Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I’m about to go to bed but before I do I just want to quickly post this. Jenny was trying to stay up longer than me but finally gave in about a few minutes ago. She gave it a good attempt but you simply can’t outlast someone who is used to working closing shifts at McDonald’s, it just messes with your body clock too much 😀 (although don’t get me wrong, I realise it’s not massively late to most of you reading this but then students have a different body clock to regular people and Kieran’s body clock is in a league of it’s own.

For reference I took a screenshot of the conversation and the date and time dealie Windows has.

Btw, that block square isn’t something I’ve blanked, all the emoticons are showing up like that in my convos, I really need to restart my computer as stuff is starting to play up.

Haven’t blogged in a while, thought I should in case people start thinking I’m dead.

I’ve been looking at barebone systems just now but I’m not having much luck finding what I want. Ideally I want something that can support 4 Serial-ATA hard drives so I can run two sets of RAID1 configured hard drives. All of the barebones only have 2 Serial-ATA sockets though.

There are a lot of stuff I could blog about right now. I’m listening to Lostprophets – 4am Forever. It seems appropriate. We had a really long close tonight at work and didn’t get out until 3:15. I’m back at work tomorrow at 3 so I guess I should probably get some sleep. I have other issues too, I just don’t want to make another blog post about how stuff isn’t working out, they are a little too cryptic for a public blog and I don’t need the outlet.

It’s been ages since my last blog post because I was in somewhat of a state of flux. I had stuff to blog about but I also had (and still have) a lot of stuff to deal with so I didn’t really feel like the act of blogging (which is worrying for me). Hopefully things should be cleared up by the end of tomorrow.

My parents are back off holiday too so I no longer have the house or the car to myself :(.

Still, ignoring all the bad stuff, I’ve just found out I’ve been approved in my application to the YouTube director program which means I can add custom fields, URLs, logos and so forth to my YouTube videos which is good news. I’ve just started publishing a new series of videos which are being fairly well recieved and I hope to get a lot more of them on there soon.

Dragged my ass out of bed to get down to HSBC to pay a cheque in before getting to work for 11:30. Timed it a bit wrong actually, I was almost late. Work dragged a bit at the start although because people had called in sick I ended up doing dining area (clearing and cleaning tables, emptying bins, sweeping up, etc) which was an interesting change despite the fact my entire training for what my responsabilities were and how everything worked was Tom quickly explaining so I could cover him on his break.

I also tried the McChicken Premiere which is really nice, I’d highly recommend it if you are in the mood for chicken. I’m slowly working round everything on the menu :p. I ended up staying until about 7:05-7:10 to cover for the people that were off which wasn’t too bad as it was only an extra half an hour. Ash was stuck on for an extra three. Although Charlotte did offer me her close :p.

So that is it for work until Friday. Although that it’s going to be a mental weekend as I have a close on Friday, working till 10 on Saturday and another close on Sunday.

I don’t think it would quite work to start a post off with a smiley. It would look too weird and besides, do you end the sentence there or do you continue it?

Anyway, I’ve just come off what turned out to be a little over a 9 hour shift. I was expecting 10 as I started at 5 and was working till close which is pushing 3 a lot of the time but we got out at 2:10 which was cool as it’s the earlier close I’ve had (not that I have done many, this is only my third).

It was quite a weird shift actually, though we had quite a few people in when I first got in at 5, it wasn’t ultra-busy. Enough to have a few of us working grill though. Then it just died, it was like a ghost town. I didn’t get my break until 8:36 which was cool as I like my breaks as late as possible so that I have less to work in the second half. Although when you’re doing 5-2, I still had 4 1/2 hours when I got back, I’ve had my break as early as 6:15 and given we didn’t finish until nearly 3 that was like an 8-hour block.

We had people right up until the last minute though. At midnight when we close we got a drive-thru order. Quite a good thing we hadn’t thrown everything out and shut down like we did on my last shift :p. So it was quite an impressive close time given we were cooking so late.

