Sponsorship for CompSoc

I've recently been talking to some folks regarding corporate sponsorship for CompSoc (Aston Computing Society), to sit alongside our faculty affiliation. Wow.

_{To those who might be interested but can't be bothered reading the below:
Contact me if you know someone who might be interested in making a sponsorship offer.}

I still remember back when the society consisted of little more than Will & myself sitting in a pub and sketching some ideas for posters to put up. Putting them up on 60 floors of halls of residence, seven floors at University and three floors of the Guild was a long afternoon's work, and recovering from said work with a small tipple at the bar took us late into the evening.

Having spread the word, we invited everyone who'd shown an interest (or who had the fortune to see a poster) along to an initial meet-up in one of the lecture theatres. Not having any speeches prepared, we decided to kick things off with some XBox games - and soon found that the people who'd turned up were true geeks, with duct tape, creative wiring and balancing acts that would have given a Health & Safety executive a heart attack soon coming into play to get the games working.

I ended that first meeting with an oration that will be remembered for generations to come, and weeks later, we hosted our first LAN party - a rather dismal affair in possibly the least suitable room at University. The spirit was there though:


_{The first LAN}

Skip forward a few months and we had paid members (it's so easy to bully geeks out of money), equipment, LAN parties and even a committee of sorts (led by my fine self, of course). It was time for a new year, a lot more faces, and a lot more activities.


_{Committee - v1}

As I started my second year, fully signed up as a Microsoft Student Partner (aka slave), things really started to come together. Lots of people paid £10 and signed up at Freshers' Week, and then subsequently never talked to the society again. Perfect - lots of expensive equipment for the other folks to enjoy.


_{Secret of marketing to geeks: have a girl}

We went on adventures across the country, wrote three lines of code and thirty thousand lines of garbage on IRC and managed to play the odd game along the way too. The LANs were improving too everything worked, people arrived in their thousands and snack food reigned supreme as we stared wide-eyed at screens for all-night sessions.


_{'Wire tidies' never made it onto the shopping list}

In the year I've been away, things have gone from awesome to leet, and we're looking quite professional now. Professional enough to get interest from companies who want their branding all over us in fact. We're considering offers now, and if you know anyone else who might be interested, please tell them to get in touch, and we'll see what we think.


_{Looking good.}

Xx

Back from West Wales!

Sorry things have been a bit quiet around here (other than the tweets) - I decided to take a short break from the internet, and so popped off to West Wales for a few days.

This proved to be quite a futile gesture as Twitter is available on my mobile phone nowadays. That, and everyone who's been ignoring me whilst I've been available suddenly had urgent questions to ask me, and great parties to invite me to. I'm sure they were just making it all up.

Being the bank holiday weekend, it was the busy season over in Pembroke - which meant that up to thirty people were in the town centre at one point. The coast, too, was similarly crowded - with it being necessary to deviate from a straight line to traverse the width of the beach at one point.

Despite the rain, which kept me indoors for the duration of my first full day there (Die Hard 4.0 & The Andromeda Strain are awesome films by the way), and soaked me on the second day, it was a welcome break and now it's time to rejoin the world of the internet.

In other news, apparently some graph I drew ended up in Wired Magazine. I wouldn't bother buying a copy just for that though, as it's freely available online. Looks like I'm not getting any money out of it too :(

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