2000 - 2001

ChairEntity Richard Plackett Chair of Vice Ed Walker Treasurer Simon Clay Librarian Michelle Osmond Secretary Lorna Robinson Picocon Sofa John Kirk Publicity Off. Lloyd Kilford Editor Michael Wright

Despite hopes of being in our brand new library by now, we started the term still in our portacabin and look likely to stay there until at least Easter. We did however move the furniture around a bit and put in the new book shelves, one set of which was supplied through our 'sponsor a shelf program' and some generous members. Freshers' week was chaotic as ever; we managed to commandeer a large chunk of the JCR for our Freshers' Fair stall and drag lots of people along to the library.

The first big event of the year was Femtocon our first Fresher's convention. This featured free food and drinks, videos showing and an extremely popular LAN network of Unreal Tournament and Starcraft. There was also a quiz the lucky winners of which (Wilson House residents I believe) walked off with a vast amount of chocolate, or ran off rather, hotly pursued by committee. Despite minor panics during the transporting of computers and confused room bookings the day was a huge success and likely to become an annual event.

Other events this term featured the Monday night 'videos you should have seen' showing. Also known as 'things that Richard wants to see again'. There were also trips to the Star Trek Exhibition at the Science Museum, the traditional book crawl, and a showing of 12 consecutive episodes of Trap Door, which will turn even the sanest member into a gibbering wreck.

Both Librarian (Michelle) and Editor (Karne) decided to attack their posts with a vengeance. Thanks to Michelle's weekly treks round the local charity shops the number of items in the library is increasing dramatically. Without making a huge hole in the budget, much to the relief of Simon, our somewhat terrified Treasurer. Karne is producing vast numbers of newsletters and has introduced the submitatron for easy submissions, and the e-mail newsletter to save our photocopy budget (and Simon's sanity).

The term was rounded up with Christmas dinners galore. The society dinner was held at Pierino's and attracted an astonishing (ERM, 20 WAS IT?) people! The committee dinner at the icsf flat was also well attended by 18 people for a traditional turkey dinner although the chefs (Karne and Lorna + assistants) were a little well done themselves.

For certain members of the committee the Christmas holidays were spent wrestling with html and business plans to redo the website (yes, this one) and submit it for a union wide competition.

As spring term began the panic for Picocon really kicked in, but after much blood sweat and tears though Picocon 18 was a huge success. 100 attendees saw talks by Christopher Priest, Juliet McKenna and Jane Killick, 2 panels (one of which replaced an AWOL author), a pub quiz, dalek racing, an Easter Egg hunt and The Matrix in the Union Cinema.

The rest of spring term was a fairly quiet afair with a few cinema trips and an end of term dinner at Wagamama's on High Street Kensington (photos and report). The summer term was also quiet until the very end when we finally gained entry to our new library and a frantic couple of weeks of planning, shelf building, furniture chosing and box moving was done. Pictures of the beautiful finished thing can be found in the history of the library section. Bizarely the society got more active over the summer holiday due to the large number of people working at college during the holidays. Cinema trips were an almost weekly occurance and many meals were eaten in Pierinos!