And just after I posted, as I was emailing somebody, the building alarm went off. At more than 60 dB, and of course I was at the workstation closest to the siren... I sent, logged out, and held the door open while almost everyone else left. A couple asians seemed not to mind the noise (?!) and didn't budge. As the last of those who left hit the staircase, the alarm stopped. I went ahead on outside. Following a security bloke back to the gatehouse, I found out the cause: someone had unlocked and opened their office without telling security, tripping the alarm. I commiserated, telling him that stupid people were the security problem in infosec, too.
So I went back to the pub (which is in the student union building and across the hall from that laundry facility). I found K there, and asked for clarification. She demurred (she was at at table with a few people then), but once I had wandered about for a minute or two and set up shiny at an empty table, she came over. We had a nice little chat. I slowly remembered some of the things she had told me at other times (we met at the airport, actually) and she clarified. She apparently had to listen to this girl talking about me for "half an hour". She seemed agreeable to me trying to not encourage it any. I told her about Jack, and showed her the meichi, er business card he handed me. She found the whole thing pretty amusing. The girl in question got back to the pub a few minutes after that (I had seen her and exchanged destinations outside the gatehouse). Steve lumbered over shortly after, wanting to fiddle with shiny. I put him on as guest, but he couldn't see or paly much from there, so I relogged (he wanted to see the porn and music). Although critical of my porn (which K seemed to like a bit, but maybe just playfully) he looked at quite a few ;)
The pub cleared out a bit, K left to get a cab to the airport (Amsterdam for the weekend) and I left the girl in question (Really had ought to get her name, huh?) looking over the front page and introduction of Reciprocality, and then the easy intro to M0, while laughing at a show on BBC4 about a guy who travels the world looking for other people with the same name as he..
Colin threw us out as athe show went off the air (was past midnight after all) and abbreviatedly: I handed her the Tolkein biography and Ley lines pamphlet (a brief explanation of ley lines was required) and wished her good night. I pointed her to the secret passage, cautioned her to mind her head and went in search of chocolate.
Two things are obvious, at least. I am more interested in K than this girl (of course). K professes to be looking for girls (of course). (Oh, and I told the assembled table a brief version of the peaux,rick,jen,(me) thing (as part of the story of how impressively dense I am to people's entreaties and such (Hi Peaux! I wuv you!)).
Oh and the third obvious thing. the girl in question (less socially adept than I, possibly) also did not like my collection of porn. She made the humourous suggestion that only guys porn, and I had to disclose her responsibilty as a netizen (to leech porn) and the state of IT tech (porn and video games, email on some days).
This exciting day brought to you by Mozilla Messenger, "cat > 11july2002.html", and the OS X Terminal with a little cleanup in GNU nano.
adric, roehampton.ac.uk, 0:48,1:01 12 July 2002