Halos won and lost – part 2 of 2

There were a couple of firsts this week – some in work and some not so.  The latter first…

Academic Standards Committee is a very serious place – which this time looked at the various Annual Monitoring Exercise (AME) Reports that come out of the 4 schools and a couple of the academic related departments – namely Quality and LIS – my department.

I’m very happy to report that once again, we received an excellent summary overview from the Deputy Vice Chancellor – and overall high confidence rating from our activity over the past year.  Coming after a difficult year for all (restructures and not) is a credit to the excellent people involved in delivering our services.  And I’m really very grateful to Michael Webb for his brain – and his usual high standard of assistance in the document preparation. We sit in a genuinely privileged position between the administration and the academic functions of the University – and our potential to act as an enabler and catalyst of success for the institution can not be over exaggerated.  Robustness, partnership and innovation do and must continue to lie at the heart of all we are…

Another City Centre Core User Group – and the negotiations go on regarding the risks associated with the remediation of the land.  The Value engineering exercise(s) never cease to amaze me – if its possible to do that bit for that amount, why was it the other amount in the first place   However, at some point, we’re going to have to make some hard choices and we’ll then need to ascribe some tangible value to the principles we have for this excellent venture …

It was again an absolute privilege to attend a Governors / Academic Board Away Day – albeit only a half day – and, well, not exactly away (it was in the Board Room).  That said, we had an excellent time once again looking at the vision and mission of the institution as we move forward.  One of my colleagues was away – so it fell to me once again (I did object – but you can only object so much before you look a …) to do the feedback of my breakout group.  A combination of passionate feelings in the area, and the fact that I wasn’t feeling at all well (having slept for no longer than an hour the night before) gave me cause to worry, but it went okay – I think (no P45 so far!).

BUT, I lost a halo here as I bought some sweets on the way to the meeting, and, as my astounding excellent colleague Lawrence Wilson will testify, I also ate some biscuits.  This statement hides two facts.  Firstly, not enough sleep can stop production of serotonin – which in turn, leads your body to crave sugar as a substitute (and fat loss regime therefore requires adequate sleep!); and secondly, “they” say that it’s a sensible leader who surrounds himself with people who have greater credibility and competences in their own specialist areas than he does.  Well, that’s the case with Lawrence – I’ve rarely come across somebody who is so utterly good at what he does (Student Services) and I’m glad to have inherited such a nice colleague too!

Now then, days literally full of meetings lead to nights full of email and preparation – but that seems to be parr for the course – so suck it up, boy!  The night following the event above was no different. 

I had  my first opportunity to present to our Learning and Teaching Committee the morning after – and I didn’t finish the email and get started until about midnight.  I had lots of material prepared so it was just a question of putting it all together – but its funny how something can appear perfectly sensible and astute at 2am – yet can make you cringe internally when revealed during committee only 7 hours later!  Again, I think it went very well and raised a lot of really interesting discussions and follow-up comments/actions.  I really really – REALLY like LnT committee – its one of those key cogs of the organisation.  My role is vice Chair – and I also Chair a sub-group that I created called the Learning Environment Group.  The LEG brings lots of kindred spirits together from around the institutions (from academics to IT to estates to, well, whoever is relevant and interested) to move things forward.  Oh yes, the presentation was around Student Engagement and my US experiences recently – please look at the Educause  2007 tag to see blog posts on the topic.

We ended what seemed to be a marathon week with a Caerleon Campus Development Group meeting – something established to look at the development of our Caerleon Campus as the new City Centre Campus comes online.  Some excellent things are going to happen – and I’m very excited about the potential for LIS …

Halos won and lost – part 1 of 2

Outside of work, there was the usual round of meetings – though no teens club this week.  I did however have the opportunity of speaking at the children’s’ carol service in the local retirement home on Saturday… I used the link to the news items about the Savoy closing down and the manager preparing a much better place – similar to comments in John 14 v 2 “I am going to prepare a place …”.  Anyway, I also fell again big-time (see serotonin comment in the next “Halos won and lost” post) as you can safely say I ate more of those tea cake things (marshmallow covered in chocolate) than you could fit in a moderately sized bucket.

Well then, Halo 3 … finished it on Saturday.  Now, I’ve played lots of computer games for lots of years –but never very seriously.  In fact, I’ve never ever finished a computer game – not even nearly.  I’ve only ever played for 10 minutes here and there for a bit of light relief/entertainment from whatever has been going on.

But I plodded on with Halo over a few evenings during the last fortnight on “easy” level, as the kids had bought a second hand copy from eBay for my birthday near the end of last month.  I had wanted to know what all the hype was about – this game had made more in its first day than any movie in history (though it should be noted that watching a movie costs about an eighth of the cost of this game when it was released!).

Anyhow, the hype turned out to be just that in my opinion – just another shooter, albeit with good graphics.  I did like how the voice hints seemed to come just when you needed them with a couple of frustrating exceptions and the odd irritating opening that didn’t appear until you’d wondered aimlessly for ages (or so it seemed).  I did not like the bad language that appeared mainly in the early stages of the game – it didn’t add anything to it imo.

Surely  they can get some technology in there to allow the user to choose profanity and gore settings?  That way everybody could enjoy …

The end (apart from coming surprisingly soon), was a little anti-climatic.  There was a never ending drive around exploding ground.  This on its own was a little disappointing – no running, shooting, just driving.  Then, after spending hours fighting to keep your hero character alive – he apparently dies in a huge explosion that takes out the enemy planet – and its completely beyond your control!

The cut scenes were often quite long and I never got the depth of the plot beyond “blow stuff up”.  But the music was very atmospheric – especially since getting my sub-woofer down from the loft and hooking it up after moving!

In fairness, I’ve not played any other similar game beyond the very first stages as said above, so that says something about the game in itself – but I did feel slightly the victim of hype

Well, 10 minutes after finishing, I put it on eBay buy-it-now for a coupla quid more than I paid – and it sold almost instantly.  You can sell ANYTHING on eBay this time of year, its NUTS.  I would  have kept it if Aaron were a little older – but its not the kind of thing I’d leave him to play with.

Right up to the moment… I was on security duty tonight – it was freezing!  But there’s a Korean Church that meets at the Heath and I got to listen to them practicing for their Christmas Service next weekend.  I stood for a time outside the hall door where they were and have rarely heard such beautiful and moving singing – what a funny thing, the cold just wasn’t any more.