Odd Thomas Odd Blog

Well, it seems that the cafe at The Forum has finally caught up with the rest of the Starbucks chain and have started the annoying practice of demanding your identity to label your cup with. To set the record straight, the cafe itself is not actually a Starbucks .  It is run by Food Hertfordshire , a wholly owned subsidiary of the university, but they make use of Starbucks' mugs, cups, coffees and advertising, presumably to justify the prices.  My guess is that as part of this agreement, they have to follow certain guidelines. From a business perspective, I can understand the desire to get the right drink to the right customer, but having such a common name myself, I would be more likely to get the right drink if they just named it.   Assuming they get it right in the first place .

Buying new gadgets is easy ... at least, that's the rumour going around and we all know to take rumours with a pinch of salt, don't we? When the iPad was first released, I was quite anti the idea as I couldn't see what use it could possibly be beyond being another glossy toy for Apple geeks to spray over.  Don't get me wrong, I admire Apple and their incredible success at taking an existing idea and making it their own; they believed in the product and their customers believed in their marketing.

I didn't appreciate just how geeky I was until last Wednesday - now I know what everyone else knows! There is an extra-curricular project, called EPiCS , being run by one of the lecturers at the Uni.  Unfortunately, despite wanting to sign up for it, I was worried about the time it would take up when there is so much to do study-wise . However, a few weeks ago, the tutor announced a trip to The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, the same place where the Enigma machine was decoded in the Second World War.  For the discount price of £5, forty students had the opportunity to see Colossus , the Harwell Decatron Computer (also known as WITCH) and a range of machines from history that made me realise just how much I have seen things change: I am not old ... I've just seen a lot!  :-) The trip was originally to be booked for the second year students but they wanted to see if some of us first years wanted to go: needless to say, the little group I'm p...