But relating to what the post was actually about (well it was about my shift two, it’s a combination hybrid post), I’m quite a fan of Carpie Diem (the phrase not the place, it’s Latin for “seize the day”). I don’t often practice it because of my neurotic and generally unconfident personality but if I had the guts to I would practice it more often. I finally did today so I no longer have to spend hours every day beating myself up over my recent failure to. Those who know, know, those who don’t, sorry it means that I secretly hate you and resent our friendship. Ok, that’s obviously not true :p. I was quite touched by the concern actually. Please consider yourselves absolved from worry :).

The phpBB team are working at a decent speed – yesterday they released 3.0 Beta2 with 267 bugs fixed no less. Looks like we may be seeing a release candidate within a couple of months at most.

Interestingly enough, Jelsoft released vBulletin 3.6 only 10 days ago packed with even more AJAX than 3.5. It doesn’t look like Invision are planning to make a move though.

Claire organised a bowling event today so myself and John drove down to Hollywood bowl and met Claire, Norm, Jay and Gemma at about 5:30. As usual it took me a game to warm up and I ripped my thumbnail off but on the second game I managed to bowl a 111 which I was fairly pleased with as it was enough to put me ahead of everyone else.

Afterwards we headed over to McDonald’s as I hadn’t eaten and wanted to make use of my discount card before I’m sick of the food. Then finally we headed over the road to the Cardigan Arms and spent the rest of the night drinking. Although personally my alcoholic intake was very much limited due to the fact I was driving.

We set off back and it was dark by this time and raining so it was hard to see. We ended up taking an earlier turning from the inner ring road than the directions said (I blame John he was the official navigator – all he had to do was to read the directions printed from Google Maps) and we ended up on Scothall Road or maybe Harrogate Road, the one that goes past the BMW garriage so luckily I was able to find my way back from there. Just as we got onto Harehills Lane a part of it was closed off so we had to navigate round that as well though. Absolutely conspiracy against us.

I didn’t think it was that much of a detour although when you look at it on Google Earth it looks insane. The route is marked on and we ended up somewhere near Chapel Allerton.

That’s the main reason I hate driving, it’s a killer to try and navigate on our roads, especially when you are trying to concentrate on the road itself and not what route you need to be taking.

Dammit.

Absolute f****** conspiracy against me. I’m such a f****** idiot.

Apparently more than one. The light in my downstairs hallway blew recently so I finally decided to get round to changing it just now. It’s a mission though. It took me ages to unscrew it because everything is unscrewable so holding onto the right bit of the fitting was a challenge in itself. To the point where the entire thing is now sitting on my dining room table in bits.

Nor does it help that there are like a million types of bulbs. Why can’t there just be 100w bulbs, I’d even settle for 240 100w bulbs, I can work out what that means. But they all have some kind of serial code on which is all the same on the box but different to the light. As far as I can see it’s the same thing which is the one I tried although there are loads of other different classifications on them as well. It’s just a lightbulb!

On the plus side, I was getting worried this real world thing was getting to me a little too much. But I can relax a little now knowing I haven’t lost all my nerdly persona.

Another night, another load of bars to cross off my list…

• Bar Censsa
• Yates’s (Boar Lane)
• Room
• Bar Above
• Tiger Tiger

Of course I also remembered 5 more places to add to the list so just evens out lol. But yeah, I met Claire straight after she had finished work and we went to Weatherspoon’s for some food and then met John in Bar Censsa. I was quite impressed with the prices, £1.50 for a bottle, which isn’t trailing the Llama by much. We then headed to the Boar Lane Yates’s which was ok though lacking the pool tables the Woodhouse Lane one features.

After that we went into Room which is like a mega posh bar and restaurant which was interesting. It was really nice place although I felt a little self-conscious. They came over and served us and everything plus Claire tried this Room Cocktail or something which was weird but came with a strawberry on top and it looked really cool.

Next we hit Bar Above which is really nice. Again, £1.50 a bottle and had some excellent sofas, probably the only sofas I have found that challenge the ones in the Llama, and they really put up a challenge, you just sink into them. They also have really, really nice toilets – John awarded them 9 urinals out of 10! Finally we finished the night off at Tiger Tiger. It’s been a fun night and it’s great getting to know everywhere in Leeds, after all I’ve been here long enough.