Archive for August, 2008

Society of the summer

Thursday, August 21st, 2008 | Humanism

A-Soc is continuing to do well over summer, we managed 16 people to this week’s Tuesday social.

We are getting a great attendance every week and a good mix of new people and recurring people which tend to mix from week to week as people go on holiday and we still maintain our numbers, not bad, not bad at all.

Meanwhile I got the proofs from the printers back for the business cards. I sent them the high quality 300dpi source files to printing and to make sure the vectors looked right when they opened them I sent along some sample JPEGs in low quality with the word “sample” written in big letters on them just so there would be no confusion.

It having been a few days I had already phoned them to ask where the proofs were, apparentely they had been sent and had just “gone missing” before they arrived in my inbox. So once it was re-sent I opened them up to find them with a note saying the image quality was poor and with the word “sample” written in big letters across them.

I’m assured by the graphic designers in my office that this is quite normal behaviour for printers. So the fun may be just beginning there. Hoodies might turn up soon if we’re lucky too.

Heads and brick walls

Sunday, August 17th, 2008 | Tech

Facebook’s developer platform is a joke.

I mean, it wasn’t great initially but they made an effort. They launched a wiki and tried to provide good documentation. They often didn’t succeed but a little more time and experience and they would probably get the hang of writing good quality documentation.

But it’s just gone down hill. As you probably know they have re-designed Facebook and as part of their changes they have altered much of the API and mark-up language. The only problem is, they didn’t bother to updatr any of the documentation. So none of it works anymore.

Nothing is coherant either. There are dead links and nothing matches – the new integration guide will say one thing and the documentation for the function it is talking about is completely different.

Worst of all, the final hope of salvation, asking users who have actually managed to get it working, isn’t a simple search of the forums at the moment as it’s returning no results for any search term I care to put in. Fantastic stuff.

Accelerate

Saturday, August 16th, 2008 | Distractions, Life

It’s not even 10am yet and I am awake and watching Doctor Who. I’m not like out of bed or anything, but I’m fully awake and able to blog and everything.

Personally, I don’t think this is a good thing. I’m getting far too old when I’m awake at 10am. You would think being awake so early would give me more time and yet, we’re half way through August and I’ve only just started on series 2 of Doctor Who. Summer is running out…

There’s a place off Ocean Avenue

Thursday, August 14th, 2008 | Distractions, Reviews

…where I used to sit and talk with you
we were both 16 and it felt so right
sleeping all day, staying up all night

Seriously, where have Yellowcard been all my live? Returning home from the pub on Sunday night Rich stuck Ocean Avenue on the stereo and since that I have fallen head over heals for them. If you like anything by Taking Back Sunday, Saves the Day or generally any punk revival they are well worth checking out.

Short tags

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 | Life

Short tags. My one victory of the night.

It’s been one of those days.

I got my new equipment delivered today in preparation for the podcast. The mic stands are, well, awful. They are way too big. Still I’m sure I can look beyond that if only Behringer had got back to me in terms of configuring my mixing deck so sound comes out. I haven’t got that far yet so I’m now sitting on lots and lots of very expensive equipment that I can’t get to work and we start recording the show in just over a week.

A-Soc. I had to redo the artwork for the membership cards because everyone prints different “standard size” business cards apparently. I don’t know if my artwork has sent because all my SMTP servers sent my email then told me it had rejected it. And I can’t order the hoodies because people aren’t answering their phones after they haven’t responded to my emails. I can’t test the A-Soc website locally because the MySQL server keeps rejecting my connections.

Finance. I’ve had £170 go missing out of my account which means I have had to cancel my card so now at some point I need to go home and get my new card and no doubt spend time on the phone activating it too as well as going through the fraud procedures.

Web. My web host isn’t returning my emails with regards to the fact they have lost my database. I still can’t commit all of my files to the SVN for House Metrics but the one victory I have had tonight is short tags. Having finally got everything running, anything without a full

When you think all is lost

Monday, August 11th, 2008 | Distractions

How many of you have seen American Graffiti? If not, well, you should. It’s a defining moment in the young George Lucas’s film career and will explain a lot of Simpsons jokes to you. But never the less I shall fill you in. It’s a movie about the 50’s rock and roll cruising culture in the States before it made way for the crime and the drugs.

That’s exactly what The D used to be like. We’d get out from a close at 3am and cruise down to Tesco, grab ourselves a sandwhich and eat, chat and generally wind down.

Those days are gone. Less closers, people heading straight off claiming they are tired despite being doped up on caffeine, taurine and increasingly these days even alcohol as well. The drink and the drugs is pushing out the friendly sandwhich culture which made the old days so great.

