Hi folks,

Just want to let you all know that I probably won't be around much from the 26th onwards, for an undisclosed period of time. I'll be making the whooping 25 mile trip from my home town of Torquay to the City of Exeter to begin studying Computer Science at the university there. I'll be living in halls, which I'm definately looking forward to, but it'll mean more going outside (I better install the "no-cliffracer" plugin before embarking on any trips).

I've spent the past year bumming around on a year out. Figured that it'd be stupid to go straight from 13 years of non-stop education into another 3 years and had good fun working on site projects and generally doing nothing, but now I've got to re-enter the real world!

Exeter is a great city, Simon (that'd be Anubis for anyone around when MWC first began!) has been up there for the past two years doing the same course, and I was up there a lot last year, and the year before that. I figure I've got a major head start on most people who'll be freshers this year -- I already know the campus, and I know a lot of 3rd years, which is always worth big brownie points. Especially if I want their houses next year when they move on.

I'll be using the univeristy connection, which is fast but highly firewalled and proxied, which makes online gaming extremely difficult. If I can't get ports opened for games (especially BF2) I'll hopefully route through Simon's connection which will hopefully work. Else it's quite possible the Gaming Source BF2 server will be coming down if I can't make a connection, since there's not much point in me paying for a server that I can't play on! That's a heads up!

Probably won't have a connection for the first few days, 26th to 28thish.

Have a good time road trippin'.

Given the state of public transport in this country, we might hear from again round about Christmas time, then?





Have fun! And enjoy student union drink prices!

Good luck. Have fun, and don't get too trashed.

Hopefully you can figure out how to open the right ports. Should be simple enough, unless the school has some serious protection [which, unfortunately, is probably the case.] Yar.

Have a great time and don't forget us! In all the partying don't forget to a) work (occasionally, you don't have to go mad), b) network and c) avoid matrimony - it tends to happen in year three when eveyone is going their own way again.

Good luck m8 hope you have a good time

Good luck with the course, evil uni firewalls of d00m, and cliffracers.

We'll try not to jam too many socks into the server while you're gone.

Halls, is that the same as dorms? As long as they don't have bandwidth problems, they'll probably be likely to have ports for popular games open.

Good luck,hope it all goes well
hope u dont have to close down the best server on BF2,now that would be a shame.......out of interest what does it cost a month to run it?im sure theres enough of us that could donate towards it

Think it was £430 for 3 months.

Well all the best, sure you'll have a great time (and figure a way to get connected for online gaming )

I myself have just started at college studying english literature, graphics, product design and geography so its little gaming for me too, but I always have time for emails - which I get sooo many of

come on please to sell yourself short, with a study like that you at least have some "IT" background, so some minor difficutlies with firewall/proxies won't be that big of an issue now wil it

The only advice i can furher give you is "ace" everything else so you have a lot of spare time to do all the cool stuff

Good luck m8 hope you have a good time

Arent you going to do a 4th year honours degree or do you not get that for computer science though im sure you do.

Good to see you getting an education dude - though i doubt they can teach you anything you dont already know!

Just got to uni too after a Gap year bumming around, travelling yadda yadda. Its been about 12 months since i posted on here. Good to see the stinking barfly's still going strong. Like you I'm pretty stacked up now but I'll still pop in and add my two seplims when its needed.

As far as security goes, uni halls tend to be pretty relaxed about the amount of bandwidth you use up/what you use it for. Gaming is a bit more of a problem, but there's a group of us up here working on it as well. If we make any progress we'll let you know! I think they're open to the idea of a sort of "LAN gaming society," so its all above board...but we'll have to wait and see.

Well thats it, good luck with your studies, and i'll leave you with the preacher's top cullinary tip:

"weetabix and curry sauce is surprisingly tasty"

good luck with it all hope u enjoy it