Archive for August, 2011

A few weeks ago, myself and Elina headed up to York for the York Brights monthly meetup.

It was much nicer than last time as we weren’t in the middle of a torrential downpour, so I could actually see the road in front of me. The meetup itself is held at a pub called Ye Olde Starre Inn, which those in York will no doubt be familiar with.

Having missed my mixed grill the day before (all you can eat steak is subtly different), I decided to go for the mixed grill. While it was very enjoyable it was certainly a little unconventional – it was basically a mixed grill, crossed with an all day breakfast with egg and beans. Crazy, buy never the less enjoyable.

Having hit Fazenda last month, and then again a few weeks ago, I took one more trip there recently, to celebrate Jonni’s birthday.

As usual, they delivered some good meat, though with us being there on a Tuesday, they seem to suffer from a lack of turn over, as the meat was often slow coming. This was a little disappointing, though ultimately we ate to bursting point, so we didn’t have any less food.

We also got a free cocktail for checking in – they weren’t shy with the alcohol either.

I think it clearly has a critical mass point though, so if you’re going to go, I would recommend going on a Saturday evening when there are plenty of people and plenty of meat coming round.

A few weeks ago, we held the first Margarita Monday.

Having recently watched Franklin & Bash, our policy was, if two fictional lawyers in Los Angeles can party on a school night, so can we. I actually felt reasonably well the next day, which isn’t bad given I got through seven shots, two cocktails and a bottle of cider.

In any case, it is definitely a winning idea, if a little time consuming in terms of preparation when you are having to make vegan pizza.

While I’ve enjoyed playing poker at Grosvenor recently, I think to learn the game I need to play against good opponents and a lot of the time at Grosvenor you have to play past a lot of bad players before you get to the real players.

As such, I decided to head down to Alea for a few tournaments. They don’t get the turn outs that Grosvenor do, but as I’m not playing for the money (well, obviously I am playing for the money, but I’m not expecting to win quite yet), it isn’t too much of a problem.

So far, it’s not gone so well, but I’ve learnt quite a bit. I figured it was probably worth blogging about my experiences so that anyone who is good at poker that reads my blog can point out when I’ve made silly mistakes.

The first tournament I entered I ended up going all in on a pair of pocket queens pre-flop, and two other players followed me in with pocket kings and pocket aces. Despite hitting trip queens on the flop, a king came out on the turn.

The second tournament I entered, I was sitting on pocket aces and with a flop of 3, 7 and 10, all off suite, I check-raised all in. Someone called with an ace, 10 and hit a third 10 on the turn.

A few weeks ago, we dropped into the Golf Bar down by the train station.

While it seemed a nice enough place, with an outside area overlooking the river, the staff seemed somewhat shocked when we actually turned up and tried to order a drink. I always thought that was kind of the point when running a bar business, but maybe I’ve misunderstood.

Recently, I bought a fish from the market. Like a whole fish. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to do any Finnish fish, so I had to settle for a Norwegian one instead. It was alright, I decided it was too mean to tease Viki in the end, so I just settled for cooking and eating it.

Recently, Google merged their regular accounts with their Google Apps accounts. Unfortunately, they didn’t do it very well.

The problem is that people often had both accounts using the same email address. For example, chrisworfolkfoundation.org is managed by Google Apps and so we have an info@ email address. But because you only get mail, calendar and docs with Google Apps, in order to use services like YouTube and Google Checkout, Google made us set up a separate account with the same email address.

Now they have merged them all together, obviously they have found that they have a lot of conflicts.

Indeed, we noticed then when I recently tried to sign into the Foundation’s Checkout sellers account and found that it wouldn’t accept the right password. It would accept the other password, but that account was empty. When I contacted Google Support – a rarity they let you do I will tell you!, they said they had created a temporary account for me and I would have to sign in to that one and use the migration tool.

I signed in, there was no migration tool.

I then started to worry about my other accounts with Google and signed into one of their other services, at which point I finally made it onto the migration.

This would seem OK, I could migrate a lot of my data over to the new account. However it wasn’t as simple as this. First of all, a lot of the data is sensitive and doesn’t want to be accessed by everyone who has access to the email account. But you don’t seem to be able to migrate to any account other than the conflicting one. The only other option is to create a whole new account @gmail.com.

Secondly, none of it works. We use about 12 different Google services – 9 of which aren’t supported by the migration wizard, two of which are supported but weren’t available for us because there were complications. In fact, the wizard only actually allowed us to migrate one of our services – Picasa Web Albums over to the new system.

This left me with having to create a brand new @gmail.com account for the Foundation which many of our services are now using including YouTube, reCAPTCHA, Google Checkout, AdWords and many others. All of which now looses significant user confidence because what organisation uses an @gmail.com account?

After all this, many of the manual migration that Google suggests you do as a last resort doesn’t exist either. reCAPTCHA for example offers no way to transfer the domains/keys you hold to a different account and of course, because it’s now a just a small wing of the Google Corporation, you can’t contact support about it because Google don’t do customer support.

I actually mourn for the days of Microsoft, they weren’t perfect but at least they do backward compatibility and customer support.

I hadn’t been able to make the last Humanist Society summer social because I was meeting the parent, but August provided a good opportunity to take in a few drinks at The Adelphi over some good conversation.

It turned out to be a really good night – almost half the people who turned up were new members, or at least hadn’t been in so long that I didn’t know them – one guy said he had first joined in 1984 – two years before I was born! It’s great to belong to a group which has such a long and rich history.

The food was quite nice if a little overpriced, but the drinks weren’t too bad – at least once the barman realised he had meant to say £7.10 rather than £17.10!

Despite many of our members being unable to attend because they were at Leeds Pride, the August meeting of Humanist Community was both well attended and a fascinating evening.

The topic of conversation covered social justice, balancing freedom of expression with protection of people’s safety, world languages, equality and whether the sausages Gijsbert had been given were actually vegetarian or not – turns out they weren’t, so it was a good job we had such a good discussion about it and checked before he started eating!

Recently, myself and Norm headed up to the Grosvenor casino for their “Facebook Freeroll” tournament – a £500 guaranteed free roll that I figured was worth a punt. I managed to double up in the buy in period so didn’t need to re-buy, though I wasn’t impressed by the £2 for my coke, even if it was unlimited refills and a no registration fee evening.

I managed to keep going until 2am, at which point I still had 60,000 chips (with an average of 37,000), but I was so tired by this point I started making silly calls and was eventually knocked out after going all in on trip eights, which lost to a flush on the river. Could have been worse though, 21st out of 129 with no re-buy.