2 points... so it was a painfully close competition, where our team had a lot of fun, but kind of lucked out sadly at the finish...

The upshot of this experience, was that I finally managed to gt around to buying a non stick pot and two frying pans at Wilkinson...

So yesterday evening, after returning from the day's trip to town... I processed with gusto to make myself a sunny side, of course since I didn't use oil, I made a royal mess of my supposedly non-stick pan (but I didn't break the yolk!) Today for Lunch, i did actually use some oil, so it was a lot better (and again, I didn't break the yolk!) and with the exception of the potatoes, the whole thing ame out quite well...

Spent most of today relaxing to music, and getting my brain in order for the onslaught of the coming week...