Diverse Alarums

So the ineveitable happened.

Someone set the fire alarm off at 40 minutes past midnight.

So I had to get up from my nice warm seat in front of the computer and head out into the night (and it wasn't exactly warm), after putting shoes, fleece and coat on and picking up keys and cellphone. I did consider taking the laptop, but I currently don't have any DVDs with me, so there wouldn't have been much I could do with it.

Anyway, headed outside with the rest, and then about 30 seconds after I got outside the first wave of flashing lights arrived, which deposited a lass from security to check things over and make sure we had all got out of the house. Since it's after midnight the fire brigade had been automatically called out, and so we had to wait outside for them to arrive.

Apparently, student flates rate pretty highly. The second wave of flashing lights (at about 0050) consisted of one flashing orange light (campus security), and two sets of flashing blue lights (yup, two fire engines) which discharged a bunch of blokes in fireproof suits and hard hats to go and check things over, plus a suit from campus security. They went inside, wandered round for a bit trying to work out what had gone up in smoke (apparently one of Jon's cigarettes held too near a smoke alarm), and then hit the shutup button on the alarm.

Ah. Peace at last. (interestingly, I noticed that the alarms are not quite in sync. They're all the same siren model, but oscillate at slightly different rates. Makes for an interesting effect).

So, the flashing lights vanished off (at about 0054) to wherever it is flashing lights go, and we trundled back in, with Jon panicking slightly over possibly having to pay a fine for being the culprit of all this.

And here I am, typing this in front of my PC, and slowly warming back up. It's nice at times having a dual-screen setup with an Athlon system - it pumps out a fair amount of heat and warms the room up nicely.

(no subject)

I'll give the TV Licensing people this, they're very persistent.

I just picked another bunch of letters for the house I'm in. One was for the "Communal Area" (presumably they mean the small hall-like area which is just large enough to fit 6 doors and 3 cupboards around the perimeter), so I had a look at it. The stance is very "guilty until proven guilty" - the details of how to say "I don't have a TV" are on the back in small print, while the front of the letter covers the fact that a) you don't have a license, b) we've sent you several letters telling you that, c) we're now investigating your address, and d) if we catch you then you go to court and end up paying us £1000.

This time round I didn't get one, which presumably means they've got the letter I sent them which states that I do not have any kind of TV receiving equipment. Fortuantly, computers with video capture cards (not TV tuner cards) don't count for the purposes of the license, as my only way to watch Top Gear in my room is to find an internet stream or torrent of it. Even then, I'd be better off watching it from somewhere else as while you can watch video streams over dialup with pretty decent quality, it's not even close to a real TV or a nice big fat 450k stream.