Still, having gone through the usual Sunday night ritual of pub quiz then drive thru for some late night food we found ourselves for one night re-capturing the spirit those days, if only for one night. What made last night different from any other night? Maybe it was because we had all been drinking more the normal. And maybe, just maybe, alcohol really is the cause, and solution to all of lives problems.

I don’t want to genralise but…

Sunday, August 10th, 2008 | Life

…but everyone from Birmingham is bad news.

I got into my car to go to work and sat fiddling with my MP3 player, stationary at the side of the road when a taxi comes past and a crashes into me!

But what really tops it off is his excuse for why he drove into me.

I’m from Birmingham, I don’t know where I’m going

How about, not into other cars. That would be a sensible start, wouldn’t it?

Luckily my car was for the most part fine other than some scuffing on the bumper. Seriously though, how much of an idiot do you have to be to drive into a parked car?

Fresh faces

Thursday, August 7th, 2008 | Life

You’re probably reading this on Facebook or Netvibes.

Therefore it probably has slipped your attention that my homepage has a completely new look. Having managed to fix the site and looking for a new style to give the podcast mini site I decided that it would be better to just come up with a whole new look for everything and use that across the site.

And, for the first time, my blog has a separate skin which matches the main site as well! Finally, that integrated look which I know Kieran has been suggesting for so many years ;). So, give me your feedback, what do you think, does it work in your browser, have you found any problems?

You may notice once you start playing around that the image at the top keeps changing. At the moment there are only 6 that it “randomly” selects out of each time (I put randomly in quotes because most of us know how bad computers are at picking out random numbers, on saying that, humans are no better), two of them are photos – from graduation and Rationalist Week, two of them are collages of loads of different pictures of me and two are of composed of some of my favourite stock photography. As the months pass I’m hoping to add more and more until there is a sizeable library of them.

My two cents on graduate jobs

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 | Thoughts

Here’s an interesting fact you may not know (or to be fair, even find interesting). The American expression “my two cents” is actually just an Americanised version of the original British idiom “my two pennies worth.” Yep much like whisky and invading less powerful countries, the phrase is just another concept that actually came from the British Isles and was merely imitated by the United States.

So, given many of us are soon to be or indeed have started graduate jobs, I thought I would throw in experiences and thoughts given I have been working for over a month now on the off chance it is helpful but mainly because I am guessing I can score a few cheap jokes somewhere in this post.

It really is a lot of the things you imagine to be honest. You know when we were doing things like normalised databases and understanding business processes before designing a system and we’re all sat there thinking this clearly is a better way of doing this but nobody is going to be doing this in the real world and because I know this it’s then going to be my job to have to go in and sort it all out which is just going to be painful.

Well, that is exactly how it is :D. Having arrived for my first week by boss Nick announced he was going to be away for the next week so I used the time to almost entirely rewrite a big system we had written for a client so it is all normalised and doesn’t duplicate silly amounts of code (it now only duplicates a large amount of code ;)). But it’s far less painful to actually sort out – it’s more of a fun challenge once you actually get into it.

You’re going to like the people you work with. Possibly because they geniunely nice people. I think I’ve got lucky in that the people I work with really are geniunely nice people. Even if they weren’t though, you are still going to like them because it’s like that in halls – you make friends and then looking back a year or two later you realise that they were actually a right bunch of losers.

The first week or so you haven’t really got into the swing of things so they can be a bit boring while you really build up the knowledge to just be able to walk in on a morning and get on with things. So if there is some serious clock watching in that first week, don’t worry, it’s going to get better once you’re up to speed.

Chances are, you aren’t going to be a newbie for too long. Most of the companies we are going for will have a relatively high turnover compared with companies outside of IT and not recruiting graduates who are going places so with all probability there will be someone else who started just before you and will soon be someone newer than you too. My company recruited a few months before I started and have some else starting in about two weeks.

Things happen slowly. This is where your experience running societies comes in. Remember all that nagging of people to get things done that a president has to do constantly throughout their term? It is a skill that will come in handy a lot. If you missed out on the experience of running a society then don’t worry too much, you’re just going to feel far less flustrated when nothing gets done.

Finally, whenever you get stressed, just remember that you only have 40 years of work left. And a good few years of people telling you that joke. Over and over. Like Thursday crashing a car. So yeah, good luck!

Woke up this morning

Monday, August 4th, 2008 | Life

Walking up to the Deer Park on Friday we heard a few fireworks going off.

Except they weren’t fireworks. They were gun shots.

We arrived at the Deer Park, got ourselves a drink and sat down next to the window looking out across the street. The next thing we know there are loads of police, crime scene investigators and news reporters turning up.

It turns out there had been an armed robbery as a Securior can dropped off cash at the Abbey branch in which one of the security personell was shot in the leg. West Yorkshire Police are currently appealing for witnesses. Given it happened on a busy street opposite a busy pub it seems suprising if nobody had.